On the Road Again, Again

Homeward Bound (Feb. 7, 2019)

It is now Thursday morning, Feb. 7, and I waiting for dawn in the Days Inn in Van Horn, TX. I’m almost certain I have stayed at this very hotel on previous trips. Van Horn is a small dusty, wind-driven town about half way between El Paso and Odessa. There is not much there, but even less between there and Odessa, so it’s a logical place to stop. I picked the hotel farthest east in Van Horn, but the “Best Available” rate turned out to be for a smoking room (as opposed to a “non-smoking” room). They either charge less for smoking or more for non-smoking, but I didn’t feel like arguing about it and took the smelly room. Dinner was a sandwich from the Subway at the Love’s gas station down the road. That was the best part of the stop.

The drive from Tucson yesterday, on the other hand, was pretty great and filled with drama from the sky. I got on the road about 8:45am in the rain, traffic, and low visibility. It was chilly and wet, but traffic was moving and I got out of town with no trouble. Then somewhere between Tucson and the Texas Canyon rest stop, the rain turned to snow flurries. Nothing was sticking, but it did add a nice level of absurdity to the morning drive through the desert mountains.

As I continued east on I-10 the snow turned back to rain, and then the rain and fog began to lift. I glanced to the side and saw this rainbow on the horizon. The picture can’t do it justice. I’ve never seen a rainbow so low on the horizon, or so complete, or so brightly and fully colored. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road.

And then the clouds started to break up and I got big patches of blue sky for one of the few times over the 1998 miles since I left home 8 days ago. The breaking clouds brought their own sort of drama, which in retrospect looks more peaceful than it did at the time.

It’s surprisingly comforting to hear my navigation system say, “For the next 431 miles, go straight!” No turns to worry about. No chance of missing the road. Just watch the fuel gauge, stay hydrated, and listen to some jams as the miles roll by. Yesterday I listened to The Beatles’ White Album box set with bunches of alternate takes, rehearsals, and other extras. I’ve never been clear on how those later albums fit together, so it was interesting to hear things like “Lady Madonna,” and “Let It Be” turn up in the same sessions. And the “second version” of “Helter Skelter” makes the official release sound a bit tame. Amazing.

But the sky was not finished yet, and as I rolled out of El Paso, I got my first experience of the dust the roadside signs keep warning me about. It wasn’t the blinding dust storm the signs describe, with no visibility, and you’re just supposed to pull over and hope nobody hits you. No, I never lost view of the vehicles in front of me, but I did lose sight of whole mountains in the distance. It’s an odd sensation driving into no horizon. But I made good time on the road. I lost an hour to the time zone change and stopped around 4:30 here in the land of Central Standard Time, a bit early, but I already knew I wasn’t doing another 2 hours to Odessa.

In other news, my proposal for the World of Bob Dylan Symposium at the University of Tulsa has been accepted. Here is what I proposed:

Jokerman at the Ritz: Bob Dylan, Alexander Pope, and the Revision of “Jokerman”

Bob Dylan submitted two different versions of “Jokerman” for copyright in 1983, once in May and again in November. The differences are significant and the key to those differences lies in two scraps of Ritz-Carlton note paper currently in the Dylan Archive. I have examined all of the documents in the archive related to “Jokerman,” and these two 4″x6″ sheets, manuscript in blue ink, include the earliest notes toward the second version of the song, including Dylan’s first bungled reference to Alexander Pope’s line from An Essay on Criticism: “Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread” (l. 625). Dylan tries several times over the next few drafts before getting the line right. The quotation from Pope replaced lines that Dylan had worried over since the earliest drafts of “Jokerman”: “no store bought shirt for you on your back – one of the women must sit in the shack . . . & sew one.” Yet the archive documents show that even in the final drafts of the second version of the song, Dylan seems to have oscillated between Pope’s fools and angels, and his own early vision of the Jokerman wearing hand-made shirts.

In this presentation I will focus on those two sheets of note paper from the Ritz-Carlton to consider not simply this opposition between the two images, but also how Alexander Pope fit into the overall development of Dylan’s thought about “Jokerman” that night in the Ritz-Carlton.

