Potomac Jazz

After than heart-stopping soul food brunch, the perfect welcome to Washington DC was some freshly washed greens. I rolled up to my cousin Jeni's place and was greeted by my aunt. It was so good to kick back and catch up with my little cousins after 10 hours driving on the road. They had meanwhile spent years drifting around the world after leaving South Africa, with no true home to go to. After a decade of efforts, DC had finally welcomed them, green cards and all.

We took advantage of the multicultural metropolis by taking a nature walk on Roosevelt Island, just a horn's honk away from the capital. Dreamy boardwalks twisted between yellow irises and drifting butterflies. e walked down a dreamy boardwalk as we approached the tribute to the conservationist president. Next we visited a tropical greenhouse, free of charge, and later the holocaust museum. On the banks of the Potomac, with kayakers rowing from under the bridge to Georgetown, I felt the collision and gathering of people and nature, both struggling and cooperating at once.

In Baltimore, a dear friend Helen was attending a Jewish farming conference and I was stoked to see both her and the fields in bloom. The road kept winding North, and it was just my luck that a fellow nature lover Adam had shacked up in rural Pennsylvania and was in need of a Toyota Camry to really keep his bluesy toes swinging at Philly get togethers. I swung into Avondale to check out his gorgeous water research station and enjoyed a late evening of fresh blueberies, homemade pickles, freshly baked pizza and latenight banjoed jams. The last time I was in New York I was a wee bleary-eyed 7, so I couldn't pass up a crisp bite of the Big Apple. Adam bought the Camry and I boarded a megabus, which fired me North again and soon I was in the subway, riding next to my dear ginger amiga Ionie. Since I'd last seen her, this fiery MexiJew had managed to tear into the New York music scene and was filming a music video...Hot October. Damn girl! I loved the vibes, and we met lots of chill New Yorkers as we shopped for props like records and lingerie. 

After my dose of Manhattan I buzzed off, snare drum in hand, for some city nature time. I ended up at a park in Chinatown where, beating on ny drum, I made friends with some chinese kids and played tag with them. All that running and I was sweating, so I went for a swim at Brighton Beach, where a Russian couple was having a proper fight, spitting and hitting and everything. Almost got some flem on me but, some salty seawater to float in and I was right as rain. As I got out, I passed by the apartment where my grandma had grown up, the daughter of Polish immigrants, before moving to little cowtown Davis, CA. With the glum buildings right before my eyes, I still couldn't make out the connection between the two places besides the constant motion west over land and sea.

Back in DC my Aunt and I went on a jazz hunt. We hit a luck at the Bohemian Caverns, a speakeasy built underground at a time when alcohol was prohibited, which apparently just inspired the musicians' creative juices more. This place was built like a cave, with dim lighting and plastered, rounded walls, and they packed a 17 piece band, a bar, and an audience of forty into this tiny space. The improv sax solos were unbelievable. It was a wonderful time to share with my Auntie.

From one coastal populace to another, these American cities seemed like empires in their own right, drawing up needy immigrants into somethhing mighty. Even Chicago on the great lakes seems to benefit from being at the water's edge, whether that is because that is where the land ends, or where the trade begins. We Americans also need to keep pulling in the needy who already are one of us.

I couldn't leave the country without one more musical note and in my favor, a live Brazilian Jazz band was filling the halls at Dulles Airport. On the evening of the last day of July, I boarded a plane and crossed the Atlantic.

Cheese to please! Nepalese shopkeepers were quite slim - lactose intolerance has its perks.

Rising South

Mighty Mississippi, even more glorious at sunset. It's so wide in parts, it seems like a sea.

Some may call me an African-American, because of where my Dad is from (though they might also be jealously referring to his gorilla-esque bounty of hair). Now this is a bit confusing for a relatively pink and freckly mongrel like me. But three years ago I looked myself in the mirror and admitted it, "Damn boy, you white!" And with a map in hand, I knew that the remedy was called Mississippi. Still today, nearly two centuries after the end of slavery, this state still has highest percentage of people of African descent and sadly is the poorest. Although the region was graced by the likes of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., its people are still struggling. I knew all I had was stats, and I wanted desperately to see what the place was really like.

