it was a wild weekend, lots of running around, lots of stress. we juggle a lot of activity around here, younger girls (8 & 10), older girls (17 & 20), disabled son (20) who we run food & supplies out to, and foster kid who lies about coming home to go to school, in order to get a ride for his girlfriend to or from work. this last is on the edge of my patience but, in the end, when they start making money they are contributing to the cause. and you don't want to leave a young teen woman stranded in the dark even in the good weather. but the rest of it gets a little nervewracking especially when it comes between nine and eleven when it's peak hour. as for the younger ones the issue is you can't leave them alone, or just leave the house for the others. also when the dogs don't totally all get along, it matters how you leave the situation.

the weather is clearing up a little; it's cold, but getting warmer; it'll get cold again this weekend, but it's almost over in a lot of ways. maybe no more pounding blizzards for a while. back when i got to the area back in the seventies people said april ninth, april ninth, worst blizzard we ever had, it was all fresh on their memory, some blizzard that happened some april ninth in the early seventies maybe. so i tend to hold my breath until april ninth. but then around my birthday, april twenty-first, i'm pretty sure it's about over.

i have a son who's out on the road in california. he chooses between rest areas like tejon pass and aliso creek, trying to decide whether to shoot right through los angeles on his way to san diego or back, through los angeles on his way back to stockton or the valley. i'm telling him to talk to the other truckers - knowing the routes, the stopovers, etc., that's all part of the game.

a good philosophy of life. more later.

on the road

i've been thinking about the time i've spent on the road lately because a son is truck-driving and spending lonely days and nights out on the road, separated from his family.

i spent a good part of 1974 and 1975 on the road and then spent a lot more time out there too, even after i had my daughter in 1978. in 1974 i hitchhiked 48 states, including alaska but not north dakota or hawaii, and including mexico and guatemala although my main objective was to see the u s a. i also wanted to meet people - talk to them, find out what they did for a living and whether they liked it, discover the difference between, say, living in san francisco and living in new york. i was just curious about a lot of things and i decided to get out and experience it myself. sometimes i jumped trains or even tried to hitchhike an airplane or boat but those were kind of diversions, and, having learned from them, generally i went back to what i knew best, hitchhiking.

i remember the loneliest i ever was was one night on the bluegrass parkway in kentucky, when traffic slowed to a crawl and i couldn't get a ride. there were lots of times when i couldn't get a ride, but for some reason this time stood out. i also disliked sunday mornings in cities, because i was especially disappointed by church traffic. but looking back on it, i kind of wonder if the problem wasn't the gap between my expectation and reality, in other words, i was setting myself up for something i thought would be good and it just wasn't any better than anything else. there were actually lots of times when i was lonely, times when i took my sleeping bag, wandered off into the woods until i was out of sight, laid it out, lit a small candle, got in my sleeping bag, and put my head on my jacket-pillow and nodded right out. i didn't generally have trouble falling asleep, no matter how much truck noise there was. but i was lonely plenty of the time.

i actually made lots of friends, and had wonderful connections with people of all kinds. there were people who were mad at me, and even turned me out on the road, for political views or whatever, but mostly people didn't mind a little alternate viewpoint or unexpected perspective; it was part of the situation. on my part i had to tolerate such things as cigarette smoke or possible drunken driving which was common in those days. the police thought i was a nuisance because they considered it dangerous, and sometimes would harass me just to get me off the road, or even arrest me, which happened a couple of times. a couple of policemen were actually nice and i didn't mind if they checked my ID as i wasn't a fugitive. in the end i got all kinds of reactions and learned from them all. you don't see hitchhiking these days but back in the seventies it was much more common and people knew what i was doing and accepted it, either giving me a ride or not.

