A Few Quick Notes about a Road Trip
Two hippies leave Arizona after a two-day stint collecting lemons and herbs from trees in suburban highway medians, punctuated by excessive biodynamic wine-drinking and putting up with being hit on by white rappers at a bar called Dos Gringos.
The hippies embark on the first leg of the trip to White Sands, New Mexico, where they meet a third hippie and set out to camp in the "backcountry"- in the middle of a sea of rolling white gypsum dunes. The second and third hippies disrobe and play folk music on the guitar, which stays in a Mexican traditional woven case when not in use. The first hippie prepares a wine and cheese plate on a disk sled that the third hippie brought along for sledding down the sand dunes. The sun sets and the hippies sit atop the dune, dining on the feast. Of course, lyrics are forgotten, and the idyllic scene has its iPhone moments when the first hippie tries to google "Angel of the Morning" by Juice Newton. The wind howls at the tent all night long, and the hippies sleep under the stars in their sleeping bags.
The next day, the third hippie returns north, and the first and second hippies continue east to Marfa, Texas. Marfa is an art town, but not an artsy town. Marfa is a tiny West Texas town best known for land art by Donald Judd, and patronized mainly Wednesday through Sunday by university art departments on field trips seeking out the classics of minimalist and conceptual art, which have gathered in Marfa thanks to Donald Judd. The hippies arrive, and the art is so minimal that it's obfuscated behind the boutique hotel and the $120 dinner, so the hip Thunderbird Hotel it is, and of course, dinner on the gravel patio at Cochineal rounds out the evening. Nobody's there, save a few tall-and-fat-looking, Texan-looking, conservative-looking, art-collector-looking probable art collector couples. The hippies head to the hotel and get some much-needed rest after the night on the dunes. The next morning, they swim in the saline pool while some guy with New Jersey plates on his car watches them suspiciously from beyond his beard while reclining in his Bertoia replica lounge chair. What a fashionable and fine bohemian with a man-bun hairdo he is! His partner, of course, is a big-boned woman talking acquisitions on her mobile phone. Skinny jeans dash across the parking lot. The hippies pack up and head out after arguing briefly about whether or not one should be nice to people one does not want to be nice to.
Picnic tables dot the sides of the highways in southwest Texas. All they want is to find an empty one where they can make vegan-wraps, but at every table is a big guy in a plaid cotton shirt and Wrangler jeans, with a huge blue cooler and a family of five eating sandwiches on Wonderbread while their F-150 idles next to them, preserving its air-conditioned cabin. These families complete the Texan landscape. Without them, the hippies' road trip would not be quite right. The American experience of the wandering hippie is, after all, a series of serene scenic pit stops throughout life. It is good and right that these cooler-toting Americans are taking advantage of the life.
Somewhere near a place called Fredricksburg, the flower children declare that they will buy land in Texas (amid the cattle ranches, hunting resorts and granite quarries), and they skip off the highway to explore, coming across a state park at the cusp of a thunderstorm. They enter the park and it's a monument to an enormous granite dome; they run up it like dustmites on a giant bulbous lightning rod. The rain on the granite shines in the light that breaks though the clouds and the storm heads in the other direction; the hippies do passive yoga on stepping stones atop a creek.
Arrival in Austin, Texas, takes them to a friend's friend's dad's house in the suburbs. They go out that night with friends and friends' friends. They sit at a long table on a veranda at a bar in the city called Don's, which is almost entirely the color deep red, and chivalrous men talk to them candidly, but under false pretenses, about love, car repair, F-150's, and urban professional-league softball games. The first hippie remembers something about a former life quite similar to the one described, a life when she wasn't a hippie, but was just a nice person who lived in the city with other good people. She's handed a Lone Star and forgets quickly enough.
The night is spent on air matresses in the plushly carpeted guest bedroom -slash- divorced-dad-music-and-excercise-room. The next day the hippies and friends go to Barton Springs for a swim, and make friends with some more nice people. Some of the more nice people are pregnant, and will soon return to Alaska to be cared for by their husbands who work 5 weeks on and 2 weeks off on the pipeline out in Nome, away from the young newlyweds' home in Anchorage. A medium-roast is attained by all members of the party, so they cover up and flock to a place on the water of Lake Austin called "Hula Hut," where bickering goes on between assorted siblings and frothy sugar alcohol drinks are consumed. Also, everyone there is gay and hot, and several members of the party used to work there so they get a big discount on the drinks and the food. Many of the waitresses stop by the table to complain about the current working conditions. They serve the best homemade tortillas in the world; I don't care that Hula Hut's a chain restaurant owned by Chuy's and they put MSG and pure formaldehyde in them, they're good.
