The Sunday drive seems like a dying art. I see less and less of it, but when I do, it makes me happy.

A guy just drove down my street in a fabulous early 60s Speedster. Silver, top down, and brighter than the sun. His lady was in the passenger seat. They were tailed by two guys on two motorcycles. One looked like a 60s Moto Guzzi and the other like a 60s Norton, but it was hard to tell as I only got a quick look. Both riders wore vintage leathers and helmets. None of them were in a hurry; there was no rush to get to the bottom of the hill. Just a nice, stately jaunt to who knows where.

A few months ago, while driving to Home Depot on a Sunday afternoon, a guy and his friend were taking an excursion down the road in a stunningly immaculate Model-A, or Model-T, I'm not sure which. The one with the wooden wheels. You'll get nowhere fast in one of those, but that's exactly the point: it's a drive purely for the sake of the drive, the slow breeze winding through the open sides of the rumbling carriage, the early afternoon sun playing on the brilliant black piano laquer finish, the Indian horn somehow in tune with the handlebar moustache and driving gloves of the driver.

One Sunday in August, while driving down the highway in Arkansas, Robert and I passed a convoy of older gentlemen taking their wives out for a midday drive. No car was newer than 1965 or so, all sterling examples of some of the finest American cars I've ever seen; windows down, in no hurry, probably not going faster than 55. It was a wonderful, reassuring sight. The mint green fenders, bronze cowlings, creamy pink curves, resplendent in chrome, shimmering down the highway, the throaty chorus of lazy V8 engines anchoring one car to the next, piloted by men with white hair and driving caps.

It actually made me look forward to being old, and retired, with a nice car and beautiful wife, with nothing better to do than enjoy a calm, sunny afternoon in a beautiful car together.

I've got the car. Now I just need the years and the wife.

I like waffles. Waffle House is all over the south. If you haven't been, know that Waffle House is just about everywhere, seemingly at every offramp on every major highway. It's almost surprising that we didn't eat at one sooner, but it took us until Arkansas to do so.

The day before we'd driven across Georgia and Alabama, and at some point outside of Atlanta, we resolved to eat at Waffle House. Now I don't remember why we actually didn't that day; something to do with timing exits with refueling and whatnot--you get into weird predicaments on long drives, like how we nearly ran out of gas on our very first day, not six hours into the trip...that's another story. That night we had dinner in Oxford, Mississippi, at the fabulous Ajax Diner. It was the next day, in Arkansas, somewhere past Little Rock, not an hour before Russellville. The yellow and black Scrabble-board sign of Waffle House rose up into the magenta-smeared horizon of the darkening sky, and we knew what we had to do.

We pulled off the highway, parked, shook off the memory of a thousand dead armadillos, mopped the small lake of water off the floor of the car, went inside and grabbed a seat in a narrow booth.

My forearms stuck to the table. I tried to pull the paper placemat/menu thing towards me so I could read it better; I had to yank it. The grease on the formica tables apparently makes a formidable adhesive if left undisturbed. A thin, vacant blonde girl with a Waffle House hat drifts up to the table, staring down at us through glazed, dark brown eyes. She mumbles. I don't understand a thing she says. It's not the accent. She may just be shy. We're not sure. She looks at us, and there are long pauses between our answers and her next questions. Somewhere, the gears of time come to a shuddering halt.

A booming woman's voice cracks the stillness, as another waitress behind the counter yells about something we didn't catch; a joke. Two guys at the counter laugh. Time catches back up with itself.

The girl drifts back behind the counter. The door opens, the roar of a passing truck amplified. A woman and two men walk in. They pass us and sit at a larger booth at the end of the restaurant. The men are fairly plain, possessed mainly of an attenuated roughness; unkempt beards, one tattoo, sunburned, greasy, not very long hair, a net baseball cap, tanktop shirts, faces that have been worn a little beyond their years. She is fat; not huge, but fat, her belly rolling into folds when she sits. She spills out of her black hot pants and tight black tank top. Her face is puffy and red, her cropped brown hair capped by a bleached blonde mini-mullett. She speaks through a black hole where one of her front teeth used to be. Her voice is like coarse grit sandpaper, the beginnings and ends of words vague, the overall effect one of slurry. Her skin is littered with prison tattoos, the ones that are made with improvised, hand-ground needles and Bic pens. The tattoos are blurry, mostly incomprehensible, haphazard scrawls of simple lines, with only the outline of a heart on her upper thigh truly legible. Here and there--on a knee, or a calf, or above a breast--there is a word, and maybe a figure. Around the base of one thigh is a line. Just a line. It wraps all the way around. I am somehow reminded of one of Henry Rollins' tattoos.

They settle in, light their cigarettes, and have a chat with the loquacious brown-haired girl who works there. They're all friends.

I reach for a napkin to clean off the knife. The metal dispenser is beaded with the accumulation of an untold number of greasy fingerprints. I wipe off the knife. Our food comes. I got waffles and hash browns. I reach for the syrup dispenser. It too is sticky. We begin to eat.

The waffles reminded me of those frozen waffles we used to sometimes get as kids: thin, sort of like recycled pressboard, with no variation in texture from the outside to the inside; not, you know, like these things are sold: "crisp on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside!." After a good soak in the syrup and a liberal application of Butter Product, they began a unique transformation into a kind of shaped paste.

I also had hash browns. Each little grated piece of potato remained an individual entity, each lubricated by a film of grease. Should I have wanted to, I could have teased the whole thing apart into a field of hundreds of soggy, limp little grated potato pieces. The whole thing failed to stick together. I'd pick up a forkful and the mass would disintegrate, falling off the fork. Ketchup helped bind the pieces a little, but not much.

The door opened. With the blast of highway noise came four men about my age, maybe a little younger. They sat at the counter, in a row.

I turned back to my dinner, distracted by the sensation of unnamable sticky residues faithfully migrating onto my hands and forearms as if drawn thereon by some magnetic force; innumerable, animated films of oil and years-old syrup, heeding the siren call of human flesh. I thought of body snatchers. I went through numerous napkins, finally resorting to wetting them with pieces of ice. It helped a little. I started to eat with my arms off the edge of the table.

"FAGGOT!"

