Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 31

My Birthday . . .

—From CB—

This week was my birthday. I turned seventy-seven. A DJ announced a song by the Indigo Girls. I heard their name as the Evening Overalls. Senility has its perks.

I was born in 1941, two months before Pearl Harbor, of which I was unaware, being politically indifferent at the time—my only concern was nipples. My mom was in Denver, my dad somewhere in Washington state, working construction, and the marriage was soon to dissolve, partly due to my existence. My grandmother took the bus from Iowa out to Denver to be with my mom and tell her how stupid she was.

William Butler Yeats had died two years before, but I’d been unaware of that until many years thereafter. Nor was he remotely aware of me, sorry to say.

About age four, my dog Ragsie died. About age seven, I shot a sparrow with my BB gun. Age eight, I saw my step-dad die of a heart attack. I didn’t actually see him die, just saw him make funny faces and deep tormented snores. I didn’t like the guy.

Around fifth grade, a classmate, Kathleen Bogardus, died of leukemia or something I didn’t know the name of. The class went to her funeral and I saw her dead. She was nice but not popular, and I had no feeling about it, but it was maybe from that time that I knew that everyone would die. Since then, I’ve seen much further evidence.

It takes so many years and calories and missteps, struggles and revelations to create a human being, and then in one breath, the data is lost. Birthdays inevitably bring thoughts of the end-parens. This one spurs me, at least, to clean up my files, take photos of all my puppets, finish the next draft of our new novel, and resolve to go to the ocean every week.

And of course you procrastinate from your sworn duty to die. You keep track of blood pressure, go to the gym, obsess on projects, post on Facebook—every symbolic act that promotes an illusion of immortality.

On October 8th, my birthday, an estimated 151,600 died. I celebrated that I wasn’t included: a day of writing, watching the antics of the cats; going out to dinner; sitting by the fireplace and making love with my collaborationist. Most of the time I have welcomed life and looked forward to more of it, despite my search for a parking place, the chronic struggle to open plastic wrappers, and a perpetual longing for people to be kind—myself included.

So, another year.

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Centering . . .

—From EF—

Turning upside down in order to center. Doesn’t sound plausible, but bear with me.

When we take our normal picnic to our ritual ocean-bluff spot, we look at the biggest rock out west and see the slim black silhouettes of seven or eight or nine black cormorants perched on the top. We call them “The Supreme Court.” Today the rock was completely vacant, and I couldn’t help empathizing with them

However, my objective in this weekly (or bi-weekly) visit to Mama is to accept her majestic and loving presence and let the shit wash off—pardon my language, but it’s the way to express what is sometimes needed. Like today. No need to let cormorant empathy complicate the process.

After the sushi was eaten, after the hot sake was drunk, after the dessert of dark chocolate and crystallized ginger and pomegranate seeds had pleased us, it was time to sit in silence, in the sun, in the warm insistent breeze, and just be on that bluff, hearing the whump of the surf.

When Conrad felt like going back to the car, he asked, as he always does, whether I’d like to stay a while longer by myself. Yes.

I turned my camp chair 180 degrees to get sun on my other side, slumped down until my neck had somewhere to rest, closed my eyes, and began to let all thoughts drain away. That left more room for simple sensations. The sun was warm on the top of my head, the breeze was a soft cats-paw patting my left cheek, the sound of the waves was a heartbeat in my right ear, and the chair and earth under me were a comfy lap. Sweet.

Then an awareness that wasn’t exactly thought crept in. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. I sank into an image of the compass, but came out backwards. If sun-fire was my south, then yes, chair-earth was my north, but then air, the breeze, should be on my right and the water should be on my left. It wasn’t that way. I wasn’t exactly awake, but it still didn’t make sense.

My sleepy mind explored the conundrum. If Air was on my left and Water was on my right, which they clearly were, then Fire should be at my feet and Earth at my head, which wasn’t the case. If I put Fire and Earth in the right place with respect to my body, Air and Water were in the wrong place.

The stunning solution was that I wasn’t on my back, at the bottom of the sphere. I should be face-down, but since the whole front of my body was open to the elements, there could be only one answer. I was indeed face-down, but on the top of the celestial sphere, facing in. Toward the center.

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Presence. . .

—From CB—

The state of the world can make it difficult to write a blog. Countless topics offered, but with all the heavy ones—the SCOTUS hearings, climate change, perpetual war—I fear that everything that can be said has already been said: to say more has merely an excretory function. Yet retreating to trivia—deciphering what an Irish supermarket means by “Sale on Washed Roosters”—seems a surrender to triviality. The compromise, perhaps, is to address a topic so foreign to anyone’s interest that it straddles that fine line between bloviation and the runs.

