Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
its terrible beauty. When you're in the midst of it, it's a whole other thing. In New Or-
leans after the storm, I was simply sickened. So much of it was ugly, revolting, the sense
of waste overwhelming. On more than one afternoon, I drove through the most devast-
ated areas, the Lower Ninth and beyond, through miles and miles and miles of what can
be described only as a former civilization, neighborhood upon neighborhood, shopping
center upon shopping center deserted, grotesquely soiled and horrifyingly lifeless. I've
never been in another landscape, in the city or the country, entirely without a heartbeat
and I never wish to be again.
This weekend I didn't get a chance to ride up Esplanade, visit the art museum, or
check on the resurrection of the Lower Ninth (which remains, according to what I've
read, a sparsely populated, largely unrestored urban wilderness, a dumping ground for
old tires and unwanted cats and dogs amid swaths of jungly undergrowth). But the re-
collections of my previous visits to the city came streaming back to me as the wedding
events unfolded. I almost said flooding, but that would have been inaccurate as well as
unseemly, because the memories returned one at a time, each following on the previous
one's heels, a narrative of my New Orleans history, connecting the little blips of personal
experience that add up to my knowledge of the place.
It's the local version of what I'm doing with America this summer, a passage through
time instead of space but, still and all, gathering knowledge a blip at a time, scratching
out my own skinny little path in the silvery dust of the grand scheme of things. The
world is but an Etch A Sketch.
Thursday, October 13, Cumberland, Maryland
Jan just left. She packed her Brompton folding bike in the trunk of a rented Ford Malibu
and disappeared onto a highway cloverleaf. She's on her circuitous way back to Paris via
Annapolis, the Brandywine Valley in Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. It's good I still have
three hundred miles of pedaling to pay attention to because watching her drive away
was dispiriting. I've spent a lot of my romantic life in long-distance relationships and
enough is enough. This is one thing I
am
too old for, no argument.
One reason I began riding cross-country in midsummer was so I could be on the road as
the seasons changed. I had some chilly, autumnal weather before it was actually autumn,
but the foliage has been slow to turn this year. It's only in the past week or so that the
colors have taken on the burnt yellows and burnished reds that we associate with fall,
