Blankets: I-44
Ten miles outside of St. Louis, on I-44, the four lanes of traffic stop suddenly. For the first few minutes, cars jostle lane to lane, trying to make a guess which ones are clogged, which ones are free. This happens all the time in cities. Nobody blinks.
After five minutes, nobody is jostling. Nobody is moving. A few people hit the far right shoulder and ease up the road, angling for an exit. But I'm a visitor, just passing through. I've taken enough wrong turns to stick to the big slab.
After fifteen minutes, we still haven't moved. Cars are still running, but brake lights are going off as people stick their transmissions into neutral. It's 85 degrees with bright sunshine, so it's a little warm out there in the concrete river. Twenty minutes in, we start to creep forward. No more than 6 feet at a time. I pass, slowly, a guy in a suit and tie waving a manila folder over the over-heated engine of his Taurus.
Thirty minutes in, I can tell we're easing off the interstate, all four lanes headed for an exit still 1/2 a mile away. There's a sort of resigned steadiness to it. Somebody lets you in eventually. You wave. I'm punching the radio, trying to find a damn traffic report, but all I get is college football. Suddenly it's all just one big lane of traffic. We're forty-five minutes into the adventure when we line up and pass by the scene.
I see the first white blanket as it appears in the corner of my eye as I pass a state trooper's car. It's a body under there; I can see a black boot stuck out. But the heavy white blanket covers the rest of it. Then, thirty feet ahead, in a similar pose, another blanket, the outline underneath smaller, the pinky finger of a hand the only visible marker. Two troopers in brown, without hats, stand facing the traffic, one next to each of the bodies. Off on the other shoulder I see a motorcycle, upright, nearly unmarked, and a sedan, a woman sitting on the hood, another trooper writing down the things that she says.
I'm ten feet from it. I'm drinking Mountain Dew. I've got U2 on the CD player. I have a map on the dash. I'm wearing sunglasses. I've got half a tank of gas and I've got a lot of miles to drive yet before I stop for the night.
Carl Phillips - St. Louis, MO
St. Louis is a city in all respects of the word. Big time sports - the baseball stadium rises up suddenly right in the middle of the central business district - industry, commerce, tourism. The gleaming silver arch is visible for miles as you arrive. Billboards outside of town advertise - in nearly equal numbers - casinos and churches.
Parts of the city, west of the big river, reveal a diverse populace. Gentrified neighborhoods with coffee shops, book stores, and cobbled walkways, butt up against neighborhoods that look as though they didn't survive the bust of the 70s. You see empty storefronts, burned out houses, empty, weed-strewn fields, and every kind of trash - from half a pool table to truck tires - discarded alongside streets with pretty names like Euclid and LaClede.
But even at its worst, it's vibrant and bustling, street vendors are set up for a big Saturday. I see people selling everything from flowers to BBQ. There's one optimistic fellow sitting in a lawn chair selling - what appears to be - about 100 bar stools.
At a local grocery store, people gather at the front doors, some going in with empty baskets, talking to friends coming out with full ones. A sort of bare and dismal park is livened up by twenty kids working one giant Chinese kite, two older teenagers watching, actually almost rolling on the grass laughing, as the kite veers out of control and lands on the sidewalk, string sawed off by a "Drug-Free, Gun-Free" metal sign.
Carl Phillips' home hides on a gorgeous tree-lined street in the shadow of the 150 foot high giant green dome of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. The house dates to the turn of the last century, and its front is dominated by a giant Magnolia tree. Inside, the house has high ceilings, hardwood floors - with occasional and surprising marble slab inlays. Carl's study is on the second floor, full of light from giant bay windows that open into the back yard, where one of two large dogs is waiting to see what my next move is.
Carl and I sit in the front living room, he's on the "dog's" couch; I'm in a big chair. Max, the milder of the two dogs, is barking at me. Barking doesn't cover it. As he barks I can see the muscles in his legs and back tense. His mouth flies open, the teeth, nice and white and present. If Carl were not so calm, I'd imagine that I just looked like a great big doggie treat to Max.
In a gorgeous late summer afternoon, Carl tells me about St. Louis and Massachusetts, his two homes. He's from Boston, and goes back there every summer, but has lived in St. Louis - in this house and another - for ten years. I'm interested in if he identifies himself with either place more, but, smiling, Carl confesses that he's probably just an "American" poet.