One such topic is theatre. This art has been the focus of my life since age 15—before I even thought of it as an art rather than just a neat way to meet girls—and it continues to torment me. For the 2.5 years we toured our KING LEAR, I thought, okay, this is our last piece, better to focus on the novels. Then came SURVIVAL, and now a new one in the early stages. No getting away from it, though by now I’ve met the girl.

I rarely go to the theatre, except periodically to our local small-town troupe. (I often don’t like the texts themselves, but their productions are astonishingly good.) Seeing a play, I’m unable to disengage my technical mind—the ten thousand things on which I’d give notes—and respond simply to what works. And to spend $25-35 to make mental notes is, to put it bluntly, a bit silly. Better a good meal of raw oysters for half the price.

And yet people do me the distinct disservice of producing—at rare intervals—truly moving theatre. “Disservice” in that it restores a faith that might prefer to die. Recently, two experiences.

In the Milwaukee Fringe Festival, our friend presented a solo show, a narrative of the life and rendition of the songs of Lorenz Hart. He’s spent many years with the American songbook of the 1920’s and 30’s; in that time his voice has matured, and he’s brought his theatrical instinct into the heart of the songs. A deeply felt, deeply moving piece—you could feel his unfeigned love for the work.

And last week in Dublin, we arrived after an eight-day drive around the western coast to discover there was a theatre festival happening. We saw three shows, and the first two—with rare little blips of enjoyment—were dogs. Well-produced dogs, but for me a waste of time except to exercise my diagnostic powers.

The third show (a Polish company), dammit, dispelled my nihilism. Bare stage, eight actors responding to a miked offstage voice. A litany of lines, all beginning with “Michael is playing a man who . . .” “Irina is playing a woman who . . .” Focus shifts to the appropriate actor . . . who does nothing. Or sometimes a shift of posture, sometimes a vague change of expression, rarely a gesture. Sometimes the narrative extends a few sentences, and at one point there’s a lighting change and a more extended story—then back to the litany.

There were structural things I’d change, and it seemed in post-show talk that the cast was surprised at the frequent laughter—a laughter of recognition at the incongruity of our inner lives and our outward concealments. But the great achievement was PRESENCE. They weren’t pushing energy out to us; they were drawing us in.

It’s a stock presumption among theatre people that our art is superior to film in that we’re in live presence with the characters and the story. But how rare tht is! Too much theatre—and I speak of “experimental” as well as conventional—is canned and bottled, would bebetter seen on TV where we’d have closeups and an editor could jazz up the rhythm.

Maybe it has to involve a sense of danger. The DVD of our KING LEAR is good, shows all the elements of the production, but there’s no way it can convey the sweat of two old actors tearing themselves apart for an hour and a half. The company in Dublin took the risk of being deadly boring, but they drew us in. It’s what “comic relief” does in serious work: it opens an aperture, it’s inappropriate, almost as if a raccoon appeared onstage at the climax of MEDEA. But it’s real. It jars us into presence.

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Ireland . . .

—From EF—

It rains, it rains, and the air is rich with ravens — swooping, quorking unsolicited instructions . . .

Sounds like a good opening for an Irish song, but it’s just what came into my mind as I was beginning to think of this week’s blog. Today, Sunday, we’re in Kilkenny; last Tuesday we were on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. The plan was to take the ferry from Doolin, the closest port, and we stayed Monday night at a very sweet hostel.

Come morning, the word was that no boats would embark from Doolin, given the violent weather. We’d paid a non-refundable 100 Euros for our Aran B&B and were aghast. Our valiant hostel-keeper, however, phoned our B&B and was told that the ferry was still running from another port west of Galway, a two-hour drive, and we might be able to get there in time.

Indeed, we were able to get there, park the car, walk onto the boat, and begin a stay on Inis Mor. We even had an hour of watery sunshine and did a modest walk northward toward the major cliff-and-fort sights. We’d leave the major trek to the next day, with assistance from one of the many battered vans that accommodate tours for a mere 15 Euros each.

Tuesday dawned with a howl. We shared a huge Irish breakfast with three other guests, one of them an intrepid citizen of the Isle of Man, who had arrived in a kayak. (He was resigned to the inevitable delay of his departure.) No ferries at all had arrived from any port, so the tourist trade was slim. We found a driver who was willing to go with only two fares, and off we went. He took us slowly past houses, cottages, rocks and fields, and knew who dwelt in every single one. He’d lived there all his long life, forty years as a fisherman, now trawling for tourists.

