Category: on the road
to knoxville
the coldest night in a motel in Murfreesboro (with heating this time).
a hamburger breakfast (lunch for the workers) in just the perfect
delightful home-cooking place (maggie definately has an eye).
buildings from the 1950s that suggest not much has changed since.
on the road to Knoxville.
at some point we get off the highway
and onto a small road that takes us through a beautiful landscape:
hills spread out with barns, meadows and old wooden houses
made soft and golden by the light of a late afternoon sun.
and i swear to god that it’s not much exaggerated when i say
that every second or third building along the road was a church.
looking for public spaces in this alien social geography deprived of
a center as we know them in Europe? here they are.
alongside the gas stations and the occasional small supermarket.
(that is before we hit mall-sized towns).
capital of country music
maggie got us a room at the Drake Motel, with an office decorated with country music icons. this morning she woke up singing: Tennessee, Tennessee, there ain’t no place i’d rather be.
it is so cold in this southern state – thank god for the bottle of whiskey maggie brought me. much to discover in nashville but we decide to hit the road, and come back to the capital of country music in some days time. the guys in the cowboy gear store already told us about a music place where the ladies get in free on friday nights, and we’re curious about the cowboy church. driving out the city, passing the Grand Ole Opry (a number of times…), with the wind rushing something that looks like dry snow into dancing formations on the road in front us.
highway 17
an early morning bus ride from santa cruz to san jose
the sun breaks through as we drive on the winding road
through the santa cruz mountains
highway 17 – this road is beginning to feel familiar
i’ve come to known its pace and curves
all of a sudden i think of the last time i will take this road,
to go home. where that exactely is, has become less clear.
there’s something nice about these cheapy US domestic flights
– despite the fact that every time i took one they are entirely full
and one gets candy bars as “food”, and it has little to do with
the SouthWest staff cracking not-so-funny jokes
(“there are 50 ways to leave your lover but only 6 to leave this aircraft…”).
the flight routes are lower, or the sky is more open,
so it’s the forth or fifth time that i get to see
the massive Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains
(peaks, snow, canyons, rivers, roads, fields, small settlements…),
mesmerizing. i stare and stare and imagine all kinds of stories
of lives down there, now and in past times.
it’s enchanting to see the country like this.
american dream
i am driving through endless fields of waving corn. i get tired and pull over, in the shadow of an old barn. i get out the car to strech my legs and i light a sigarette while my eyes wander over the horizon. my thoughts are interrupted by laughter, which i figure must come out of the barn. curiosity guides me to a crack in the wood, and i look inside. the time my eyes take to adjust to the dark… holy shit. bush, rice, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz and more of their ilk are sitting around a table. the words i managed to catch in between the bad jokes tell me that they are designing the new middle east. my eyes quickly scan the barn. some security guys, but they are all facing the table. i move away from the crack and look around me. no other soul to found. then my eye falls on some red shiny dynamite between the corn. it all happens very quick. grab the dynamite, take my lighter, shove the sissing dynamite near the crack and jump in the car. drive away as one life depends on it. the big bang, the image of the barn blown into pieces in the rearview mirror.
hours and hours of driving till the adrenaline is gone. a gas station and a diner. i slide in with the hope of not being noticed, and find myself an empty booth in a corner, with a view on the television. no need to be worried about getting noticed, i can’t even get my order taken, the few people in this place are glued to the screen. a big black whole in a cornfield. digital reconstructions of how the barn must have blown up. looks like a video-game. people are mesmerized. their mouths open, unable to produce a sound. no witnesses, no clue about the terrorist group behind this attack. i keep on driving for days and days, from diner to diner, from small town to small town. gradually people find words again, they start speaking, laughing, it’s over. whoever did it, maybe it was god, or perhaps the people, the important thing is that it’s over. a new fresh day.
i wake up in a great mood. go to pergolesi to work with marÃa, but we can’t begin before i’ve told her the dream. i also talk about the need to be in brussels now, for the first time ever i feel we need to be able to push and work the european institutions. is it about a feeling of political powerlessness connected to being in santa cruz? or connected to how mass mobilizations all over the world against the war on iraq ultimately failed to stop that war? i do not know…
to watsonville
to corralitos
permit
I had an appointment this morning at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), and i arrived well in time to find that the appointment implied having a lady point me (and all the others, whether they had made an appointment or not) to queue up in “line A”. That’s where i got a California Driver’s Examination – a different one than the previous one which i didn’t pass. Thirty-six multiple choice questions throughout which i had to demonstrate my knowledge of the California driver’s code. In the special designated examination area, hardly separated from the hall full of people doing their DMV business, i answered all the questions. After struggling over some (like the legal blood alcohol concentration when you’re under 21, euh, wait a minute, i thought drinking under 21 wasn’t allowed in the first place… i got it wrong, guessed 0.1% and it seems to be 0.5%), i returned to the line and eventually gave the sheet of paper to another lady who corrected it on the spot (oh, i got nervous at that point…)
“You’ve passed.” Only two errors. “So when do you want an appointment for the behind-the-wheel driving test?” Very good question indeed. The thing is, there’s quite a stage in between for me, as i have never driven in my life. “Well, i’ll first need to learn how to drive.” “Sure,” she said without lifting her head from the stamps she was frantically putting on papers all over the place, “just call when you want to make an appointment.” She wasn’t really into her job as the guy was the other time – i could actually imagine him saying: “Oh just make that appointment and try, you might get lucky.”