I nearly dropped my fork. I was sure it was us.

It wasn't us. One of the four guys behind me was ventilating a particular principle of his, relating an anecdote about mumble and how mumble mumble and then mumble fucking faggots mumble I swear I'd mumble growl boot up angry growl ass growl mumble. One of his buddies sympathized with an unintelligible opinion. A back was slapped, a snort of approval punctuating the fervid exchange.

I thought of Bill Clinton.

A few stools down from them, a young couple changed their baby's diapers on the floor. The dad wore a bright orange shirt, she, a purple flowered blouse. The baby wore nothing.

Nobody else seemed to notice the conversation. I returned to my meal.

Soon we finished. The blonde girl made her way back over to the table to collect our plates. We got our bill, paid, and got up to leave. I went to the rest room to wash up. I almost expected someone to say something to us. What, I did not know. Just something.

Nobody said anything. We were hardly even stared at on the way out, which isn't quite how it went down later that night at the PDQ gas station convenience store in Russellville. I do believe that the middle girl of that trio of buxom blondes may still be collecting her jaw from the pavement.

On the way out, two young guys stood outside smoking, slightly hunched over, feet at shoulder widths, bodies swaying slightly, the smoke snapping around their dark heads in the early evening wind. Their voices were the voices of purposeful young men, set on a mission. What few words I could make out amidst the rushing din of the highway suggested it involved cars, but it was hard to tell. Robert came out after me, we got in the car, the two guys went inside, and we left.

When you're sitting in the car for so long, driving through a thousand towns, you start noticing patterns. Or maybe it's more correct to say that you begin to generate narratives to fit a recurrence of similar sights, sights that may not be as necessarily related as they seem.

Vacant homes and stores would be one of those patterns.

From the old main street of Russellville, Arkansas to large tracts of Memphis, to North Platte, Nebraska, to Pittsburgh, the vacancies were abundant. In some places, like Russellville, entire blocks stood empty, the old brittle reflections in the cantilevered display windows masking the dark space behind them; brick facades tinted a pale, dusty tan; rust striping old metal signs advertising Buck's shoes, Rosemary Gifts...or just Barber.

In Memphis, the vacancies were as much homes as businesses. Here, large sheets of rough plywood--often painted dark blue, grey, or green--were nailed over doors and windows, tall weeds choking foundations and rising up over porches.

Along the highways, off back roads, in dusty hamlets, and on the fringes of county seats, the fading shells of clapboard houses lean earthwards, dotting the countryside in irregular intervals, the peeling paint turning chalky and then to dust under the recurrent pressure of sun, then rain, then snow, and then sun again.

Views like these were common. We got used to them very quickly. I found myself lingering over some of these old stores and houses; over the whole blocks of vacant storefronts especially, staring into the blank faces of dead shops and homes, wondering where the people went, wanting to know every story behind every aged facade.

Sometimes, it was hard not to invent them. Sometimes, those stories read almost like newspaper headlines superimposed over a scene of civic disturbance, like in an old movie where the EXTRA editions flutter over the black and white moving pictures of throngs in the street, or men and women lined up to collect bread or soup. This story is one of national failure; of a great recession, or the accretion of smaller recessions over many years.

Another story speaks not of great upheaval but merely of a small town gone bust. A mine dries up, a factory closes, the soil decays and grows sterile. Or natural calamity. A forest fire, a tornado, a flood; whole crops, or stands of timber, or neighborhoods destroyed, the fabric of the community torn in two, the livelihood of those remaining no longer tenable.

Or it is a story of hubris. Of men and women whose dreams were as unrealistic as their will to work was real.

Or maybe the dreams were realistic and it was the will that faltered.

Maybe the abandoned houses tell of families migrating to the city, the sagging wood frames remaining as symbols of old, discarded ideas and possibilities, ideas whose failures point towards the city, and the guarded optimism of the prosperity that multiplies there.

Or maybe these sagging edifices are the decaying echo of a more bitter story; of a family riven by internal collapse, or enmity, or tragedy; of neighbors and men and women consumed by their own darker angles.

It's all too tempting and easy to paint these scenes with such narratives: symbols of an inexorable march forward into brighter futures, or tombstones standing atop folly and failure...and all the subtle variations on these themes; all the possibilties between these two seeming narrative poles.

Sometimes, it's difficult to make any sense of the vacancies at all. Beaufort, South Carolina is an exquisitely pretty old town, thrust out deep into the coastal lowlands, situated near a Marine base, close to Charleston and Savannah, with a modest if dependable tourism industry, filled with old, fastidiously renovated houses and shops. Inexplicably, right there on Bay Street, there are vacancies; those same cantilevered display windows filled with nothing but still air. In the wake of so many other vacancies in so many less prosperous towns, it was tempting to imagine many of the familiar narratives. And yet, this is a town that has a good dozen fresh fish restaurants with wide outdoor seating overlooking the marshes, some very upscale boutique restaurants in the old quarter, magnificent Victorian inns and professional businesses.

Maybe the story here is a familiar one, if you're from the city: the rent is just too damn high.

Earlier on the same day we stopped in Asheville, we were descending from Cherokee on the east side of the Great Smokey Mountains, heading east on highway 19, when we passed a few shacks perched on the edge of a short, steep cliff. They were selling cheap cigarettes, antique odds and ends, plates, junk, fruit, vegetables, and assorted preserves.

I found Scuppernong Cider. First time I'd ever seen it. I'd never heard of it until I'd read about it in Faulkner, and then I became terribly curious. I was delighted to find some. It's not alcoholic, so perhaps in that way it's not faithful to the Scuppernong cider in the books, but that's okay. I bought a cold bottle and drank it. It tastes like a cross between grape juice and apple juice. I like it, even if it is quite sweet.

The shop also had jars of local, home-made jams, jellies, preserves, pickles, and other relishes. I bought a jar of Ethel's Raspberry jam, with a simple printed label, her name written in blue ball point pen. On top of the original Ball's two-piece lid was a small sticker with the name of the fruit written on it. I also bought a jar of the most sour, garlicky pickles I've ever had. They are quite good. They were especially interesting eaten out of the jar from the back of the car after sitting in the trunk for six hours in 100 degree weather.