We talk about St. Louis' size. It's a city, full of the kinds of things anyone needs, but it's not "dizzying" like New York. He says he couldn't live in too small a town, citing Oberlin, Ohio, the current home of one of his friends, the poet Martha Collins (see below).
His proximity to the Basilica comforts him. He says he likes the hourly ringing of the bells, the "flocks" of nuns he sees each morning as they scuttle on his street.
When we're done, Carl walks me out to my truck and I say, looking back at his house, "This is a really great place."
Work Day - Mt. Vernon, IL
In Mt. Vernon, IL, I make an early stop to do some work. I've got transcribing and laundry to do, two jobs that are exactly as sexy as they sound.
The transcribing goes slow. I let it my slim, silver recorder run a few seconds, get a sentence or two, hit pause, start typing. By the time I'm typing I've only remembered the gist of the thing. I rewind, listen again, fix what I fouled, and then the next sentence is waiting. These interviews are ranging from 20-40 minutes, but the transcribing of a single one takes as much as 1:45. Sometimes the voices are crystal clear. Sometimes it's just a hiss and a squawk. What's that word? Constancy? Or inconstancy? Is that a word? That dog is barking. Should I transcribe that? The tape recorder is too near the air conditioner; it sounds like I'm interviewing someone flying a prop plane. That one guy keeps tapping the table as we talk. I get half a sentence, than a white noise CLONK. How does one spell CLONK?
The laundry goes more smoothly. The Daisy Fresh is empty when I go in, but Daisy - I imagine she's Daisy, but don't have the nerve to ask - tells me she's the change machine. She gives me a stack of quarters, points me toward the machines "that were working last night," and goes back to the sports page. "Cardinals killed me again last night," she says. "Lose at home. To the Cubs. No wonder it's a long summer."
Once I get the clothes in the machines (mostly white things in one, any other color in the other), I wander outside the Daisy Fresh and sit on the tailgate of my SUV. I spot a guy with a laundry bag over his shoulder walking toward me, but about three blocks away. Because of the sun, and the flat land, I can see him clearly. It looks like a gigantic bag. He stops every few feet and swings it off one shoulder and onto the other. Suddenly, without any particular warning, a train goes rushing past him, obscuring him from my view. He's so far away still that the sound of the train is only pleasant. But he looks to be right up against the rails, so I imagine it's as loud, as, well, a freight train. I can actually see his feet for a while under the blur of the train. Then his feet and the bag, which he's set down.
When the train's gone, he keeps coming. I swear, he's only blocks away, but it's taking him forever to get here. Daisy comes out, smoking a cigarette in one of those old-timey plastic filters. Very continental, I think. "That's Terry," she says, pointing down the road. "He's a fireman. He's got the Turk duty this week. He gets all the unmentionables. He's got to do them all, and he's got to fold them and put them in everyone's locker."
Terry is within speaking distance now, so Daisy turns her attention away from me and to him. "Did you see my Redbirds," she says? "Fucking stinking summer. I'm waiting for the Rams to start on Sunday."
Terry and Daisy go in. I wait outside a while, giving my clothes a chance to soak.
Once I clear out my dryer, I go to my car and see Terry sitting on a curb. He's got a burr cut, like an army guy. He's got a t-shirt on that says VOLUNTEER across the back. On the front is some kind of insignia. He looks up as I open my truck and start putting stuff in.
"You got a cigarette?" he says. I shake my head. "I'd bum one from Daisy, but sure as hell she'll talk my ear off." He looks down at my license plate and kicks at it with the toe of his boot. "Where you from, Maryland?"
"Yeah, I say, from around Baltimore."
"We got a captain who's from up there. Now he's here training us." He pauses, Daisy's emerged from the inside of the laundry.
"Terry, you got a load done, honey." Then she goes back in.
"You sure you don't have a smoke?" he says again.
"Nope. Nothing. Sorry."
"Hell, I'll have to walk all the way back and get mine." He peers in the laundromat, then over at the road he'd come up before and makes his decision. As I'm backing out, I see him headed back toward the train tracks.
James Cummins - Cincinnati OH
Jim Cummins, in addition to teaching poetry and lit at the University of Cincinnati, is the curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection, housed in a quiet spot on the 6th floor of UC's main library. The room is set up for readings, so we have a ton of chairs to choose from. He seems glad to hear how the trip has gone so far, so I take a little longer getting set up. Once the recorder is on, though, we get down to work.
A lot of Jim's work is really all about a psychological landscape. In fact I've been eager to see how what he has to say about place will fit with the more traditional sense of that word that I've been researching so far.
