The ambivalent traveler goes home

I am now being sad at Fisher's Peak, which will clearly be the last piece of what I came to see before it's dark. I'll wake up where the corn side is crispier, I guess, nobody's idea of scenery. I seem to be harping on this. My dread of the Midwest is not much of a secret. 

Today was nothing. We went for breakfast burritos and I told M that there was some argument, so I had heard, over whether breakfast tacos and I guess by extension breakfast burritos were invented in Austin or Albuquerque. (Austin ones are better. Sorry M if you are reading! I liked all my New Mexico food!)

It occurs to me the main thing I wanted the universe to cough up on this trip that it did not cough up was an overwhelming sunset such as one theoretically sees in the west. This seems like a pretty minor omission. 

We were in the town called Trinidad under Fisher's Peak however right at "the golden hour" and it looked like a more intriguing place than one would imagine it is. The usual perverse fantasies of getting off the train without even my bags. 

...and then at some point I fell asleep. J asked me what characterized the train-riding public and I said I wasn't sure except they seemed to maybe make less money than the flying public. I will add that they are on the whole somewhat unattractive. Also a lot of them are retired. 

Made it into Chicago right on time and managed to have dinner with old friends at The Red Apple, the Polish buffet up on Milwaukee. The staff seems to speak English these days, for which I should launch some hipster lament. It was a fine ending to my vacation and now I'm waiting to depart again in half an hour. 

Something flashed through my head as I was falling asleep about travel and object permanence and I kind of wish I could remember what it was, but then the stupidest things seem pithy when you're falling asleep. Blah blah three weeks blah sense of self blah. 

I have flipped the last page of my packet of e-tickets, schedules, maps, car reservations. It's all over but the getting home. New York in sixteen hours! -as the song says, only it's nineteen these days, thanks I guess to the decline of rail travel and the staying-put of freight rail.

Speaking of that song, I will have to listen to "On the Twentieth Century" tonight, as I am on the Lakeshore Limited which once was the Twentieth Century. So: the Twentieth Century is my favorite train route, my favorite cocktail, my favorite musical, and probably my favorite century. 

The disconnect for me that I keep wailing about has to do with the Twentieth Century and my insistence on imagining a little of that glamor is preserved in the Lakeshore, even if it really isn't. I dreamily fancy myself a little cosmopolitan for traveling this way, and then I snap out of it and remember to everyone else it's essentially a very long Greyhound Bus I'm on. 

Well, Lily Garland and Oscar Jaffe didn't think so and they are the company I'm keeping tonight. So alright then. 

Now you tow it to the repo man's front door and you give him these keys, I don't need 'em no more

My trip is over. Not entirely but. 

I awoke around the time we passed through a thin stretch of the Petrified Forest National Park, where we went when I was too young to remember. I forced myself to stay awake for a while though my contorted sleep had been fitful. 

The scenery was indeed lovely. So many kinds of mountains and desert I've seen, and apparently not all of them at that. We rolled into New Mexico and the mountains and mesas were quite majestic in exactly the way iPhone lenses will not capture at all. Somehow we arrived in Albuquerque an hour early, and M and D sprang into action and fetched me. We had Mexican breakfast at The Range and then went to their house, which is right in the shadow of the Sandia mountains. The Sandia Mountains which turn pink at sunset. 

There's a tram thingy that goes up the side of them that looks awfully steep and I made a note to keep us busy enough that no-one would suggest taking it.

M and D are old friends and true. Well, not that old--we met in 2008 after I had known M blogospherically for several years, but we feel as though we'd known one another a very long time, who knows why. They used to be my escape when they lived in Boston. I'd head up there when I needed people to be very, very nice to me and I'd come home recharged. 

Dinner was at a place I think was called Antiquity, very good and kind of interesting because it was so thoroughly unassuming and quiet. I don't get the feeling there's a bustling part of town. It's so sprawling. Maybe by the university but we didn't make it there. 

M drove us most of the way home and then got a demonic look in his eye and tore up a hill to where his childhood friend had lived, the highest house in town at the time. Sprawling towns between mountain ranges are a fine sight at night. 

I got very tired around 10 as we started watching the second Thin Man movie and had something of a headache and went to bed, had a dream I was caught inside a game like the one in that Michael Douglas movie. Kept waking up, feeling very out of it and increasingly nuts, occasionally certain I was very ill. 

Today I told D that I had spent maybe 1/5 of my trip acutely anxious and she made noises of pity and I said oh it's kind of fine, the salt on my trip in a way.  This is true. 

About that, sort of...people keep telling me how nice it would be if I could fly and I guess I somehow encourage them by my horribly apologetic reiterations of how strange my way of traveling is. 