The conference should be big fun, and the buzz has already begun on Facebook about who will be presenting. You can check out the current info, including registration, here: https://dylan.utulsa.edu/world-bob-dylan-symposium/.

There’s lots more to tell, not the least of which is the Tucson Gem Show (!!!) and the simple satisfaction of sitting next to Hannah while she graded papers (even better than the gem show). But, well, the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful . . . and I have miles to go before I sleep. 561 miles to be exact, the long sweep across Texas from Van Horn through Odessa, Abilene, Fort Worth, Dallas, so I have an easy day home tomorrow.

Westward Ho (Feb. 3, 2019)

And so, after some absence, I’m back on the road again. At the moment I’m visiting my older daughter, Hannah, for a few days. It’s now Sunday (Super Bowl Sunday 2019, to be exact) and I’ve been on the road since Wednesday. Most of the road west for this trip has been new for me. The first leg took me to Sugar Land, TX just outside Houston, where I visited my brother Pat for the first time. He and his wife were great hosts and took me to eat in Houston’s Chinatown, where we also visited an Asian supermarket. Which was pretty different.

I guess turtle soup has to come from somewhere.

     

And frogs. At least you know it’s fresh.

The next day we headed out to see my brother’s property out west of San Antonio. It’s way down at the end of what some might call a road. Where we were greeted by what appear to be Pat’s pet vultures. When he whistles in a certain way, a pair comes gliding right over the tent site. Seriously.

I spent the second night in Boerne, TX in a Motel 6 that was next door to a great Mexican diner where I had breakfast, and then on to Ozona where I gassed up before heading out across west Texas.

 

In Ozona, for all your sweater and deer corn needs.

While my physical travels are continuing I’ve been without some non-work-related reading, so I’ve decided to give Kerouac’s On the Road another shot. I confess that I have started the book several times, and never managed to get passed the first chapter. I knew it was supposed to be a classic of my generation, but I just couldn’t care. Something is different this time, though, and I find I’m enjoying the book very much. I had never really appreciated the level of irony and (what I assume / hope is) self-mockery in the narrator. I’ve also been reading a lot of Byron lately, and I find the narrative voice in On the Road very Byronic, complicated in its relationship both with the characters and with itself.

However ironic the narrator may be, the excitement of the road is contagious, and as I drove into the west on Friday I was excited, too. It was surprisingly foggy as I drove out of Boerne and then past Ozona. For about 3 hours I could really only see about a mile in front of me. But around 11am, the fog began to clear and the elevation was rising, and I could appreciate the landscape. The most prominent feature was just the sheer expanse, miles and miles of scrub brush gradually yielding to rocky mesas.

A few months ago I traded in my pick-up truck (part of an earlier retirement plan) for a new Honda Clarity — a plug-in hybrid electric car. It’s a brand new model, and to some degree, I seem to be beta testing it for Honda. They haven’t sold enough of them in the US to have much data, so every now and then, they accumulate enough complaints about something to issue a recall and a fix. So far, the biggest problem has been the range calculator. The car can run as an electric-only vehicle (generally for in-town driving), or a hybrid vehicle combining the gas engine and the electric motor for longer-distance driving. The range calculator reads the battery charge level and the gas tank level for a combined mileage projection. The calculations were especially unreliable — for me, for example, at one point a full battery and full tank yielded a range of 370 miles, at other times only 270 miles; some other users reported ridiculously inflated range projections. A recall was issued and the range calculator replaced, but I’m not sure I trust it. So, on this trip I’m tracking how closely the range projection and actual mileage agree. So far, it’s better than I expected. Nonetheless, as I drove into the expanses of west Texas, I was careful to watch my fuel and battery charge levels, and I made it from Boerne, TX to Las Cruces, NM with no trouble at all.

After a good night at the Comfort Inn Las Cruces, it was an easy 4-hour drive into Tucson, where I’m staying with Hannah. Last night (Saturday) was pho for an early supper, and then Kubrick’s The Shining (which Hannah had never seen). Now it’s Sunday, and it’s raining, and neither Hannah nor I really cares about the Super Bowl. Hannah is grading, and I’m reading On the Road and trying to find my own voice after losing it for a while. And there are episodes of Deep Space Nine. So, we’re just sitting around and I’m really enjoying my first non-driving day since Wednesday.