Both made it home fine.

Another fine example of the Southern Diner was in Asheville, NC. The interior was an immaculate, bright, glossy light pea soup green, with natural wood wainscotting, small, narrow wood booths, chrome stools at the counter, mostly older hardware behind the counter, and a dry-erase board on the wall behind the counter listing the day's offerings. The food was straightforward: mac and cheese, cream corn, meatloaf, french fries, biscuits. Whole meals were served in molded plastic plates with built-in dividers, the gloss of the plastic long ago reduced to a dull matte finish. The plates reminded me of the old aluminum trays that came with Swanson's TV dinners. "Hungry Man!" What a treat those were...even if the food paled in comparison to my mother's own cooking.

Rotund men with short clipped hair, open-necked shirts and wide suspenders sat on the stools. Sharp small talk shot across the room, quick threads of gossip from a cook to a patron intersecting another patron's story told to the older lady with red hair who darted around behind the counter bisecting a third story lifted into the air by a diffident fat man, directed at no one in particular.

The back room was panelled in wood, from top to bottom, small ornaments and plaques adorning the walls. NASCAR featured heavily. A thin pall of smoke hung limply in the upper air. Groups of two or three sat at the small square tables, eating efficiently, talking slowly, a hand gesturing, a fork tracing a shape in the air.

Our meal was inexpensive, and a decent way to spend a small portion of the three hours it took for our rear brakes to get serviced at Shook's Service, two doors down.

Shook's was a good counterpart to Tastee. Neat and orderly, the men of this shop ran an efficient, clean operation. The mechanic who worked on our brakes spoke through a profound, dirty blonde moustache whose corners seemed to flick back and forth when he spoke. His speech was not always easy to understand. His accent was thicker than the black grease encasing his hands and his skin worn and dark. He inspired total confidence. It matters that a mechanic speak with confidence and authority. Especially when you're a thousand miles from home with many more miles to drive.

His diagnosis was precise and right and his repair exact. The rear brakes have worked flawlessly since then.

The other man--the manager I think--was very kind in advancing our little car ahead of a couple other vehicles that were awaiting service. He didn't have to do that. We didn't ask and weren't looking for any special accommodation, having already girded ourselves for the possibility of a night not a hundred miles from the last.

The price was just right too. A very fair $98 for what it was.

I don't know why I think this is so funny (link via Ken Layne). Maybe because part of the fun of road trips are all the quirky, dopey little things you do or get amused by, one of them being the raucous assortment of insects that get stuck in the windshield wipers. Drive 5,000 miles at high speed and you'll have some trophies.

A common event would be to see a particularly large insect--say a butterfly or locust or some such evil biblical creature--hurtle into the path of the car, and the passenger would call it out, and in the fraction of a second akin to the pitch in baseball were I a baseball watching kind of guy you'd make a silent bet with yourself whether or not it would hit the windshield. I think once, Robert was actually fast enough to make that bet out loud.

They almost always made an audible 'thunk,' followed by the pasty streak on the glass.

We did a lot of window cleaning.

Wiper highlights: two hundred miles after striking a very large locusty looking thing, we pull off to get gas. It's still twitching. That's guts. We too mauled one of those stunning, southern, yellow and black and blue butterflies. Sniff. The highlight was stopping at some point and looking at the tangled mess in one of the wiper blades and realizing that an all yellow butterfly was locked in a frozen, titanic battle with an insanely huge waspy death critter. There's some unknown story there. Could it be mere chance that these two got tangled up together on the same stretch of wiper blade? Maybe the wasp attacked the butterfly in midflight, thinking "ah HA! Gotcha, ya giant yellow bastard! Trophy meal of the day!"

We showed him.

On the other side of Pennsylvania there's Pittsburgh, the first place in which we spent the night. Pittsburgh is a city of which I had few expectations. Nor was it terribly high on my must-see list. At the same time, I have a few very vague and trivial associations with the place that piqued my interest, Andy Warhol being one. That, and that one of my adored art professors--back when I still thought I was going to be an artist--was a fellow student of Warhol's at Carnegie-Mellon, and last I knew, had left SFSU (where I went to school) to return to teach at Carnegie-Mellon. He was an inspiring teacher, one who opened a bunch of doors for me. He--Bryan Rogers--the fabulous and eccentric James Storey, and Steve Wilson (I think), formed the core of the short-lived "Conceptual Design" department in the SFSU art department.

The name is deceptive, as it was almost completely unconcerned with design, and totally concerned with concept, process, execution, and ways of thinking about media (in this case, the potential materials, tools, and devices of art), artmaking, and the presentation of art. Integral to the program were computers. This is where I started getting serious about computers; this was 1985 to 88. The program was absolutely fascinating. It was also some of the hardest work I've ever been expected to do. It was all light years away from your more traditional painting or sculpting departments (I did the painting too; I was going to double major). The work load was enormous, and many of the projects--especially Storey's--thrillingly difficult, almost more akin to mad puzzles than art, but then that was half the point: to force the student to start thinking outside of the traditional confines of "art." Brilliant, life-changing stuff those classes were. The loss of Rogers to Carnegie-Mellon and Storey's retirement were no small factors in my decision to abandon art and pursue literature. Partly I think it was because these guys set the bar so high in terms of rigor and discipline that the rest of art just seemed stupidly wishy-washy, and I wanted that resistance and challenge. Lit seemed to have it; painting didn't.

Funny...reminds me of an old dubious chestnut that nothing makes for a better atheist than a Jesuit education. At least that was the line an old ex-Jesuit friend of my dad's used to give us. So thorough, so rigorous, that you'd end up thinking yourself out of faith. Or something like that.

A n y w a y , Pittsburgh. I was pleasantly surprised. The city is situated in a way unlike most any other city I've seen, ringed on three sides by hills, and sliced into three wedges by the converging rivers. There are also a fair number of pretty, old buildings, and that one Phillip Johnson monstrosity. I'm kind of a sucker for red brick industry in decline though. The problem with Pittsburgh is the forbidding air of depression that's clamped down over the city like a wet towel. Between 1990 and 1995 alone, something like 50,000 people left the city. Property values are absurdly low; commercial and private vacancies are shockingly high. The city owns many of them. The place feels beaten-down.