But as soon as we begin to talk, it's clear that his work is about place, maybe more internal, but driven and shaped by external, too. He talks about the writing of one of his books, Portrait in a Spoon, and about how the writing of that book took place in the basement of his house, late at night, after he'd read his daughter to sleep. He'd grope his way down into the shabby basement and "wrestle" the poetry to life. In a dirty town, in a small house, he found refuge in the basement and the poems found their way to him.
As a long time Cincinnatian, he has an interesting relationship to the city. He remembers vividly coming back to the city after having down graduate work in the seemingly sunny and primary-color-rich state of Iowa, and when he got back home, the dark and baroque Germanic architecture depressed him. He talks candidly - and not without a little stoic resignation - that this is his city, and a city that means a lot to him because of his own history with it.
Jim is an excellent host and map maker. Once we finish talking, he makes me maps for some places to check out, the giant brown Ohio River, and the streets of his much beloved Hamilton Avenue neighborhood.
I'm driving, mad, lost. It's not the map's fault. It's all me. I've got no one to blame but myself. The river, I think. The river can't be hard to find. It's got to be right over this hill. No, that's a muffler place. Then, maybe if I turn the map around and go back to from where I came. But where's that? Is this a one way? Officer, I'm only going one way.
Finally, I drive right to a gorgeous overlook. I check the map and realize it's all me, baby, the map was perfect. Two lovers are actually smooching on the brick railing that protects the public from a long and painful tumble through the dense and green hillside. (Though the railing doesn't stop a stray cat that leaps it and disappears.) This couple is going at it like they're in an Adrian Lyne movie, but I sneak by to get a good look at the river. It's a snaky delight from up this high. But I know from other trips that down low it's a big moving brown stink that really should just be covered over with some of Riverfront Stadium's old artificial turf.
But like I said, from up here, it's terrific.
The couple finishes their assignation, give me a sort of "Get soaked" look, and leave.
I grab the other map, commit parts of it to memory, then head out again, looking for James Cummin's neighborhood, the place he lives, a place where he has worked and written. If only I can find it.
Woody's Dairy Bar
Today's an off day, so I'm steering the red SUV through endless Ohio towns. Roads are closed in a flurry here right now. The last months of heavy summer construction have got me detouring through towns I've never seen before, and I'm turning around in many nice driveways when I miss those "No Outlet" signs.
After my third detour in three towns, I get a hankering for some ice cream. Not a big sundae or anything by Baskin Robbins, but soft-serve. I'm dreaming about soft-serve as I drive, someone dropping big dollops of the stuff from the sky on top of me. Me sliding down a big mountain of it, etc. These are the dreams that foodies always have.
Milford Center is a tiny town that is less than a wide spot on highway 4, and just as I'm blinking and passing it by, I spot a small wood one-story building on my right. The hand painted sign says, "Woody's Dairy Bar and Pizza."
There are no cars at Woody's, save one that I assume is someone who works there. It has two walk up windows in front, but a side door that opens into a tiny eating area that might hold 12 people if you stacked them like wood. One lady is watching "The Young and the Restless" on a TV sitting in one of the three booths, and an older lady with tiny wire frames is behind the counter. I thump down on a stool, give a wave to them both and tell them I've been dreaming of soft-serve ice cream and could I get a large vanilla.
While I wait for the cone, the three of us talk a bit about the weather. Did I come through rain? Was there rain where I was this morning? Have I ever seen so many days straight with rain? When I see the cone coming at me, I take a bit of a breath. It's gigantic. Think Skywalker. Think light saber. The lady hands it to me and it's the exact size and weight of a $48 flashlight. I'm dumbstruck. I don't even know if I'll be able to get it out the door of the place without ducking.
The ladies keep talking, oblivious to my delight, my horror, my stupendous amazement at the size of the behemoth cone.
I give it a few licks to get started. I spin on the stool and watch some of the show. Victor is still good looking, I'm glad to see, and still running Genoa City with that Euro accent and his fancy suits.
Five minutes in and the cone is now the size of what you might get for $5 at Dairy Queen if the server was hopped up on something. It now resembles a big cone.
"What a cone," I say.
"Good, isn't it? Good on a muggy day," the younger lady says.
"Big, I meant, actually. It's a huge cone."
The older lady sort of cocks her head. "You should come after 4 o'clock."
The younger lady says, "Yeah, when Kenny's here, he makes really big ones."