There were no sheep. Not one. Years ago, every family had a flock of forty or so, but times became hard and cows were more profitable. The population of humans dwindled, too, with nothing for the young people to do other than farming, fishing, or the tourist trades. Many dwellings were boarded and vacant.

We were left off at the little cluster of buildings where we would pay our admission to a spectacular hike along massive cliffs to an ancient fort, and we were to be back at that spot in an hour and a half. Perhaps the cafe would be open then, but it was closed tight, as was the gift shop.

I’ve never tried walking in such a wind: it made a fair bid to knock me flat. We arrived at the gate where admission would be paid, and it was locked tight, as were the toilets. A workman waiting in his truck to do god-knows-what came out and walked around with us, but any fool could see that the site was closed because of the weather. We walked back to the pickup place and knocked at the door of the closed cafe, and a compassionate lady came to the door, heard that we were facing an hour and a half out in the storm, and let us in to wait.

At twelve-thirty we climbed aboard our rattly van and forged on. There was a stop at Seven Churches’ graveyard, whose entrance gate was in the midst of a mini-lake. Never mind, I slipped off my sandals and walked barefoot—onto sacred Irish ground. I will never forget.

We went on to the barren jumbled rocks out by the lighthouse, one of the many whose human guardians were being ousted by automation, and again I took off my sandals and walked through the gooey kelp froth out to the end of the boat-ramp. 

Once back in the van, trying to ignore my fragrant feel, we reversed and went back via the low coast-road, past rocks, ruins, and abandoned dwellings and storage sheds. 

People are hanging on. Ravens are hanging on. The wind and the water continue their work. It’s hard to see the hope, but easy to see the love.

It rains, it rains, and the air is rich with ravens — swooping, quorking unsolicited instructions . . .

Sounds like a good opening for an Irish song, but it’s just what came into my mind as I was beginning to think of this week’s blog. Today, Sunday, we’re in Kilkenny; last Tuesday we were on Inis Mor, the largest of the Aran Islands. The plan was to take the ferry from Doolin, the closest port, and we stayed Monday night at a very sweet hostel.

Come morning, the word was that no boats would embark from Doolin, given the violent weather. We’d paid a non-refundable 100 Euros for our Aran B&B and were aghast. Our valiant hostel-keeper, however, phoned our B&B and was told that the ferry was still running from another port west of Galway, a two-hour drive, and we might be able to get there in time.

Indeed, we were able to get there, park the car, walk onto the boat, and begin a stay on Inis Mor. We even had an hour of watery sunshine and did a modest walk northward toward the major cliff-and-fort sights. We’d leave the major trek to the next day, with assistance from one of the many battered vans that accommodate tours for a mere 15 Euros each.

Tuesday dawned with a howl. We shared a huge Irish breakfast with three other guests, one of them an intrepid citizen of the Isle of Man, who had arrived in a kayak. (He was resigned to the inevitable delay of his departure.) No ferries at all had arrived from any port, so the tourist trade was slim. We found a driver who was willing to go with only two fares, and off we went. He took us slowly past houses, cottages, rocks and fields, and knew who dwelt in every single one. He’d lived there all his long life, forty years as a fisherman, now trawling for tourists.

There were no sheep. Not one. Years ago, every family had a flock of forty or so, but times became hard and cows were more profitable. The population of humans dwindled, too, with nothing for the young people to do other than farming, fishing, or the tourist trades. Many dwellings were boarded and vacant.

We were left off at the little cluster of buildings where we would pay our admission to a spectacular hike along massive cliffs to an ancient fort, and we were to be back at that spot in an hour and a half. Perhaps the cafe would be open then, but it was closed tight, as was the gift shop.

I’ve never tried walking in such a wind: it made a fair bid to knock me flat. We arrived at the gate where admission would be paid, and it was locked tight, as were the toilets. A workman waiting in his truck to do god-knows-what came out and walked around with us, but any fool could see that the site was closed because of the weather. We walked back to the pickup place and knocked at the door of the closed cafe, and a compassionate lady came to the door, heard that we were facing an hour and a half out in the storm, and let us in to wait.

At twelve-thirty we climbed aboard our rattly van and forged on. There was a stop at Seven Churches’ graveyard, whose entrance gate was in the midst of a mini-lake. Never mind, I slipped off my sandals and walked barefoot—onto sacred Irish ground. I will never forget.