It's a pity, as it really has potential. With some cleaning up and respectful redevelopment (not the Disney kind of redevelopment), it could become a lively and dynamic place again. But with 350,000 people and falling, it's not looking good.

We stayed with Scott, who is Robert's old friend from back when they were both students at the Culinary Institute in NY state. His house is amazing. It's a huge, three story Edwardian built on the side of a hill, in a quiet neighborhood. Mount Olive I think. He bought it from the city for a fire-sale price and has spent the last few years fixing it up. He's done magnificent work with it, liberally reworking the original design of the house with a lot of contemporary, artistic flourishes. It helps that he's a working artist. It's still a work-in-progress but I do believe it'll be a museum-quality piece of work when it's finished.

I look at it as symbolic of what Pittsburgh could become if, somehow, the city finds the means and economic engine to reinvent itself.

For a city so down at the heels, I did like it. Or maybe it's partly because it is so unpossessed with itself that I like it, with none of the pretension of say Philly, which, in my experience, has an unnerving habit of asserting that it's a far greater city than it actually is. Pittsburgh suffers no such illusion, is what it is, tries to get by, and dreams of a more comfortable future. It's just a decent place fallen on hard times. Kind of like a lot of hard-working Americans today.

It was the first stop on our trip. Highly touted, brand new, we arrived late in the day, didn't pay (they let us in), and had to rush through. Not a fair way to take it in, but I think we were both a little underwhelmed. I'm not sure if the premise of the place is enough to support such a large, interactive experience. It's pretty damn hard to come up with a fun, engaging, hands-on blinking light experience that conveys the history, nuance, and contemporary relevance of issues like states' rights, federalism, the electoral college, and other such stuff I'm not good at talking about.

My favorite part of the Center was the figurative Constitutional Convention. In it are just fractionally larger-than-life resin casts of most (all?) of the attendees at the convention, with a mock copy of the Constitution that doubles as a guest register. You're invited to sign it. You may also sign the dissenter's register, if you're so inclined. This shows just a small portion of the room. Those guys had a bit too much to drink at lunch. Robert caught them in action.

Anyway, what was cool about the room had very little to do with the Constitution, and everything to do with art.

It's not crowded in the room, but there are a lot of people milling about around the figures. If you relax your pace and meander rather than charge through it, something interesting happens: out of the corners of your eyes, as you pass figures, and twist and turn through the maze of people, you begin to start or even flinch momentarily as someone turns into you or reaches to tap you on the shoulder. You snap your head around or lurch to the side to avoid the oncoming person, and all at once you realize it's one of the casts. Maybe Alexander Hamilton. Or George Washington. Or some dude from North Carolina. I kind of enjoyed this. It reminded me of some environmental art and installations that play with your sense of place and space. The room gently distorts your perception so that people become comingled with statues, and for fleeting, disjunctive moments, you fail to differentiate between the two. There's some good art around that works well on that visceral, sensory level.

Anyway, it's a difficult sensation to describe, and it's no substitute for actually feeling it, so I'll leave it at that except to say that it was neat.

Other than that, the center was so-so, and Indpendence Mall in Philly made a rather dismal impression. It's a shame that these probably once grand buildings are cloaked in abominable, uninspired concrete and glass high-rises. The whole space felt terribly claustrophobic, and while driving through the rest of the city I couldn't fight off this oppressive sense of dullness and fatigue. I know we didn't give Philly a fair shake, but in our tour of first impressions, this one was not so good.

Opossum Gen'l Store, Old Route 41, southern West Virgina.

We stood out on the porch, speaking with the man while he finished his dinner of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. He was brother in law to the owner of the store, and from Beckley, about an hour or so south of the mostly nameless place we were in. Beckley's one of the last real towns before you hit the panhandle of Virginia. He was very courteous and informative, seemingly in no hurry to point us in as many fruitful directions as possible. We narrowed it down to one, and that was to get to Beckley or thereabouts and spend the night. He urged us to try to get off the old route as soon after dark as possible; this, as the sun was sinking, the sky a thickening shade of burgundy through the wild palisades of evergreens.

He hinted that the innumerable dead deer alongside the road weren't always the only ones to die at night. He took one short look at our car and warned us we'd have no chance if we hit a buck. It's not so much that they're fast out of the undergrowth, lunging out of the thickets into the road. It's the fog, and not five minutes after departing, it reached down and choked the road nearly all the way to New River.

I wasn't privy to the conversation when it turned to blood, but the man told Robert that before the place was reborn as the Opossum Gen'l Store, it was a hillbilly drinking joint. The new owners bought it cheap, with bullet holes in the walls and dried blood on the floor. They mopped up, patched the holes, spray-painted a new sign on a piece of plywood, installed a snack bar with orange formica-topped tables and deep friend shrimp baskets, red and white checkerboard wallpaper on the main counter, built a display rack in back with assorted rifles, a cheap SKS "semi-automitic," and an M1 Carbine replica, a glass case filled with secondhand Rugers, Colts, Smith and Wessons, and a Luger replica. The back of the store smelled like leather and damp wood. Next to the glass case stood a finely engraved hand-made saddle for sale. An aisle over were tackle, flies, and a plastic lined box of something that looked like Nightcrawlers. The other two or three aisles resembled any small convenience store, the only indication otherwise being the occasional local packages of jerky. At the counter were various postcards and other cheap gift items. One postcard of a still operating steam engine somewhere in the vicinity caught my eye. I asked one of the ladies about it. I, as yet unsure of what exactly a southern West Virginia accent sounds like and with no reason to think she was from anywhere else, mistook her for a local. She had in fact only just moved there from Tennessee or Kentucky; I can't remember which. Family asked her back. She came and was helping run the store, and she knew nothing about steam engines in West Virginia. I paid for my purchase, thanked her and walked back out on to the porch, where the gentleman with the orderly blond moustache, white, collared, tucked-in shirt, the top button undone, and rolled up sleeves revealing a large cross with a snake twined around it tattooed on the bottom of his right forearm began to incongruously talk about the problems in town with too many kids on Crystal Meth and Oxycontin. He shook his head sadly, disapprovingly, changed the subject and asked us where we were headed after Beckley.