That night the hippies sit and jam with their friends' friend's dad. They miss a bluegrass show in downtown Austin, but end up at a dueling piano bar where two pianists sit at grand pianos facing one another. One guy plays "Rock You Like a Hurricane" in ragtime style while the other guy texts his friends and makes fun of the pianist playing. The kids drink Shiners.
Out of Austin, the hippies drive to New Orleans where they have a rollicking time in the French Quarter, and they stay for the night in a hotel room with twenty-foot ceilings but practically no furniture or decor. They share a "Horny Gator", or, a beverage that looks and tastes like antifreeze and comes in a matching neon green plastic alligator-shaped 16-oZ cup that reads "THE DRINK THAT'LL GET YOU THE MOST MESSED UP IN NEW ORLEANS" on the front of it. They eat their obligatory beignets at Cafe du Monde, and wake up early for brunch at another fine dining establishment, Bayona, where they meet a sassy realtor and her 40-year-old realtor son, who tell them places tourists should go, and take the opportunity to write down the place names on the back side of a business card. Bayona is tucked away in a garden-home in the quarter, and the hippies are tucked away deep in a corner of America with whom they've never become acquainted, having grown up on the east coast and spent most of the rest of their lives on the west, of course, both in and out of established hippie communities, and largely participating in the regular life bicoastal jackasses, spending money on drinks and food, reading about old friends' weddings in the newspapers, and completing various advanced degrees. All of this information becomes nonexistent when one is ingesting sweetbreads sauteed by quite possibly New Orleans' best chef.
A fast walk around the city and some music, and they move on to the next place, which is the Hilton Garden Inn outside of Montgomery, Alabama, where they will never, ever go again. However, the Hilton Garden Inn is reliable, clean, and wonderful, in any state, on any night, for a three-day stay at a music festival in Palm Springs, for one night in wine country when you have to wake up at 5 a.m. the next day to pick grapes, and on the highway outside of Montgomery, Alabama.
Atlanta. Thanks to sweet Kelly Jean, darling of Facebook, socialite for all times. The hippies send the Atlanta local a message with no expectation of response; within minutes Kelly Jean has told them a million things they should see and do and where to stay and eat. In 24 hours time, they: down an entire bottle of rosé, crash an unnamed R&B star's private party at a rooftop bar where they are the ONLY white people (everyone wishes them mazel tov, though)(and everyone there is hot and black), they take on the warehouse district for some serious fine southern dining at Serpa's (great wine), get charged $22 to go .5 miles by a cab driver with a "special" car (???), go to 3 different beer/wine bars, and go dancing to 1980's music spun in it's pure form at a hipster club in the basement of a suburban house. Not too shabby for two 30-something ladies in ridiculously free-spirited-looking roadtrip-wear.
The hippies head out from Atlanta haggard and stop at a Whole Foods on the way out of town. Whole Foods really sucks, but they need to eat hot food from the salad bar. The second hippie pops a pill and contemplates the irony that the road trip which was intended to be a strictly anti-establishment sampling of southern America has taken a turn for the consumerist worst- having spent the last night at Atlanta's premier boutique hotel (decorated in the most basic, hideous orange- orange sheers, orange carpet, orange bedspead) and having eaten and drank enough to last for an entire week, and now being at Whole Foods, wavering as she recalls John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, in his WSJ article on health care reform last year, stating that people 'wouldn't need free health care if they ate healthy like the Whole Foods way' (okay, a bit of a paraphrase). But the hippies eat their "health" food and make it on the road by noon or 1, escaping normality altogether.