i found the cities to be the loneliest. generally when there were a lot of people around or a lot of traffic, it felt lonelier, it felt like it was a cruel cold modern world where everyone was too busy to stop and talk or make a friend. they actually hid behind their windshields and this seemed especially true in california or arizona where the sun would naturally make them want to shrink back and avoid the open fresh air. being out there made me a little ripe as there wasn't a shower every day, but the open air in general was good for my sould and because i am allergic to tobacco i found myself opening car windows, almost impulsively, every chance i got, usually with permission. i hitchhiked in winter too, and couldn't, but controlling the air flow a little made me feel slightly more in control of my experience and now i'm still aware of how, if you just manage the controls a little, you can feel how you want when you are out on the open road. a little bit of management will go a long way and there's a lot you can tolerate, and a lot you don't have to.

to get back to the bluegrass parkway, perhaps it was one of these roads that, because they charge a fee, the locals avoid and that changes the nature of the traffic or just reduces it drastically. the will rogers parkway is like that in oklahoma. you're thinking will rogers, that'll give you something to talk about, but all the good people are on the backroads avoiding the tolls, and you just chose the wrong way to go, and now you're stranded on some exit in the middle of nowhere.

you're probably thinking nobody in their right mind would pick up a hitchhiker after about ten at night, but lo and behold sometimes people did, and everything was fine. more often traffic would thin out and people would rightfully be afraid to stop for someone in the middle of the night. one time a pastor stopped for me at about midnight in iowa and actually offered me a place to stay, but i lived in iowa and was only an hour or two from home, so i turned him down. it impressed me though, a guy who put his money where his mouth was, was willing to take me in and provide for me, as i think a man of the cloth should do. usually at night i'd just take the old sleeping bag and walk off into a copse of trees or some place nobody would be watching. lonely, but it would work just fine. i didn't mind being alone much of the time. when i was with people i asked them all kinds of questions. i figured they wouldn't mind the conversation, though sometimes i figured wrong.

i often wrote in a little journal while i was out there, and documented virtually everything that happened. it so happens that upon my return, i lent the journal to a writer friend, and was never able to get it back; but, the actual process of writing it was most helpful. even if you're saying "i went here" and "i went there" it helps you to review, process what you saw, clarify your own goals and see how you are doing on them, etc. the times i jumped trains i came out realizing that i'd seen some fantastic countryside, with no cars in the way, yet i had not met anyone or talked very much about what it was like to actually live someplace. and i got twice as dirty and did twice as much walking, though i didn't mind those so much. the thing about jumping trains as i look back on it is that i'm lucky i'm still alive; it's a risky practice. are you a hundred percent awake for everything you do? one little mistake jumping a train, and you're dead, not to mention the risk of getting beat up or locked in a boxcar.

i got a number of rides from trucks which i still remember. in general, i think they weren't supposed to pick me up for insurance reasons. but they knew the road better than anyone and were pretty good at spotting when something wasn't as it should be out there on the side of the road. they'd be the one that called in emergencies, or stopped to help someone who really needed it. in general they too considered me a nuisance but generally they were friendly to me and would actually help me if they could. i lived for the times when people were just genuinely friendly and helpful, with a spirit of making places easier or better to travel through. it's a good nation that way in that the vast majority of people out there are good, whether they are actively able to help you or not, and you do get uplifted by this sense of helpfulness that i find very refreshing, cheerful, uplifting. i felt like i'd thrown myself to the mercy of the traveling world and that i found god in every corner. and it was genuine, spiritual experience to put myself out there as far as i could go, to every corner of the country. canada, to some degree, was even better than the u s, and so were mexico and guatemala, but i'd really set out to see the u s a, and wasn't disappointed at all by the friendliness or hospitality of its people. it was wonderful.

i did, however, experience plenty of loneliness. these were times i really wanted to connect with someone in any way, just talk to anyone, and there just was nobody around. on the bluegrass parkway, stars all over the place, beautiful mountains, not a car in sight,anywhere in the valley. another spot was schenectady exit, new york thruway. it was just timing. there were of course times i would have rather been alone, and spent an hour or two chilling out, than done what i did and just get ride after ride until i couldn't see straight anymore.

