Two cities, separated by 21 hours of driving and stops in Atlanta and Cincinnati. What comes to your mind when you think of New Orleans? Perhaps jazz and jambalaya. What could you remember of Detroit? Cars and the rhythms of Motown, maybe? Two majority black, chocolate cities. One's a place tourists used to flock to, the other one where tourists go by accident.
    One city displays fresh, raw wounds. The other the scars of slow bloodletting. Though neither is ready to accept death, a pall hangs over both.

On a hazy, humid Saturday afternoon in Detroit, I was lunching with my friend Karen who works as a librarian in a city school. This summer she attended the American Library Association's conference in New Orleans. The librarians held it there as an act of solidarity.
    On my road trip I had stopped in New Orleans just a week earlier. So we compared notes. Karen didn't make it beyond downtown and the French Quarter, while I had a full tour from old friend Kalamu ya Salaam: the 7th, 8th, and 9th wards, St Bernard Parish, New Orleans East and Uptown. And I took time to visit a corner of the Quarter and walk around Audubon Park.
    To Karen I described the neighborhoods where I saw streets and blocks of abandoned houses. On some blocks, I saw a handful of people rebuilding while the rest of the houses were standing vacant.
    Karen and I nodded in a moment of recognition. We both know blocks like this — in the east side of Detroit. The mind tries to relate what the eyes see to what memory remembers. And when I was in New Orleans, it immediately reminded me of Detroit. The destruction was more raw and fresh, more widespread and just one year old, but in time, the city could look like parts of Detroit.
    New Orleans collapsed under the blow of hurricane Katrina. Detroit's death agonies were slower and framed by two major disasters: the 1967 riots and the collapse of the auto industry in the early 80s. In between came white flight, disinvestment by corporate money, organized neglect after the city had elected its first black administration in the early 70s.

Read More

The great North American road trip is officially over. I started in San Francisco on August 1 and finished in Cincinnati on September 7: thirty-eight days and 7132 miles, passing through some 20 American states and one Canadian province. Someone back in Oakland, listening to me describe my planned stops, had said, oh you're doing a W with a flair. And indeed, though it's a W in the hand of a child, quite zigzaggy, it was a W with a looped flair at the end. Here's photos from the climb up to the northernmost point and the flair.

On a hazy, drizzly Sunday morning, August 27, I crossed the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit into Canada. The Canadian border official asked me why I was so far from California. I said I was traveling across the continent, visiting friends and family, working on a novel. He wanted to know where I had stopped last and where I was headed after Canada. I told him, Detroit, then down to Rochester in New York state. "And all these people support what you're doing?" I assured him they did. He returned me my papers and wished me a safe trip. I was relieved. In present times, relaxed border crossings are no certainty, especially folks like us burdened with names like mine.

Read More

I've crossed the continent. I went down to the Gulfcoast and drove through the South, into the Midwest, into Canada, and then across the Adirondacks to New England. Right now, I'm resting in Natick, Mass. I've been working on a post about my visit to New Orleans, but until it's done, here are some more photos.

Interstate 10 from Houston to New Orleans passed through 20 miles of the Henderson swamp. A year ago, this highway was the evacuation route from the Gulfcoast for those headed towards Texas.

Read More

Here's photos from the trip, driving from Green River, Utah through Oklahoma south towards Texas. I went above 10,000 feet in Colorado down to the flat flat lands of eastern Colorado and Kansas.

Just east of Green River, Utah, I passed by these majestic cliffs that looked like heavily-fortified castles.

Read More

As I drove south through Oklahoma City, I saw the billboard again. On a stark black background, the message in white letters said "I love you" in English, Spanish, and Chinese. It was signed "God."
         Last month when I'd also been passing through here during a family reunion, I'd seen the same billboard. And another one that said, "One nation under me." It too was signed "God."
         Now Oklahoma is squarely in the middle of America's Bible Belt. When I lived in Tulsa in 1972, I remember you couldn't walk far without running into a church. One I remember had orange flames of hell painted outside, no doubt warning you what lay in store if you strayed or was some sort of heathen.
         Why does God need billboards in such a place?
         And did he go to Clear Channel or CBS or whoever owns the billboards, turn in an application, a design of his own choice, and submit a rental fee? Did he have to show a bank account or a credit card? Was he asked for his SSN? Did he pay month to month or for eternity?
         While he was filling out the forms, did he pause to consider alternative means of getting his message across, such as skywriting? But that would have required him to hire pilots and rent airplanes, and again, there would be pesky forms to fill out. He'd probably need clearance from Homeland Security.
        Would it not have been simpler for God to simply shape some cumulus clouds into letters and words? And if he'd done that, wouldn't people have marveled at it and found it more believable?

Read More

I kept seeing the signs. On Overland Avenue in L.A. near where I stopped to visit my sister and nephew, as I walked each morning towards Venice Boulevard to get my morning coffee, I passed three small houses with signs. Psychic. Readings by Maria. Palm readings. Tarot cards. During earlier visits, I'd passed by those houses many times, but this time a part of me wondered, "Should I enter one of these houses — just for the lark of it?
    I'm a hardcore skeptic, finding it hard to believe that lines in your hands or a random pick of cards from a deck can tell anything about your life.
    The skeptic in me prevailed. I kept walking.
    In Boulder I would make a different choice.

Read More

I drove today from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Green River, Utah. In Utah, especially on I-70 headed eastward towards Colorado, you see some of the most spectacular vistas: mountains in formations that look like human-built monoliths, ranges that change color from shades of red to gray and black, twisted trees, and rock arrangements that look like children put them together. Here's some of my favorite photos:

I hit my first thunderstorm soon after turning off to I-70 from I-15 North. It wasn't too bad.

"Vegas is king, baby. Woo hoo," my friend W. wrote back from New York after I'd dropped her a line saying I was in her favorite vacationland yesterday. She grew up in Hawaii. I remember her telling me the playground city in the Nevada desert is the destination of choice for many Hawaiians when they migrate to the mainland U.S. When traveling back home to Maui herself, W. often stops there.
    Perhaps Vegas is king if a) you're a gambler; b) you're not just stopping there on the way to someplace else; and c) you go there with company.

Read More

Nothing really to say, but here's some photos from the drive down to Los Angeles. 

Heading south on 101 from the Bay Area 

Zen? It felt so. 

I stopped for lunch at Morro Bay. For several summers I used to come down here from Oakland to write for a few days.

My traveling companion who accompanied me from Providence to Oakland in 1997 has come along for this ride too. Say hello to Celia.

A paper cut. A pain between the shoulder blades that felt like I'd been stabbed by an instrument of torture. Too many sad partings with friends and favorite places. Such are the scars with which I drove away from my home in Oakland at 6:27 p.m. on the last day of July.
    Thanks to two band-aids, the paper cuts are history. The back pain worsened from sleeping on an air mattress that I had not fully inflated — blame the exhaustion — but with a rest from driving, a letting go of tense muscles, and a few doses of naprosyn, that too shall be memory.
    The scars of saying goodbye are not so easily healed. The pain was for the moment anaesthetized by the anxiety and bustle of storing or getting rid of accumulation. It hasn't really hit me yet, but I know it will get worse before the edges are dulled and the sorrow becomes the kind of memory that brings a wistful smile.

Read More