In any case, sometime mid-morning i found myself on Capitola Road, waiting for a bus to take me home, and with a driving instruction permit in my bag. Was hard to believe, alienating and exciting at once (is this actually me, on the road to driving…). Standing at the bus stop, i was thinking about the whole DMV experience. There had been far more people than last time, the DMV was crowded on a this Monday morning. And i got the impression of seeing quite a cross-section of the population around here, including the obligatory weird figures like the guy with some kind of Elvis Presley shirt, greasy grey hair tightly combed back, super heavy grey eye-brows and… two small american flags sticking out on each side of his heavy glasses. In the absence of many things public, like spaces and services and not to forget bureaucracy and waiting lines, i started thinking… but this it! This is the equivalent of a more or less central public service, much more than the Social Security office on Walnut Street. Yes, this is the closest it gets to la Maison Communale de Saint-Gilles around here. Starting to think of it: a driver’s license counts very much as the most wide-spread identification. And in the (rare, somewhat pathetic) case that you don’t have one, the DMV is also the instance that issues identity cards – you know, just like a driver’s licence but it doesn’t allow you to drive. And the DMV is also a central place where you can register to vote – you know, one of these citizenship things. And you have to wait in lines – that must mean it’s a communist, i mean state thing. Not to mention the financial accessibility of it – you can get the license for half of the amount of a monthy bus pass, and in case you fail the first behind-the-wheel driving test, it costs 5 bucks for every extry try). There i stood on the busy Capitola Road, alone at the bus stop, with a car or two slowing down and offering a ride (but i wanted to be in a bus so much), thinking about the incredible extent to which citizenship is tied up with motor vehicles in this place…
Oh, let me share some of the things i learned while studying the local driver’s code with you:
Do not shoot firearms on a highway or at traffic signs.
(under “Additional Driving Rules – Things you must not do”, p. 33)
Try chewing gum or singing along with the radio.
(under “Health and Safety – Alertness”, p. 76)
And one of my exam questions. What interrupts a smooth flow of traffic?
Among the three possible answers: c) Leaving your car at home and taking public transport.
reclaim the streets… well, trying.
saturday night on Pacific Avenue means it gets crowded and restaurants are full. we put our names on the waiting list of the Thai place, and stroll down the street as we’re waiting for our table. that’s how we stroll into a Santa Cruz Reclaim the Streets March. from Pacific Avenue to the clock tower at the intersection with Mission Street, which is where it really becomes apparent how the carpeople don’t like their traffic flow to be disturbed. but wait a minute, it is actually not very much disturbed. the crowd gathers around the clock-tower, where people dance to the sound system or burn an american flag on the police car. admittingly both things can be very fun, and in this era of war burning the U.S. flag provides a nice spectacle, and then what do you do saturday night in a small town, but frankly the sense escapes me a bit. is this a reclaiming the streets action or a playing war with the cops game? sure, the small thrills of annoying the cops are a familiar and well-rehearsed part of leftie culture. but i’m not impressed, especially not in this place where i’m mostly angry at the lack of political awareness and mobilization.
so i begin dancing in the middle of what is basically Highway One intersecting with down town Santa Cruz’ main street. a bit scary, but slowly (believe me, it seemed very slowly from the middle of the intersection location…) some people join the dance. but cars are aggressive and make people very reluctant to actually occupy the intersection. i’m getting really annoyed with the honking SUV’s, don’t feel like dancing anymore, and just sit down in the middle of the intersection. this attracks a small crowd around me, taking pictures and doing interviews. and women from the Dyke March who very friendly, addressing me as “sister”, ask me to leave the intersection.
the thing is… two marches kind of bumped into each other in Pacific Avenue and decided to join hands and march together for, well, everything. sexual diversity and taking back the streets. but the Dyke March had a permit, which Reclaim the Streets didn’t seek or have. so at the moment of arriving at the clock tower, the Dyke March people needed to have the small crowd off the intersection as fast as they could, while that wasn’t really part of the RTS people’s idea, but then again their ideas weren’t well articulated in any case. (check out the indymedia audio reportage if you want a sense of how the small bunch of people came on the street to have some fun, without much of a vision.)
i ended up doing this spontaneous one woman’s action that didn’t connect well with neither RTS nor the Dyke march (and in case you’re wondering, of course i left the intersection when my sisters of the Dyke March asked me to do so.), and that i didn’t manage to explain very well cause honestly i was a bit shaky in the middle of the intersection with the angry cars around me. but for some reason it did make me feel better, ventilate a bit of the anger against this place. so then we strolled back on Pacific Avenue and had nice Thai food. so far our saturday night adventures in small town Santa Cruz.
on the road again