all through the late seventies and well into the eighties i was out there, partly because i had trouble readjusting and coming back to a workaday routine where i slept in the same bed every night. there were a couple of married women who were coming on to me at various times, and i just didn't know how to deal with it; it was hard to say no but i was deeply uncomfortable breaking up their marriages. so my reaction was to up and leave for a week or two, pick some place to go and just get out and do it. one time i set out to hit north dakota, the one state i'd missed, and because of divergent rides i ended up going around it, going out to banff, coming back through northern montana, and again missing it because of some ride or because somebody i liked traveling with was going south. i'd frequently change my route if there was someone i enjoyed spending time with and i was really eager to just know different perspectives and get the experience of people who had done different things. those times, of being with people i really liked, though will probably never see again, will still stay with me forever as something that made me a wiser, larger, more generous person. one who has actually listened to others' experiences...

i'm not sorry i did it. i'm grateful to still be alive to talk about it. fifty years have passed, and the practice of hitchhiking has virtually disappeared, but it stays in my heart as an era of my life that really opened me up to the different experiences of different kinds of people. and i really saw the country. one of the things people said to me was, "i wish i did what you're doing...." life makes you feel trapped, often and very easily. the road can make you feel free, if only because you can control the internal air of the vehicle, or stay warm on a cold night.

it's a bleak, cold, snowy saint patrick's day, the kind that makes everyone go to the bar, get drunk, and let the bullshit run. i'll do that last while avoiding the first. i'm 1/365 irish and my wife is part irish so i consider myself lucky, and also have a little rebellious orange irish on my mom's side, where a wallace married a young fisherman's daughter and lived in northern ireland for over twenty years, before coming to maryland.

in chicago they dyed the river bright green like they always do, on the saturday before saint patty's day, and it's a big drinking event, bars are full all up and down the river and the loop for all of saturday and well into sunday. but this year they saw a shark in the water and people got seriously wigged out about it. a shark in the chicago river - aren't those sharks supposed to be in salt water only? i want to point out that, since that river originally went down to the mississippi, but they dredged a canal to connect it to lake michigan so that boats could go from the great lakes to new orleans and back, that canal upset our understanding of which way the water actually goes. we can guess that it still by and large goes toward the mississippi. but right up there near chicago, does it still flow down to new orleans? does it drain the lake or lakes, or fill them up? it's not clear to me at all.

but it was clear, after a bit of hoo-hah, that the shark was a moviemaker's stunt to publicize some movie about sharks, and wasn't real; he'd made a contraption with a fin, and stuck it in the river just at the right time when it was turning bright green. he apparently was very clever and it looked like a shark; it fooled everyone, or at least, a lot of people. and keep in mind, the alcohol was on his side, in this incident. they thought they saw a shark.


As for me, no river, no bright green, no lake, no shark. we could go over to the mississippi itself and see if any of that dye made its way down the river, but i kind of doubt it. and there's been a lot of snow and rain to wash it away in any case.

no alcohol for me either, just coffee, one cup after another. a book almost done. snow melting, slowly but surely, and getting warmer, almost imperceptably, if that's a word. chao

a wild trip to chicago started before i even left, when i got pulled over for expired registration and out-of-date insurance card; the citation for the insurance will go away when i show we were up to date, but the warning for the registration was just that: you drive around with that orange 2025 sticker, we'll see it and pull you over. sure enough, november had gone by, and four other months, and we hadn't noticed. a warning was a warning.

but the online registration computers were down, and at the dmv they weren't giving out stickers. turns out when i got there that they were giving out 2026 stickers as they were old, but not 2027. it was a this-year one that i needed, having failed to renew last november, and i was in luck, but an hour late on my way to chicago.

