Words and phrases that will no longer be tolerated in this establishment (a running list)

--Mindset: Persons using the word Mindset will be subject to various painsets, after which they will exhibit serious injurysets.

--Skillset: You will not have agilityset to escape our wrath. We might then go after your familyset.

--That being said: That being said, we will cease speaking.

--Metric: By any metric, you talk like a cretin.

--Too much on (his) plate.

--The whole nine yards.

--At the end of the day. At the end of the day, you may have given it the whole nine yards and found you have too much on your plate. That being said, you'll have the skillset to get the right metric for the mindset of your colleagues. But that shouldn't prevent serious drinking.

UPDATE:

Thank you, Dr. Cajka! Yes, I don't know how I could have forgotten that. Drill down will absolutely not be tolerated, unless it's the sort of drilling down that goes, for example, through the speaker's head.

Further on Ranger Road

We travel down a little road in Virginia, starting from the more-or-less known world.

We leave the historical Williamsburg, with its Governor’s Palace and its Capitol Building, and Wren Hall sitting at the end of the Duke of Gloucester Street, the oldest college building still in use in America.

We leave the tourist Williamsburg with its rentable period costumes and old English script written everywhere, and several genuinely ancient streets now filled with Brande Newe Olde Shoppes. Once out of town, the scrim of woodland crowds right up to the highway and leans over it.

For more than 300 years these have been well known boondocks, the backwoods passage from the civilization of Jamestown and Williamsburg, to the great James River plantations further west, where we’re headed. The motorist, like the horseman of three centuries ago, only hopes to get through without a breakdown.

In general, we’re heading toward Charles City County, which contains no actual city, despite what once may have been intended. It contains no solid places at all, but indefinite locales with the names of families long gone and known only to local usage--that is, except for the plantations on the James. These are very definite.

Charles City County came into being in 1619 because, even then, the restless were eager to move west. Most of them continued west—the county’s population today is about what it was in 1730. But in the remaining evidence of those settlers, it is possible to glimpse the first flourishing of an alternate America, a place Thomas Jefferson had not yet consecrated to the equality of man.

As we move west, they begin with Sherwood Forest, retirement home of John Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, who because he’d been “outlawed” by the Whig party, named his home to suit his status.

After that comes North Bend Plantation, and then Shirley, Evelynton, Westover, and Berkley plantations. We have to watch for the signs, usually nailed to trees, as most of these estates are still working farms; no chamber of commerce advertises them. Some still belong to the families that built them.

All of these places were designed to awe. On behalf of their owners, all of them strove toward a status that never lived long in this soil, the status of landed aristocracy, a people removed to higher concerns behind the bastion of their nobility. In a country where only the very rich and the government could build in brick, these great houses hoped to conflate those two spheres.

It didn’t work, of course. The view of an Arcadian America, stewarded by a compassionate gentry and devoted to an ideal of beautiful living, met its decisive end at Appomattox Court House. But the intimation of that vanished life steals among these woods and meadows like a mist at dawn.

Of all the great houses in this county, there is only one that speaks to us with anything like modern vitality and humor, only one I really want to see:
Westover, built in 1736 by William Byrd II.

When Byrd built this house, he was already an accomplished man, heir to a tobacco fortune his father had made. Born in America and raised in England, he came dutifully home to manage the estate upon his father’s death in 1704, but he preferred England. The coffee houses, theaters, company, and the events of great moment all suited his peculiar energies.

Here, he made the best of things by walking his grounds, reading his books, conversing with friends, and living like a biblical patriarch.

“I have my flocks and my herds, my bondmen and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on every one but Providence,” he wrote to his friend the Earl of Orrery. And though the life required energy and courage, he found it amusing, and a continual exercise of his patience and economy, which he enjoyed.

We drive two miles in from route 5, following the nailed-up signs, seen by and seeing no one. Even at the end of the drive: no visitors center, no visitors, no sign of current life, the only parking lot a grassy patch by some little cedars. And then, an old iron gate-- pedestrian-sized as opposed to carriage-sized—with a wooden box for donations and a sheaf of pamphlets. The quiet James commands the entire southern vista, so quiet you can hear waterbirds twittering halfway across. A brilliant, clear day.

We can’t get inside the house itself—still a private residence though no one apparently lives there—but perhaps that’s just as well. Because as we walk in at that gate, past the brick-walled garden, and then out into the front yard, watching the house materialize slowly on our left, the accumulated Georgian magnificence becomes so powerful it could knock you into the river. Nothing inside could compare to this.

For more than 200 running feet, the house presents its stupendous façade to the river, no doubt to the wonder of passing boatmen. It is tall, heavy, steeply sloped in the roof. It seems to claim the same patron god that inspired the great fugues of Bach.

Here William Byrd throned in augustness and industry.

It’s too bad we get our picture of colonials mostly from dour men like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, for Byrd was the ultimate anti-dour. Where learning was concerned, he could have spotted the puritans several laps of education and still won the race.

In addition to English, he spoke French, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and read extensively in all of these. He amassed a library containing more than 3,600 volumes, second only to Benjamin Franklin’s in the colonies, and built a wing to his house to store them.

Byrd is often compared to Franklin, but to me he always seemed more real. He was Franklin without the registered trademarks, no seven maxims for highly effective colonials. He consistently failed in piety, and did so with appealing dismay, but neither piety nor dismay ever slowed him.

He bestrode that Virginian wilderness with seldom a stretch, crossing the Atlantic 10 times to attend the best schools in England, to conduct business, and to travel. While there he joined the bar at one of the great Inns of Court, and was ultimately inducted into the British Royal Society, one of very few Americans to receive that honor. Back home he founded Richmond and Petersburg, and personally established the southern boundary of Virginia.

But he never completely left earth. His encoded diary, discovered in the 1940s and one of the most entertaining of colonial documents, shows how much he never left earth.

July 30, 1709. I rose at 5 o’clock….I read two chapters in Hebrew and some Greek in Thucydides. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast. I danced my dance. I read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson and then took a little nap. I ate fish for dinner. In the afternoon my wife and I had a little quarrel which I reconciled with a flourish. Then she read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson to me. It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table. I read a little Latin. In the evening we took a walk about the plantation. I neglected to say prayers but had good health, good thoughts and good humor, thanks be to God.

Byrd died in 1744 at age 70, and was buried in his garden, where his tombstone still stands—a large enough tombstone to list at least some of his accomplishments: Receiver General of His Majesty’s Revenues in Virginia, Public Agent to The Court and Ministry Of England, a 37-year member of the Council of Virginia, and president of that body for two years.

To all this were added a great elegancy of taste and life,
The well-bred gentleman and polite companion,
The splendid economist and prudent father of a family,
With the constant enemy of all exorbitant power,
And hearty friend to the liberties of his country.

For balance, we might list some of his other traits: arrogance, parsimony, contentiousness. Readers of his journals will find Byrd guilty of the usual crimes of his age, including allegiance to the oppressive patriarchy, exploitation of non-renewable resources and, certainly not least, the holding of slaves. He could be cool, he could be cruel. But if there is such a thing as expiation of sins through humor, vigor, and intelligence, I move that William Byrd of Westover be redeemed. Far, far back in the wilds of primal Virginia, he was pioneering in this land the art of enjoying oneself.

Aunt Renoir Scores Again

Last Monday at 4 p.m., Jack, Maxine, my friend Sue and I went across the street to the courthouse where yet two more Maxine Sweeney portraits were adding to the corridors of Elizabeth City immortals. Courtroom A was filled with lawyers, clerks, secretaries, judges, awesomeness, and us four.