With about 4 inches to go on the cone, I figure I've sat there long enough. I say goodbye and walk out to my car. As I drive away, I dream about soft-serve again, but now I dream about Kenny, this magical man who appears at Woody's after 4, and makes the big cones. I will have to think about that some more. One day, maybe when I'm rested, I'll come back.
Martha Collins - Oberlin OH
It may be that the towns of northern Ohio are about the prettiest I've ever seen. Each little town is full of endless green lawns and 1880 houses bright white with crisp green or black roofs. Nobody is scurrying; there's no traffic to speak of. Even the town bank is an architectural beauty. In Norwalk, OH, I get myself caught in the wrong lane for a moment while I try to negotiate my way to a different highway than the one I came into town on. Momentarily I'm blocking three of the four lanes of traffic. Nobody honks. Nobody flips me the bird. A guy on a tractor in front of me, points once, up highway 113, and then once at highway 20, as if to say: "You can do one of these two things." When I pick one, he gives a little wave, traffic continues as it once did, and I'm pushing down yet another road of perfect houses, red flower planters on porches, a fat kid bouncing a ball, and a fire station done up in American flags and a banner saying: "Pancake Breakfast, every Sunday."
Oberlin College is finishing its first day of the new semester when I arrive in town. The campus is bustling, but beautiful. A middle quad of enormous relative size is ringed by benches, large painted rocks, and students of every variety walking back to dorms.
Martha Collins has given me directions to her Rice Hall office, but I stagger around campus a while first, carrying my gigantic bag of cameras and recorders (and batteries, and tapes, and notebooks). Two girls wearing red "Lifeguard" sweatshirts are talking to a young man with a blank look on his face. He's holding a crumpled piece of paper and actually scratching his head. As I pass, I hear a few words, "Professor...across there...need your schedule...going to Akron...those are cute pants."
When I find Martha, she's cheery. I'm tired from the long day and a head full of allergies to some of these gorgeous trees, but once inside her bright basement office, I feel better. Martha's smile is big and welcoming and we get to work. During the conversation she laughs easily. It's clear she's tickled by these discoveries my questions have brought. She talks about her work with real care. She doesn't have a casual relationship to her work like some poets do. I get the feeling from her comments that those poems were written with great care by a precise and exacting woman, and even talking about them years later, she's affording them the same kind of attention.
We go out to a small courtyard between Rice and Professor Halls and shoot some photos. Mosquitoes love me, always have. My wife tells me I'm so sweet, but she always says sweet like it's a four letter word. I get six bites on my bare legs while I'm shooting Martha up against some great looking trees. We say goodbye, and I pack my big bag again. I walk back through campus the other way. Once, as I stand on the corner of College Street, letting a perfectly good walk light go by, a big African American man on a tiny green bicycle asks me if I know where I'm going. "Yep," I say. "Just taking it all in." "Oh," the guy says, and he and his bike ride off.
David Citino - Columbus OH
When you book motel rooms over the Internet, it's never entirely without some hidden value. After leaving WV on the afternoon of Sept 1st, I journeyed another 200 miles to my next city, Columbus OH, where I will meet with David Citino. With a whole evening stretched in front of me to recuperate from the initial blast of the trip, I pulled into my Super 8, a motel notable for having both a Waffle House and a Gentlemen's club sharing its parking lot. They form a little triangle with a weird energy. The strip club, The Gold Fox, is red with yellow lights around its exterior. On the front door, which you pass as you walk to the motel lobby, I see that they have a 2 drink minimum, but no cover charge. In felt pen, someone has written: “Shirts with sleeves – no motorcycle gear.”
The motel is spectacularly bad. It's cheap, too, and this is now all making sense to me. I bunk out that night, listen to banging of an unknown origin from room 120 - except when the steady stream of truck traffic on the interstate doesn't drown it out - then get out of bed quickly to wash it all off of me.
This morning, I am not rested, but I'm happy to be checking out. I drive down I-71 to the campus of Ohio State to meet with Citino. The campus is ungodly large, covering blocks and blocks of area. Inconceivably, because of the crush of buildings already there, construction is flourishing everywhere. When I pull into the Parking Garage B, just off High Street, I am surrounded by work trucks, guys getting out with metal lunch pails, helmets, etc. I go another way - haven't I always - and make my way across to a 2 story McDonald's. The place is fantastic inside, clean, empty. Nobody there but me and Janet behind the counter. I give my order and then head over to a corner of the room with a TV. Right at 7 two kids come in. Now, my first though is: "Lunkheads." Don't get me wrong. I like lunkheads. Sometimes, when I think of my youth, I realize I was often a lunkhead. It's not a slam, is what I'm saying. They look like they just woke up. They both have OSU hats and t-shirts on, thin, worn down. They turn the TV without asking me if I'm watching CNN, which I'm not. There's a car ad on so the taller of the two hustles over Janet and makes their orders. Before guy #1 gets back, a show starts. It looks like a Jurassic Park thing to me, made for TV, though. I miss the titles and opening because I'm doing my best to keep the syrup off of my shirt as I work through three perfectly symmetrical pancakes.