We went on to the barren jumbled rocks out by the lighthouse, one of the many whose human guardians were being ousted by automation, and again I took off my sandals and walked through the gooey kelp froth out to the end of the boat-ramp. 

Once back in the van, trying to ignore my fragrant feel, we reversed and went back via the low coast-road, past rocks, ruins, and abandoned dwellings and storage sheds. 

People are hanging on. Ravens are hanging on. The wind and the water continue their work. It’s hard to see the hope, but easy to see the love.

Emigrants . . .

—From CB—

We’re the sort of tourists who can marvel at the scenery and traipse through every sort of museum, but we seem to gravitate toward paleolithic tombs, cemeteries, and various locales of atrocity. Today: an artifact recalling the Irish Famine.

The workhouse would have been an atrocity even without the Famine. The chain of Irish workhouses, financed by taxes on landlords and modeled on those of England, was a response to the fact that of a population of 8 million, 2 million were near starvation—before the failure of the potato crop in 1846 that led to a million deaths and 2 million emigrants. During which ample harvests of wheat and dairy were being shipped from Ireland to England. 

It’s all a long, complex story, and one wonders how that tale—like the Trail of Tears—occupies only a footnote in history. The Nazi-driven Holocaust is at the front of our minds (at least every sentient mind), but in my view an intentional, planned holocaust is perhaps less horrid than one that’s simply allowed to happen, a function of economics, acts of Parliament, and benign neglect.

The Irish Workhouse Center offers a fine tour of a facility slowly being restored. I’ll spare the details, except for one fact that screams out of the tour guide’s calm lecture. As one means of discouraging the myriads of starving peasants from entering workhouse “charity,” it was required that entire families enter as a unit (a means of ridding estates of unprofitable tenants), but once entered, the families were separated: men in one block, women in another, boys in another, girls in another. Only children under 3 were allowed to stay with their mothers. The only way you might know if your child or spouse died—disease being rampant—was a weekly announcement at morning Mass of the roster of the dead.

Many others emigrated, mainly to Australia, Canada, or the USA. Many died en route. One can readily imagine the welcoming committee:

We need to take care of our own people first. 

They’re only coming for the money.

They’re taking American jobs.

They’re changing America.

It’s their own laziness.

They’re diseased.

They’re degenerates.

We don’t have the room.

Why don’t they send us their upper classes?

No scum from a shithole country.

Clearly, the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Bohunks, the Polacks, the Chinks, the Japs, the Africans, Cubans, Scots, Vietnamese, the refugees from the St. Bartholomew’s massacre, the tired and poor from the world’s vast, encompassing squeeze of injustice—they all ought to fucking go back to where they fucking came from. And leave us to our gold-plated toilet seats. Us who have one.

I don’t like to get exercised by politics. I feel things, but I have very effective armoring in writing and in irony. At times, though, it gets through to me. I was feeling a bit of self-pity, after the workhouse side-trip, in having to drive considerable distance on narrow, winding roads, to get to our night’s lodging. And then I thought, “Christalmighty, Conrad! You’re going to a hostel in Doolin and listen to Irish-trad music at a pub, not on a coffin ship to Boston! Suspend your self-pity, at least till Tuesday.”

Jet-setting, Economy Style

—From EF—

We’re reveling in our daughter Johanna’s pocket paradise in Tuscany, breathing the scented air and eating her amazing cookery, but we really paid our dues to get here. The three-airplane bounce from Dublin to Amsterdam to Milan was tedious, yes, but that was routine. It was the trains from Milan to Florence to Pontassieve that nearly did us in. They say Mussolini made the trains run on time, but he’s long gone.

We fretted that the hour-long shuttle bus from the airport to the train station might not get us there in time and were very relieved when we had a whole twenty minutes to spare. Ha. We boarded, found our seats, and then our snakey-looking Freccia Rossa (red arrow) sat for fifteen minutes past its departure time. Fellow-passengers said there’d been an announcement of a half-hour’s delay, but we’d still be able to connect with our little regional train at Florence, if we put speed into hiking way down the far track where they put the less-glamorous trains.

But half an hour came and went, and we still sat there. No further announcements, no lurch into bullet-train movement. 

At the one-hour mark we started to fret. We’d miss our scheduled connection, but there was a later train—just one. However, we didn’t yet have our ticket for that one, and the ticket machines in the Florence station often had long lines, even late at night. I texted Johanna to warn her that we were delayed.