The judge called everyone to order, saying this was a ceremonial session and we could shoot cameras if we wanted, though I hadn't waited. He introduced a district attorney who got up and spoke at length about the greatness, the humanity, the forebearance and great heaps of principal possessed by the one judge being honored, who then came up and spoke awhile.

Then another district attorney did the same for another judge, who then came up and spoke awhile.

Then the second district attorney noted that all the paintings in the room had been painted by Maxine Sweeney, who was with us today, and he nodded toward her, and Aunt Maxine stood up and acknowledged the applause, which was good improvisation, as she'd spent most of the day cussing out her new hearing aid and had turned it off. He noted also that her husband John did the framing.

Then the draperies were tugged delicately from the faces of the new portraits, and judges Beaman and Small blazed forth in magnificent visage, with bright delectations of sunlight falling upon them like the glory of sublime justice, and so forth, and immediately court was adjourned and everyone ran for the bar.The local paper ran it front page next day:

http://www.dailyadvance.com/local/content/news/stories/2008/01/29/0129portraitsDM.html

and Aunt Maxine is expecting to get work from it. One very nice lady approached her who needed a picture repaired, and Aunt Maxine later told me the lady would buy a pastel. I said, oh, she didn't want a picture repaired? And Maxine said, oh yes, she wants that, too, but she'll also wind up buying a pastel. She just doesn't know it yet.

It's no surprise to me my Aunt Renoir makes a living doing this.

Medium Rare

Whoa, The Ruiner had an amazing experience that I don't know if I believe for a minute. Most of a minute, perhaps. I really need to start watching more television.

Sterlingian Majuscule

It’s hard to write about my friend Sterling Brown, one of that great tribe of modern American writers operating well clear of the fatal distractions of recognition, praise, and payment. Hard because it betrays some ugly secrets about this life, brings light to a labor perhaps best left unseen. If you want to enjoy the steak, you don’t visit the slaughterhouse.

But it’s a fact that the heavy preponderance of writers working today do so with no incentive beyond their own crackpot wish to tune a given body of writing to a high state of agreement and felicity, to see a thing well done, to do something well themselves.

I do not lament this fact, only state it, in as much of a cool and objective tone as I can affect.

It’s not enough that Sterling has built several houses with his own hands, run several businesses, renovated three boats—three boats and counting—and employed his gifts to bring many a small project in wood, fiberglass, metal and mechanics to beautiful completion. These accomplishments don’t seem to register. What counts most to Sterling is the writing. The most difficult structure is the story’s. The heaviest raw material is the blank page.

Sterling began his writing career not long after he grasped his first pencil, and has remained loyal to this calling, whether in his right mind or out of it, through a long eventful life, a long marriage, two children, a full-time job.

It’s fair to say his themes and characters were never calculated to bring him instant celebrity. He writes about Atlantic City and its losers, the dying occupations around the old South Jersey bays, the people who still embody the folkways of an older, less polite, less pretty world. But it’s clear the vision burns strongly in his imagination. Some writers nibble and nag away and their little plot of lines, slashing this part, amplifying that, adding three pieces and subtracting two. But Sterling writes like a storm; events unfold faster than he can record them. He is as much an audience as a creator, the mark of a true writer.

Oh, how many hours he has sat at table, watching this or that character jig and caper in utter despite of his instructions, often running off with a plot that had until then stuck to a careful plan. He has witnessed murders, rapes, violences of no clear explanation or intention, and he has seen them enter boldly upon his stage and revise his affairs in a way not consistent with his predictions.

He has rewritten patiently, and rewritten again, a conscious and deliberate craftsman, figuring the actions to the characters, scaling levels of detail, seeing so much that can be put in and choosing painfully what to leave out. His writing desk has been a tabletop at home, the dashboard of his car, the inside of a drawer at work.

His reward for all this—it hardly needs to be said—has been constant and convincing rejection.

Talent, of course, only gets you the lottery ticket. It’s luck that gets the jackpot.

There is no especial reason to decry this fact, just as there is no reason to send the writer anonymous money in a box. Misery is its own reward. Little stories make nothing happen. They don’t cut the tax rate, they don’t shoot down the school board, they do not bring extravaganza points if returned with proof of purchase. They do not gain 5 percent by mid afternoon or signal the flight of capital from growth to value stocks.

Rather, I feel inclined toward gratitude, if not exactly for Sterling the writer, at least for the knowledge that on this planet solitary constructive labor, the work of the independent artist, is going forth with undiminished naïveté—and vigor. Like those monks and hermits who disappear into their hermitages to explore the rare but still important realms of spiritual life, expecting nothing but perhaps the satisfaction of a carefully elaborated new investigation of the soul, so it is good that this writer feels his way toward the illumination of his inner world.

I am glad that somehow amid the cost/benefit analysis of our modern life, there is yet some particle of the imaginative, the thoughtful and beautifully useless at large in the world.

Meantime, Sterling is indeed getting more frequently published—in South Jersey Lifestyle Magazine, Art Beat, and a soon-to-be-released magazine called EnVision. You can get samples of his recent stuff here, here, and here.

A Ponderous Chain in Philadelphia

"The gentlemen from Philabundance, Mr. Scrooge."

Scrooge winced.

"They've been cleared by public relations?" he demanded of the intercom.

They had.

"Let them in," he growled. "But mind, an urgent call in three minutes if they're not gone."

His secretary understood. Scrooge sat up straight and adjusted his Hermes tie.

The door opened. They were two portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, who now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him. There was no doubt which partner they beheld, Scrooge or Marley, for the trade magazines had carried ample notice of Marley's death in the crash of his Lear jet, seven years ago this very night. Still, as one said, approaching Scrooge's darkwood desk over the vast carpet, they were sure Marley's liberality was well represented in the surviving partner.

And about that he was right, for Scrooge and Marley had been kindred spirits. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Scrooge! He had all but levitated himself through mid-level management to partnership by generating greater output at lower cost through advanced software. Not a department posted production numbers but Scrooge's numbers beat them, and with a smaller personnel budget and lower overhead generally, especially in regard to health benefits. He inaugurated the era of major capital improvements to replace the expense of labor; and without anyone's seeing it, the average work week had lengthened. To those who spoke of overtime pay, he predicted it would be necessary for them to part--those who didn't part anyway as a consequence of restructuring. He was effective, efficient, conversant to the gills on employment law and raking in stock options. There was talk of a Peter Binzen profile in the Inquirer, or even a fawning interview by Ted Beitchman in The Player.

"Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman before the desk, taking up his pen. "At this festive season of the year, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

A smile oiled itself over Scrooge's face.

"Gentlemen," he said. "Are there not unemployment offices?"

"There are," said the gentleman.

"The welfare and food stamp programs still in their former vigor?"

"They survive," said the man, "though greatly weakened. I wish I could report otherwise."

"That is gratifying news," said Scrooge, in his concerned businessman's voice. "I was afraid from what you said that something had happened to stop them in their useful course."

The gentleman appeared confused.

"Under the impression," he said, "that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude, a few of us are endeavoring to raise--"

But Scrooge, in an unaccustomed show of impatience, raised his hand.

"Gentlemen," he said. His words were firm and even, and came from an Andrew Cassell column on techniques for better management.

"As you know," he said, "Scrooge and Marley is a publicly-traded company. Which means that I am answerable to a higher power even than myself." He laughed faintly at this old joke, as he had a dozen times before.

"None of us wishes for such austerity in daily business," Scrooge said. "If I had it my way, everyone who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips would receive a cup of warm pudding and a holly branch. But, sirs, we must deal with facts. The Asian economies rise, the price of goods plummets, the Dow is retrenching. Consumers aren't consuming, not even at Christmas. Competition is keen. And all the while, labor costs increase, and on Wall Street they can think of nothing better to do than fling mashed potatoes at each other.

