Date: 9/30/2013
Day: 4
Location: Eureka, CA
Miles Today: 302
Total Miles:  695

Departure (at last;) a reverse, a REVERSE and some adventures.

An apocryphal and ancient Chinese person (or maybe it was a fortune cookie fortune author from Bayonne,) is supposed to have said that a  journey of ten thousand miles starts with a single step.  True enough either way.  What that person did not suggest is that the long distance traveler start by stepping backwards.  The One Lap enterprise began with a drive north to Ashland, Oregon and reversed field on day 4 by returning south a couple hours on I-5 to Redding and then west on the Trinity highway (299) to Eureka and the Pacific.  Our drive north on Hwy 1 will begin on Day 5 from Eureka.

This complication had the pleasant effect of allowing the Colonel to spend a few more hours in company with Mrs. Colonel Boot, something devoutly to be desired.  The Colonel does and will miss her every moment he is away.

This reverse was planned.  The second reverse was not.  About two hours into a two month solo trip the Colonel hit a deer on lovely Hwy 299.  This has never happened to him before and he does not recommend the experience.  Certainly terminal for the deer, the event was merely unpleasant for the Colonel.  He was able to drive away with the windshield and airbags intact; also the radiator, alignment and headlights.  There is some nasty impact damage to the hood, which can probably not be opened without a pry bar.  Since suicidal deer have been known to roll though the windshield during these events, our guardian angel did good.

Speaking of which, two German tourists in the trailing car very kindly stopped to be sure things were as well as could be.  They too were shocked that there was no more damage than there was.  Bless them.

The driver is always responsible whatever happens.  On a clear, dry road, moving at moderate speed -- who's hurrying -- the Colonel never saw the deer before impact.

Once is enough, once is once too many, in fact.

Tomorrow a report on walking through Weaverville and dinner at the Samoa Cookhouse.  And US 1 Northward

Wellington Boot, Col

 

Date: 9/29/2013

Day: 3

Location: Ashland, Oregon

Miles Today: 24

Total Miles: 393 

 

At OSF

On offer today at the indoor Angus Bowmer theater was The Tenth Muse by the Mexican playwright Tanya Saracho.  This play is set in a convent in New Spain in 1715.  The cast, all women, was brilliant.  The plot involved race and cast and power and the preservation of important literary material in this tiny insular world.  The energy driving the play is the body of work by Sister (Spanish Sor) Juana Ines de la Cruz, O. S. H.  (12 November 1651 -- 17 April 1695.)  Not at all known to the Colonel she was, according to Wikipedia, a self taught scholar and poet of the Baroque school.  She is considered today to be both a Mexican writer and a contributor to the Spanish Golden Age.  She is said to have been the first person to write a play in the Western Hemisphere and, according to Octavio Paz, the most important poet in the Americas before Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman. 

The following images are before and after her entry to the convent:

This person is worth some looking into and the Colonel will do so.

One further word about the outdoor "Elizabethan" theater and the use of projections.  The following picture shows this stage set up for tonight's performance of The Heart of Robin Hood.  (Which we missed, alas.)

At night OSF is able to project images (animated or still) on the white sections of the faux half timbered walls around and over the stage.  For Mid Summer Night's Dream it was giant trees and vines making the actors seem tiny fairies in scale.  Last night for Cymbeline it was the fire of war and the image of flying over water to accommodate change of scene from England to Italy.  Used with restraint, this is a powerful tool.  Not unlike CGI in movies, used to excess it diminishes the actors on the stage.  Fundamentally, the Colonel likes it.

The League of Nuevo Berkeley

Ashland is largely made of the same stuff as Berkeley.  It is smaller, cleaner, has far better theater and less (virtually no) graffiti.   But under the skin beats the same left wing heart.  It occurs to the Colonel that there must be other towns in America similarly afflicted.  Yellow Springs, Ohio, is one for sure.  Chapel Hill North Carolina is probably another.  This office welcomes submissions for entry into the League of Nuevo Berkeley.  Candidate cities must vote a straight Democratic ticket (unless an anarchist is running,) virtually everyone must listen to This American Life and be able to identify the birth names of both Click and Clack.  Announcement that a local theater group is going to produce an all female production of Two Gentlemen from Verona must be greeted with universal applause.  The city council must, from time to time, take feckless positions on foreign policy otherwise reserved for the Secretary of State.  Extra credit will be available if the city is home of an institute of higher learning which fields undistinguished sports teams.  Extra extra credit if it is surrounded, as is Ashland, by political troglodytes or even worse ... Republicans.

Tomorrow; On the road and how to post comments to this blog.