They spend the next night sleeping in tent in the backyard of an old friend on an Air Force base under F15's and A10-A's patrolling the night. The friend makes them pancakes in the morning, and they chat with her, her husband, and the in-laws. Camping sometimes makes you nervous. Nervous about people. Sometimes nervous about animals, like bears, if you're way out in the woods. You hear something and wake up and can't sleep for hours. Mostly it's not animals, though. Camping in American campgrounds has turned into a pastime where you expect to be murdered by a serial killer out wandering in the unprotected nature of less civilization. Camping on an air force base and being awakened by F15's protecting you is an entirely different experience. The noise is so loud you'd have to shout to be heard over it, and you still wouldn't be heard. But you wake up to this sound in the middle of the night, and it basically puts you right back to sleep, safe and sound, knowing that no sociopath is getting at you tonight, out in the open. You did have to go through a full background check just to be allowed on the base. Comfort... this is the true sense of American security.
The two drive on to Virginia Beach, where they meet up with a criminal ex-boyfriend of the second hippie. He brings his girlfriend. She's adorable, and atleast 15 years older than him. They walk around some swamps and head out to the beach, where the first hippie makes a phone call to an unlikely (and likely misguided) love interest somewhere far away. The call is awkward and interrupted by sand filling her ears; she plays with the sand in her hands a bit and ends up with someone's old fingernail. The hippies bid farewell to the young (/younger) couple.
That night, they reach Baltimore, where they stay for a few days with a beautiful tomboy. In Baltimore, the three get lost running through Sylvanian hillsides and along creeks. They drink a lot of beer. They buy a bunch of crabs with Old Bay seasoning and eat them outside on a picnic table at an apartment complex off 95. Miller High Life is the champagne of beers. Drinking is one of the world's greatest pastimes. The tomboy has discovered that the other one is sleeping with rich guys whose brothers are famous. She treats men like they're little girls and gets what she wants. She takes the lead instead of leading them on, and she tells them when they're not her style. She's post-feminist. Hippies are still stuck in the womens' lib movement of their mothers' 1970's, drifting away from the societal norms which cause their despair. The tomboy? This girl's mom is 59, a homemaker from a nice conservative suburb, and is getting a tattoo of a rose with her husband's name on the stem for her 60th birthday. Clearly they are of a different, awesome breed. One which the first hippie envies quite a bit, but the next stop is the end of the line, and all weighing of ideas about seat-filling in society has to end at some point. There's no more time to flirt with the lives of the definitive people that the hippies are not. The survey of the American physical and social landscape comes to a close.
The hippies have reached their destination and are in no way settled. This is reason for rejoice, as is pretty much everything else.
The hippies embark on the first leg of the trip to White Sands, New Mexico, where they meet a third hippie and set out to camp in the "backcountry"- in the middle of a sea of rolling white gypsum dunes. The second and third hippies disrobe and play folk music on the guitar, which stays in a Mexican traditional woven case when not in use. The first hippie prepares a wine and cheese plate on a disk sled that the third hippie brought along for sledding down the sand dunes. The sun sets and the hippies sit atop the dune, dining on the feast. Of course, lyrics are forgotten, and the idyllic scene has its iPhone moments when the first hippie tries to google "Angel of the Morning" by Juice Newton. The wind howls at the tent all night long, and the hippies sleep under the stars in their sleeping bags.
The next day, the third hippie returns north, and the first and second hippies continue east to Marfa, Texas. Marfa is an art town, but not an artsy town. Marfa is a tiny West Texas town best known for land art by Donald Judd, and patronized mainly Wednesday through Sunday by university art departments on field trips seeking out the classics of minimalist and conceptual art, which have gathered in Marfa thanks to Donald Judd. The hippies arrive, and the art is so minimal that it's obfuscated behind the boutique hotel and the $120 dinner, so the hip Thunderbird Hotel it is, and of course, dinner on the gravel patio at Cochineal rounds out the evening. Nobody's there, save a few tall-and-fat-looking, Texan-looking, conservative-looking, art-collector-looking probable art collector couples. The hippies head to the hotel and get some much-needed rest after the night on the dunes. The next morning, they swim in the saline pool while some guy with New Jersey plates on his car watches them suspiciously from beyond his beard while reclining in his Bertoia replica lounge chair. What a fashionable and fine bohemian with a man-bun hairdo he is! His partner, of course, is a big-boned woman talking acquisitions on her mobile phone. Skinny jeans dash across the parking lot. The hippies pack up and head out after arguing briefly about whether or not one should be nice to people one does not want to be nice to.