"And city government...." Here Scrooge rolled his eyes vaguely, and took a deep breath to calm himself. "Our government simply hopes to tax us to tiny bits."

He shrugged his shoulders to ask what he could do.

"I'm sure you'll find that Scrooge and Marley's contribution to the programs I mentioned is substantial. As I say, none of us wishes for austerity. But my stockholders, you understand. If they caught wind that I had upset their expectations of return, by even the tiniest degree--why, if they heard of that you would now be speaking to Scrooge's ghost and not Scrooge."

The gentleman began to speak, but Scrooge continued.

"Scrooge and Marley has done business in Philadelphia for 40 years," he oozed. "In the past the relationship has proved amiable and productive. I would hate to think that this fair city had become more hostile to our business than, say, Horsham or Great Valley or King of Prussia."

The gentleman again began to speak. But just at that moment the secretary buzzed with an important call for Scrooge, and the men were bidden to depart.

Scrooge took his usual melancholy dinner at the Union League, then drove home to his monstrous mansion in Gladwyne. There, he locked all the locks and armed all the alarms, and sat ensconced within, solitary as an oyster. Before retiring, he punched in his personal computer and noted with relief that the Dow was up 63 points, the dollar had advanced against the yen, the prime rate was steady, and the National Park Service had given preliminary approval to his bid to convert the money-losing Independence Hall into a casino and entertainment complex. Then he went to bed and slept as peacefully as ever.

I Read a Book and Get Retrospectively Creeped Out

Okay, so, yes, creepy.

I got stupid lost in the library again, this time looking for the oversized biography section, which is not, as it sounds, the section devoted to notable fat people.

I never did find the oversized section—never got near the B’s (for Bligh, William)—but a book in the W’s froze me.

I had a philosophy professor who liked to say there was nothing perfect in the world, no living Platonic ideal anywhere in the world--except Natalie Wood. And we always laughed. Because to have Natalie Wood show up in the middle of discussion on Plato’s pure forms blew up our notion of scholarly rigor. She appeared more than once in Jack Whitcraft’s lectures, always as the one indisputably pure and beautiful thing on the planet.

But Natalie’s shown up frequently on bookshelves in the last 10 years, and will no doubt show up more, as her various friends and husbands die off, and speculation flares anew on the circumstances of her death.

Wood drowned after apparently falling from the boat she owned with her husband, Robert Wagner, off Catalina Island in November, 1981. Also aboard was the actor Christopher Walken and Wagner’s hired captain.

Everyone had been drinking heavily that night, first on the boat, then on shore, then on the boat again. Around midnight Walken and Wagner got into a fiery argument and Natalie left them to go to bed. About an hour later, they couldn’t find her aboard, nor could they find the boat’s dinghy.

Those aboard first believed she’d taken the dinghy out for a ride, though upon consideration realized it was unlikely a drunk woman, who didn’t like the little boat anyway, would take such a jaunt on a dark, cold, windy night on rough seas. They called the Coast Guard.

Next morning searchers found the dinghy in a little cave on the rocky coast. And then they found her, about 100 yards away. She was suspended in the water beneath her red quilted jacket, which held some air and prevented her from sinking. Underneath the jacket she was wearing her nightgown. She hung in almost a standing position, head down, eyes open.

Of course the story exploded into a tale of scandal, conspiracy, cover-up. Wagner had thrown her overboard in a jealous convulsion for her attention to Walken. She had stumbled into a stateroom to surprise Wagner and Walken together. She possessed embarrassing information on both men, who staged a loud argument to mask their joint guilt in killing her. The forensic evidence supported none of this.

What probably happened, of course, was she fell overboard while adjusting the line holding the dinghy to the boat’s stern. Anyone familiar with boats knows you spend a large part of your night quashing this or that little noise so you can sleep. Night-time dinghy bumping is the number one cause of insanity among boat owners. And that particular dinghy had a history of bumping.

She was probably shortening the line when she fell in, probably held on to the little boat as long as she could, and then succumbed to hypothermia. A very sad story.

Well, it never occurred to me while sailing off Catalina that I might visit the spot of a notorious death. I had heard Wood’s name in connection with Catalina, when I worked in California; had heard she drowned somewhere around there. But it wasn’t until I opened her biography today that I knew exactly where.

Indeed, there in vivid description was Two Harbors, a place I know well, a ramshackle outpost on far side of the island that then, as now, contains only one restaurant. It was where she ate her last meal. And there was the description of the anchorage where they had moored their big boat, exactly where Exy and Irving always anchor to give the kids a swim.

There in description was the little dock I knew, where they had pulled her out. And there in a photograph was the very cave I had kayaked through with my kids, a long tunnel open to the ocean at both ends that always got them enthused. It was in this cave they found the dinghy.

So in other words we had all been playing right where she died. We’d been swimming where her body spent a night almost floating.

I’m glad I didn’t know this then. I wish I didn’t know it now. But it only goes to show you, don’t go into the library without a deliberate plan.

It reminds me of the time that the great David Vis and I climbed to the top of a hilltop village in Spain, only to find that what looked like Moorish fortress was in fact a great crypt, which, furthermore, had—

No, skip that. I’m creeped enough for the time being. Maybe one day all these macabre stories from the road will go into a book and I’ll be finished with them (possible title, “Travels With Ghoulie” --apologies to John Steinbeck and his dog.) Until then I want to concentrate on the living.

And While We're On Great Architects...

Just found this in the archive--and it fairly represents the mind of its sender--and wanted to post it, so all could see what I have had to endure in the way of personal correspondance. This came from our own great architect of the age, Patrick Michael Zampetti, sent in March of 1990. And the correspondance continues.

Another Random Looking Up of Stuff

Thank you, PMZ, for setting off the next random looking-stuff-up obsession. Our topic today: Evelyn Nesbit and the Stanford White Murder.

Pretty girls get attention when they’re murdered, and even when they’re only standing near a murder. In this case the victim was the pretty girl’s boyfriend…manfriend…lecherous old bastard friend, Stanford “Stanny” White, an architect, who got popped on the roof of a building he designed. The details of the murder are pretty freakin picturesque, the personalities involved likewise, and the whole story occupies a place in the annals as the first great Crime of the Century—the 20th Century, I mean. There would be many more, of course.

This Evelyn Nesbit, though, was probably the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s famous Gibson Girl, and had a number of other notable attributes, not least was that she lived some of her later years in Northfield, New Jersey, one town north of me own auld sod. So sayeth Wikipedia. (She died when I was 9, and had probably left Northfield long before that, so chances are I didn’t interview her for the paper.) In youth, she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the country, with "the slim, quick grace of a fawn, a head that sat on her flawless throat as a lily on its stem, eyes that were the color of blue-brown pansies and the size of half-dollars, and a mouth made of rumpled rose petals," according to Irvin S. Cobb. She earned lots of money as an artists’ model, fashion model, and eventually an actress. The movie "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" was written about her, and she appears as a semi-fictional character in E.L. Doctorow's novel "Ragtime," also the movie made from it.

As for the swing, god, who wouldn’t want to push a beautiful 16-year-old back and forth on a velvet swing? To reinact some arcadian fantasy. Sure, throw some grapes in there, and twining vines. Don’t you have a swing, Pat? You architects know how to have a good time.

I'd Rather Be In...

As long as I’m leaving Philadelphia…

I yearn to stay here, but only for nostalgia’s sake. Most of the people I came to know here have gone, leaving me to hold the lonely city by myself.

Some went off to get married, some followed jobs, and some just went the hell off.