When guy #2 gets back, the two buddies face the TV, sitting on the same side of the booth, and stare at the set, eating all along. At the first commercial break they talk back and forth, #1 catching up his pal on what's happened so far. I find out they're ceramic engineering majors, but don't find out what THAT is because the show comes back on. It's called Lost World, and it is a Jurassic Park sort of thing. These two guys in the show have rescued a damsel who they find has psychic powers of some kind. She's been on before because the lunkheads are glad to see her. At the next break they resume talking to each other: "Has she got predestination?" one guy says, eating half a hash brown at the question mark. "No, she's a sensor." The show comes back on; the lunkheads quit talking, and I head over to Denney Hall.
David Citino has one of those offices every professor wants, full of books, spacious, well lit from inside and out. It's big enough to play racquetball in. He's a terrific host, and we sit next to each other in front of his desk and we chat about the book a while before I begin asking him about the role place plays in his work. Citino's lived in Ohio his whole life, born in Cleveland, now 30 years in Columbus. For him, Ohio is a place that he takes with him on any journey in his own writing.
We spend some time looking out the big bank of windows that open to a nice circular seating area, stone walkways and wooden benches. It's a great place to sit and read or write. We open his window and I go outside the building and take some pictures of David through the window from the outside. I'm almost falling over a circa 1985 Schwinn Roadmaster bicycle, but I get some great shots. I go back in, we talk about a few poets I'll be seeing down the road, and we say our goodbyes.
Thirty minutes later, as I'm hustling up I-71 north, headed for Oberlin, on the radio, crackling a bit in a sudden rain storm, Garrison Keillor reads one of David's poems on his "Writer's Almanac" show. Keillor's voice always a bit too much gravitas for my taste, but he reads David's poem "Hair" beautifully. I weave in and out of truckers who are spraying me senseless. After the poem is over, I pull out a Shelby Lynne CD and turn that up as loud as I can stand and keep driving.
Jim Harms - Morgantown WV
I leave Beltsville around 5:30 am, making my way west through the early and sluggish dewy morning. Out of the Maryland panhandle, into West Virginia, out again, then in Pennsylvania for 6 minutes, then into West Virginia again. By 7 the sun is behind me, diffuse, but lighting my way. By 9:30 I'm in Morgantown, too early for my interview. I hit Wal-Mart and buy a cheapo watch - always buy something, always buy something. I wait out the last hour or so at White Park, tapping on my laptop, listening to whatever kind of bird is going to town on the trees there. A late 20s mother comes by my truck window with a blue-barretted blonde baby and a surging black Lab, and says, "Do you know where the trails are around here?" I tell her I've just arrived here myself this morning, but maybe she could look over behind us by the softball fields. "I've been here a month and this is the first time I've gotten off my butt." The dog barks for the eleventh time, and she says, "Looks like we better go," and then they do.
Jim Harms couldn't be a more amiable fellow. He lets me in the front door of his little white and neat bungalow. I step over his sneakers on the front porch, but leave mine on. We sit across a small coffee table and I see he's a music fan, the Elvis Costello box set gives that away. A Dell laptop rests between us, as if any moment it might be needed. The warm breeze comes in the open windows, mixing with the downward draft of a single, lazy ceiling fan. Harms wears a t-shirt and shorts, loose white socks. He moves his hands around when he talks, but it's all relaxed. No rush, but he's got much terrific stuff to say about place. He tells me that his own "default" landscape is that of California, where he grew up, but that now he's ten years into his life in West Virginia, that these places all sort of mix together.
We talk for about an hour, and then go out to the grass of the front lawn to shoot some photos. I make him move a couple of chairs and a garbage can, and he sits on a brown wicker number while I shoot. He doesn't smile, but he doesn't not smile. He's just taking a day off at the bungalow. I shake his hand, we talk about staying in touch about the project, and I get on the highway to Columbus.
