Motels (and Zombies)

Whew.  I would have posted sooner but I was helping a friend.  We were strategizing ways for bilingual entrepreneurs to use social networking to fend off zombie attacks.  Inversely, during this process we developed and launched Fleshbook, a way for zombies around the world to stay connected, share photos and videos of recent flesh-eating orgies, and check in at places like malls, basements and grocery stores where the few remaining live humans are hiding out.  


We're also engaged in a bidding war with two very large cellular providers over rights to the exclusive launch of an app for smart phones, called Flesh Mob.  The app will tie in with Google Earth to provide zombies with GPS coordinates for said live humans, based on signals that emanate from their cell phones when they try to call one another for help.  Nearby zombies can then assemble spontaneously and surprise the humans with dance and/or song.  It's exhausting work, but we're really proud of the results thus far.


Where was I?  Travel, desert, childhood reminiscences, music, zombies - oh, right.  Motels.


By motels, I mean those small, family-owned-and-operated places that were called 'motor inns', 'motor courts' or 'motor hotels' back in the very old days.  ('motor' + 'hotel' = 'motel'.  genius.)  Motels usually consist of a single long, low one-story building, or a series of tiny individual buildings.  They often have no more than a dozen rooms, the doors of which all face the parking lot.  You can pull your car right up to the door and walk in.  There's nearly always an owner or manager that lives in the back behind the lobby and emerges, grumpy and disheveled, when you ring the bell for service as instructed by a sign on the front desk or affixed to the bulletproof window outside the lobby.


I seek these little places out as often as I can.  When it's midnight, and I've been driving for sixteen hours, and I only need a place to sleep for a few hours before I shower and hit the road again, I have trouble justifying $100 or more for a 'good' hotel, a chain hotel.  I'd rather spend $35 for the room and put the remaining $65 in the gas tank.  Call me crazy.


One place I stayed that typifies the small motel experience had a light yellow brick facade and was located at the crossroads of two obscure two-lane highways near the middle of nowhere in Manitoba Province, Canada.  The owner was obviously doubtful about my assertion that I was merely an adventurous young American girl out tooling around his part of the country with my German Shepherd as a companion.  He seemed to think I was a draft dodger, fugitive from the law, drug runner, or - barring all that - had six other people tucked away out of sight around the corner, waiting until after I'd paid single occupancy rates to invade the room and stay for free.


This man told me in no uncertain terms that my dog was not allowed in the room.  Amiably, I said it would be no trouble, my dog had a bed in the jeep and would be perfectly alright there for the night.  This only seemed to make him more skeptical of me.  To prove JUST how suspicious he was, the key he handed me was to the room right next to the motel office.  The room where, I assumed, he put all the troublemakers so he could keep an eye on them.  I shrugged, went outside, walked and fed my dog to get him settled in, then took my things to the room.


Which was immaculate.  Tidy, clean, obviously well tended to.  The bathroom, though.  To call it a technicolor nightmare hardly begins to describe the full effect.  The bad, bad, awful fluorescent lighting illuminated bright yellow linoleum floors.  Mud-brown toilet.  Grass-green towels.  Pale blue bathtub.  I laughed, thinking of the lengths this man had gone to to protect his hodgepodge of remnant-sale bathroom fixtures, then went back to the truck for my camera.


I made a special point that night of double-bolting the door and wedging a chair under the handle, just in case the looks I interpreted as 'skeptical' and 'suspicious' were actually intended as 'sizing me up for that crawl space out back underneath the shed'.  Because of the movies.  You know what I'm talking about.  Any time a small motel appears in a movie, any combination of the following things are likely to happen:


     1) someone stumbles across a dead body
     2) someone gets stalked and killed by the crazy motel proprietor
     3) two people with opposite personality types are forced to share a bed, at which point:
          a) the come to realize the common bonds they both share
          b) they fall in love
          c) both


My real-life experiences in even the shabbiest motels have varied greatly, but not been quite that colorful.  There was the motel outside of Milwaukee ($18/night!) with rooms so tiny the door didn't open all the way.  The place in Colorado, where I set my card key down on the night table and had to pry it our of some sticky substance the next morning.  The one in Kansas where I zipped myself into my sleeping bag to avoid contact with the bed linens.  