Joe the skater, for example, just one day decided to take a year off and travel. He sold everything in his apartment, emptied the place out, and when the last knick knack went out the door he followed it by a brief interval. He started in South America and worked his way up into Canada and finally to Alaska, where he got work on a fishing boat. Meanwhile he kept in touch with the folks back home via the skate club listserve. Even thousands of miles away he knew the time of the weekend skating sessions, and their place of gathering. And later, when the information went up, he knew who had skated, where they all went, and who had how many beers afterward.

This skating club—I can hardly travel a street in Philadelphia and not think of it. Back in the late 90s when skating had taken everyone with a fury, the skate club numbered several hundred members. Any hundred of these might show up for any given skate, and where did we not go when gathered all together like that. There is something about skating in a big group you can experience nowhere else. We skated miles, miles, every week, down from the Art Museum, into Old City, down along South Street amid the stranded traffic, up to North Philly and Northern Liberties, back uptown and across the bridge to West Philly and Penn, all around up there amid the crumbling neighborhoods, then back over another bridge into South Philly, and never stopped again until we hit Lincoln Field. We were a flock of birds, all of us free and striving together, all of us set to flight on an impulse.

Of course we never covered all of that in one day, but our range was vast. Fifteen and twenty miles a trip was the average, at least twice a week, often more. Our legs were like steam pistons. We’d usually stop at some favorite eatery or water ice stand, take a long refreshing break around our Gatorades and ice cream, then leap into flight once more as the night came down.

You get to know people when you’re skating. Socializing happens with butterfly ease. Stop for a light and chat up a stranger, continue talking until the next light, drift to a new stranger, drift back to find some old friends, pause and watch the crowd skate around and around the stairs at Dilworth Plaza. Our leaders, veterans of many years on these streets, knew every surface worthy of skating in the city, and didn’t fear to push our vast mob through twisting alleys and along hidden sidewalks. We skated the subway concourse, going underground at 17th Street and resurfacing at 13th. with numerous twists and detours between. We rode elevators to the tops of tiered parking lots and whirled our way to the bottom. And the Art Museum steps…I never got brave enough to skate them, but many did. It got to be the opening ritual of our skating trips to watch Buzz or John or Ellen come screaming down bank after bank of those stairs, the tiers thrumming on their skates as they flew down, all the way from top to bottom. It was easiest to do it backwards, and so the uninformed witnesses to these events believed they were seeing the impossible: boys and girls flying backwards on roller skates down the largest bank of stairs in Philadelphia. Rocky only had to run up them.
That skate club created many durable friendships. Even though Nina has moved away and had a baby, even though Lynn got married, even though Tylis took a job in New York—I still stay in touch. And even now, hardly a sojourn in town will fail to show me a familiar face and a friendly wave. We all have skating in common. Like drum corps, it’s an experience that binds you.

But of course, Philadelphia is an experience that binds you, too. Sometimes not in a good way. But let that rest. I leave here knowing I had as good a time as anyone, and better than most. And the friends I made are friends still.

Live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.
--Frederick Nietzsche

I sometimes see my life as romantic. But then I remember where I live.

The “house” that I have rented for many years—an interesting structure—one of those bland fronts of a South Philly house that often shield peculiar and sometimes rich lives from the glare of public knowledge. Long ago my little place probably housed sailors or dockyard workers or longshoremen. Just a few blocks away are the great piers that once serviced ocean-going freighters, the street that was once a seething waterfront thoroughfare.

Photographs from the mid-19th century show this street a maelstrom of activity: the dusty avenue thick with horses and wagons, and thousands of carts bearing the freight of the tall ships whose masts tower above the piers in the background. It was a close, active street, the kind of street where the primary commerce of the international American trade once took place—among men and small-scale vehicles, not cranes and mechanics and diesel trucks. (I miss it, can you tell?) Now, of course, Delaware Avenue is no such thing, but a six-lane boulevard of stoplights and road rage, connecting the Sprawl Mart with the Home Repo and the Super Stash. It’s a strip mall stuck in the only place the city could put it, the only stretch of open retail-ready land within 10 miles.

But the houses around here remain largely what they were. I’m pleased to live in a place where a house can reach 150 years of age, and more, and still serve as a house, without making any great fuss about it. I live amid scores and scores of these houses, and not even a block of suburban-style mini-houses—vinyl siding, garages—can destroy the ambience.

However, I’ve known I must leave this place--the lust has indeed wandered—and have wondered what circumstance would permit me a graceful exit from this residence of six years. Last week I found it: The first floor wall, long bowed outward into the alley, has in fact collapsed. I didn’t realize this at first. My landlord spent the night here last week and we couldn’t figure out why the furnace, which had run all night, had apparently failed to heat the house by morning. Then we looked in the alley. A big brick wall really does make quite a pile. We had only a piece of sheetrock between us and the great outdoors.

This new development with the house takes its place alongside other, older quirks of the structure. For example, the hole in the bathroom floor that looks down into the kitchen.

Following the walll discovery came frantic calls to contractors, several of whom came to give estimates. And they confirmed what I’ve always told the owner about this place: Fixed up, it’ll sell at a huge profit. I think he believes it now, and plans to sell. Which means I need to find a new place to live.

Which is all right. I’ve decided, at least for now, that my only safety is despair of safety. I seem to be happy only when in flight. So once again into the wild blue yonder. So far the remaining two floors have not tumbled. Just give me another two days….

What I Do On My Summer Vacation

Coming into the sailing job in 2004, I tried to drain the former director of the program for every scrap of information: How are the boats provisioned? Do the kids wear life jackets? How many miles do you cover in a day? Where does everyone sleep? I left no uncertainty untouched: How do you wake the kids in the morning? Who does the cooking? What happens if there’s a mutiny?

But nothing could have prepared me. Here was a program that put 10 people on a small boat for a weeklong sail around the Bay. The kids would learn how to sail, how to anchor, how to navigate, meanwhile trying not to sail into ships, piers, submarines, buoys, dolphins and the other boats in the program.

They would grope their way to the next daily destination, cook the food, clean the boat, plot the courses and do everything possible to prevent collision, sinking, drowning, exposure, sunstroke and death by flying boom. In theory this would happen. In practice what happened, what continues to happens, is: we all shove off and pray for the best.

Usually we get the best, but sometimes not. In four years I’ve seen two serious accidents. Two years ago I left a parent alone to steer while I went below. The wind was well up on our starboard side, the boom stretched out to port. I came back on deck just in time to see the boom swing across and crack another adult in the forehead, the classic accidental jibe, caused by not only by the skipper’s inattention, but also by the helmsman turning us more about 120 degrees to port without apparently noticing it. The victim rose from the deck with blood streaming down his face, and two hours later he was getting stitches.

Last year, lowering our spinnaker, one of the scouts let the halyard off the cleat and then tried to hold it while several hundred pounds of force tried to make it run. It eventually ran, but not before pulling several layers of skin off his palms. This was not an enjoyable event. At the emergency room, they cut away the lose skin, bathed his hands in ointment and wrapped them like mummies. For the rest of the week he could do nothing but order the other guys around, which indeed he did very well. But we’d have preferred he needed no such promotion in the field.

Aside from these, we have managed to scrape through, no matter what nature or the wiles of adolescence have thrown at us, and I make no presumption which of these forces is the stronger.

The season begins with the almost ceremonial shakeup of the boats, which have lain unused all winter and which have begun to develop their own strains of mold. This shakeup is usually undertaken in the sort of slow-motion melancholy that can only accompany the revisitation of things long played out and inanimate, much like seeing an ex-girlfriend.

Mold, old food smells, stains on the floor, perhaps the residue of an overflowed toilet are usually the only signs of welcome. There are sails to mend, ice boxes to clean, lights to test, deck leaks to fill. You got to change the oil, double check the fuel filter, pore through the sea strainer, keep a sharp eye on that fan belt. But things look brighter when the boss gives you the account number at West Marine.