these days i take interstate straight north forty miles to moline, then east on 80 a couple hours until i get to 55 which shoots me right into the loop. it's a pretty straightforward route. was also lucky that my son lives but a few blocks from laskeshore drive, and our destination was also a few blocks from it, just further up the lake. so lots of lakeshore drive and otherwise pretty reasonable traffic.

i saw my policeman, though, right in the median, nose pointed at me as i passed a truck. if i still had that orange 2005 sticker i would have been a dead duck.

the only major event of the trip was that upon landing at the intersection of 80 and 55, a large sign said RAMP CLOSED. No detour, no sign warning, no alternate route. So I went south on 55 one exit and turned around. Probably half of us did that, the other half just shot past the ramp and came back on the next exit east. when it's unmarked you get that kind of random distribution and maybe that's best. a single detour might have overloaded either of those options.

lakeshore drive was beautiful; sun was setting to the west, sky was pink, lake was blue, the city shimmered alongside it. my sons seemed a little battered by life but it might just have been battered by making it to chicago during the week. it was good to see them and also grandchildren that accompanied them.

it so happens that today is a kind of longevity day. their grandfather, who would be my ex father-in-law, is turning 100 today. he's not in great shape but at least most of the family is there to celebrate what there is to celebrate. my ex herself is not showing up for whatever reason but that makes it easier for me to come and go.

but march tenth is also the birthday of my brother, who is 63, and of a guy named frank who he was named after, who was perhaps the most famous leverett. this guy walked 100,000 miles of the midwest collecting data and figuring out where the glaciers had been back in the ice age. he had mastered this technique which later became very valuable to the oil companies, of using surface features to predict underground things. he'd collected data his whole life, but he never had children, though his second wife had march tenth as a birthday as well. and then, toward the end of his life, he began collecting data about the family - how many? born when? married? to whom? etc. ect. he was obsessed with data, and yet of all the data he collected the most important number seemed to be longevity. how long did they live? what does that tell us about how long i'll live?

an ironic thing about his life is that while he was born on the iowa side of the river, back when iowa was a territory, and the river, of course, even then was the line between east and west, his research proved conclusively that long ago, that river flowed to his west, thus he was actually an easterner, given that ice age layout. today we are similarly obsessed with that line, at least in this territory.

in the end his longevity wasn't better or worse than anyone else's. yes he had walked 100,000 miles. i assume his knees and ankles gave out just like the rest of us. i'm not sure if he died happy. but he died at a relatively normal time (~87), nothing unusual.

i'm thinking of him, my ex father-in-law, and my brother as we go hurtling into spring. spring is springing. the dog is sound asleep, but it's beautiful out, and i, tired from my long trip, am just hanging in my chair.

forgot to finish the story though. nine-thirty or so, time to call it quits, and i take the third son home down lakeshore drive and get on the road for the west again. this time my ramp is open but i see that two of the four are closed including the one i'd have come in on. now it happens that i'd forgotten to change my hearing aid batteries upon leaving in a hurry, and now one was dead already, and the other about to die. it did die, somewhere around that junction. the last 2 1/2 hours i drove in silence, more or less, with lots of coffee, because, while it is somewhat dangerous to drive in silence, the real danger is in falling asleep from lack of loud trucks bearing down on you. i have a small car that blows around because of trucks and winds and i have to keep white knuckles on it all the way, but i did, occasionally taking a sip of a huge coffee i'd bought to make it. i made it. home ragged, but still here.

so i have a neice in london. she has a well-paying job; she speaks french, german and english well, and she was on her way to sri lanka for a holiday. Her boyfriend was going with her. the plane stopped in abu dhabi. just then, the war started, and they bombed the airport. the airline put her in a fancy hotel, expenses paid, and told her to wait. they'd have a plane out a s a p. they waited. no plane. they were holed up in abu dhabi as a war started. apparently 300,000 british travelers had their plans disrupted.

