Episode 17: “Oh, Canada” Road Trip

Introduction: Themes and Reading Companions

My last cross-country trip in 2005 had several themes: Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, to visit 4 men who fought with my father in WWII, to visit some places that I had never seen (Niagara Falls, Carlsbad Caverns, Charleston and Savannah, etc.), and to at least touch all the states in the lower 48 that I had never visited before.

What are the themes this time? One is to visit friends and family, some of whom I have not seen for decades, some of whom I have never met. Also: to attend baseball games in parks that I have not seen as well as to visit Japanese Gardens. Also, several architectural landmarks, and other sights along the way. And the ultimate goal: the Canadian Maritimes (New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island sans Anne of Green Gables, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador), then back for Quebec and Montreal; this means that after this trip I will have visited all 50 states (accomplished when I drove to Alaska two years ago) and all Canadian provinces and territories except Nunavut.

Let’s focus on baseball parks for a second since this is a major theme. I have never seen a game in nine of the 30 major league cities. With this trip I will reduce that by five and there will then be only four cities where I have not seen a game. Does this mean I have to go to Houston and Dallas? I have to note that I have gained further respect for Michael’s feat in 1991 when he visited all 26 parks (at the time). I had a hard time figuring out how to visit five. It required some weird backtracking.

My itinerary is along the northern tier of the US, into Canada for Toronto, back to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (baseball schedules dictated this weirdness), back east to DC, up through Philly, NY and Massachusetts, then Maine, and, finally, the Maritimes, then back to Quebec/Montreal.

Some of the reading material I have taken is the same as last time: William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” and Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie”. My only real guide is “Road Trip USA” by Jamie Jensen – I find it a terrific guide, mainly because his tastes are similar to mine: architecture, baseball parks, and outlandish road signs.

Since this blog might actually be “after the fact”, I might arrange some of this material by topic, rather than by chronological order. Then those of you who are not interested in baseball can skip the episode on that subject.

The Beginning and the Hi-Line:

I chose to take I-90 to Spokane. I had sort of wanted to go along US 2 from Everett to Acadia National Park in Maine for a good part of the journey (Jamie’s “The Great Northern” route). But I was anxious to make some tracks at the beginning and I have been on almost all of US 2 in Washington (including the start of my 2005 trip) so I decided to start by driving I-90 to Spokane instead. One thing I saw along I-90 is something that I have always thought should be done: provide signs for the type of crop being grown along the road.

When I got to Spokane I saw my first roadside attraction:

The Spokane urban sprawl depressed me. It always saddens me when I think of what we have done to the American Landscape. The rest of world seems to be following suit, but we started it. I also realized that this is the biggest town I will see until Minneapolis. After about an hour of the crap along Highway 2 northeast of Spokane I was Jonesin’ for the Interstate again.

In Kalispell, Montana I stopped at Albertsons to check out the size of the food packages. I have fond memories of this town from a1969 trip: a small town (at the time) with one supermarket that had outlandish sized packages of cheese, bacon etc. To feed the farms and ranches, I assumed. When I returned in 1991 I was greatly disappointed to see how much sprawl had taken over and I could not see any large packages in the supermarket. This time, Kalispell did not seem so bad: yes, lots and lots of franchises but maybe after Spokane it did not seem as bad as I was expecting. And I did see a couple of large packages of cheese and tubs of butter this time.

In Essex, near Glacier National Park, I had lunch at the Isaac Walton Inn that was constructed by the Great Northern railroad to house railroad workers. I talked to the waitress about cabooses, which one can stay in at the lodge. I am reluctant to talk about the waitress this on this blog, since we have to be aware that it is in cyber space and can be read by anybody, so if you want to hear about this, send me an email and I will reply with the story.

Here is a monument at the continental divide near Glacier National Park: the rain that was falling to the left of the obelisk would go to the Pacific, the rain that was falling to the right would go to the Atlantic.


So, what will happen when there are no more glaciers in Glacier National Park? What will they call it? The “National Park Formerly Known as Glacier” or “Global Warming National Park”?

The Hi-Line

The “Hi-Line” is what US 2 is called locally as it hugs the border of Canada. It goes on for miles and miles on the relatively flat Great Plains. Both Jamie and William talk about it, trying not to actually call it boring. William talks about his car going pock-pock, pock-pock interminably on the tarred road cracks. He says: “No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.” They must have fixed the road since his trip since I heard no such pock-pock sounds.