The road took me through East Texas, across upper Louisiana and into the bayou. I hit Natchez, Mississippi at sunset, the river's girth splayed out like a placid bay. As the moon rose, I rushed to domed Temple B'nai Israel where I learn that Jews had been in Natchez since the late 1700's. My feelings were mixed though, when I read that some members of the community easily joined the ranks of superfluous and hierarchical white Southern society. In the Jewish community, in every place, there always seem to be leaders struggling for political goals at both ends of society. Before I pitched my tent, I insisted on a cleansing dip in the mighty river, but it turned out to be slimier than I could take and I bustled off to the campsite in the dark of night.

When I woke the next morning, I might have been in a jungle. Green light filtered through the leaves onto my tent screen, where a hand-sized spider was perched. Lord have mercy! Where water flows, life grows and boy had this creeper grown! Before I became its breakfast, I hustled onto the road in search of a local lunch. My car rolled between a cascade of white magnolia blooms, flourescent teal butterflies, and the radio's endless supply of heavenly gospel music. Jackson, MS, the state capital, impressed me with its handsome moulded architecture. And since it was Sunday, I was just in time for an endless soul food buffet brunch at Two Sisters. Okra, creamed corn, buns, sweet tea, fricasseed chicken, chicken fried steak, fried fried fried, sugar sugar sugar. Damn, it was good! I got to talking with a local bruncher, Brenda Mathis, whose best friend was an elderly Jacksonite and a Belgian Jew. She was enthralled with her life and her wisdom and filled my ears as much as I had filled my stomach. I promised that if in Belgium, I would greet her friend's loved ones.

Satisfied in belly and soul, I sped over to the next state capital, Montgomery. I have to say I have a thing for dark women, what with their sunblock-free superpowers, and I found myself hitting on a receptionist at the motel. It just hurt me to know that I might be the only one swimming at the pool, because I was the only one who could! I desperately tried to persuade her that I would give her a lesson, but she was scarred like so many are from a near-drowning experience of a loved one. No degree of humor could convince her that what she knew as such a dangerous place could actually be relaxing. In the morning I strolled around the city. For a place I had heard to be racist, it was easy to get along with people regardless of color. I was even impressed to find a self-guided sidewalk tour of Dr. King's marches. This educational homage to the great man convinced me further that in a segregated city, the segregated parts are the racist parts, but people always find a place to mix.

I had to run some errands, like going to prison. It was the only place where I could get my fingerprints stamped to become a true African-American, a South African Passport holder. I passed through some bars, sat on a metal stool and had an awkwardly tender moment with a gruff giant holding my hand, wrestling the ink onto the page. Across more bars another man sat, jailed. I'd never seen it before, and I grimaced at the deflated look on his face. It was back to the street for me, and I turned on the radio to be soothed and caressed by the cool voice of radio host. After he was done honeying up us listeners, he switched on THE TUNES WERE B^@$H F&$%ING S*@% loud. Praises! That hip hop was real. Good beats too.

Ahead lay a night in the Great Smoky Mountains with its chuckling crystal streams and belligerent touristy billboards. The road North.

Magical Drink Will Make You Grow!!

To my surprise, I'd felt most at home in the Mid-West. But as a liberal Californian, I couldn't have such high hopes for Texas. How would I survive? Despite my woes, the Lone Star state was smack dab in the middle of my cross-continental drive, and there was no missing it.

Luckily, I had someone familiar waiting for me on the other end. It was great to see my techie cousin David from hyper-liberal Davis, Berkeley's edible and political pantry. This smart guy had found a summer home for himself as an intern in Austin, and we had a good time touring Dallas's butter-heavy food scene together. Soon enough I'd found that this rival metropolis was actually darn close to my coastal hometown.

Turns out that San Diego and Dallas both have massive populations of nearly 2 million people, and both are positioned on either end of the arid Southwest. What was once a drab agricultural pitstop on the Friar's mission trail is now San Diego, the 8th biggest city in the U.S.. That's a lot of thirsty gullets to quench on the edge of the desert. Let's take a rough glance:

• 1870's 2,000        thirsty people
• 1900   20,000      thirsty people - an order of magnitude!
• 1940   200,000    thirsty people - another order!
• 1970's 750,000    thirsty people - 3x national growth rate!
• Today 1,500,000 thirsty people - doubled again!
  

(Rough #'s from San Diego History Center)

Yes indeed, every time another Texan moved to the beach, Diegan mayors and tycoons went hunting for water. Or was it the other way around? Either way, San Diego is water-limited, and its growth is water-induced.

Texas cruisin' babe! This country is BIG country, from its twangy radio to its open plains.