Sure, I could stay only in the chain motels, where I know what I'm getting every time I walk in the door.  I definitely would during the event of a zombie attack, because I could raid the vending machines and mini bars for food and fashion weapons from the grab bars in the bathrooms.  The small motels, though, are all part of the adventure.

Road Music: The Eagles

Wolfy, a Facebook friend, recently posted a YouTube video of the Eagles song 'Desperado' on his wall.  Hearing the song got me thinking about music that I listen to when I'm on road trips, which led me back around to the Eagles.


I've liked the Eagles for as long as I can remember.  In high school, my brother and I had a cassette tape of the Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume 2 album.  I can't tell you how many nights we spent cruising around in the powder blue family wagon, singing along to 'Seven Bridges Road' and 'Hotel California'.  Something in the music of this group spoke to me, back then, of continual motion and a freedom I dreamed of but didn't know I would ever be able to attain.  Maybe it was the tempo of 'Life in the Fast Lane', such an easy companion to the thrum of the tires and the feel of the ground moving underneath the car.  Or a wistfulness I picked up from Timothy Schmidt's vocals in 'I Can't Tell You Why'.  Or it could have been the devil-may-care attitude of the lyrics in 'The Long Run'.


I was playing an Eagles CD the day I caught my first glimpse of the desert as an adult.   Since then, I've associated the Eagles not only with the physical landscape of the desert, but with my internal landscape as I drive through it.  Most of the time, that landscape is one of movement and restlessness.

You know I've always been a dreamer - spent my life runnin' round
And it's so hard to change - can't seem to settle down
But the dreams I've seen lately keep on turnin' out, and burnin' out, and turnin' out the same.

So put me on a highway and show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time.
- Eagles, 'Take It to the Limit'


But that's not always the case.  In early March of 2002, my sister Jane, her boyfriend and I were preparing to camp on national forest land just outside Sedona, Arizona.  Thirty miles away in Flagstaff, temperatures were in the thirties.  Among the red cliffs near the Palatki ruins, though, there was only a hint of chill to the air. We didn't have a tent with us.  There was no reason to drag one along, no one around for miles.


The three of us had hiked earlier that day, up to the top of Doe Mesa.  We were pleasantly dusty and tired.  We built a small fire, more for ambience than for warmth, while we ate dinner.  I don't recall what we ate, what we talked about, or what time it was when we let the fire burn down and rolled our sleeping bags out on the sandy red slick rock.  All I remember are the stars.  I'd lived in Chicago for a decade.  Life under the orange city skies had almost made me forget such things as stars existed.


Not that I'd ever seen so many at one time, ever.  With nothing to dim or obstruct my view I felt as though I could reach out and touch every last one of the twenty billion or so stars that I could see.  The Milky Way flowed unrestricted from horizon to horizon.  The main constellations were nearly obscured by the sheer quantity of visible stars.  Periodically a bright fragment would detach itself from the background and go whizzing across the sky:  a shooting star.  Up above it all, faintly, I caught a glimpse of a satellite moving along on its gravitational track.


I lay there breathless for what may have been hours, too exited and joyful to fall asleep.  I felt like I couldn't open my eyes wide enough to take it all in.  When I did doze off, I had bizarre dreams from which I awoke disoriented.  I opened my eyes and there was this brilliant night sky, still whirling above me.  I turned over and lay on my side, grounding my vision on the ridge to the west.  As I stared, I could see the line of the horizon swallowing up the stars.


That was when I had, for the first time, the actual, visceral sense of the earth's rotation.  Not as an abstract concept that I learned in a grade school science class ages ago, but as a real motion I could see and feel.  The realization was dizzying.  I closed my eyes and fell asleep again.


I woke in the pre-dawn.  Jane and her boyfriend were still burrowed into their sleeping bags.  As I watched the last of the stars fade into the light of the early morning the lyrics to an Eagles song - 'Peaceful, Easy Feeling' - were stuck in my head.  

I like the way your sparkling earrings lay against your skin so brown
And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a billion stars all around
I've got a peaceful, easy feeling, and I know you won't let me down
'Cause I'm already standing on the ground.

 For once I was content, right where I was.

Before the Staycation

A few years ago, with the economy well into its downhill slide, the term 'staycation' was picked up by the media and, for better or worse, entered our national lexicon.  Wikipedia says the word was coined as early as 2003, but finally gained popularity in 2008.  Urban Dictionary defines a 'staycation' as 'A vacation spent close to home.'  And, alternately, a 'Vacation for cheap-asses.'