The fact is it's how I travel and, factoring out some feeling of being an outsider, I can't imagine doing or being otherwise. It makes my trips feel meaningful. Would I like to go to Europe? Sure. Would I like to have it be easy, a matter of no real thought, to cross the country? Not especially. I'm glad all you normal people enjoy your travel in all its efficiency. 

We got green chile bagels. We drove to Santa Fe and walked around. My anxiety was subsiding. D bought me a tiny, lovely piece of local color. We had lunch at Pasqual's, which was terrific. I bought little things for friends and boyfriends (alright only one.)

Then a long walk among galleries largely filled with kitsch. Not that I know from visual art much but oh my god. Some of it was staggering, like big bronze native Americans looking noble and disappointed. 

We drove back. M and D had wanted to take me many more places because they love it out here. Unfortunately, I'm spent. And unfortunately, I planned the trip largely quite well but with a few missteps, like not being here all that long. It looked like more time, on paper. 

So we didn't drive through the Jemez mountains on the way home, on account of the spent. It had been few enough hours since I'd been anxious that the thought of winding roads was not doing it for me, and besides, I had suggested that drive weeks ago because I wanted to see West that looked like my internal, mythic West and I have done that. 

We went to the hotel at the top of a casino though both M and D dread casinos. Had a drink, watched a pretty though not spectacular sunset. Came home and watched the rest of the movie. 

I guess I'll write the next couple of days if there's anything to say. We're going through Kansas, which is my internal mythic version of not much. Tomorrow is the most nothing day of the trip (I'm fond enough of the Lakeshore Limited after riding it these many years) and though nothing is fine, I would at this point rather be in my bed. 

I've left out a trillion things, because how can I tell you the intimate conversations I had with old friends, but I think it will be nice to have this later on as a chronology that will, with pictures and actual memories, be a good keepsake of The Big Trip of '13. 

I don't know any songs about New Mexico. Well, one, but it's annoying.

Now I'm on the train. Sadly, they made an announcement about not drinking your own liquor, so I may be too timid to do so. 

Yesterday was a nostalgic return to one of the few places I remember from the summer my dad got some kind of fellowship in LA and we spent a few weeks or maybe the whole summer out there. The place I remember is the La Brea tar pits, a weird little park where you can watch tar bubbling up through a pond, through various patches of ground...you can also watch people excavating bones out of the tar, because things used to get stuck in it and die and be preserved. There's an exhibit inside the museum where you try to pull steel poles out of tar, and I swear I remember this from when I was four or five. 

By afternoon I was obsessing about various things far beyond the end of my vacation and was no fun. Some down time was needed and taken after a lunch trip to the big semi outdoor mall thing called the farmer's market. There was this crazy, excellent store where they had all this vintage crap, just postcards and plastic things, all pretty cheap. I got some kitschy rodeo postcards. I guess they're actual photographs. I guess those people exist. 

L and I walked to The Abbey, a cavernous gay bar with predictably perfect-looking go-go people, one of each gender. I needed a martini and got one. M, a friend of 20 years now living near Santa Monica and working at UCLA joined us, with her girlfriend. 

On the way out of town, something infuriating happened: I was taking a bus to the subway to save twenty bucks (or, who knows, thirty?) and as I was waiting on La Cienega, a cab driver leaned out of his window and yelled that the bus wasn't running and did I want a cab. Now, I was pretty sure I had seen a bus going down La Cienega just before. I said so. He shrugged or something. I shrugged or something. And of course five minutes later, my bus came. Asshole!!

Union Station has a cheap bag check so I left my stuff and walked around downtown for an hour. Several people had told me it would be an interesting walk and it was. City Hall, the old LA Times building, finally I was plunged back into noir LA. I walked to Disney Hall (not so noir) and back. 

The seat assignment lady was a dick about giving me a window. I was an hour early and clearly her chart of the car was empty but I walked up an odd number instead of an even and she kept saying "there might be families!" It is very hard to sleep in an aisle seat, nothing to lean against. As it turned out, I got a row to myself which is the grand prize. Even so, one wakes up with a horribly stiff back. 

The sun set immediately upon our departure so there hasn't been much to see, but the moon is very bright and the glimpses of scenery have been very grand. It takes an hour and three quarters to escape metro LA but then there are more snowcaps. 

Hoping to see some westerny looking West in a couple of hours. It'll be the last great scenery of the trip. After New Mexico there is a lot of Kansas. Now passing Flagstaff, as close as we get to the Grand Canyon. Jesus, what an enormous fucking country. 

I think I saw everything I wanted to in LA except maybe the Watts Towers. Surely I won't be back for a while. 

A long day living in Reseda

One of the things I do in other parts of the country is look at strangers in public places and want them to embody the place so I'll really know I'm in wherever. In Texas it's fine--you actually do see lots of cowboy hats and hear lots of accents. In LA I want them to somehow evince LA but I have no idea what that looks like. 