All of that thirst can really put a slice of stress in your piña colada; in drought years our stressed beachgoers have gone a bit wacky for rainmakers, inviting soothsayers like sewing machine salesman Charles Hatfield. But the real results seem to come from water projects. The most recent growth spurt in 1960 flowed in tandem with the construction of an aqueduct to the Colorado River. Today the Colorado River, in the desert on the other side of the mountains, is the lifeline of the city, from which the vast majority of San Diegans drink. Now that sounds like a crockpot idea to me too.

And since I'm from a city of sunburnt crockpots, I'll be dammed if I don't think outside of the pipe. Why don't we try catching our rainwater or coastal fog, and recycling the runoff from our lovely lawns? We could take a hint from the Israelis or the Namibians, who can't really ignore the fact that they live in the desert and have been relying on drip irrigation and wastewater recycling for decades. I may not be dressed in suit and tie, but all this desert wanderer wants is water, please! No ice :)

Homey Oklahoma

In the crossroads of America, where semitrucks thunder past likes sports cars to the radio's twang of Country music, I paused for a break. My mom's California college buddy David had lived in LA, tried it out, said the hell with Hollywood superficiality and headed home to Tulsa, OK where the streets are tidy, the people polite, and life is comfy. The Finers opened their home to me and I eagerly took shelter from the summer monsoons behind me in their comfy abode.

David treated me to some nice Southern barbeque (funnily familiar to my Polish Grandma's brisket), and we wound between the heavily forested city just enjoying the general calm. For my city thrills I stopped by the memorial of the federal building terrorist bombing, artfully presented, and an art gallery of Native American works from across the continent which was assembled to educate the ignorant Italians and other Europeans about the immense diversity of this land. 

After a good day's rest we hit the lake, a massive man-made string of freshwater fingers. I put my surfing skills to the test and started wakeboarding, jumped off a massive cliff with a hideously girlish scream, and realized this wasn't anything near the dry prairie I'd imagined. Even though I'd always thought the ocean was what made me feel centered, it was easy to feel at home in the middle of the middle of things.

 

David and I dig into a Southern barbeque feast! Pickled chiles a must.  

NEWS FLASH! DUST BOWL FLOODS!

July 17, 2013

CHEYENNE, OK - Rapid flooding swept over the plains of western Oklahoma this morning, as the United States' historic "Dust Bowl" transformed into a mucky claybed. Foolish Californians bore the brunt of the trauma, as one bleary-eyed San Diegan explains.

"Man I was like sleeping and then I woke up and then it was like, whoa my tent is squishy man. And then like I got out and the whole tent it like, went up and started floating. Dude, I've never slept on a water bed until like, last night!" Joel Kramer stammered.

Local residents were also on the scene, such as rancher Dale Pierce, whose neighbor had lost a cow to the nearby woods in the precipitous confusion. According to Mr. Pierce:

"Climate change." 

And more elaborately, "It hasn't rained here in 100 days, and now, in the middle of summer? Sho is strange. Creek's been dry e'ry summa since 2010 now. Fact is, last time we got storms like this was back in '88. Boy, you musta been a young thing then."

Black Kettle National Grassland in Western Oklahoma was the site of historic massacres by the U.S. Army of native plains Indian families. White settlers later took the fall when intense droughts turned their grassland farms and open skies into a snowglobe of black powder. Today, cattlemen like Pierce struggle with national entities like the Forest Service which claim access to waterways for ecological conservation. Wild hogs in the area mowed the forest to stubs, and a series of fires and droughts have ferried in the invasion of dryland mesquite shrubs.

With pots and plates on his car roof to catch washing water, the oblivious Kramer shares his wisdom, "Like - don't camp on clay where's it's all flat when you're like, next to a swamp. Yeah!"

 

Drenched marshland campsite pitched by none other than this foolish Californian

Heartland

The lungs of the country stir with the whirring of windmills. Rainy roads glisten with the setting sun. Dusk settles like dust on the prairie.

Spurting through the muddy tracks, my messy tires slide into the campground. A half moon lights the dusky sky. Fireflies scatter between the trees. Grasshoppers spring staccato from the switchgrass. Soil glows as vermilion as a summer sunset.

On my humble stove, rice, beans, a shiny jalapeno. I eat on a damp bench, my nostrils steam with the chile's Mexican heat. For so long I have clung to other cultures, Mexican, South African, Israeli, Canadian, English, clinging to anything that made me feel more significant than the estranging America around me.