We spoke for a few more minutes, enjoying the easy tempo of the conversation, I finished my drink, we thanked him for his time, he wished us a good journey and safe drive that night, and we got in the car and left, pressing into the blackening woods and opaque white mist in the headlights.

Just mentioning the Lomax recordings reminded me of the conversation Ken Layne and I had under the stars about those recordings, and the fabulous archive that the Library of Congress maintains online for your downloading pleasure. I found it almost a year ago, after researching southern, rural music.

Here is the main page to the Lomax recordings of Southern music from 1939.

Warning: this collection is vast, with almost as many photographs and field notes as mp3s of the music itself. You could get very, very lost in this collection if it's your thing. Navigation is also not so easy. If you click on Audio Title, you'll get all 686 songs listed alphabetically. Better to pick a subject that sounds interesting. Say work songs, or drinking songs, or field hollers.

Personally, I like this as a starting point. It organizes the recordings somewhat chronologically, according to the actual recording expedition by the Lomaxes, breaking it down by state, which is useful if you know you're more interested in say Delta blues than south Texas canciones.

There's at least one sort of famous musician in the archive. That's Washington "Barrel House" White, later and better known as Bukka White. He was recorded as an inmate at Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi. This is the same--and very non-fictional--Parchman that's mentioned repeatedly by Faulkner in several of his books.

If you dig archival field recordings, and you like the roots of modern american music, then this collection is for you. I'm amazed by it quite frankly.

That's not all. You can broaden this far beyond the south and the Lomaxes here. Want Appalachian Fiddle tunes? Done. California folk music from the 30s? Get it here. Hispanic music of the Rio Grande? Find it here.

Moving beyond music altogether, here's the master index for all the LOC American Memory collections. There's enough archival information here to keep you busy for a short lifetime.

I unfortunately need to try to buy red oak lumber and get it ripped down to my weirdo dimensions. Maybe this--the third attempt--will be successful. Wish me luck.

What I just learned from the fabulous Temples of Sound:

Willie Dixon's main instrument was acoustic bass. How did I not know this; this, of one of the great songwriters of modern music?

It's been repeated ad infinitum, but if you're not acquainted, and you happen to dig things like the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Eric Clapton, and just about seemingly any other mega-giant white English rock band, then thank Willie Dixon, because he seems to have written half those bands' catalogues.

Thankfully, not all of those English guys fail to acknowledge the debt, as the second thing I learned today was that the Stones' "(I can't get no) Satisfaction" was an oblique tribute to another forebear of all things rock, and fellow Chess Records labelmate to Dixon: Muddy Waters.

Too, Eric Clapton has always reminded listeners of his debt to the brilliant Buddy Guy, another Chess alumnus.

I'm not old enough to have seen Willie Dixon or Muddy Waters, but I've seen Guy once, and it was one of the most scorchingly intense shows I've ever seen. It was with Junior Wells on harp. The same long-time duo that illuminated the Utah darkness last Monday night. That recording was of only the two of them, with Guy on acoustic guitar. When I saw them circa 89 it was with a full band behind them.

By the way, per the link above, the book is readily available, but I picked up my copy at the nearly brand-new Stax Museum in Memphis. For devotees of great American music, you must visit. It's an absolutely riveting collection of artifacts, instruments, an actual rural Delta church, nearly the entire label's catalogue, a near-perfect reproduction of the original recording studio with original desk, tape machines and other equipment intact, Isaac Haye's gold Cadillac, many stage costumes, and a host of other things. Because of our timing, we only managed about an hour in it, but I could have easily spent a dozen, as, apparently, quite a few other visistors have. Too, several alumni have visited, some reduced to tears at the site of the studio. By the way, if you want to record in the room, it's available for hire, although you must provide your own remote truck as the equipment is off limits.

I wish we'd had a lot more time in Memphis. Something really grabbed me about the place, all the stranger considering we were in and out in about four hours. I'm not sure what did it, but driving around the south and south-western districts of the city excited me. There's a subdued sort of tension on the streets, an energy that feels something akin to a lazy bustle, if that makes any sense. It's not at all the energy of NYC, or the very different kind of energy that inhabits LA. It's a lot quieter and hardly as dynamic as the other two, but for whatever vague reason, I felt it. Maybe it's the history bubbling up through the cracks in the sidewalk. I think you can hear it in a lot of the music. There's a rawness and urgency to it that's leavened with a relaxed sense of melodicism.

I could have it all wrong. Really, except for a brief flash by Graceland to see the gate, and the couple hours at Stax and lingering around it, we saw nothing. No Sun Studio, no National Civil Rights Museum, no Beale Street, no Peabody Hotel, no Gibson Guitar Factory; more importantly than historic sites, no time to absorb the city and be in its day to day respiration; no chance for me to attempt to put a real place to the images of Ike and Boon heading in to Memphis to get more whiskey...not a whole lot of anything to base an opinion on. Nevertheless, something stirs me to return, more so than many cities I've ever fleetingly encountered.

It's proximity to the rough-hewn hills of northern Mississippi compounds the draw. That there's this dense concentration of urban life crowning a densely wooded country steepd in a multifoliate and difficult history; that the roads radiating out from Memphis point to these birthing fields and shacks of the blues and indirectly all modern popular music; a country laden with myth and at once starkly real and plain-spoken...there's a covert magic to it. It's utterly seductive, and I do believe I could spend a long time in that country.

I know nothing about the venerable trade of cattle auctioning so maybe this is old hat, but a real treat in Cheyenne was witnessing a cattle auction in a large conference room. They used large, projection TV screens arrayed around the room to view the lots. The screens consisted of nothing more than video shoots of cows lolling around in pasture, sometimes individually, in close-up or medium shot, and sometimes in clumps, ambling from one bunch of grass to another, with superimposed titles that contained animal, lot, and location information. At the front of the room was a raised platform, a table with an association banner covering it, and three guys behind it. Between offered lots, all three would talk a bit, one taking the lead on offering a general description of the lot. Then, when the action started, the guy on the far right would unspool a whirlwind of verbal fire; the syllables rolling into the room, a fabulous, dense texture of consonants and vowels punctuated by the short, sharp draw of breath and abrupt, economical gestures in the direction of bidders. I understood not a word. If a man could speak in tongues it was as close a thing as I could imagine; volleys of intricately defined sound reconfigured into an unknown language. Everyone else in the room seemed to get it just fine. I swear that man had more verbal dexterity than virtually any of the most artful rappers I've ever heard.