This year, three of us managed to spend close to $20,000 getting our boats ready to sail. In theory, we acquired them in a ready condition. But you know how imperfectly theory sometimes translates to fact, especially when a West Marine account number enters the picture.

Oh, you have to have smoothly working blocks, mainsheet tackles that don’t twist, an easy-running furling line for the jib, sails spruced up and clean, and a radio that can be counted on to broadcast further than 60 feet. (My radio was so old I was hearing Fred Allen on it.) It means having bright new halyards and sheets, and fresh new waterproof chart kits showing in particular detail the shoals that we will probably run into anyway.

It means having fancy acid-based hull cleaners and steel polishes and—I still expect to get in trouble for this—an entire set of signal flags. It means replacing any compass that even looks like it’s thinking about deviation, replacing all the flares and life vests.

It means, in short, participating in a buying spree that is the Boy Scouts’ gift to you.

My boat suited me. Just recently purchased from an actual yacht broker--the scouts apparently robbed several banks this year, perhaps as a merit badge requirement—my Morgan arrived with luxuries I had never believed would ever surround my person on a small boat—a working toilet, for one thing, also a working water pump, a shower, and a heat exchanger that produced hot water. All of its lights worked, inside and out, as well as the heavy-duty anchor windlass used to pull up the very stern-looking claw anchor and 90 feet of chain. (I especially like this windlass, though it played me the clever trick of dumping 100 pounds of wet anchor chain onto the V-berth cushions the first time I tried it.)

This year for the first time the program ran out of a brand new camp just opened in Bayport, some 22 miles up the Rappahannock from Deltaville, where the river meets the Bay. This far up the river—actually, anywhere on the river—you can only reach deep enough water by building a dock more than 1000 feet long, as the Boy Scouts did, against all advice. Walking this kept us in good shape.

Great nervousness ahead of the first arrivals. So many things could happen this year. Booms could crack open young heads. Legs could tangle in life lines during a jump overboard, and break. Rope burns could scourge hands. And sunburn, lacerations, knife cuts, fabric whippings, broken bones, ripped skin, drowning.

Nothing looks so bleak, nothing carries a fuller freight of disaster than a season of sailing before it begins. When the scouts do arrive, of course, constant work, hard physical work, keeps you safely ignorant of those hovering calamities, and attentive instead to your immanent shortage of water, the fragrance from the head, the fact that some of these parents expect four star eating on a boat run by, after all, the Boy Scouts.

The kids finally do arrive and spend the first night learning about the boat, the simple skills necessary and where to sleep, then spend most of the night chattering like monkeys, calling to one another among their sleeping bags and from boat to boat, some of them slung in hammocks between the mast and forestay.

Next morning they awaken at 7, sometimes with assistance, and make ready to sail. The countdown enters the last frantic minutes. With encouragement, the scouts guide carts of food out that long, long walkway to the floating dock, cram the food into every locatable gimcrack including the inside of the oven and the crack in the cabinet beneath the sink, remove their wet towels and swimsuits, capes, loincloths, bibs, diapers and pantaloons from the lifelines, gather in the cockpit to receive one final pep talk and pre-packaged dressing down to be used as needed, and receive their instructions for shoving off.

They do all this under the fevered eyes of the adults, who are dripping with anticipation to go and creating puddles on the deck that I ask them to clean up later. Those scouts whose attention wanders are gently guided back to the present with a kind word. In the half hour before launch I let none of them visit the bathrooms on shore—first because the bathroom is almost a quarter mile away; second because they’d most likely forget the purpose of the trip and wander blissfully about the beach for hours, looking at fragments of broken driftwood and the shape of their own footprints, and I’d have to send a rescue party. The teenage mind is constructed upon turbulence.

At 9 a.m., we go.

For most of these kids, the first minutes off the dock are the first minutes ever sailed. They know as much about mainsheets as they do about medieval theology. Actually they know more about medieval theology, the precocious bastids, and will explain it to you at great length when you’re intending to do something else, such as pull one of their colleagues out of the water. The Rappahannock is wide, tranquil, scenic. Its banks look like the landscapes of Durand and Morse.

From the middle of the river, you can gaze upon mile after mile of orange beaches, misty forests, crumbling headlands topped with meadows of clover, enchanted streams leading off into quiet lagoons last viewed, it often seems, by the continent’s primeval citizens. It is open, untrammeled, wild. Stop at any point and there are small beauties to count and contemplate, burbling freshets and streamfalls, blasted trees mellowed by years and covered in vines, hanging moss, honeysuckle, wisteria, otters, beavers, badgers. Nose into any cove and behold a new slant on the transcendent.

But these mean little because the first of your crew are already violently ill.
The prevailing wind blows from the south or just west of south, the river itself runs east-southeast. With a good fat wind on your beam you can expect to travel far and fast, without troubling much about sail trim. The ride on a beam reach is smooth as it gets. But I have come to understand that just the thought of water brings seasickness to the predisposed. And many, so many, are predisposed.

Assault of the Carpet Monster

The creature waits in hiding, patient in ambush, blood on her mind and yearning in her claws.

When the moment is right, she springs from her lair, bent on killing!

Pure luck got the camera pointed in the right direction. Here is a never-before-seen view of the beast in mid strike.

Fortunately our screams broke her killing trance, and she retreated.

Later she cooled down in the basement, and took her Audi Quattro out for a spin.

She is always happier, and calmer, after running over pedestrians.

Stars and galaxies brought to you by Jim's Night Sky machine, plus a disco ball.

Of Fish and Cha-Cha

Several nights ago I arrived at my brother Jim's, barely half an hour after his wife Jamie, now two months divorced, finally moved out. The party was already winching upward.

Al was there with his wife, also their friend Teena, and music was playing from Al’s iPod through Jim’s mammoth speakers, a lot of top 10s from the 1960s forward, which were surprisingly seductive, also lots of Sinatra. Also of course Beatles and Billy Joel. There were spirits on the counter, and we all got more spiritual by the minute.

Teena was deeply involved with her new PlentyofFish account, a free online dating service, and was actually online as she sat there, fending off IM requests with a thumping rhythm. Some very hot guys hit on her, offering coffee and dinner, and Teena found no easy way to communicate she wasn't looking for anything tremendously meaningful at the moment. So she agreed to several coffees. Sort of.

The music got louder and Jim's daughter Olivia wanted to dance. So Jim hung up a disco ball and shone a light on it, then put out a machine that spread stars across the ceiling. Then he switched on the karaoke machine and gave the mike to Olivia, but very soon turned the mike off, in consideration of those who could still hear. Everything hushed down suddenly when Jamie called to say goodnight to Olivia, but by that time Olivia only wanted to get the party cranking again.

“Daddy, will you please turn back on the disco ball?” Olivia whined, straight into Jamie's ear.

My brother could always turn sorrow into hilarity, sometimes in feats of high inspiration. I remember the night neighbors Pete and Sue came over to visit Jim and Jamie, and somehow a tape of the infamous Tanya Harding wedding night video got put in the machine. We gollied and shucksed along about whether to watch it, as everyone there but me felt some need to square such a thing with regular church attendance. But then, almost without conscious control, as if resigned to the inevitable, we sort of collectively pushed the button.

And there we sat, grim as death, while images of a naked Tanya Harding riding wild and free bathed the room in lurid blue.

Once into this show we could nowise figure a deft way out of it, and so well before Tanya shouted her final war cry the anticipation of post-video embarrassment had gotten thick. In a moment the video would end, and all of us Protestants would face each other in shame and awkwardness.