My abhorrence of this mashup of the English language causes me to wonder:  What did we call this notion before it came to be known as a 'staycation'?  Probably something less brief and more literate, like, 'We're not really going anywhere for vacation this year but taking some time off anyway,' or 'I can't afford Tahiti so I'm going to buy a gallon of rum and sit in the kids' sandbox all week.'

Our family went on some epic road trips when I was growing up.  As much as we looked forward to the long excursions, my parents were the true masters of small getaways close to home - or (groan), the staycation.  They had to be.  We were a family of six living on a small-town school administrator's salary, which was modest at best, plus what my Mom made at various bookkeeping jobs through the years.

When they got married, Mom and Dad purchased a tent.  It was a hefty blue canvas number, big enough to sleep six adults or a heap of kids.  I know we logged a lot of camping miles in that tent, but I have only the vaguest recollections of actually sleeping in it.  What I remember best is the camper.  The kind of camper you pull behind the car with a trailer hitch.  It was more than twenty feet long, with white paneling on the outside and brown paneling on the inside.  The brand name, Utopia, was emblazoned across the front, heralding idyllic good times to come.

I was eight or nine when my parents sprang for the camper.  It wasn't as big as the 1970's-era Bendix Life-Time motorhome my mom's parents traveled in; still it was a considerable step up from the tent.  It featured a galley kitchen with a propane stove, oven and small refrigerator, three bench seats that converted into bunks, storage bins in every nook and cranny, and a bathroom - complete with shower - that was approximately the size of a phone booth.  The camper also had an air conditioner, which made my mom happy (although we rarely used it).  Granted, things got a little cramped when all six of us were inside, but this was the height of luxury for our family.  We no longer had to sleep on the ground or worry about whether it was going to rain.

With the camper in tow behind the car, a little food in the cooler, and just a few dollars for gas and campground fees, my parents could make a mini-vacation out of any three-day holiday or run-of-the-mill weekend.  We visited nearly every state park within a three-hour radius of home.  In Southern Illinois, we made several trips to Giant City State Park, Pounds Hollow, Garden of the Gods, and Cave-In-Rock.  We crossed over into Indiana to stay at French Lick, Turkey Run, and New Harmony State Parks.  

Most of my Dad's side of the family lived an hour away.  We generally stayed with my grandparents on weekend visits, but periodically we set up our home away from home in the city park.  On these occasions, family members would sometimes bring food out on a Saturday evening, or on a Sunday afternoon when church was over, and we would gather for an impromptu potluck meal.  The grown-ups would sit talking, on folding chairs and at picnic tables, while we kids ran wild all over the place.  

Other times, we wouldn't go any farther than the local municipal park ten miles down the road from where we lived.  The point was not how far away we could get.  The point was just to feel like we were getting away.

Out of all the parks we frequented on these local jaunts, our hands-down family favorite place to camp was McCormick's Creek State Park, outside Spencer, Indiana.  It had everything my overworked parents could hope for to keep four rambunctious kids occupied:  trails to hike, caves to explore, waterfalls to splash in, horseback riding, an Olympic sized swimming pool, safe roads to ride our bikes on, and when all else failed, a huge playground.  There was a nature center with interactive exhibits, and the park rangers often hosted informative discussions of native plant and wild life in the evenings.  On autumn weekends there were horse-drawn hayrides through the park.  Roving gangs of raccoons - and a skunk, once - visited our campsite nightly to beg for scraps.  That place was a wonderland to me.  

A wonderland for cheap-asses, to be sure.  Frugal-minded as these weekend outings might have been, they afforded me a wealth of intangibles no first-class flight or five-star hotel could have done.  I gained a love and respect for the natural world, became proficient at building a roaring fire from a few twigs and a couple matches, and mastered the techniques involved in assembling the perfect s'more.  More importantly, I discovered that sometimes great adventures can be had just by walking outside the front door and taking a look around, the importance of being a patient traveler and getting along with others in close quarters, and the joy of seeking out simple pleasures, close to home.  

Routine Trips and Commutes

Curiosity about the extraordinary behind the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil.  -Phil Cousineau

Today I'm dedicating this space to small trips. Routine trips.  Your daily commute to work, your drive to the local grocery store, the route you take between home and school. 