I sip black tea. I smoke my cigar. Animals call in the night, darkness surrounds my small tent, and I relax. I am home in my camp. In my America.

Breaking Bad on the Ground

Gabi and I would do anything for the best TV Show on earth. So we saddled up and rode through Indian Country and highland desert to Albuquerque, New Mexico in search of Breaking Bad. Luckily, we were rewarded with a nice milkshake at Los Pollos Hermanos, A.K.A. Twisters! We hit up a couple of other essential spots, like the Irish lawyer Saul Goodman's office (a bar), a massive warehouse (a massive broken down warehouse) and Jesse's Crossroads Motel (the Crossroads Motel). Yup, turned out Albuquerque was in fact a bit shady. Desert. Drugs. Immigration infighting. BUT, we had the idyllic Santa Fe, NM just down the road to help us enjoy the scenery.

Gabi lookin' tough next to her hefty sidekick at Walter & Gus's favorite rendezvous. (above)

Ancient Pueblo architecture lives on in the touristy "Spanish" style of Santa Fe, NM (below)

The cubic adobe architecture in Santa Fe was very unique. I liked the cool feeling inside the thick-walled buildings, the beams sticking out of the finely plastered stucco, and it made me wonder how the Spanish so cleverly adapted to the local climate. After all, it couldn't have been the natives who had devised such practical yet attractive engineering. However, we were enlightened from our trip to the dusty, barren and friendly Hopi Nation, where this architecture was the staple. Yes indeed, while the tourists walked the streets and enjoyed the supposedly Spanish style, it was in fact the indigenous pueblo-dwellers who engineered and mastered the craft. These original architects belonged to the same community who, when faced with the Spanish, lost their women to rape, their artifacts to bonfires, their lives to the gun barrel. 

The abuse and theft dealt by the Spanish was nothing unusual for the Hopi and other Pueblo tribes. These farming natives had defended their precious desert riverbeds for centuries against the onslaught of the warrior Navajo. The Hopi relied on the techniques of dryland farming, while the Navajo hunted wild game, and the two peoples fell into natural roles of hunter and hunted. The Navajo would attack the Hopi pueblos to steal from their granaries, forcing the Hopi to build their villages on flat-topped hilltops (mesas) and hire mercenaries to guard the entrances. In their ancient way, they continued to farm, and the feeling of their tightly-bound community contrasted greatly with the spacious and disjointed feeling on the Navajo Res.

Although the Navajo have the largest American Indian reservation in the mainland U.S., equipped with a multi-campus university system, the community there felt broken. Gabi and I drove through the flat valleys lined with buttes on our way to the Canyon de Chelly. We passed an old woman with a cane and couldn't miss the opportunity to give someone a lift. This seemingly sweet woman hopped in and soon enough, we found ourselves at a gas station buying beer for her "sick brother". We stopped at the university, the whole campus as quiet as the library, and by the time night fell we'd barely seen anyone. The natural beauty kept us afloat and before long we got lost on a spider web of deep sandy roads in a magnificent thunderstorm.

All this worked up an appetite.

Albuquerque's best chilli feast in the back of a florescently-lit pharmacy

The hectic history had my hot head aching, and moreso my stomach. We set off in search of satiating spice and lo and behold, ran into the bearded shark scientist Dovi Kacev. He was, of course, visiting the interior Southwest to lecture to freshwater fish researchers. His communication expertise was invaluable as we asked a couple of tattooed cholos where to get lunch. And of course the answer was in the back of a nearby pharmacy. While this sounded like the start to a drug deal, we were in Breaking Bad land so, what the hell, we followed the enchiladas.

By god that was chilli. We got to the pharmacy, walked in through the doors and, with florescent lights beaming down, sniffed our way to the back of the store where a full-fledged traditional Mexican restaurant was dishing out bunuelos and salsas like mañana had come early. We needed the fuel because I was about to drive Gabi to the airport for a sad goodbye. What a great journey together through our beautiful Southwest!

Shady parking lot in Gallup, NM; Chinese goods rumble across the tracks. Meth country.

With the sharp crack of a cowboy's whip, the thunderous wind spurred dust and alamo leaves across the riverbed. I hurriedly gathered firewood for the wet desert journey ahead. In the midst of it all, my friend Surprise (Simangele) called from distant California, asking where I might be. Scurrying into my car, I was enamored with the West, its winds, its untameable wildness.