It was at that moment Jim arose from his seat and cued up his Favorites of Cha-Cha album on the stereo, featuring 15 of the greatest cha-cha hits of all time, making it the soundtrack to Sonya’s moment of love. It was perhaps the greatest use ever found for the cha-cha version of Theme from "The Magnificent Seven," that proud and strutting tune.

The cha-cha music put Tanya and husband into just the right aesthetic context for us. What looked grim and lurid in one light looked completely different on a sporty cha-cha background.

It was in something of this mood that the music got cranked up again, on this first night of my brother’s return to singleness, a night that might have sunk into deeps of gloom. Instead, we remembered a happier way to channel light, with my brother as usual holding the disco ball.

My Aunt Renoir

My Aunt Maxine grew up in North Carolina, and has remained in North Carolina for most of her long life. At 92 she’s entered probably the most productive period of her artistic career. Maybe it’s taken this long to conquer the business of art selling, but my aunt now finds herself with more commissions than she can manage: portraits, oil paintings, pastels, watercolors; pictures of children, prominent citizens and not so prominent, seascapes, landscapes, pets, houses.

They are all finding out about her: doctors, dentists, teachers—anyone with enough ego and money to commission a painting. (I should note my aunt’s prices have remained about what they were in 1975.) They come with photographs, sometimes clusters of photographs, and cobbling these together she will compose the picture, set a canvas in her hand-made easel, and begin to paint.

She has already populated a large part of Elizabeth City with her images: They appear in the local history museum, local art galleries, and once a whole truckful of them went onto the walls of the new City Hall. Eminent persons from Elizabeth City’s past, mayors, councilpersons, benefactors of various flavors, celebrities—singly and in groups, they have passed through the bright sphere of her gaze to the permanence of her canvas.

I will not fail to note my Uncle Jack’s place in this enterprise. At 87 he’s the errand runner, the frame stretcher, the appointment scheduler. He’s the man that makes things go. Along with her talent, my aunt also received the gift of long talk, and my uncle long ago gave up competing for a space in the conversation. If not often heard, you will see him plenty, fixing some part of the house or other, painting a porch floor, cleaning a wall, trimming a hedge. Early in the morning he’s spreading food about for the three cats and a dog, and any other stray creature finding a congenial place here amid the fig trees and palmettos.

Plenty of creatures have, myself not least.

I arrived here after yet another summer on the water, a regular but rigorous period of sweat, strenuous labor, long days in the wind, long days of squeezed-out tubes of sunblock and aloe vera, baloney sandwiches, hunting down propane cylinders, playing chicken with power boats, and the occasional trip to the emergency room. I came here last year, too, and the year before that. By early August I’m ready to experience the full explosive thrill of endless rest, days of rest, weeks of rest. I want to put my feet up until all the blood drains out of my legs.
And so I have done. Every August I have launched myself with scant apology into their lives, dragging my bike into their garage and making a mayhem of the “apartment” adjoining their house—actually its own small house attached at a corner to theirs. I have lazed on their porches and filled closets with my important papers. In return for this kindness, they get in me an occasional porch sweeper and paint fetcher, an alert boarder guaranteed to rise before noon and investigate if some great noise signals trouble nearby. It’s the least I can do.

Very quickly I have gotten used to the pace, as who could not? Jack rises by 6, Maxine a bit later. She reaches her studio by 8, while Jack hits the wood shop for a morning of framing and matting. At 11:30 all work ceases and they go to lunch at the little restaurant whose menu they know by heart. In the afternoons, there’s often some work in the garden, maybe some weeding. (I once pulled an invasive plant out of the flower bed, all on my own.) In the evening, another restaurant, and rest for the creation of more art.

And while I lounge without shame around this property, with its gallery view of humanity on the streets and its hanging gliders, while I wander amid the garden house and the woodshop, the flower beds and peach trees, this demi-paradise with a pretty lawn, and its dedication of every cove and corner to the making of beautiful things, I suddenly realize:

I am at Arles. I am in Tahiti and the Marquesas. I am surveying Paris from Montmarte. I am in Guernsey and Provence and Auvers. I am seeing stuff in person that others will admire in galleries a century from now. I get to stand by while art is being made. And I think: well, maybe I can help out a little more.

Mark and Me

An important announcement. Henceforth this shop will no longer carry the Mark Twain line of products and services, popular as they may be with our current customers. The stock has run out and will not be replenished. The Twain brand will no longer form a part of this inventory.

I mean it. I’ve gone sour on this guy. I will no longer use Twain’s life as a yardstick and standard of judgment upon all other lives, and raid it for metaphors, and chop it into anecdotes to illustrate common wisdoms. I will stop coughing up Twain quotes at every chance. Henceforth I will quit the footrace I’ve run with this man since my 20s, which I long ago lost but never abandoned. I’m kicking him out of the cabin. He will no longer rattle his sarcastic bones in my closet.

It’s time. Some fascinations really do need to end, and especially those that beckon downward. Nowhere have I read more avidly, imagined more vigorously, yearned more desperately than in the study of Clemens. Nowhere have I failed more completely than in his comparison. With his success as the standard, he has strained my labor and blighted my career--to use a word he would surely approve. He has made me nostalgic for an age I never knew, and no doubt made my company tedious sometimes when it might have been otherwise, more like his.

No one ever explained him, is the problem. Probably no one will. What James Couzens said of Henry Ford he could have said of Clemens. You can’t analyze genius.

Oh, how I hate the G-word. But Clemens surely had something, something that not even he understood. He could mesmerize with words, even himself. Whatever fear he felt, whether on the page or the stage, the words took over when he began to produce them, and that was that. The words followed their own way. There was something from Beyond that spoke through their strange and beguiling combinations, that shines yet through those truer-than-life word pictures, which I’m finished describing as talent. It was much more than that.

And let us not speak of the voice, which had a power all its own. The drawl was hypnotic, the slow cadence pulled you into participation, brought you into its own sphere of experience. You could not be in a room with that drawl and want it to stop, hope it would stop.

It’s a significant loss to American history that recordings of Clemens’s voice, made upon wax cylinders as he dictated his autobiography in 1906, have never been found. (Nor have those of William Dean Howells, who followed Clemens’s example in dictation.) Even Howells said you had the best of Mark Twain when you had the voice. To feel the utmost of his powers, you had to share the room with him, your eyes and ears awake to the performance. Whatever the voice might have told scholars, maybe it would have given me, finally, the man instead of the miracle. I have gotten right sick of the miracle.

These thoughts come courtesy of an octagonal aluminum garden house in my Aunt Renoir’s backyard, where I am now sitting. I had been taping a tear in its plastic roof, on this warm September morning, wondering if I should move my computer into it, when I began to think about Twain’s famous octagonal study in Elmira, built for him as a gift on a ridge above the Chemung River.

I have been in that study, that structure in which much of his greatest literature came into being. It felt odd. Who knows but that something about its shape, some bounced-back convection of brain waves, didn’t ignite genius in there like a vapor explosion. Clemens wrote much of Huck Finn in that study, and Life on the Mississippi, a good bit of Roughing It, and much else that has expanded the vocabulary of American letters. I would say he averaged 16.5 brilliancies a day there, a pretty good pace.