Whether we walk, ride a bike, drive, or take public transportation to get around, these small journeys take up a lot of room in our daily lives.  A study done by the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey* reported in 2005 that on average, Americans now spend more time commuting to work annually than they get in vacation time:  100 hours/year commuting vs. 80 hours/year vacationing.  


This seems really high, I know.  Believe it or not, the percentage of people in the US who commute more than ninety minutes round trip to their jobs is actually lower (at 11 percent) than in many other countries around the world:  workers in Japan, China, India and Korea have the highest percentages (32, 31, 26 and 25 percent, respectively)**.


Depressing, right?  We travel the same routes, day in and day out.  We put our minds on auto-pilot.  We distract ourselves during these small trips and longer commutes with music, smart phones, dvd players, books on tape, crossword puzzles, the newspaper, work we brought home from the office - whatever we can find to escape the drudgery of another soul-sucking ride to and from the places we have to be every day.


When I moved from rural, downstate Illinois to Chicago in the early 1990's, every day was a new adventure in getting to work.  I tried different bus routes, took the El train to stops that were varying distances away from my office, and walked home a different way each afternoon.  Perhaps it was because living in a city and riding buses and El trains was so new to me, or because I'm so nosey and curious about my surroundings, but I never got in the habit practiced by many of my fellow commuters - that of sticking my nose in a newspaper or book and ignoring what was happening around me till my stop was called.  If I had a spot near a window, I looked out the window.  If the train or bus was too crowded for me to be able to see out the windows, I looked around surreptitiously at my fellow passengers, noticing small details about them.


There were plenty of times in the twelve years I lived in Chicago, especially through the long, dreary winter days so endemic to the Midwest, that commuting via the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) lost its luster.  In order to fend off the funk that would settle over me during those times, and in order to break the monotony of the same old daily routine, I made up games to play in my head.  My favorite game was to look for the cutest guy or the most interesting-looking man within sight and fall in love with him, just for the duration of the ride.  (Did I mention what a total romantic I was as a youth?)  Ah, the coy flirtations that took place, the torrid and dramatic love affairs I carried on, the tragic, emotionally draining partings...all in my head, all between the Rockwell and Chicago Avenue stops, or Sedgwick and the Merchandise Mart, or 87th Street and Division Street.


Another thing I did was not so much a game as an exercise in awareness.  I made it my practice to try to notice one new thing on my commute every day.  It didn't have to be monumental.  It might be that the lady down the street had planted pink geraniums next to her front stoop.  Or the new burrito place opening up where the sub shop used to be.  Or - my favorite, one that I still look for when I'm on the Red Line - the parking lot behind that one building in River North, where there was always at least one random pair of shoes dangling over the low-hanging power line.


When I began making a conscious effort to really see the things that were around me, traveling to and from work and making those small daily trips to the same old places went from an annoyance to be endured to a rather delightful way to spend my time.  It was a daily mini-adventure I embarked upon to keep things lively while I waited to use my 80 hours of vacation time.


Okay, so noticing a couple pairs of shoes hanging over a parking lot isn't quite on par with lying on a beach in the South Pacific while some muscle-bound man in a sarong rubs warm oil into my skin (like I did that one day, with that hot guy on the Brown Line...in my head).  But it still gives me a small private thrill to think that I might be the only person in the El car on any given day to notice the bedraggled pair of running shoes that have landed next to the faded Chuck Taylors. 


What do you do to make your everyday small trips more interesting?  Did you notice anything new on your commute today?  Tell me about it!


Sources:
* 'Americans Now Spend Over 100 Hours A Year Commuting' by Robert Longley.  about.com, April 2005.
** '1 in 4 Koreans Spend 90 Minutes Commuting' by Bae Ji-sook.  KoreaTimes.com, 11Aug2010.

Things That Go Bump in the Early Morning

It's still early July of 2010.  Tanner and I have left Shiprock, NM.  We drive east, then north, gaining elevation as the road winds up onto a bluff overlooking the San Juan River.  There are farms and green fields below in the river valley.  Signs along the way advertise hay for sale.  The air becomes cooler.  There are mountains ahead.


Just shy of Durango, CO, I turn east on Highway 160.  This is a stretch I haven't yet driven.  I'm thrilled at the prospect of seeing new terrain.


The sun is descending at our backs.  We follow the shadow of the Jeep as it stretches before us.  A few monsoon clouds toss about on the wind, making complicated effects with the sunlight as it lies across the landscape.  Big drops of rain dot the windshield.  The sky overhead clears and a rainbow arches over the road ahead of me.  Dusk is approaching.  Time to find a place to set up camp for the night.


