The Road Trip - Chapter II: On to the Berkshires

It was good to shake the dust of Poughkeepsie from my feet. The place baked in the relentless sunlight and just looked tired, dusty, and best seen in the rear-view mirror. The road (U.S. Route 44) then took me north and east, through Millbrook and Amenia in Dutchess County and across the line into Connecticut. In Canaan, U.S. 7 meets Route 44 and heads north into Massachusetts. I had programmed my GPS device to take me to Southfield, Mass., the home town of my dear departed law school friend and classmate Jim Stevens, seen here in June 1978 with my daughter Lindsay, then just a year and a half old, at the top of the World Trade Center (remember?) in New York City... And with your humble correspondent at the Scottish games in Round Hill, Connecticut, in July 1991... A tiny village in the southern Berkshire Hills, Southfield has come a long way since I visited Jim there first in late 1974. We were both first-year law students then and had bonded in our mutual bewilderment at the utterly baffling stuff we had been studying for the past several months. Jim was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and his academic abilities sustained me through many a bout of despair over the mysteries of Marbury v. Madison and other landmark Supreme Court decisions he'd already studied in his undergraduate history courses. In those days, Jim worked holidays at the Southfield village store, which then did double duty as a general store and the municipal post office. Today, new owners have turned it into a Yuppie-chic gourmet cafe and restaurant catering to the burgeoning throngs of urbanites who have established vacation homes in the area... Ultimately, Jim Stevens's story is a tragic one (in keeping with the tone of my road trip? I hoped not). After a long and hard-fought battle with a recurring brain tumor, he died just about 13 years ago to the day, the father of a wonderful son, veteran of many years of criminal prosecution work in the Manhattan District Attorney's office and then a well-respected country practitioner in Great Barrington. It was fond memories of that friendship, so many of them centered on Jim's beloved Southfield, which had brought me there on my 65th birthday, to lay a wreath (figuratively) at his resting place in this idyllic little town seemingly in the middle of nowhere...

My daughters called him "Uncle Jimmy." He was godfather to Lindsay, and honorary godfather to Janet. I was godfather to his son, Armen. While were were at Villanova, he was an almost regular weekend guest in our home, where we tried to feed him up a bit from the diet of cold cereal and freeze-dried mashed potatoes which sustained him during the week in the rooming-house where he lived. His boyhood hero was John Wayne; I remember giving him for his birthday in 1975 a big book of photo stills from movies in which the Duke had starred -- and snippets of whose dialogue Jim could rattle off by heart.

This was another rather melancholy stop on my sentimental journey into New England, but in the end an uplifting one, so I thought. Sometimes it's good to remember places and people who have held vast tracts of one's interior landscape.

Now, it was time to drive up through Stockbridge, Lenox and Lee, get on the Mass Pike, aim the car east, and make a beeline the 112 miles to Boston, then Cambridge, then Harvard Yard, and to turn away from the land of the melancholy to a place of joy, youth, energy -- and Nora Jeanne Molyneaux and her parents!

The Road Trip - Chapter I: Darkness at Midday

All right. It's time to stop crying over unexposed film and get on with the story.

The first destination on my road trip was 139 Academy Street, Poughkeepsie, New York, an historic Hudson Valley farmhouse listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the home where my first wife was raised with her four siblings in such a Bedlam of chaos and dysfunctional relationships that sanity was in critically short supply (if the family folklore is to be believed). Of course, many things become clear only in hindsight. Things seemed normal enough in the Poughkeepsie homestead during most of the two decades of that marriage (1970-1990) -- if one disregarded my ex-mother-in-law's penchant for collecting strange derelict characters and lodging them on the third floor, a kitchen which might have been condemned by the public health authorities (the refrigerator especially), and enough misery and weirdness to have filled a fat novel by Edgar Allan Poe.

So what drew me back to the place? Curiosity, plain and simple. Morbid curiosity? Perhaps. The house has been out of my late ex-wife's family for a good many years now. From outward appearances, it's in the process of falling down, like the House of Usher. It's hard to tell if the place is even inhabited (by living human beings, I mean); certainly no one challenged my walking onto the property to take pictures. It exhaled darkness and decay, even in the middle of a bright day in June 2010.

On this side porch, guests gathered to go through the receiving line after our wedding in August 1970. After looking at the pictures, you may decide for yourself whether or not you'd be willing to set foot on that porch for any purpose. The front of the house, facing Academy Street, was once an imposing specimen of Hudson Valley Victorian architecture; now it's just a specimen of faded glory.

Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose. So far, my epic sentimental journey was looking a bit shabby and melancholy around the edges. You can't go home again, wrote Thomas Wolfe. It has something to do with time and the river.

DAMMIT!!

One of my worst fears spread its big black bat wings, flew out of its cave and hovered over my head, blotting out the sunshine and plunging me into the midnight of despair. When I returned from the Road Trip (see previous), the roll of color film I had been shooting during said Road Trip was still in the camera. Subsequent events revealed that the film roll had not seated itself properly on the take-up sprocket; or, to put it plainly, I had been shooting pictures of NOTHING. But I'm a seasoned enough photographer to have been carrying a back-up camera loaded with black-and-white film. So, unless I screw up the processing of that film, I should have something to show you in a few days. In the meantime, my shimmering prose will have to suffice....

