September Leg of Trip Complete
I've returned safely from the two week tour through the Midwest. What a terrific time, and what terrific hospitality I was treated to at every turn. My mighty thanks to all the poets.
We are now just packing up the house and relocating our stuff to a small vacation home we've purchased in NW Arkansas. We expect to have the big RV on the road in early to mid October. We'll be hitting the plains and mountain states in October and November.
Stay tuned for more postings; enjoy reading the archives (which you can access from this page at anytime).
Elevation
After 4000 miles in 14 days, I find myself headed home, half lost on the freeways around Pittsburgh at 11:30 at night.
Construction has thrown up fifty orange detour signs and I'm blinking and seeing about a third of them. Finally, I'm on the PA Turnpike, headed east out of Pittsburgh. The city skyline is beautiful, and I'm still sort of seeing the lights in my head as I drive.
About five miles outside of Pittsburgh, I start climbing. Endless switchbacks. There's a three-quarter moon, yellow to orange, right ahead of me, and the traffic is light.
It's been a long trip, driving every day, bad motels at night, working on the laptop till all hours, trying to make sense of all the things I've heard in these great interviews. I can't make it home tonight. It's already late, but I'm just trying to push a few more miles so my last day will be easy.
Ten miles out of Pittsburgh, the switchbacks continue, and the climb is steady.
A Harley, its distinctive rat-a-tat-tat sound coming first, passes me. The guy is big, with a black helmet with "Tommy" stenciled on the back. His red tail light starts disappearing. But because the traffic is light, I increase my speed a bit and follow along behind him. We're doing 70, maybe, for the first couple of miles. When he gets too far ahead and I can no longer hear him, I pick up the pace. We occasionally come behind two or three semis struggling up the hills. I keep thinking that we'll level off, hit a valley, something, but the incline is steady.
Twenty miles out I notice I'm up to 75, 77, something like that. The pavement is glassy smooth, and the moon gives a little light. But it's still a highway near midnight so it's dark everywhere else. We bend left and right, up the switchbacks. I keep thinking, what the hell is the elevation here? How high are we going?
Thirty miles out, two semis have to weave from the slow lane in front of me. Tommy, the bike guy, is still ahead. I lose sight of him. The slow lane has narrowed because of construction barriers. The semis are in front of me; I ease off the gas and watch my speedometer start to fall.
Off to the right, up another climb, I see Tommy's tail light. It's getting dimmer, and I can't hear him anymore.
I tap my steering wheel a while, think that it's odd I'm driving without some CD blasting, and I take a drink of water out of a bottle that is in my passenger seat. It takes about five miles for me to pass the semis, but now my Pathfinder is rolling. I hit 80 miles an hour and the road is empty.
I have the windows all open, and the wind is rushing through here like I'm on a roller coaster. I'm at 85 when I see Tommy's light ahead of me. In a few minutes I'm behind him and we settle in together. We bank the corners, he a second ahead of me or so, and we use both lanes, the left lane for bends that way, and the right lane when we cut back.
He's aware of me - he couldn't not be - but he senses I'm not passing. We climb higher and impossibly higher. As we pass about the 50 mile mark out of Pittsburgh, we haven't seen another car in five minutes. My speedometer says 90, and the sound of his engine is nearly deafening, even to me, the echoes slapping back from the rocks that crowd both sides of the turnpike.
Higher still. Impossible, I think. The moon hangs ahead of us still, the only light save our own, and we're headed up another switchback when I hear Tommy's engine misfire a time or two. Altitude. The gas mixture on the big bike is off a hair, not noticeable anywhere else but here.
He drops to 80 and I stay behind him. When two semis appear ahead of us on the right, Tommy pulls into the slow lane and gives me one finger point, motioning me to go on ahead. He eases his throttle back as he nears what appears to be a level spot of highway.
I go past, not waving, not looking, just pushing on. I eat up the two semis and am now on a flat. The speedometer says 95 and the hum of the engine and the roar of the window is exhilarating. It's the best I've felt about anything in a year, maybe five years. That's a horrible and sad thing to say, and my life is full of incredible blessings. But tonight is extraordinary. It's one of the best nights of my life. I love cars, I guess. Highways. I love the feeling of going somewhere. I never gave a shit about home. That's what it means to me.
And suddenly, there's Tommy again. I can see his single headlight coming up. We're on a flat when he pulls even with me. We don't look, don't wave. And what's important is that this isn't a competition. It's not some testosterone event. It's just driving. Driving a perfect and smooth highway. There are few things that are as effortless and as beautiful as when the whine of the highway and the noise of your own soul match each other.