Well, maybe if I tried writing here, in my own little octagon, I could enjoy that kind of success! Maybe I could produce great literature and earn several fortunes and be hunted up by universities conferring honorary degrees! Maybe I could have that kind of life, see the great wilderness of a young America, witness gunfights in the wild west, go around the world on a steamer. Maybe I could pan for silver in Nevada and set fire to Lake Tahoe and cruise the Mississippi in a paddle wheeler. Maybe I could--

After a quarter hour of this I decided what I really needed was medication, and went and lay down. For it is no good, you see. Even I can understand that, sometimes. It is no good singing someone else’s happy song if you have the chance to sing your own. An easy lesson, but difficult to embrace. Why be the Elvis imitator when you can be McCroon the Wonder Scotsman?—a lesser light, perhaps, but steadfastly his own man. Why dance the dear old Twist when your own steps include double knee swirls and fast-action rump gyration and a complete backward somersault over an open fire pit? People might wanna see that. Imitation is a form of enslavement. Don’t go that road.

I know it, of course. Probably I always did. It’s one of those truths we don’t want to believe. However, I believe it now. You can’t be the man you never were in the first place. Forget it. Quit the whining already. Grab a rag and do some dishes or something. Hit the road till your head’s clear, don’t stop for lunch meat.

Yeah, that's the way. Say goodnight, Huck. You can go to hell without me.

Statistical Anomaly

Written Sept. 9, 2007

I am having the strange experience right now of being shut up in a remote cabin with nothing to occupy me but a couple cans of beer and this computer.

It was because of the Boy Scouts. They called Thursday for help moving boats on Friday—apparently a storm forecast for the weekend put them in a panic. And so I rose at 4 and drove four hours to the scout camp in Middlesex County, and yesterday moved two boats, first one of our Morgans, then the Hunter, to their haul-out at Yankee Point. I traveled twice along the 15-mile route, and was retrieved each time but the ever-untiring T. J. Auth in his red James Bond speedboat. (Two and a half hours down in the sailboat, less than half an hour back in Bond style. Why do I like sailing again?) For company I had only myself and at one point a brace of dolphins, who surfaced six feet from my boat and made me scream in my brother’s ear as I spoke to him on the phone.

Naturally I didn’t want to leave afterwards, but elected to stay the night in one of the camp’s cabins. These little cabins have no running water, most of them. But they do have air conditioners and microwave ovens, and a striking hilltop view of the mile-wide Rappahannock. They also have—most significant to me—coffee machines. So when I tucked in last night and opened the window to the murmur of forest sounds, I didn’t figure I’d be rising early.

And I didn’t. I rose way late and did nothing, and went on doing nothing all day, and only very slowly persuaded myself to leave tomorrow. (This same storm might pound Elizabeth City tomorrow afternoon.) But for the moment, here I am, shut up in this very Kacsinski-esque cabin, minus the books and bomb-making materials, and waiting for the urge to overthrow capitalism and the spirit-killing, ever-expanding structure of technology that has made such a slog of human life.

But I find myself not in the mood for violent overthrow tonight. I find myself troubled.

Two nights ago, the city of Elizabeth City phoned me at about 8 p.m. to say someone had found my wallet—I didn’t know it was missing—and could I possibly retrieve it soon, as it would become official “property” at midnight and retrieving it would become much harder.

No need for encouragement: I got to the police station before the voice mail finished. Lisa, the dispatcher, apologized for making me fill out a form. I found myself remaining quite patient.

The wallet came back containing every one of the seven library cards I have collected in the last three years, also my driver license, also my credit cards, also the $160 in cash I have been carrying. A young couple had found it, he from California and here with the Coast Guard, and she his sweetheart, a local girl. Lisa had no phone numbers for them.

“I thanked them for you,” she said. “I knew you would be grateful.”

Yes. Grateful is one word for it.

I have lost my wallet no fewer than three times in the last five years, two of those times on the hard streets of Philadelphia. Each time it has been returned to me, containing everything I lost with it including Schlockbuster Video card and ShopTite supersaver card, also postage stamps. Two of those times, the finder had to play the detective in finding me, for my phone number appeared nowhere in my documents.

Now, here’s the disturbing thing. I have tried very hard to remain cautious and eternally vigilant against trespass against me. We should all keep a wary eye open, no question. You can’t watch the news without acquiring a fresh batch of murders, rapes, robberies, confrontations at knife point, scams, ruses, organized deceits, fires. Each night a new assortment. I am no different than anyone else, I fear for my life out there. People are crazy, kill you for a piece of Velveeta.

The trouble is, my experience—and I’m sorry to confess this—my experience has so far failed to ratify this picture.

Oh, I know I’m not normal. No doubt I’m a statistical anomaly, a man who by some unknowable grace of god has gotten this far in the world without being shot, burned, stabbed, cheated, scammed or hated in an organized way. People return my wallet when I lose it, what are the chances? I leave my doors unlocked and find my stuff still there in the morning. I leave stuff lying around all the time, and find it still lying around when I come back.

The consequence is, I find myself becoming…less…vigilant.

I know, it’s crazy. I shouldn’t take my eyes of the scoundrels out there, the villains, the humbugs and frauds, those ever vengeful, ever exploiting figures we glimpse on all the most instructive TV programs.

I know I should be locking my doors every night, so that thieves and murderers can’t cut my throat. I know I should lock my car when I leave it, so the smash-and-grabbers must at least make noise when they steal my phone charger. I know I should breeze past the man broken down on the highway, as his steaming radiator could be masterpiece of trickery, and I need only to turn my back and he’ll brain me with a spanner.

It's the patriotic thing to do, as well. We got to be scared in these times, we got to be as frightened as possible. Even the government says so. It'll make us stronger.

So I’m gonna try harder. As a matter of survival. I’m gonna start watch the TV news again. Every night, I vow. With a little effort now, I can fear my way into--if not a happier future, at least a more secure one. And what could be more important than security?

On Ranger Road

Sometimes we hear an irrefusable voice from within. It speaks in its own language, but is nevertheless understood. It speaks without volume, but is audible always. It speaks without force, yet its command shines with overwhelming radiance. Recently this voice spoke in me. It said: go camping.

The Outer Banks of North Carolina, clogged with development perhaps, still have room enough for the occasional little camp ground, often in someone’s back yard. You’ll find more of them the further out you go, as the tourists, like in number to the grains of sand on a beach, become outnumbered by the grains of sand on the beach.

At the far end of the Banks, where the long arm of shore is interrupted by towns with names like Salvo and Waves, where every quarter mile shows you another chance to stop, and raise a tent, and heat a can of beans, and be eaten by flies, and sleep with a broken clam shell digging into your backside, the command speaks with special emphasis.

The Mighty Ranger got me pretty far out the first day. Rodanthe, North Carolina: Not even a wide patch on the highway. Rather a temporary suppression of the wild vegetation that wants, yearns, perishes to take back these islands. Private property here, as in most of these towns, has expanded to its federally protected limit. If a lot doesn’t belong to someone now, it never will. That fact, and the place’s remoteness, have preserved in it some flavor of the frontier and recently-settled. Builded lots alternate with wild meadows of beach plum and bayberry. After a windy spell, drifted sand buries the roads.

My tent went up exactly in accordance with the printed instructions, which were sown onto its storage bag so that first-time tent putter-uppers couldn’t lose them. The campsite lay on the sound side of the island—never will I understand why the western side of barrier islands go unpeopled throughout the summer—and the sunset, as well as the full moon afterwards, brought a warmth and contentment that you often find in dreams of happiness--if you could ignore the Grateful Dead playing from one of the nearby RVs.

Q: What do they say at a Grateful Dead concert when the drugs wear off?
A: Man, this music sucks.

Development takes place under great restraint in the Outer Banks. And the sheer extravagance of miles protects it from overcrowding, mostly. Miles-long stretches of surf-washed beach contain not a single soul, and what souls do arrive do so in a motor vehicle. But this is an eastern-end phenomenon. In big tourist towns like Nags Head and Kitty Hawk, you’ll find the full array of beachside commerce in full throb: jet ski rentals, custard stands, drive-through liquor stores, “sundry” shops, big box retailers, and often entire blocks of new retail shops, which universally contain at least one t-shirt store, also a den of knick-knacks featuring carved wooden light houses, sea captains standing at ship wheels in their sou’-westers, shot glasses mounted on wood blocks and many sizes of souvenir plate, all made in China and stamped with the magic words, Outer Banks.