The Road Trip -- Prologue

LIKE ALL complex logistic operations, my Official 2010 First-Days-of-the-Rest-of-My-Life-65th-Birthday-Father's-Day-Summer-Solstice Road Trip had its genesis in meticulous planning. I spent at least fifteen minutes squinting at maps and trying to remember why certain places shown on those maps had some nostalgic or sentimental significance that would justify the time, expense and wear and tear of a solo pilgrimage in my long-in-the-tooth (123,000 miles) 2003 Dodge Neon. I didn't have the time or (so I thought, anyway) the stamina to visit every place in New England that had been formative in my life over the last almost fifty years.

So, we may write of other road trips. For now, we'll concentrate on this one.

Since I was traveling solo, I had the luxury of selecting the musical theme for the voyage. Don't ask me why, but I chose Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony -- the "Symphony of a Thousand" -- as suitably majestic and lengthy (not to say tedious) enough to gobble up road miles by the dozen. I listened to it three times on the outward journey and three times on the trip home, in each case with multiple re-plays of the portions which REALLY gave me goosebumps.

The camera gear was important, too. I loaded both Pentaxes, made sure my gadget bag was full of spare ammunition and lenses, flash, tripod, etc. This was going to be a PICTORIAL pilgimage, worthy of such stalwarts as The National Geographic, even if I wasn't packing a nuclear-powered, turbocharged Model K9-P Nikoltacanonflex Digital Demon DSLR Deluxe with hazelnut flavoring and cinnamon sprinkles. Nope, I was going to use film, you see -- with tragic results as you may read presently.

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AND NOW THE DAY OF DEPARTURE HAD DAWNED!! With a full tank of gas, a big cup of coffee and a couple of contraband doughnuts (another positive aspect of traveling solo), and with Veni, veni, Creator Spiritus ringing forth in full choral splendor from the rear speakers (yet another good thing about flying solo: I get to set the volume where I want), I set out heading east and north, bound for the Hudson River Valley, Dutchess County, and the Town of Poughkeepsie. This was the situs of my first marriage, if you please, and an oft-visited place during the two decades of that (ill-fated in some ways but not others) liaison.

But now, dear readers, I shall leave you while I spend a few days trying to dream up the next episode in this ridiculous saga....

The First Days of the Rest of My Life: My 65th Birthday, Father's Day, Summer Solstice Road Trip

Watch this blog for stories and pictures from my epic (?) First Days of the Rest of My Life Sixty-Fifth Birthday Summer Solstice A. D. 2010 Road Trip. It covered about 800 miles and 40 years, with stops in Poughkeepsie, New York; Southfield, Massachusetts; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cohasset, Massachusetts. The characters ranged in age from two and a half years to ... well ... deceased. Stay tuned!

OBX? OK! SIC? OK! ROG? WTF???

IF YOU drive a car in traffic, you've seen these little emblems people put on their cars, to say something about themselves. Most often, these are the initials of places the car owner has visited, and found recreationally meaningful or significant, or initials of a college attended or some other talisman. This is one of those little find-the-image-that-doesn't-make-a-bloody-bit-of-sense tests. Please look over the following (this is dead easy, trust me) images, and find the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense. Have fun!

Now, we all know this is the ubiquitous "Outer Banx" (huh?) status symbol. This means the driver of the car in question and his/her family (if any) has/have spent time in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and that he/she/it/they can't spell. This one tells us the driver's status involves time spent at a lovely community on the South Jersey seashore. At least this driver knows how to spell the name of his/her/its/their particular vacation Shangri-La.

NOW, for the one that doesn't make a bloody bit of sense...

WHAT??? This is one crazy-ass message. What is/are this person(s) saying?? I spend my vacation at the ORTHODONTIST?? I spend so much money on my orthodontist I can't afford a vacation at OBX or SIC? I have a whole lot of status and you should kiss my ass because I spend money at the orthodontist? I'm providing free advertising for my orthodontist because he/she's charging me out the ying-yang for teeth-straightening?

I'd be most obliged if some reader could explain this puzzle to me....

Up in the San Juans, 1966

Having just turned 21, I spent the summer of 1966 with my aunt, uncle and cousins in Bellevue, Washington, just across Lake Washington from Seattle. Over the Independence Day weekend, we took the family's cabin cruiser, Molly Brown, on a voyage in the San Juan Islands just below the Canadian border in Puget Sound. Since it was the Pacific Northwest, it rained just about all the time, and memory tells me we didn't see blue sky or sun the entire four-day weekend. But, so what? Once you're wet, you can't get any wetter, right? One of our ports of call was a place called Boat Harbor, a place I haven't been able to locate anywhere in cyberspace today -- so maybe, like Brigadoon, it only appears once every so many years. As I recall, Boat Harbor was pretty much the exclusive domain of the Kendall family in those days, and the Kendalls, like Boat Harbor, seemed pretty elusive and ... well, ominous in absentia. The Kendalls did, however, make their attitude toward visitors pretty plain... In case there's any doubt in your mind about what a "haywire private dock" looks like, this image should give you an idea... Across the harbor, seemingly careened on the beach for caulking, but on closer examination permanently affixed to the real estate, was a vessel which may or may not ever have gone to sea, but which now apparently swashbuckled from a fixed position... All of this happened so long ago, I wouldn't even try to chronicle it were it not for the photographic evidence. Even though I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest that summer, I've only been back once -- for a short visit in May 2008 with my cousin and his wife in Gig Harbor, near Tacoma. There's still nothing that stirs my love for the sea quite as much as the clear, cold, wildly tidal waters of the North (anywhere in the world, but particularly here), teeming with creatures and peopled by quirky characters like the Kendalls (if they ever existed).