After an hour and a quarter we finally departed, and the train engineer gave it all the speed he could muster. We watched the info screen as the estimated arrival time edged backwards, gaining us nearly ten more minutes, so we might not be doomed to the midnight train. 

The arrival process in Florence is always frustrating, because the track comes to an end there. The train crawls into the station, slowing to a stop at the bumpers, and will go into reverse to head onward to Rome. It took forever, but the doors finally opened and we galloped down the endless platform to look for the display board that would tell us what track our little train would be on, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be Track 18. The other seventeen tracks start right at the station hall, but to get to Track 18 you have to walk down what feels like half a mile to get to where the train will be—if it hasn’t left yet.

Surprise. A barrier with turnstiles had been installed since last year, allowing everybody to exit into the station hall from the tracks, but re-entry requires the ticket we didn’t have yet. We could have stayed on the platforms and bought our ticket on the train, hopefully avoiding the penalty because of the massive delay, but the display board had lost its mind. It was past 11 PM, and no trains were listed past 9 PM. Whatever had crippled our train from Milan had knocked out the normal display system; we didn’t know what track to go to, and had five minutes to find our train.

Nobody could tell us where it was, but said that Track 18 was likely. The ticket machine wasn’t working, so we begged to be let back in, succeeded, and started running like hell. Before we could see the train, the fatal whistle blew, and the train took off without us.

I texted Jo to warn that we’d be on the last train, and we walked back to the head of the track to try a different ticket machine. Conrad ran back and forth to see the postings at the head of each track while I tried all the machines, none of which would work, but fate was kind. Track 14 suddenly posted our train, the one we thought we missed on Track 18, and given the system-wide delay, we’d be able to leave right away instead of waiting for midnight.

Jo had warned me that buying a ticket on the train would only work if I could find the conductor before the train started; evidently there are more than a few people who don’t pay and just count on not being caught. I stuck my head out the door, couldn’t see anybody on the platform, so just started barreling down the inside corridor from car to car. At the head of the train I found the conductor just stepping aboard, and as the train lurched forward I stuck out my hand with the exact fare and explained my problem. He just smiled, waved me away, and said “Never mind.” It was after midnight when we finally got to Pontassieve, but Jo and Fra picked us up, took us home, fed us minestrone and wine, and all was well. Hail, Tuscan paradise!

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Escape. . .

—From CB—

I grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa. All my life I’ve been trying to leave.

Age fifteen, I discovered there was a world out there. Up till then, my tastes were cowboy movies, baseball, Boy Scouts, stories about sports or animals. Suddenly, I discovered theatre, poetry, a world of thought, and I was diverted from a stellar future as an entomologist. If only I could someday get to New York, or at least as far east as Chicago.

Since then I’ve been lots of places, including Chicago and NYC, but I still struggle to escape the Council Bluffs of the mind. Many find enormous value in reconnecting with their roots—family, place, ethnic identity—but I don’t. I’ve written some plays about that milieu, but to value my “heritage” would be to celebrate inheriting a dead dog. The one thing I do value is that, growing up in Iowa, you acquire a kind of internal gyroscope that keeps you upright on two feet, no matter how wild the storm.

But there’s a downside to escape: you’ll do anything to get out. If you can’t clear the wall, you’ll try the tunnel, you’ll try hiding in the laundry cart, you’ll try high public office. For me, that’s been the wild scramble between media, styles, locales, from realistic drama to sketch comedy to puppetry to audiodrama to classical adaptations to prose fiction—never at home.

Not knocking it: a lot of the work has been good. It’s stuff I believe in and take pride in the making. Never a story, however trivial, that I felt unworthy of the telling. But I’ve always had to fight that fierce little worm that longs for the Broadway hit, the national bestseller, the one-way ticket out of Council Bluffs.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Victor Hugo—the lesser work as well as the masterpieces—and apart from the story and the craftsmanship, there’s an authenticity of voice I aspire to. His prominence and his genius weren’t sufficient to spare him 19 years of political exile, but he speaks with a full and forceful engagement in what he’s telling. I’m still groping for that.

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Tripping . . .

—From EF—

On our way home from Milwaukee the GPS had us on interstates all the way, but I caught sight of Dixon, Illinois, on the map, and overrode the planned route. Conrad’s mother lived in Iowa, and during our Milwaukee years we’d make the trek to Council Bluffs several times a year. The interstate highway system was still incomplete, and we’d be on state highways down through Beloit and Rockford, then follow State Highway 2 southwest along the Rock River toward the Quad Cities, where we’d hit I-80. We’d pass through little towns like Byron, Dixon, and Sterling, and that beautiful winding river would keep us company.