And William quotes Gertrude Stein: “In the US there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” (BTW, it may not be widely known that Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco but moved to Seattle with her father, an early Jewish businessman in the Northwest.)

Jamie says that across North Dakota the road hems and rolls and yawns forever. “It’s a long, flat, (and dare we say it? Dull) drive across the state….”

So, I too am alone with my thoughts. I have been asked, what do I think about at these times? For one thing, cows don’t eat meat. We don’t seem to eat animals that eat other animals but do eat animals that don’t eat other animals. This does not seem fair. Also, I was thinking about turning my rusty green propane tank into the Yellow Submarine. And about the bugs that were at one moment living creatures (with families, and dreams of the future – well maybe not) and the next moment are goop on my windshield. But mainly I was just engaged in the moment, not thinking of the past or future, just experiencing what I call the “Zen of picking them up and putting them down”, mile after mile.

You realize why this part of Montana is called Big Sky country – it really is. A photo is hard to capture it. The road in Montana did not bypass towns and I was happy to slow down for a few minutes to visit these lonely places. Here is proof that Cut Bank is the coldest spot in the nation (thanks to the presence of a US Weather Service monitoring station):

After Cut Bank, I stopped briefly in Shelby, to check out the Marias Museum in a former house in a residential neighborhood. The museum houses a model of the 40,000-seat arena built for the1923 world heavyweight fight where Jack Dempsey defeated Tommy Gibbons. It was a publicity stunt to lure people to this oil boomtown but only 7,000 people showed up.

Along the Hi Line the towns have exotic names: Kremlin, Havre, Zurich, etc., all of which were founded by the railroad and settled, in the main, by northern and eastern European immigrants enticed here by the railroad’s offers of farmlands and homesteads. Here is the post office in Kremlin, Montana:

And then around the corner:

Near Havre I heard a radio advertisement (as a break in the announcements of the results of local school board elections) for a bull auction, and here is a direct quote, word for word: “All the bulls have been semen-tested; lunch will be served”.

And here is Chet Huntley’s schoolhouse in Saco, Montana. It was amazing to think that someone who was so large on the American news scene (starting with the 1956 Conventions) could have come from this small place.

And if this is Saco, where is Vanzetti?

In Glascow I stopped at the very funky local museum. It includes an entire bar, iron lung, fantastic political button collection, dioramas of Western scenes by a local woman, and automatic music in one room (it turns on when you walk into the room) of the high school band – with bagpipes, of course, this is Glascow – playing their fight song (On Wisconsin). I told the two elderly ladies in charge that I thought their museum was terrific. Why are there always two elderly women “manning” these little museums?

The Fort Peck Indian reservation raised issues about high school mascots. Political correctness led to Stanfurd becoming the Trees and my high school dropping the nickname “Warriors”. But at Poplar, Montana, inside the Res (where Sitting Bull surrendered six years after Little Big Horn) the High School Mascot is the “Indians” and in Brockton (also within the Res) it is the “Warriors”. Outside of the Res, the town of Culbertson’s teams are called the “Cowboys” and “Cowgirls”. No kidding!

As Highway 2 entered North Dakota it seemed to bypass towns, in contrast to Montana. I was reminded of my work several years ago for a local jurisdiction in Lithuania, when I told them that I thought following the European Union’s standard for highways (requiring national highways to bypass small towns) could lead to the further economic decline of the town where I was working. When I visited a year later and saw that, in fact, the bypass had been constructed, this became my Career Recommendation Not Followed Number L-3 (“L” for Lithuania). Just a note: I tried to keep off the interstates as much as possible on this trip, but sometimes (when I was pressed for time to make a baseball game, for example) I had to take them. One of the problems with bypassing towns in this way is exemplified by the fact that later in this trip I didn’t even get an idea what Eire, Pennsylvania is like.

Getting back to the Hi-line, in Minot (rhymes with Why Not), North Dakota I had lunch at Charlie’s Main Street Café. Pink leather booths, waitress very old and skinny. I still had a hankering for biscuits and gravy (after seeing this at a place where I stopped for coffee in Montana) and with this dish you also get eggs over either “American Fries” or hash browns. I wondered what American Fries were but did not ask because I wanted hash browns in any case. Later, as I was looking at the Middle American faces chowing down on Middle American Food, I wondered whether this was the “real” America. Then I figured out what American Fries were – or, more accurately, what they were not: NOT French fries. I was glad I didn’t ask what they were. Outside of the restaurant I heard piped music from a radio station playing the Doors’ “Come on Baby Light my Fire”. I wondered if they knew where Jim Morrison is buried?