I pass through the town of Bayfield, CO and continue east, entering the San Juan National Forest.  I begin my search for a likely-looking side road, rejecting a few until I see a small brown sign indicating a forest service road that heads north.  When I slow and engage the turn signal, Tanner pops up from his recumbent position on the blankets in back.  Tanner is a mountains-and-deserts dog.  He recognizes that dirt and gravel roads equal off-leash time for him.


Initially there are houses, set back from the road on generously sized properties.  Two miles further, a ranch is for sale.  The house and outbuildings sit at the edge of a meadow, surrounded by pine forest.  The property is lovely.  'How peaceful it would be to live in a place like this, so remote and quiet,' I think.  Then I begin calculating how many hours this ranch is from any sizable airport, and it makes me twitchy.


Rounding a curve a few miles from the forest boundary, I catch of glimpse of brown just below the road in a shallow, narrow valley.  I bring the truck to a slow stop and roll my window down partway.  A female coyote stands chest-deep in the green grass about fifty feet away.  She is alert to my presence, but not overly concerned by it.  She and I spend a moment in circumspect contemplation of one another, then she vanishes into the bushes beside a creek.


Soon after, I spy a dirt track branching off to the left.  A side road off a side road:  it's exactly what I've been looking for.  I bounce along the rutted track, going deeper into the forest.  After climbing another thousand feet, the road bisects a small clearing.  I pull to one side.  Tanner and I get out to investigate.  We're near the summit of the mountain.  Through the trees is a breathtaking view to the west.  A ring of stones surrounding a pile of cold ashes indicates previous use of this spot for camping, yet there are few tire impressions in the dust other than my own.


I select a place under a trio of pines and haul out the tent, pausing frequently to take in the last remnants of sunset.  By the time it's fully dark I've struck camp and given Tanner his dinner.  While he eats, I root around in my backpack for the packet of pre-made Indian food I brought with me - palak paneer - and a packet of pre-cooked rice.  I empty them both into a bowl, find a fork, and dig in.  The cold rice is slightly undercooked, but the spicy cheese-and-spinach combination is satisfying.  Before I've finished eating, the miles I've driven, the heat of the day, and the pleasant cool of the evening catch up with me.  I seal the leftovers in the bowl and stow the trash.  When I shut the truck door, Tanner runs over from the stump he's been inspecting.  I hand him a treat, and we make our way to the tent by starlight.


Once inside, it still takes me a while to wind down completely.  I flip on the flashlight and write a brief journal entry about the day:  My last night of solitude, high altitude, cool, dry aspen/pine-scented air.  Must enjoy it while I have it.  And:  The air temp has dropped considerably while I've been writing this.  I'm going to have to dig out my socks soon and burrow into the sleeping bag.  How delicious to have this one last cool night.  I shut off the flashlight and lie in the stillness for a long while, watching out the mesh roof of the tent as the stars spin through the pine branches overhead.


In the pre-dawn I awaken suddenly to Tanner's warning growl.  The sky is just beginning to lighten.  I listen, and soon hear heavy footsteps thudding in the dry grass nearby.  Several footsteps.  Big creatures of some kind.  Quietly, I unzip the nylon window cover and peer out.  Tanner crowds in beside me, his nose quivering as he picks up the scent.  I can make out a couple of large shapes on the slope adjacent to the tent.  They are too big and lunky to by deer, yet not tall enough to be elk.


A branch cracks loudly in the trees across the road.  Tanner gives another low growl, followed by a short 'whoof'.  One of the beasts startles and calls out - 'mooooooo' - then trots into the open space near the front of my jeep.  We have been overtaken by a herd of cattle, mostly young males.  A few of them, curious, step within a yard or two of the tent.


Tanner whines.  He wants really badly to go make friends.  Knowing that Tanner's definition of 'making friends' is closer to 'chasing the cattle down the mountain', I make him stay where he is.  The last thing I need is some rancher coming after me for letting my dog spook the marbling off his steaks.


Eventually the herd moves on.  The sun pops up over the top of the mountain.  I release Tanner from the confines of the tent and we begin our day.

Tanner eyeballs our early morning visitors.

The view west (towards Bayfield, CO) from our camp site.  

Home sweet tent.