Saudade

A year and two days ago, I left Ely in eastern central Nevada and drove through the desert until the isolated highways were swallowed into interstates and I found myself back in California, at the end of a trip that ostensibly started two weeks prior when I packed up a minivan’s worth of possessions that whimsy had decided were worth keeping and headed west out of New York. There is another version of the tale where the trip actually started three years earlier when I first left Southern California for the uncertainty of a new life in the city (for is there not only one City, for any that have lived there and many who have not?), but this isn’t that version. I still may figure out how to tell that story someday, but today I want to talk about the act of leaving.

Choosing to leave New York wasn’t necessarily a difficult decision to reach – there were practical reasons, as well as promises I had made, that had long since removed any sense of personal agency in the action. That doesn’t mean that leaving wasn’t one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. In fact, it was only by buying into the illusion that I had little choice in the matter that the transition was possible at all. I don’t mean to mislead you into thinking that I was not, at least in part, looking forward to moving back to Los Angeles; in many ways, I was anxious to try for a life in California that had commanded a large share of my younger aspirations. What I only mean to say is that no part of me wanted anything to do with committing that greatest of transgressions, the sin of leaving New York.

There have been many who have said that staying too long in New York is a risk run by everyone who chooses to live there. Despite only being one of those anecdotal bits of wisdom, it's something you accept as an unalienable fact when you first decide to make a go of it in the city. I remember thinking during my first days there, “Two years. I can do two years here, and then it’ll probably be time to go home.” I did not anticipate that long before those two years were up, my conception of “home” would change, and that arbitrary prognostication of when I would be ready to leave would stretch far beyond any horizon I could see. In the end, I left when the enchantment was still in my eyes, with great hope but little real chance of ever returning to call it home again.

It has been a year and two days since I was last in New York. Since then, I have made a new home in Los Angeles, largely by virtue of putting down roots because it was easier to have them than to not. I have not stayed this long in one place in a long time, and the steadiness of the days is not something I am used to just yet. My time in New York was adorned with a desultory mode of being. Every few months, there was either a trip back to California or to somewhere new, the Ann Arbors and Austins I found a sudden interest in seeing. Other countries seemed closer than before, even when they were not, and anyway it was a simple matter to go find out just how close they really were if the fancy struck. Moving to a new place shook me out of my tendency toward a sedentary default, and changed the rules for what boundaries my life had to fit in. Even when I stayed local, work constantly took me to Long Island and New Jersey, those bastions of the butt end of jokes people who lived in New York told each other, yet oddly exotic to me. I knew the jokes, but did not know firsthand why the punch lines were funny, not until I went myself. And the city itself had an endless number of corners and crevices, ready for me to reach toward, waiting for me to find. What I am saying is that when I found myself living in a place where how I fit into it was not already assumed, where the history was not already congealed into something tactile in my subconscious, even the mundane could skew magnificent, and it is that easy wonderment and the appetite it awakened that I have missed since steadiness first cast the pace of my days into an even canter.

I have enough of a pragmatist streak in me to know that the change was inevitable. That having a savings account and a healthy diet would have to, at some point, trump a second floor walk-up with great natural light and getting hammered at Whiskey Ward on wayward weeknights. Leaving, in that regard, was the sensible thing to do, and I am realizing now that I do not regret it, not really. What I do regret is being unable, maybe even unwilling, to find a way to feel how I felt when New York was home. But when I start to think that, another notion creeps in, telling me that perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. That perhaps the point is to find a new way toward wonderment, a new way to feel now that New York is not home.

It is a convincing theory, and a comforting one, but ultimately one for tomorrow, or the day after. Right now I am not looking to be convinced or comforted; I am looking to miss something that is not mine anymore, knowing full well that the fair (to spin one of Joan Didion's characterizations) looks rosiest after it has ended. But that does not change the fact that once the fair has ended, nothing feels like it will ever be the same again.

White Out

The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. A lot of sun. A lot of white. A lot of pictures of Roy walking around. And not much else.

Shooting a commercial, probably.

Crunchy.

The salt flats, as stunning a sight as they are, aren't exactly a hub for activity, unless you came with the intention of breaking a land speed record. Given that we were driving my father's minivan full of the belongings deemed valuable enough to shlep home from New York, we passed on trying for the record books. So it was back to the road. The last leg of the trip went quickly.