We discovered a grocery store with a huge deli, where we’d load up on picnic supplies and head for a picnic pull-off by the river. After we’d moved to Pennsylvania, we’d make a stop in Milwaukee before heading to Iowa, so our kids became familiar with that riverside picnic ritual. I used to make up silly songs to entertain the kids, and still remember the gestures (bouce bounce bounce, waggle waggle waggle) that accompanied “Beloit Beloit Beloit, Delavan Delavan Delavan.”

So this time we searched Dixon for that grocery store and couldn’t find it. Maybe Sterling? Nope. And the highway didn’t look the same; it was a four-lane along endless strip malls. I found a side-route that at last got us to the winding river shore, and we ate the lunch we’d already bought in Milwaukee, enjoying the silence and the water’s animated satin surface.

Now, the next day, I finally remembered. The grocery store was in Byron, and this time we didn’t leave the interstate until downriver at Dixon. Next time, maybe we’ll hit the two-lane sooner, at Rockford. Interstates are great for saving time, but for pleasure? Give me Wisconsin’s Hwy 2 or Nevada’s lonely two-lane US 50, where you can still appreciate the vast diversity of this country, neighborhood by neighborhood.      

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Roadies . . .

—From CB—

Coming toward the end of our Eastern tour—two events in Milwaukee, one reading in West Liberty IA, and then hi-tailing along I-80 homeward to rescue our fat cats from the kind hands of our beloved house-sitter. Actually, only one of our cats is fat; his brother is populist, though twitchy.

Mixed feelings. On the plus side: both shows—readings of our new novel Galahad’s Fool and Elizabeth’s solo show Survival—have had wondrous response; revenue has met expectations; and we’ve had generous hospitality and long talks with old friends and new. 

On the backside of the moon, we share a collective exhaustion. The Prius is holding up fine; its drivers less so. Partly due to age, perhaps: difficulty sleeping, and it takes us a bit longer to unfold when getting out of the car after long drives. We’re used to going to gym six days a week, plus a lot of walking, so physical dormancy, the sudden rush of set-ups and strikes, and the ghastly heat & humidity all the way up the coast have rendered me pretty damned exhausted. We’re thirsty for the intense social fellowship of our visits, so different from the relative isolation of our life at home, but it’s easy to overindulge in wine & talk & laughter.

Implications? Puzzling. At ages 76 and 78 we might justly be excused from continuing long-distance tours, but I fear that would be like relieving yourself of worries by chopping off your head. Already a new project is jerking my chain and diddling my brain, but there are too few venues in our area for extended evolution of new work.

We’ll figure it out. We’ve made a long, checkered career of U-turns, detours, and off-the-road rumbles, sometimes undertaking great earthworks projects to align the terrain with the map in our heads, and now our age gives us a unique advantage: if all else fails, we can plead senility. Onward.

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Fire & Floods . . .

—From EF—

We’ve grown fond of starting our long-haul tours by leaving the Interstate after Reno and driving US 50 to south of Salt Lake City, where we pick up I 70 and keep barreling east. US 50 is a two-lane blacktop, beautifully maintained and majestically lonely. You might see two other cars in an hour. No towns, no billboards, no gas stations. But the beauty of the land can take your breath away: the huge rock formations, basin-and-range dips and swells, and the colors of the desert-like earth.

Not this time. We couldn’t see much at all, and the air was acrid with smoke. Our California fires made the air murky and hard to breathe all the way through California, Nevada, and most of Utah. Then Colorado chipped in with its own fires on the Western Slope.

When we got to Norfolk, VA, it was hot and wet, as it has been most of the way up the East Coast. Not really a surprise (it’s August, after all), but they’d been slogging through two solid weeks of rain. Baltimore was a steam bath. Philadelphia got a rainstorm of biblical proportions yesterday, with cars trapped in sudden roadway lakes. Thursday we head for Bloomsburg, which is flooding.

We’ve driven all over this country in our decades of touring and have slogged through all kinds of weather, but this feels creepy. And the escalation of aggressive driving is wild, making things even more hairy.

But our readings and performances have been wonderful, and our reunions with long-term friends have fed our souls. We’re halfway now, and haven’t had to face any disasters yet. Life is good.    

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