at first it looked like they could go on to sri lanka soon, but two things happened: one, the war went to sri lanka, and, two, it became obvious that if they went they couldn't come back. no flights were coming back through abu dhabi and their ticket didn't allow rerouting through delhi or some other place. they stayed still. they began to enjoy holiday things in abu dhabi - water park, shopping, etc. the danger of imminent shelling seemed minimal but on a wider level, stay out of the planes.

now it looks like they might go to paris on tuesday. my brother says the airlines found a narrow corridor, going up around iran and then just away from the russia-ukraine stuff, to get up into europe, and they'll use it. they also have a kind of deal with the war-makers - leave the commercial flights alone from two until about six in the evening. that gives them four hours a day to get people out of there.

my brother says usually in war they give people time to get out of its way, but in this case, no time, no warning, people were just stuck. to me that's a sign of incompetence on the u s military's part. somebody up there doesn't give a shit. and so, everyone's in harm's way and it's a kind of russian roulette.

we back here are just ashamed. we're waiting for some reason to spend millions a day, bomb girls' schools, disrupt oil shipping and air traffic, upset the balance, etc. are we just going to conquer the place, and take the oil? or is it just a crusade, they're the wrong religion, so, bomb them to smithereens. does someone benefit from this? some have called it the epstein war - trump needs it because it's clear he's a pedophile. netanyahu needs it worse because he's got similar scandals brewing. when you're at war you don't look too closely. eventually they'll be bombing american bases and then we'll all have to get united behind a common foe.

i myself think it's just ridiculous, but i don't want to say it too loudly. bring the world down, just for this? i'd rather bring trump and netanyahu down, and start over on the human relations. our peoples should be able to live in peace. we have no natural greivance against the iranian people.

it's tuesday afternoon about five. it's raining outside which means the cars sound a little different on the brick road. actually i kind of feel them more than i hear them, but it's a five-o-clock thing.

life has been busy and it's crowding me. i use two different computers now just to get online, and sometimes my phone, but my phone is the only one that's reliable, and these two have lots of serious problems, being as old as they are. this one doesn't quite charge right although just by chance it's charged now, 69%. I feel like hanging onto that charge but i have repressed needs to communicate which i'll use now even though i may be interrupted. this one is the old family computer so it's disheartening to see it charging poorly or not at all when you need it and it's slowly withering to nothing. the other one keeps blinking off, the minute i get in firefox; something about the new web security protocols just blinker it to death. oh well. i can't upgrade the operating system, so i can't upgrade the firefox, that simple. and that firefox is one of the few places i can get facebook. i need email to get on it elsewhere and don't have it. i have it here but this one goes days without being charged enough to even operate.

meanwhile teenagers are coming and going in our life, and twenty-year-old counts here; she just came back. a couple of seventeen-year-olds need lots of attention. the two young ones, ten and eight, need the most attention. and it's a busy world. here i am with all my attention directed to getting one computer to run.

the cold rain is good for the dead-looking brown yards and gardens out there; i think it was a little too dry. i think the snow we had didn't even wait around to seep into the ground. i think now finally we have a chance to see some green when it warms up.

i have a book to finish and i have to hurry up, but there's a puppy on my lap and my book is on the blinker computer which is over at my desk. the desk has been a lifesaver because when i sit up i actually get some work done. actually worked two hours or so today already. but it's not enough. i'm behind. i need to concentrate.

going to chicago in about six days to see sons and grandchildren. somehow it's stressful just thinking about it.

yet i like march, partly because of the green, partly because of the march madness, partly because it's tesol season. i used to do airport traveling in march, going to new cities for our conference, tesol. the month triggers the memory. in baltimore it was always raining. those were good times and then one year i had just gone once too often. i was burnt out. i couldn't really absorb new spirit or new techniques, or even new technology. and that also was in baltimore. my last one.

nowadays i think about those old times fondly. i find myself hanging onto those memories. even if the too-many kids in my life are too busy to hear them. it's me, and where i was is who i am.