And then it ended. As abruptly as it began, the room exhaled and relaxed, and the three men began to cheerfully drawl on about the next lot, someone made a joke, laughter, a greeting was exchanged with a man walking in the back, coffee was poured for those gathered at the two dozen or so round tables around the room...and then it would begin again.

Robert took some pictures. When I get them, I'll post them, as much for the sea of straw cowboy hats as for the wonderful character with the snow white handlebar moustache and aviator sunglasses.

Another reason Oxford, Mississippi owns me.

I only wish I'd put it all together when I was there. They also mention Oxford's small but very cool record store, Hot Dog Records. We hung out there for a few minutes, chatting with the very friendly owner, musing on the rise and fall of SST Records, local juke joints, the blues, pulp fiction novel cover art, and that they have the nicest restroom any record store in the world could hope to have...and customers can use it! Moreover, Robert was thrilled because they had the new Ween album he'd been looking for. Sold!

I'm still catching up with a lot of what went down in the blogosphere while I was gone. Something that vaguely seems to have done the rounds was the idea of a top 20 greatest Americans. Here's Michael J. Totten's list.

Generally, I don't pay much attention to these kinds of things. But, a comment in Totten's thread got me thinking: why have I not seen more nominations for people like Louis Armstrong? How about Robert Johnson? Bessie Smith? Charlie Christian? Or, how about Les Paul?

Sound weird? My angle on this is simple, if not kind of silly: these people created what is in my opinion, the single greatest thing America has ever produced, something that is wholly and originally American, and a thing that has had more of an impact on the rest of the world than Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Einstein, Lincoln, and FDR: popular music. Popular music, and everything that helped make it or derived from it. Blues, jazz, folk, country, R&B, soul, rock, hip hop, punk. It's America's most influential export. American Popular music and the vast culture it has engendered are what people the world over lust for. Not the Federalist papers, nor the thinking of the Framers. Yes, obviously it's implicitly understood that the Constitution and the thinking behind it underpin a society dynamic enough to create popular music, but ask someone in Xinjiang about Hamilton, and then ask about Elvis Presley, and see what you get.

I wonder if it could even be reduced to just Charlie Christian and Les Paul: without them, there'd be no rock and roll.

Imagine a world with no rock and roll.

The communists would have had nothing to hate! And then there'd have been no JFK heroics, no Reagan facing down the bear, no...[Ed: stop...stop now!]

For the Southern Californian, a protracted loss of Mexican food resources can become a dire calamity. Rest assured that if you're in the birthplace of Harry Truman, you can get good Mexican food at El Charro. It's on the main street just around the corner from Truman's. With luck, you can hear locals wrestle with such linguistic concepts as Pico de Gallo and Quesadilla. If you're long gone, and confused, the menu offers a handy pronounciation guide.

Just a friendly FYI, since Lamar, Missouri is of course conveniently located right beneath the flight path for all you NY/LA bi-coastals.

Also, the enticing, pretty Evanston, Wyoming is host to the smashingly excellent Don Pedro's...should you end up there too on a business trip, or, umm, dude ranch.

A fine discovery was River Valley Pepper Sauce. I had it at The Old South diner in Russellville, Arkansas. It's an historic diner. I think. I didn't see a plaque, but the menu claims they've got the designation. I'll take them at their word. It did have flavor, as did its customers, including the one in the parking lot who good naturedly proclaimed of that nice old diner that it was "nothing a couple of bombs wouldn't take care of." He grinned, jabbed an elbow, and walked in for breakfast.

I digress. Instead of the usual Tabasco, they served up the River Valley stuff. Superb! Of that type of hot sauce--made with vinegar in a small jar--it's one of the very best. So good, that I made three stops on the way out of town to get a bottle. Finally found it at Price Chopper, or Price Slasher, or Price Murderer or one of those. You can order it directly from them for $3.25, and be pleased because you'll be eating some great hot sauce that absolutely no one will recognize (well, if you're in LA like me) and you'll earn huge style points. Great stuff. I think it's the lime juice combined with less vinegar than a lot of the competition that makes it. My big complaint with Tabasco, Tapatio, and all those is that there's too much vinegar flavor. They're also not very hot. My Pepper isn't super hot, but the flavor is wonderful, and flavor will always trump heat in my book. This one's a winner.

Aside from the festival weeks, there are the state fairs. On numerous occasions, we were alerted to the just finished or about to begin state fair of this or that state. Advertising for the fairs was abundant, and often unavoidable.

Does California even have a state fair? Maybe I move in the wrong circles, but the last time I can recall anyone I've ever known who resides in California talking about a California State Fair was...uh, never.

I'm not one to broaden the gulf that seems to seperate California from the rest of the country--rest assured we are indeed the butt of many jokes, and sometimes the target of a brand of gentle ill will. Still, that state fairs elsewhere in this country seem to mean an awful lot to a lot of people, and that the idea of a state fair amongst coastal Californians seems less familiar than aliens in Area 51 says something about that divide. On several occasions we chatted with people who asked us with an unmistakable sense of pride whether or not we'd managed to visit their state fair. We had to answer no.

Perhaps in the future I'll be able to say yes. And maybe, one day, I'll figure out if California has one too.

America sure has a lot of festivals. "_____ weeks," as they so often seem to be called. The Week devoted to a cause, an idea, a pastime, an historical event, a person...anything that means something to somebody probably has a week somewhere.