Picnic tables dot the sides of the highways in southwest Texas. All they want is to find an empty one where they can make vegan-wraps, but at every table is a big guy in a plaid cotton shirt and Wrangler jeans, with a huge blue cooler and a family of five eating sandwiches on Wonderbread while their F-150 idles next to them, preserving its air-conditioned cabin. These families complete the Texan landscape. Without them, the hippies' road trip would not be quite right. The American experience of the wandering hippie is, after all, a series of serene scenic pit stops throughout life. It is good and right that these cooler-toting Americans are taking advantage of the life.
Somewhere near a place called Fredricksburg, the flower children declare that they will buy land in Texas (amid the cattle ranches, hunting resorts and granite quarries), and they skip off the highway to explore, coming across a state park at the cusp of a thunderstorm. They enter the park and it's a monument to an enormous granite dome; they run up it like dustmites on a giant bulbous lightning rod. The rain on the granite shines in the light that breaks though the clouds and the storm heads in the other direction; the hippies do passive yoga on stepping stones atop a creek.
Arrival in Austin, Texas, takes them to a friend's friend's dad's house in the suburbs. They go out that night with friends and friends' friends. They sit at a long table on a veranda at a bar in the city called Don's, which is almost entirely the color deep red, and chivalrous men talk to them candidly, but under false pretenses, about love, car repair, F-150's, and urban professional-league softball games. The first hippie remembers something about a former life quite similar to the one described, a life when she wasn't a hippie, but was just a nice person who lived in the city with other good people. She's handed a Lone Star and forgets quickly enough.
The night is spent on air matresses in the plushly carpeted guest bedroom -slash- divorced-dad-music-and-excercise-room. The next day the hippies and friends go to Barton Springs for a swim, and make friends with some more nice people. Some of the more nice people are pregnant, and will soon return to Alaska to be cared for by their husbands who work 5 weeks on and 2 weeks off on the pipeline out in Nome, away from the young newlyweds' home in Anchorage. A medium-roast is attained by all members of the party, so they cover up and flock to a place on the water of Lake Austin called "Hula Hut," where bickering goes on between assorted siblings and frothy sugar alcohol drinks are consumed. Also, everyone there is gay and hot, and several members of the party used to work there so they get a big discount on the drinks and the food. Many of the waitresses stop by the table to complain about the current working conditions. They serve the best homemade tortillas in the world; I don't care that Hula Hut's a chain restaurant owned by Chuy's and they put MSG and pure formaldehyde in them, they're good.
That night the hippies sit and jam with their friends' friend's dad. They miss a bluegrass show in downtown Austin, but end up at a dueling piano bar where two pianists sit at grand pianos facing one another. One guy plays "Rock You Like a Hurricane" in ragtime style while the other guy texts his friends and makes fun of the pianist playing. The kids drink Shiners.
Out of Austin, the hippies drive to New Orleans where they have a rollicking time in the French Quarter, and they stay for the night in a hotel room with twenty-foot ceilings but practically no furniture or decor. They share a "Horny Gator", or, a beverage that looks and tastes like antifreeze and comes in a matching neon green plastic alligator-shaped 16-oZ cup that reads "THE DRINK THAT'LL GET YOU THE MOST MESSED UP IN NEW ORLEANS" on the front of it. They eat their obligatory beignets at Cafe du Monde, and wake up early for brunch at another fine dining establishment, Bayona, where they meet a sassy realtor and her 40-year-old realtor son, who tell them places tourists should go, and take the opportunity to write down the place names on the back side of a business card. Bayona is tucked away in a garden-home in the quarter, and the hippies are tucked away deep in a corner of America with whom they've never become acquainted, having grown up on the east coast and spent most of the rest of their lives on the west, of course, both in and out of established hippie communities, and largely participating in the regular life bicoastal jackasses, spending money on drinks and food, reading about old friends' weddings in the newspapers, and completing various advanced degrees. All of this information becomes nonexistent when one is ingesting sweetbreads sauteed by quite possibly New Orleans' best chef.
A fast walk around the city and some music, and they move on to the next place, which is the Hilton Garden Inn outside of Montgomery, Alabama, where they will never, ever go again. However, the Hilton Garden Inn is reliable, clean, and wonderful, in any state, on any night, for a three-day stay at a music festival in Palm Springs, for one night in wine country when you have to wake up at 5 a.m. the next day to pick grapes, and on the highway outside of Montgomery, Alabama.