Minot also boasts a park with various buildings, artifacts, and sculptures hailing its Scandinavian heritage. Here is a very large Swedish horse, and a replica of a church with statues of skiing heroes.


After Minot one comes across what is supposed to be the geographic center of North America. According to a woman in the adjacent museum/tourist trap it was determined by figuring out where the center of gravity would be of a piece of plywood (for example) cut out in the shape of North America (including Mexico).

Another obelisk! Without getting too Freudian, is it just men that design these things and what, after all, is it all about?

Just about everything in North Dakota seems to be named after Teddy Roosevelt who spent a lot of time here, and I guess grew from a scrawny, sickly youth to a lover of the outdoors in this state. I now know why he is on Mt Rushmore in South Dakota – I always thought he was a bit out of place with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. It must be because North Dakota made them do it; otherwise they threatened to step out of the way and let South Dakota float up into Canada.

I realized that I had been in three time zones in two days: I woke up Tuesday in the Pacific time zone (Idaho) and went to bed in the Mountain time zone (Montana); on Wednesday I woke up (of course) in the Mountain zone and went to bed in the Central time zone (North Dakota).

One last word on Country Music, which I listened to a lot on this part of the journey. I found that the current hits are not as humorous as the ones on my last cross-country road trip: those included “Bon Jovi Makes Her Clothes Come Off” – I remember hearing that as I crossed the Appalachians and thinking at the time that it doesn’t get any better than this. One new song I heard now was slightly humorous: “Got Home at the Wrong Five O’clock.” Another one was mostly about middle aged, middle American, male angst: “can’t pay the bills for the kid’s clothes, the washing machine is broke, and the wife is two months late”.

Episode 16: CliffNotes from Guatemala

In February/March 2009 I spent four weeks in Guatemala, and here are some “CliffNotes” from that experience.

I spent two weeks studying Spanish in a small Spanish school in a small village (called La Laguna) up by the Mexican border. To get to La Laguna one has to take a five-hour ride by bus from the Capital (Guatemala City) to Quetzaltenago (also known as Xela – pronounced “shay-lah”), then two chicken buses for five or six more hours to La Laguna. Here is a picture of a chicken bus, which is actually what they are called (in English) by the locals because people often take their chickens on board.
La Laguna is very, very poor. There is just no work there and almost all the men in the village are working in the US illegally. The husband of the family where I lived has been in Florida for 9 years and can't return because he has no papers. Her 20-year-old son is in San Diego where he had to pay about $3,000 to a “coyote” to get into the country illegally. Both are not working full time because of the economic crisis (although I am not sure why unskilled agricultural labor is so affected). It really destroys the health of the community when families are split up like that. Here is a picture of the family I stayed with: Maria the mother, Carmen the daughter, and Trinidad the 15-year-old son.

Trinidad is very bright and I encouraged him to try to be whatever he wanted to be, but what will happen when he finishes school and there is no work? The only profitable work in the area appears to be associated with the narco-traffic across the border with Mexico; a teenager hangs out at the only store in town and calls his father on his cell phone to warn him when the army or police patrols show up in town. The police are not respected at all as there is lots of corruption. Some towns have formed their own vigilante groups to protect their citizens and to get rid of the drug traffickers.

Here is a picture of La Laguna’s main road.

Any relatively substantial buildings like this are paid for by funds sent home by the men working in the US. Notice the rebar poking above the first story on one building. I was never clear exactly why they do this. It could be to support a possible second story if more money becomes available. Is it a sign of hope, wealth? But I saw the same in a cemetery when concrete boxes used for internment have rebar sticking up above the roofline – what is the story here? In any case, when homes have rebar at their corner posts the buildings probably won’t fall down in the next earthquake; but there is usually rebar only on the corners of the buildings so the interior walls might suffer damage; but at least the buildings probably won’t collapse and this will prevent a lot of deaths. The same system is used in India.

There is no hot water in La Laguna, and no running water at all every other day in alternative halves of the village as there is not enough supply to provide the entire village with service every day. However, even when water is running the terrible plumbing wastes a lot of water through dripping faucets. The “shower” in my house was just a plastic pipe sticking out of the wall, but the valve did not work to turn it off so they used a wooden dowel to try and stop the flow (didn’t work). And the bathrooms in general are a bit challenging. One thing I have to admit I find rather disgusting is the fact that the toilets and waste system can’t handle toilet paper so waste baskets are provided for this purpose. One day when I first arrived and did not realize that water was only available every other day I left the faucet on in one of the two bathrooms at my house. The sink was located over the wastebasket and when the water came on the next day the sink’s drain was not water-tight and leaked into the waste basket which then overflowed – well this is more information than you need. In India their sewage system also can’t handle toilet paper but in India most people don’t use toilet paper anyway, using the water and left hand method – again more information than you probably need.