Any justification for inviting a whole mess of people to congregate and celebrate amidst the reminders and symbols of the thing celebrated will do. Or, the simple idea of getting a bunch of people together to do the thing they do with a single-minded concentration of effort not possible at home is cause enough. Of the former are things like Cheyenne's Frontier Days, Memphis' Elvis Week, or, to a lesser extent, Oxford Mississippi's Move-In week. Of the latter is Speed Week on the Bonneville Salt Flats, a Week that consumes nearby Wendover Utah, which actually straddles Utah and Nevada. We inadvertently just missed or ran into all of them, each miss or near-miss provoking a wide range of feeling: regret for missing Frontier Days, regret for not missing Elvis Week, regret which morphed into unexpected pleasure at Move-in Week, and a bizarre mix of the blackest regret ever at having found every motel room within a sonic boom's radius of Bonneville taken, and doubled regret at not being able to stick around and check out the mad machines designed to hurtle humans at stupidly unsafe speeds once we did magically find a room; seemingly, the very last room anywhere within said radius.

Nevada has its advantages. Namely, if you stumble into a casino hotel after midnight, looking very weary and bedraggled after nine or something hours in the saddle only to find out that your last hope in town has no rooms and then become very sad when you realize the next town with any hope of a motel is another 110 miles up the road, and you make puppy dog eyes to the slot machine VIP something-or-other manager not realizing that she is the slot machine VIP something-or-other manager, and through quivering lips find yourself about to ask if you can sleep in the lobby, and she begins asking your name because you make nice puppy dog eyes and you don't even realize why she's asking for your name and writing it on a piece of official looking paper and you look at the guy behind the desk, a giant behemoth of a question mark floating over your head and you say "what's going on?" and he says "you're getting a room" and as the gears in your brain come to a grinding, shuddering halt you say "but you said there were no rooms," and he says that they always save a few rooms, just in case, and I say "oh" because I'm dumb like that and didn't know that casinos do that because I know nothing about gambling and that whole scene, and I thank them very, very profusely and run outside with the stupidst grin this side of of the Mississippi to tell Robert and we go to our Russian mafia room with the crushed blue velvet trim, wrap-around bolsters, mid-wall-to-ceiling-height smoked mirrors and faux blue granite furniture with black trim and praise Nevada and gambling and all that is right with the world and slept the sleep of a freshly minted angel delivered unto the sweet bossom of the empyrean.

Saved.

The second regret was engendered the next morning when we saw some of the vehicles that had not already taken off to the flats, and realized we were missing something special. We heard from someone that the highlights so far included some mad genius who's rigged an International (I'm told it's some kind of 70s or 80s truck; sort of a proto-SUV meets small panel truck or something) with two diesel engines and got it up to 250-something miles per hour.

Some other dude had apparently crafted a car that was still in some way shape or form dependent on internal combustion, and it topped 400 mph. The guy Robert talked to revealed this with reverential awe, stammering that it was something divine to see with one's own eyes a land-born vehicle actually move at over half the speed of sound. I can only imagine.

Sadly, we had to carry on.

As for Frontier Days, from what I gathered it's the year's big event; a vast congregation of both Wyoming residents and out of state visitors, eager to soak up a slice of the Old West, at least as it's embodied by Cheyenne's civic sense of self. Elvis Week was deemed important enough to warrant a whole bevy of news and other broadcast trucks parked half way up the lawn between Elvis Presley street and the actual Graceland mansion itself. I don't know if Graceland is usually that busy, but if the number of visitors wearing Elvis Week shirts was anything to go by, it was massive. Not my thing really.

Move-in week was an altogether different thing. Centered around the return of Ole Miss' college students for the fall semester, it appears to have become a major event on Oxford's social calendar, and a startling piece of what I guess is Southern Life: parents, younger brothers, older sisters, accompanying those who are entering or returning to Ole Miss; eating out, strolling around town, and meeting up for impromptu chats and introductions on street corners. There was something old-fashioned about it, as quaint as it was disarmingly civilized. Too, parents and students were sharply attired. Nothing stiff or formal, but a far cry from the schleppiness that seems to attend a lot of college gatherings I've seen. Moreover, there was a sense of calm and even a sort of relaxed joy amongst the gathered parents and students. Everyone seemed so remarkably at ease.

I spoke with a few parents here and there--sitting next to them in a diner--and a few of the students, and it all seemed more or less perfectly natural. Yes, the dad from Jackson was a bit misty over his son leaving the nest, but at the same time thrilled for him. For me, and many people I know, the mere idea of having dad or mom escort us to the threshold of our blossoming collegiate adventure would have been horrific. The students in Oxford seemed to have no problem with it at all.

It's hardly the most spectacular scene, but if you can put yourself here and try to imagine how impossibly still this place is, with only the wavering gusts of hot desert air whining through the telephone poles, and the only visible source of movement the small dust devils rising up from the dry earth, you might understand why I spent a short eternity drifting along the tracks. There was a loose tie spike at one point. It came out easily. I wanted to take it, but figured that would be stupid, even if it was completely loose already.

I waited for a passing train. And waited. And waited. Ultimately, in vain. You haven't completely lived unless you've stood aside a mammoth freight train careening down the tracks through a deserted western town. Happily, Granger, Wyoming provided that the day before. I just wanted a repeat.

Here you can just see our beloved Mini Darth Vader Mobile parked in front of Wells' old frontage. Only two of those shops actually function. The rest await reuse or refurbishment, with the odd repainted facades belying the disrepair behind them.

Another view.

Elsewhere.

Most of the rest of my pictures are still on Robert's laptop, so it'll be a few days till I get them. There are a lot more coming down the 395, but they're all mostly terribly pointless. Lots of shots of the Sierra, Mt. Whitney, gathering storms, etc, but they mostly completely fail to convey any of the grandeur of that miracle of a highway. Little digital cameras are great fun, but if you're not stopping the car and not using a real camera, it's a lost cause. Hence, most of my photos suck. But you'll get to see more anyway!

One of the hard lessons of this trip was learning just how bad radio actually has become. I've always loathed Clear Channel. Now I'm praying for some sort of Enron-like conflagration to engulf it so that it will die quickly and spare us any further horror.