Well ahead of the national mania for three-letter place names, the Outer Banks staked its claim on automobile bumpers, rear windows, license plate brackets and refrigerators throughout the country: OBX, the sign of a proud vacationer.

Further down, past wastes of grass and drifting sand, on a road as straight as a sunbeam, another oasis rises, a cluster of towns huddled together like three men trying to keep warm: Waves, Rodanthe and Salvo. Beyond that, Buxton, and then the town of Hatteras, home of the tallest brick light house in the country, 208 feet, now the centerpiece of a national park. And lo, for miles along the beach, four-wheel-drive vehicles gambol and frolic, many with the fence of fishing poles clustering from their grills, and coolers held in their own protruding balconies before or behind. Their tires are deflated to 20 psi, as advised by the signs.

At island’s end one of the truly amazing North Carolina ferries will take you to the next stage southward—“truly amazing” in this case meaning “free.” North Carolina operates a fleet of ferries, some of them making two-hour-plus trips every day. But you’ll never pay more than $15 a ride. Locals pay $100 for a free yearly pass. For the ferry south of Hatteras, no rider pays a cent.

Ocracoke Island: about 20 miles of beach grass with a town sprouting at the end.

Actually a village. There is something eternally small about Ocracoke the town. It stretches a mile from its sandy north to its watery south. Rampant development has not taken over, as if the modern ethos of headless growth could find no place to stand. You are as likely to see electric carts whisking about as automobiles, and more likely to see bicycles. Not so likely are you to see banks of condos, or hulking hotels by the sea, tarted up with ornamental mermaids and pink paint. Beach scrub and wild oaks break through every patch of ground that a house does not occupy, and most of those houses go back 70 years.

By unspoken consent, the automobiles creep along the roads, often letting the bicycles set the pace. The National Park Service information center provides—who could possibly think this a good idea?—a vast public parking lot where visitors may leave their vehicles and explore on foot. Almost every house is rentable, but the proportion of vinyl construction (read: modern) is as low here as anywhere on the American coast. Here again, remoteness equals repose. The madding crowd prefers easier access to its maddingness.

Which has its detractors.

“It’s a good place to visit,” said the manager of my campground, a resident of seven years. “But you’re dependent on ferries. The nearest Wal-Mart is two hours away.”

Right. I’m definitely coming back.

But she is right. Few of the appetites usually sated in a beach town can find satisfaction here. There is not a single funnel cake stand. Mini golf they have none, nor golf of ordinary size. Nor water parks, nor movie theaters, nor boardwalks, nor “go-kart” tracks, nor tarot readers, nor hermit crabs, nor traffic jams nor beach inspectors, snow cones, invisible dogs or crystals.

They do have an ice cream shop, and a general store selling camping supplies, and a little community theater tuned to visitor interest, seafood restaurants, a fancy sandwich shop and about a dozen mouse-sized art galleries featuring local artists, which you will always find on distant islands. For no remote locale is so forlorn and dilapidated that some dreamy heart will not believe it the prime spiritual meridian of the world.

Some of the tourist books warn about this: “Don’t come here for the typical busy shore town experience,” one of them says.

Amen.

The next ferry ride lasted two and a half hours, traveling south from Ocracoke to Cedar Island and its long woody passage south to Beaufort, where I got out the bike.

Make note of this: Beaufort, North Carolina (pronounced BO-fort), must be conscientiously distinguished from Beaufort, South Carolina (pronounced BYOO-fort) if you want to see the place your friend Emily called her favorite southern town.

Chances are you’ll reach BO-fort before you even know BYOO-fort exists, and then have deep confusion over which she meant. And she’s in the middle of the Pacific so you can’t call.

So you’ll assume she meant BO-fort. And why not? Here are some dignified pre-war mansions, like she described, and the remnants of a once busy waterside street, now given to the usual pursuits of the no-longer-relevant: restaurants, sport fishing charters, art galleries. Here is the charm of the 19th century separated from its coarseness and cruelty. And here also, the fleet of cruising boats fresh off the Intracoastal Waterway, which touches the ocean here. They come here to wait for good weather before jumping to Bermuda and the Bahamas. The prospect of a long boat ride: That would have appealed to Emily, certainly, whose blood is salt water.

I drove 15 miles out of my way looking for the campground I’d called, mostly because it sat behind a locked cyclone fence that I refused to believe could surround a campground. It looked like a boat and RV storage facility. But I got a spot by the river before a beautiful old house—a spot they reserve for tents, so apparently there is some decency among campground owners.

And so on around Camp Lejeune, next day. I had to stop for a view of the perimeter fence, now converted into a large Welcome Home bulletin board. If the folks around here really supported our country’s mission, they’d not make their loved ones feel so welcome upon their return home. I have no patience with people who claim to love this country and then undermine its raids of conquest in this fashion.

Retail offerings are the television of driving, and here the programs were not high brow: local yokel tax preparation, dollar stores, always the dollar stores, bait shops, army surplus stores and a store selling both guns and hardware. I’m not sure what it is about guns that let’s them be sold in combination with other commodities. In Elizabeth City there is a store that sells guns and jewelry. I’m waiting to see one selling guns and ice cream.

And so on around Wilmington, down a highway that changes without notice to a crowded commercial strip, and so on to the only campground I could find.

Campgrounds have an ambience all their own, and sometimes you can smell them a long way off. It was a mistake not bringing a guide. Very little tourist literature of any kind lists campgrounds, so you find yourself watching for those ridiculous signs picturing teepees.

I wish I had seen a teepee where I stopped, for the place was in exhilarating. It contained the obligatory crowd of permanently placed RVs, now doubling as vacation homes for many. These provide campground owners with income through the winter. But camping amid a crowd of RVs is like pitching a tent in a junk yard.

Not that RV owners lack loyalty to their choice of temporary residence. No. You are as likely to see mirror balls, lawn jockeys, cutesy wooden figures and picket fences surrounding an anchored RV as you are the regular double-wide trailer these people call their permanent home. (This is one advantage marinas have over trailer parks: it’s hard to surround your boat with this stuff.)

The ambience is largely the same but the character of the place differs.

In this particular place, signs performed the work of running the park smoothly. Signs had much to say about my behavior. They advised me I would be trespassing if I drove into the park without registering. They advised me that littering would get me thrown out, that making trouble for my neighbors would bring the sheriff, and then get me thrown out, that overloading the washing machine would bring a sinister result otherwise unspecified. They told me that vandalizing the men’s room would get me prosecuted, fined, and thrown out.

Most of the signs, scrawled on cardboard with a broad felt-tip, seemed the inspiration of a moment, suggesting a lightsome and freewheeling approach to rule making. I could not but admire the efficiency of legislation that arose impromptu, as it were, to meet the need of the hour. I resolved to try it in my own life if I could discover any conduct of mine that needed alteration.

Never camp in a commercial campground if you can do it in a state park. Or a national park. The camping there is quieter, cheaper, prettier, more interesting, and there is a notable scarcity of threatening notices nailed to trees. Also, no RV can rest there for longer than a day. If I’d driven another two miles I could have stayed in a beautiful state forest with no company but birdsong.

Next day, down to Southport, another town with plenty of free literature and a historic district. I’m going to save that for another time. I had to get back to Elizabeth City the next day, driving five hours in torrents of Labor Day traffic. The mighty Ranger continues to roll strong.