When I first went to Quetzaltenago/Xela I thought it was rather far away and quiet. However, when I returned to Xela after two weeks in La Laguna I thought Xela seemed like Paris. Xela is smaller and has fewer Gringos that Antigua and is a rather pleasant place. It has a very funky (even surreal) little museum where the one room devoted to sports had a display featuring a local hero: there is a letter from the Guinness Book of World Records documenting the effort of Carlos Argueta Lopez for his world record for fastest marathon while skipping rope: 5 hours, 19 minutes, 14 seconds in Los Angeles on March 5, 1995.

Getting back to La Laguna and my study of Spanish, here is a picture of my School, Rio Azul, with the headmaster, Don Abelino.

Don Abelino is a very interesting guy who also is active in local leftist politics, having run for mayor of the area and coming in second last year, which is really good for a Leftist candidate in Guatemala, which is dominated now by the Right. Here is a sign for his political party:

The letters (URNG; MAIZ) stand for Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca,
Movimiento Amplio de Izquierda, more or less: the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity party – movement of the Left. This was a guerrilla movement that emerged in1982. After years of civil war a peace process was brokered by the United Nations and the URGN laid down its arms in 1996 and became a legal political party in 1998. Unfortunately, many of the agreements reached in 1996 have not been implemented, at least in the viewpoint of the Left.

I think the US has a lot to answer for concerning the lingering poverty and the political situation in general. I am not sure what good all the years of Peace Corps volunteers and all the NGOs have done. At one point 3 percent of the population owned 97 percent of the land and controlled all the wealth and I don’t think the situation is very different now. The CIA/United Fruit sponsored coup in 1954 that overthrew a progressive democratically elected government, which was considering land reform, was a huge blow. I knew about this, of course, having studied Political Science at Berkeley where this event was often cited. But to see all this first hand, and to think what might have been if this had not occurred, was very eye opening.

I had sort of moved to the Right after India (because of their disastrous attempt to meddle in the free market and the resulting Permitting Raj that lasted until 1992), and Lithuania (after Soviet, mainly Russian domination, and the current budding of free market capitalism, more or less). But after Guatemala I have moved Leftward again.

Speaking of politics, here is a photo of a blanket I saw in a craft store in Antigua:

Si, se puede

Photos of Travels

After two weeks of school I spent a couple of weeks traveling around the country. Here is a photo of Lake Atitlan by the pretty little town of San Marcos.

There are still remnants of a 1960’s hippy colony here, because of the supposed local good vibrations and energy. For example, there is the Pyramides Meditation Center and the San Marcos Holistic Health Center. When I was walking down the one street in town I saw this young couple walking toward me and I had to literally put my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing, they were such a throw-back to the sixties: he had long dreadlocks unwashed for weeks I imagine, both dressed in baggy Guatemalan type gear, sandals, etc. with completely wasted expressions on their faces.

In a little village not too far from Xela I ran across this shrine to San Simon:

San Simon, or Maximon, is a local favorite. Note the cigarette in his mouth – some how it is kept lit all thevtime. It cost me a few Queztales to enter and a few more to take the picture, not to mention the tip I had to pay a kid who showed me the place.

After visiting my second-cousin-once-removed who is a Peace Corps Volunteer I went to the Mayan site of Tikal. Here are a couple of photos. It reminded me of Anchor Wat since Tikal is still surrounded by jungle and some of the structures are still ensconced in vegetation.



Near by Tikal I stayed in Flores. It was very touristy with lots of T-shirt shops, and hotels, and restaurants along the lakefront. But for some reason I didn’t mind that too much. Maybe this picture is why.


Signs

I don’t have many pictures of signs but I saw some great signs on this trip. On one chicken bus: “Jesus es mi pastor”. OK, not a bad idea on these busses. But also on the same bus (in English) “Emergency exit instructions below”; a fat lot of good that will do. Did I mention that these chicken busses are former US school busses?

Another sign I saw in a few places: “Se Prohibe Orinar En Este Lugar; Multa Q100.00 …La Muni”. Don’t pee in this place or the local municipality might fine you 100 Quetzales.