One of their tricks is cross-promoting vacation sites by broadcasting from the vacation site location to the target market. Hence, while driving through far western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming en route to Cheyenne, we heard "Captain Dan [blah, blah, blah, something like that] and his raft of classic rock goodness" from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, complete with commercials for Chez Margarita Lobster Bar and Grill with the best Lobster this side of Angola, weather reports, and constant references to the Virgin Islands and time share condos, all kind-of infused with this vaguely Jimmy Buffettish air of good times on the water under the gentle tropical sun. Nevermind that we were at 5,000 feet elevation surrounded by an endless expanse of the hard, austere beauty of the high plains and low mountains, with narry a palm tree in sight--no trees at all for that matter--a large, gathering thunder storm, the odd sheep and cow here and there, a far off Union Pacific train loaded with oil, coal, and cattle, and air dry enough to crack the lips of even the hardiest cowboy. Oh, and the nearest large body of water is a modest 1,000 miles away.

It makes no sense. It's wrong. It's vile. They should be run out of town.

Nevermind that they played Bon Jovi, George Thoroughgood, ELO, Genesis (with Phil Collins), Billy Squire, Skid Row, Warrant, and other luminaries of a bygone era.

By now you've probably heard the complaint that because of behemoths like Clear Channel, radio sounds the same no matter where you go. I'd always been a bit suspicious of that claim, wanting to believe that it was the hysterical exaggeration of NPR fanatics.

Wrong. It's true. Literally, completely true. We heard "Classic rock" stations in Wyoming, Nevada, Missouri, Nebraska, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. They were identical. Absolutely identical. From the tone and style of DJing to the programming, to set lengths, all virtually carbon copies of each other. It was horrifying. I mean, we actually heard more than one Jethro Tull song in three days. Five--FIVE!--Bad Company songs, one of them twice. Three ELO songs. Bon Jovi was uncountable. It never ended.

Three exceptions: somewhere in Georgia--Macon I think--there was a good rock station. Oldies format mostly, but with some very interesting selections and a DJ who didn't seem computer generated. Kansas City had another. The guy we heard is apparently a local legend dating back to the pre-Cambrian era. I can't remember his name. Weird guy, but at least he had a personality. Finally, Lincoln, Nebraska had an indie station whose broadcast we flitted through all too quickly.

Outside of the dismal world of classic rock, there was as sad a lack of almost everything else except bad country of the power ballad and Shania Twain 'feeling like a woman' variety. Hardly any blues, no jazz, almost no good newer (or older) rock, no classical until we hit Palmdale, no nothing basically. It wasn't until we hit Salt Lake City that I actually heard a blues lick worth listening to: it was a fabulous, otherworldly song with Buddy Guy on acoustic guitar and vocals and Junior Wells on harp, going back to pure Delta roots.

Aside from music, Christian radio was number one. In remote areas, if there was one station at all, it was Christian. Mostly we didn't linger over them, but one day I tortured Robert with a few contemporary gospel songs. They weren't much but at least there was some conviction in the songs, even if I was repeatedly reminded that faith is the raft that will bear you 'cross the river. A highlight was hearing an archival recording of someone who sounded like John Barrymore as Hamlet reading from the Bible, with added contemporary commentary from a very dry, very cramped sounding man.

If the current state of radio is any indication of where it's going, consider it a dead art. I mourn its passing.

Here's a picture from our last day, headed south on the 395. And another.

No, we were not in a plane.

Bishop hasn't changed much.

Criminals.

Driving into a storm. My attempts to catch lightning failed.

More soon.

Go here and buy the mix for Hoe Cakes. It's from The Lady and Sons Restaurant in Savannah, Georgia. She--the Lady--is kind of famous in cooking circles, so maybe you know about this, but by god the lunch I had there made me so stupidly happy that I've still not regained my facility for sober speech. Fried green tomatoes with this red pepper sauce and hot mustard, black eye pea fritters with some kind of ketchupy sauce, and hoe cakes. I've still not recovered. The Ajax Diner in Oxford, Mississippi only made matters worse. I'm afraid I'm going to have to move to the south. Nice knowing all you coastals!

Make the cakes and pour maple syrup over them. Eat, and die happy.

Miles. In thirteen days. You'da thought that somehow we could have made it a nice round 5,000, but what are you going to do? I knew we should have taken that turnoff to Convict Lake.

So I'm home. We made it back last night, after a glorious final leg down California's miraculous highway 395. The mini Darth Vader Mobile made it in one piece and, arguably, even in better shape than when we departed. We managed to fix the dripping A/C in eastern Nebraska, so I'm counting that as an improvement. First we did doughnuts in the dirt lot behind the gas station to force out all the accumulated water on top of the compressor. Robert drove, I attempted to catch falling water with a cup while my head banged against the dash. We stopped and mopped. Then I started rooting around on the floor, determined to find the drain pipe. Found! Then Robert yanked it off and proceeded to unclog it by ramming the car antenna through it. Magic! Working A/C drain pipe. This solved the recurring problem of the small lake that formed on the floor of the car after hours of driving with the A/C on.

So yes. The car that no one thought was sane to drive across the country drove across the country, and then some, and was fun and mostly comfortable, and I've had the most ridiculously beautiful and exciting vacation to show for it. I couldn't have dreamed it could have been this good.

No doubt there'll be some pictures and stuff up later, and maybe a few stories. Right now I'm terribly groggy and have a bunch of catching up to do. I've got to ease back into things. It's a gigantic change of gears.

Many thanks to the kind and generous people we visited along the way: Scott in Pittsburgh, Glenn in Knoxville, Sarah and John in Kansas City, and Ken and Laura in Reno. You all helped make this trip an even finer thing than it already was.

If I owe you email or a phone call, give me a few days to acclimatize myself. I've spent the last two weeks in a near vacuum, mostly ignoring the phone and almost completely ignoring the news, the net, and email, so there's some catching up to do around here.

I still exist.

The short version:

New Jersey, Philly, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina. Currently in Cherokee, North Carolina, at the base of the Great Smokey Mountains. They are sublime. I've never quite seen anything like them Maybe the greenest mountains I've ever seen. Thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the highway tip and lunch in Knoxville.

Route 41 in West Virginia is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Wild turkeys are neat. The deer are more common than NY pigeons. "Opossum Gen'l store" rules.

That's it for now. Dial-up is painful, but the real wood panelling in this room makes up for it. True vintage style. "Pocahontas Motel." If you ever get here, stay here. The incredibly friendly owner makes it even better.

Okay, sleep. Tomorrow it's off to Charleston, South Carolina.

I hope your summer is lovely. Mine is.