We fly on like that for another ten miles, sometimes side by side, sometimes one a bit ahead.
When we're 80 miles into the trip, I see the lights of a coming town, an exit. I'm tired, sleepy, refreshed inside somehow, but physically ready for rest. I want to keep going. I want to keep pushing this red truck along at these speeds, under this moon. I think about Tommy. He looks to be my age, or a bit older. On a Sunday night like this, I think everyone is going somewhere to see someone who is up waiting.
It's past midnight.
Just before the exit, I point out the window to the left lane and Tommy goes by. I start to slow, but he keeps going, the Harley pouring through Pennsylvania like sand, escaping, leaving me here at the exit sign, the light of a Best Western shining in on me through the open moon roof.
I stop at Dunkin' Donuts, of course, before checking in. Two jelly filled. I smile big, like a goofball at the two workers. I say, "You guys open all night, huh?" motioning around at the empty store.
And at the hotel I sleep, I sleep like a baby, with dreams about climbing.
Richard Tillinghast - Ann Arbor, MI
Writers work everywhere. Poets can scribble on notebooks in planes and in hotel rooms. Some use every part of their homes, the study, the bedroom, even porches.
But Richard Tillinghast is the winner of the porch sweepstakes. While rain threatens from the southern skies, Richard and I sit on either end of a large, bulky sofa. Richard is surrounded by books, notepads, and a set of homemade flash cards from which he is apparently learning Turkish grammar for an upcoming trip to his beloved Istanbul.
Richard loves a lot of places, western Tennesse, Memphis, Ireland - where he goes every year as part of his work with The Poet's House - and Istanbul.
He shows me some great photos from his travels, and we go through how his geographical wanderings have informed his writing over a long and productive career. He tells me of first reading John Crowe Ramson, another southerner, and the freedom those poems gave him - one can be from the south and be a writer, is what it meant to Richard. One didnt have to be from New York, or Paris, or New England. You could be from Tennessee.
While we talk, his neighbors go by out front, seemingly everyone with one or two dogs. This quiet street, mosty free of traffic, has a never-ending parade of people. We're in the middle of Ann Arbor, a college town where professors and students live near each other and their shared home - the university.
But Richard is on leave right now. He's just come back from upstate New York where he was a featured instructor at a conference. Soon he'll be back in Istanbul, where he will meet and talk with Turkish writers - and use his improving language skills.
I wonder about this porch. Who will keep it running in his absence?
Linda Gregerson - Ann Arbor, MI
Ann Arbor on a Sunday morning is the perfect college town. The Wolverines have stomped Notre Dame the previous afternoon, and the endless outdoor bistros and cafes on Main Street are full of parents and children drinking in the sunshine and the espresso.
I see a guy set up on the lawn of an Exxon station selling reproductions of Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Monet. He also has one of the "Dogs Playing Poker" series for those with more refined taste.
I get a donut and a bottle of water at a BP service station and a guy coming out asks me if I can believe the weather. "Yes," I say, "I look up, and there it all is." I think this might open us to a few witty rejoinders, but the guy gives me a look like I just knocked his beanie off, and he gets into his Jeep - freshly Armor-Alled if my nose is right.
Linda Gregerson lives in an idyllic setting north and west of Ann Arbor. It's impossible to imagine that there are towns or cities anywhere near this place, set amidst barns, pumpkin fields, and endless trees. The only thing I can think of this morning more beautiful than this spot is Linda's poems themselves.
Linda's home opens into a wooded area, a brook awaits a hundred feet away, and deer and woodchucks often come to peruse her self-described "suburban" garden. We sit on white chairs on a screened in porch and let the warm September breeze blow through our conversation.
Ironically, when younger, Linda's asthma made this kind of communion with the natural world a miserable, taxing event. But thanks to medication, she's getting a belated start on being one with all of the great pollen bearing objects out there spewing their varied stuff.
We talk about some cities she loves, London and New York, but also of her childhood home in the upper Midwest. She talks about some poems of hers written about events that happened before her time, stories told to her by her family, and poems written in and around the hospitals she found herself in when younger.
She shows me around the yard a bit, pointing out some dear plants given to her by some friends. I'm looking for a woodchuck, however. The plants can wait. Ever since she said woodchuck I've been singing that childhood song in my head.
Groundhog? Is a woodchuck like a groundhog? I have a groundhog near where I live now. I think it looks like a great beaver, without the waffled tail, without the big teeth. Without the mountie. What's a woodchuck look like? Where do they summer?