We spent a final night in a small town, this one in Nevada. The next day I was home, with nothing but a pair of dusty boots to let you know I'd been anywhere at all. The trip was over. For good? For now.

Final tally: 4203.1 miles.

Window Seat

After passing through Deadwood early in the morning, we settled in for a day on the road as we headed out of South Dakota. We only had one planned stop in Wyoming -- Devils Tower, seated a half-hour off the interstate just after crossing the border. The national monument has been a prominent feature of the local landscape (and folklore) for centuries, but is better known more recently for playing a role in Close Encounter of the Third Kind. In fact, the gift shops in the area sell a lot of trinkets featuring little green men and words like "taken" and "probed." We opted against heading directly to the monument and settled for some nice vistas from afar instead.

After that, it was back onto the interstate and off toward the more rural highways.

Before we left New York, Roy and I had sketched out a rough idea of most of the trip. Our next real destination after Devils Tower was the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, which meant we'd be only passing through Wyoming. Given that we had to split the drive across two days, however, this also meant we could do a little exploring. Happenstance allotted one of the final gigs I worked in New York to be with an actor whose wife grew up in Wyoming (a fact which, coincidentally, I only learned when I overheard him recounting a recent road trip they'd taken through her home state). Opportunity doesn't really knock any harder than that, so I asked for -- and he very graciously obliged to pass along -- her suggestions for some of the more scenic routes to take.

Wyoming, as it turns out, is gorgeous. And this is just what I was able to see from the window of the car.

This place, this land -- it's worth seeing.

Stones & Walls

I suppose one of my resolutions this year should have been to update this blog in a more timely manner. In any event, here we are, two weeks into 2013 and still crawling toward the finish line of my September road trip's recap. Selecting and editing photos is usually the most time consuming part of the process, but sadly, I've had the photos for this post ready to go since a few days after my last post. I don't really have any adequate excuses for the delay, other than a greater-than-usual willingness to succumb to other distractions. Maybe what I really need to work on this year is balance.

Let's dive back into the recap. After we left the Badlands, we headed for the Black Hills National Forest in southwestern South Dakota, most famous for being home to Mt. Rushmore. Before we headed into the forest proper, we stopped by the city of Wall. In another world, the quaint town would act as a border between the mundane and the fantastic, but in this one, it just plays host to a hybrid drug store/restaurant/tourist trap brimming with a charming kitsch.

5 cent coffee is hard to argue against.

Mt. Rushmore is one of those landmarks that's so well known to anybody who grew up in this country that we start to take for granted the fact of its existence. In fact, I didn't even have a tremendous desire to visit, but we had already trekked this far to see the Badlands, so it seemed silly -- maybe even a little disrespectful -- not to swing by on our way back west. It's not until you pull into the well-manicured lot, park, and walk through the terrace of flag-bearing columns that those famous faces loom into view and it finally hits you -- yup, somebody actually carved that into a fucking mountain. It's really there, sitting in the middle of a forest in South Dakota. No longer on a postcard or in cartoon form on some map of the U.S. you studied in second grade. And you know what? It's pretty damn impressive to behold. It avoids the pitfall of being smaller than you expected, but it's also not hugely imposing -- it's just the right proportion to hit you with the full force of its tangibility.

Of course, after that spiel, now the irony is that I can only represent it in the photos below. But take my word for it, it's worth checking out one day.

Once upon a time, the original designer imagined the heads to continue down into torsos. Then World War II happened and Congress stopped sending money. I won't say it was a timely war to get pulled into, but I think we dodged a bullet there.

Landscape lighting.

We did a drive through other parts of the forest to take in the sights before finally heading up to Roubaix Lake, a tiny campground in a forest filled with campgrounds, to spend the night.

That attractive cabin is not a cabin. It is an outhouse.

The next day, on our way out of the forest, we stopped by Deadwood, the historic early mining town so brilliantly brought to life in David Milch's eponymous show.

Today it's a small town with a few scattered tourist attractions, long tamed by the cresting tide of westward civilization. A lot of the old legends from wilder days past are still buried there, though, including Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane, and, of course, Wild Bill Hickok. We paid our respects at the cemetery on a large hill overlooking the town and the forests beyond.

Then it was off to Wyoming.