Atlanta. Thanks to sweet Kelly Jean, darling of Facebook, socialite for all times. The hippies send the Atlanta local a message with no expectation of response; within minutes Kelly Jean has told them a million things they should see and do and where to stay and eat. In 24 hours time, they: down an entire bottle of rosé, crash an unnamed R&B star's private party at a rooftop bar where they are the ONLY white people (everyone wishes them mazel tov, though)(and everyone there is hot and black), they take on the warehouse district for some serious fine southern dining at Serpa's (great wine), get charged $22 to go .5 miles by a cab driver with a "special" car (???), go to 3 different beer/wine bars, and go dancing to 1980's music spun in it's pure form at a hipster club in the basement of a suburban house. Not too shabby for two 30-something ladies in ridiculously free-spirited-looking roadtrip-wear.
The hippies head out from Atlanta haggard and stop at a Whole Foods on the way out of town. Whole Foods really sucks, but they need to eat hot food from the salad bar. The second hippie pops a pill and contemplates the irony that the road trip which was intended to be a strictly anti-establishment sampling of southern America has taken a turn for the consumerist worst- having spent the last night at Atlanta's premier boutique hotel (decorated in the most basic, hideous orange- orange sheers, orange carpet, orange bedspead) and having eaten and drank enough to last for an entire week, and now being at Whole Foods, wavering as she recalls John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, in his WSJ article on health care reform last year, stating that people 'wouldn't need free health care if they ate healthy like the Whole Foods way' (okay, a bit of a paraphrase). But the hippies eat their "health" food and make it on the road by noon or 1, escaping normality altogether.
They spend the next night sleeping in tent in the backyard of an old friend on an Air Force base under F15's and A10-A's patrolling the night. The friend makes them pancakes in the morning, and they chat with her, her husband, and the in-laws. Camping sometimes makes you nervous. Nervous about people. Sometimes nervous about animals, like bears, if you're way out in the woods. You hear something and wake up and can't sleep for hours. Mostly it's not animals, though. Camping in American campgrounds has turned into a pastime where you expect to be murdered by a serial killer out wandering in the unprotected nature of less civilization. Camping on an air force base and being awakened by F15's protecting you is an entirely different experience. The noise is so loud you'd have to shout to be heard over it, and you still wouldn't be heard. But you wake up to this sound in the middle of the night, and it basically puts you right back to sleep, safe and sound, knowing that no sociopath is getting at you tonight, out in the open. You did have to go through a full background check just to be allowed on the base. Comfort... this is the true sense of American security.
The two drive on to Virginia Beach, where they meet up with a criminal ex-boyfriend of the second hippie. He brings his girlfriend. She's adorable, and atleast 15 years older than him. They walk around some swamps and head out to the beach, where the first hippie makes a phone call to an unlikely (and likely misguided) love interest somewhere far away. The call is awkward and interrupted by sand filling her ears; she plays with the sand in her hands a bit and ends up with someone's old fingernail. The hippies bid farewell to the young (/younger) couple.
That night, they reach Baltimore, where they stay for a few days with a beautiful tomboy. In Baltimore, the three get lost running through Sylvanian hillsides and along creeks. They drink a lot of beer. They buy a bunch of crabs with Old Bay seasoning and eat them outside on a picnic table at an apartment complex off 95. Miller High Life is the champagne of beers. Drinking is one of the world's greatest pastimes. The tomboy has discovered that the other one is sleeping with rich guys whose brothers are famous. She treats men like they're little girls and gets what she wants. She takes the lead instead of leading them on, and she tells them when they're not her style. She's post-feminist. Hippies are still stuck in the womens' lib movement of their mothers' 1970's, drifting away from the societal norms which cause their despair. The tomboy? This girl's mom is 59, a homemaker from a nice conservative suburb, and is getting a tattoo of a rose with her husband's name on the stem for her 60th birthday. Clearly they are of a different, awesome breed. One which the first hippie envies quite a bit, but the next stop is the end of the line, and all weighing of ideas about seat-filling in society has to end at some point. There's no more time to flirt with the lives of the definitive people that the hippies are not. The survey of the American physical and social landscape comes to a close.
The hippies have reached their destination and are in no way settled. This is reason for rejoice, as is pretty much everything else.
posted by Kir at 9:23 AM
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