Well, I do have this picture:

Siempre Jóven

On a microbus (pronounced “Meekroboose” I saw a sign, in rainbow letters: “Siempre Joven”. Besides being a favorite Dylan song, the concept of forever-young appeals to me so much that I envisioned getting these words painted on my truck. But I had some doubts on this trip. I signed on to a little tour of the waterfalls at Semuc champey, with mainly younger people, in their twenties. We had to hike up mountains and I could hardly keep up. One of the few times in my life I had to quit a hike before I got to the top of the hill. Later, when we went into a very moist cave I slipped a couple of times. A French woman in her 40’s (her daughter was an intern in the French Embassy in Guatemala City) asked how old I was and, when I told her, she said that she thought I had done very well that day. I felt like I had not done well at all.

A more successful encounter with a couple of youngsters was near Tikal in a little hotel where the only other guests were Dan, a youngish teacher from England, and Rita a young woman from Germany. They were great and a lot of fun. They had bought a bottle of Rum and invited me to join them (and the hotel owner, Rhoda) in rum and cokes. I don’t really like sweet drinks but I joined them. Their Spanish was not as good as mine so I often had to translate stuff for Rhoda. As the evening wore on I actually had a harder and harder time understanding Dan’s English. About the time we had to start to search this little town for another bottle of Rum Dan and Rita got into a heated discussion about Doner Kebabs, which Rita insisted was an invention of immigrant Turks in Germany. BTW, every other word out of Rita’s mouth was f#*@ing this and f#*@ing that. Dan, who is very familiar with all the Kebab shops in UK, says: “We have to look this up in Wikipedia”. Rita replies: “I don’t f#*@ing have to look in f#*@ing Wikipedia”. As it turns out, the other little hotel in this town that sold rum also had an Internet café. It was about to close but I forked over a couple of Quetzales to get on the web to check out Wikipedia. I am still not too sure but I think that Rita may have a f#*@ing point. I finally crashed about 12:30 but Dan and Rita kept on for over another hour and somehow they made it up for a 5:00 AM tour of Tikal (I had already gone).

Food Adventures

In this same wonderful little town near Tikal (El Ramate), which is much less touristy than Flores, I had dinner at a restaurant that had two things on the menu that I was not sure of. The waitress said, in Spanish, that these two animals lived in the forest: one is venado and she made horns with her fingers, and says “Bambi”. I say, “No, tan triste, no puedo comer Bambi”. The other thing, which I ordered, was Tepezcuintle, which I found out later (thanks to Wikipedia) is a paca.

Other Random Thoughts

It is nice to be in a country where I am taller than most people. But even for me it was hard on the chicken busses, especially when they shoehorn in three people to a seat. And on one ride we hit one of the humps in the road to slow down traffic and when I came down hard something in my back went out of whack, not sure what it was.

I have a “Coca Cola Light Yardstick”. A sort of development index. A town or village shows its degree of development if its little store carries Coke Light (Diet Coke) along with regular Coke.

About the only thing that really bothered me was the way people throw trash out of busses in areas of beautiful scenery. They just don’t seem to value a clean environment. Don Abelino had one theory. It seems that for the Maya garbage symbolizes a type of success, either associated with a thriving small business (all the waste shows one is doing well) or a household (the garbage shows they can afford a lot of goods). Who knows?

Houston, We Have a Problem

My flight out of Guatemala was delayed and I missed my connecting flight in Houston so I was forced to spend the night there. Here area some scenes from Houston:

• By the time I get up the hotel seems to be cleared of all the stranded “refugees” who have left on their early morning flights; the lobby was really crowded the night before with people waiting to get their rooms.
• While watching the news in the lobby I see President Obama giving a press conference on his new Afghanistan policy, and a guy walks in front of the TV in an olive drab Halliburton shirt with an American flag on his sleeve.
• I notice on the way back to George Bush Airport that the name of the road is JFK Boulevard; well that is something, I suppose.
• From the shuttle I spot an obese African American guy in an SUV in the next lane eating fast food from out of a bag. I want to give him some healthy advice, but…..
• When we get to the airport the driver asks what terminal we are going to. A fellow passenger says “C” and I think he says “Si”; time to get back to English.
• A female Asian stew gets on the shuttle (I think she works for Japan Airlines); a few seconds later I hear this very thick southern accent (like Patsy Cline) and I realize that it is the stew and I have made an ethnocentric (if not racist) assumption.

Note: I actually finished this CliffNotes on the ship between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. If that confuses you, think how I feel. See the next chapters of this blog!