I'm two days behind. 

Got in my trip to Santa Monica to dip a toe in the ocean. Really a purely punctuational trip, was there at most 15 minutes because then I had to meet J in Silverlake for lunch, and that's quite across town. 

It's good to see the neighborhoods you've heard of! Next time they are mentioned somewhere, you will know how to picture them. 

Evening was L's book party in Laurel Canyon at the home of an actress enjoying a certain notoriety. Well ok, she's on a popular tv show but it sounds fun the other way. This involved most of the people I know in LA, an interesting drive up along winding roads, a car parking service staffed by young ladies called Valet of the Dolls, a bunch of very good gluten free food (L's wife, who I toted around in a chair in a hora after their wedding, is not friends with gluten), a long conversation with a standup comic...and I think it was a happy-making celebration for L. 

Called the rental place for another day on the car, which worked out very well, as the next day I was awkwardly between people for a while and drove up to Griffith Park, where I climbed the surprisingly steep path to the observatory, and then drove into Los Feliz to go to Umami Burger, parking right across from the Scientology mother ship. 

Umami was a universal recommendation and with good reason. The onion rings were like some kind of donuts. Unbelievably good. 

The drive across town on Sunset took forever and I didn't once see a driveway I might swerve into and attend a monkey funeral in the home of a faded star. 

Dinner with the crowd of people I know through D and like a lot, in Hollywood, which turns out to be pretty bleak. Everyone wanted to know where we will be next year, and doing what, as do I. 

L and R live in West Hollywood which is not at all bleak. We watched an episode of survivor and called it a night. I don't think I'm quite on Western time which is to say I'm keeping normal human hours here. 

I have begun to long for my bed and my apartment. My town, a little less. Having so largely tied off loose ends at work, there is a dreamy quality of having moved away and being fully adrift. 

The Black Dahlia, she smiles and smiles

That all went smoothly. Bus got in, took cab to station, train was already there. I got on, fell asleep, and woke up to the sights of West Texas, which is supposed to be dull, but I find it very beautiful,  muttered "oh my god" upon opening the curtains. I saw a million cactuses and lots of wonderful abandoned structures and something shaped like a wild boar trotting through the scrubby desert. 

I would like to take a trip out there, maybe to Marfa sometime. People do go to Marfa.  But then it's just as magnificent once you turn north into New Mexico and Arizona, though it's a different kind of desert. So really apparently the daydream is to spend more time in the west, generally. 

The day went by quickly. The things I've brought with me to pass the time (knitting, 3 books on Kindle, a writing project that will clearly never go anywhere) are largely untouched. Guilty about this, I read some of a Nathan Englander story and knitted a few paltry rows but mostly I just wanted to look out the window. Well, Albuquerque to Chicago should be dull so maybe I'll kill that time more productively. 

Meals were in the dining car, which I never spring for in coach, but when it's part of the fare, it beats microwaved pizzas. Except of course you're at a table with strangers who turn out to be mostly boring. The food's ok and it's probably good not to spend the entire day in solitude. 

Explosions in the Sky and Yo La Tengo are turning out to be the soundtrack to this trip. 

I drank in my compartment and conked out fairly early. There was nothing to see after 6:30 or so anyway. I'd have been curious to see the Salton Sea but it was dark and we passed in the middle of the night. 

Arrived at Union Station and, as planned, took the subway to Koreatown, saw the Hollywood sign in the distance, spent a few hours in a Korean spa (cheaper here than in NYC but fewer features) and picked up my car. Now in Hancock Park at the home of my father's friend. 

(So here I am in LA, by the way, the endpoint of my trip. I've used up too much emotion to feel quite as I feel I ought to feel, but it seems lovely, and maybe tomorrow when I go to Santa Monica and dip a toe in the other ocean...)

For lunch we went to Mozza, a pizza place started by Mario Battali. I wouldn't have had any idea but Mrs. Father's Friend pointed out Lorne Michaels at a big table of guys by the door and right next to us the actor who played the priest who almost has an affair with Carmela on The Sopranos. 

Then a drive around Hollywood and a trip to find Ms. Stanwyck's star on the walk of fame. 

I didn't realize you could see snow-capped mountains from LA but you can. 

One for whom all travel is a penance now

Biggest travel day yet coming up now, and the one that for me is like stepping off the edge. Now, with no particular apologies to Cole Porter, I ride to the ridge where the west commences. 

It's tugging at me a little to have left Austin (on bus now to San Antonio) but it's dulled by (now past) annoyance at 45-minute-late megabus and curiosity about upcoming train compartment experience and sure ok fine excitement about LA.

What else happened in Austin...obligatory sighting of someone I didn't expect to run into. I left M&K's and went to kill an hour at Half Price Books and they said over the PA "Anne-Marie, your book buy is ready" and I thought "huh, I went to school with an Anne-Marie" or rather it registered rather faintly and then a few minutes later, there she was. We weren't good friends but that kind of thing alway makes me feel welcome. 

Had dinner with college friends at a new place on the East Side, Contigo, very Austin-since-I-left.  M has bought a house over there off Manor Road and seems settled. T is in a relationship with a nice fellow who joined us and also seems in a good place, in great contrast to 1997ish. R is, as ever, perpetually disappointed and a bit brittle and yet very funny. 

Back to J's, where I spent today in a leisurely fashion, re-staked a claim to my Austin soul by developing an opinion on breakfast taco places (Shack>Torchy's) and discovered that there is a soft drink called Doppleganger that appears to be Dublin Dr Pepper ie cane sugar Dr Pepper. This is important, though I am sure I will not encounter it elsewhere. 

Went to Toy Joy and Oat Willie's, which somehow survive. Lectured a young man on what Austin is really about (well I wasn't that bad) and then JS wanted to take us to Chuy's and who am I to say no to that?

Around those two, well and C but he barely talks, I notice my speech getting a little Texan around the edges which is faintly confounding because it never really was that, but isn't intentional so I don't really know, am I supposed to make an effort not to do it? Anyway it was a nice dinner and JS kindly took us all out. Then I sat around at J's and we talked about this and that like old friends might do. 

Austin is still peopled by my people. Everyone says "oh the place is full of Californians" and acts as if it's diluted somehow, but I still know the people I know, and they haven't been replaced with Californians. The skyline is different and you see fewer eccentric looking people and South Congress is fucking weird, but it is still my town. 

Oh we're practically in San Antonio now so this is not the most exciting entry but I should wrap it up. The next few hours are weird. Arrive, see if there are cabs, anyway somehow make my way the mile to the train station--San Antonio at 11 on a Monday night? I have no idea!--and then perhaps wait around quite a while for the train which is for some unknowable reason meant to get in at 12 and leave at 2:45. Do they let us on when it gets in? Will it be even nearly on time? Tune in and find out! Because I am on the train all day tomorrow and will probably go on and on about something. 

They shoot bookstores, don't they?

So maybe how it's going to go is that every 4-5 days I'm going to have a day of nerves. Right now it's a combination of D having left, a twinge of homesickness, bigger picture Where Is My Life Going stuff,  and this font, which I assumed was not going to manifest after I cut and pasted. 

On the other hand it's 70 degrees and sunny and that moderates the agita.  

Where did I stop? J had people over, people I like a lot though I don't necessarily keep in touch with them. We drank a fair number of margaritas and afterwards I slipped out for a few minutes to walk around Hyde Park feeling overwhelmed by being here and to get a burrito at Taco Cabana. 

I slept terribly. I explained to D that when I visited...wait I'm sure I already told this story. It's hard to go to sleep the first night in Austin because every time I've been here in the long while before, I've woken up back in New York, and there is always a fairly not-in-jest fear of that happening, the first night. 

So Friday I came over to M and K' s house in a swell neighborhood I wasn't familiar with and hung out a bit before picking D up at the Holy Shit Far Away New Airport which is not new at all but new to me. 183 is too much road. 

Dinner with old friends S and A.  S I have know since 1999. Saturday was a little Austin tourism, Mount Bonnell for the best view of town from above, Mayfield Park because it's fun to bring people there and be all "surprise! Peacocks!" A boring nostalgic walk through campus, and a stroll by town lake. 

The strange part was a few hours on South Congress which has turned from a nothing stretch of road to an insane pedestrian mall with people standing in hour-long lines for stuff that used to be no big deal to anyone. We sat outside at Güero's patio/music space and had Shiners. The local beer, not the face injury. 

D liked it well enough but it was strange to me to be showing him my town in a form I completely didn't recognize. So the nice thing then was we walked around Travis Heights which looked about the same and then as we were driving off, I realized we were very early and parked by South First, which also used to be nothing but now feels kind of like parts of Austin as I knew them in the 90s. Much, much quieter. 

Traffic has gotten pretty bad. 

Oh and we had barbecue at Ruby's. I had thought D might want to go on a barbecue junket to one of those towns one goes to in order to feel like a barbecue martyr, but he felt more like seeing things in town, so yay. I'm not a barbeconnoisseur, so though I thought it was great, I was nervous my foodier friends would look askance, but everyone was actually fairly skance about it when I said we'd gone there. So hooray. 

That's good for now. I'm meeting folks in a couple of hours and though I'm not very underfoot, I think it's nice to have your house to yourself after company so I'm going to zip up the suitcase and find a place to be.