Wellington Boot, Col

 

Date: 9/28/2013

Day: 2

Location: Ashland, Oregon

Miles Today: 19

Total Miles: 369

Ashland is a quiet place. 

There is a wristwatch on offer in town that in place of hours has Eat, Sleep, Play, Nap, Drink in random order.  Not too far from the reality.  And what's not to like, at least over a long weekend.  Since this is Oregon, there are spectacular farmers markets presided over by people who make their counterparts in Oakland look like Blackwater mercenaries. 

 

Shopping is far from the Colonel's favorite activity, but they do a good job on this too in Ashland, with a minimum of tacky Tee shirts.   Four book stores, a plethora of candy and coffee shops and some seriously good places to eat.  All conducive to wandering about for a day or two.  AND there is no sales tax in Oregon; pretty cool for those from the land of 8 3/4%.  Governor Brown, please note.

New Sammy's Cowboy Bistro

This is one of the Colonels favorite places. Vern and Charlene Rollins own the place.  Charlene is the seldom seen genius in the kitchen, Vern the gracious host who can always be trusted to put the right wine on the table.  When we first went there in the 80's it looked like this:

New Sammy's  no longer looks on the outside like a shack hidden behind a bush on the dark road between Ashland and Talent, Oregon, with a defunct "please buy your used car here" arrow on the roof.  It was fun taking people to such a unprepossessing place, because even thirty years ago, when you had passed through the mud room, the inside looked like what the Colonel imagines a French country bistro would look like, immaculate, warm and inviting; complete with black and white cow wallpaper.

Now even your GPS can find the place and the name is announced to the world in iron letters three feet high, not on the 3 x 5 inch card you can just see thumbtacked to the front door on that old picture.  When you get there it will look like this:

The food is the same, altogether wonderful.   There is an astonishing wine list; ask Vern to see the big book.  We always just ask him to recommend something and wind up with a treasure for about $45, but the high end stuff is immediately available.  The restaurant is surrounded by gardens, which Alice Waters cannot manage in Berkeley:

This place would be successful across the street from Chez Panisse.  If you are ever within a couple hundred miles, it is worth a journey.

Last night the Oregon Shakespeare Festival gave us Cymbeline, rarely performed and with good reason.  There are lost princes and an evil queen, a Roman invasion and parted lovers.  It all works out in the end.  A powerful lot of plot for one play to manage.  The Colonel likes the obscure Shakespearian plays, they are so hard to come by, and enjoyed it mostly.

Wellington Boot, Col

Date: 9/27/2013

Day: 1

Location: Ashland, Oregon

Miles Today: 350

Total Miles:  350

Ten thousand miles,

Ten thousand miles,

Ten thousand miles,

Ten thousand miles.

A quick map reconnaissance indicates that the One Lap project will involve driving 9,947 miles.  This is the exact distance shown in the gazetteer from Oakland to Seattle, Seattle to Portsmouth Maine, Portsmouth to Key West, Key West to San Diego and San Diego back to Oakland.  The actual distance driven, of course, will be considerably longer.  Our route will be much more blue highway than Interstate highway.  It will be interesting to see just how much longer this particular One Lap will be.  The Colonel suspects the over / under number is 12K.

Ashland

The Bay Area conspired to be hard to leave Friday.  It was a crisp, clear and perfect day; the  tower of the new bridge shone white over both the water and its sad, tired, erector set predecessor.  A drive to Ashland is done almost on autopilot; one puts the wheels in the well worn traces on I-5 north, applies some throttle, waits 5 hours and there you are.  This is goal oriented, get me to the church on time, driven driving, not One Lap stop and poke your nose into anything interesting driving.  That is yet to come. 

The joy of driving north on I-5 (as opposed to the joyless drive south,) is, of course, watching Mt Shasta come and go.

A lonely mountain, Shasta the great and mysterious, rises at the extreme northern end of the Great Central Valley of California.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to see just a tendril of smoke rising from the summit of this volcano?

To continue to abuse Professor Tolkien; Ashland is Rivendale on this trip, the last homely home, with dear friends -- Grant and Elise --  at whose table to share dinner.  Other  than time enjoyed with friends, the reason to be in Ashland, of course, is the theater.  Friday night we saw an interesting production of Mid Summer Nights Dream.  A bit over wrought for my taste, but the Colonel almost never thinks a director gets it entirely right.  They used very interesting animated projections  -- of trees and vines and Puck flitting about to perform his (her, it's?) mischief -- to make the fairy world vivid on the stage.  Well worth our time.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Ashland; on Monday the solo trip begins.

Wellington Boot, Col

One Lap 9/20/2013

Date: 9/20/2013

Day: -7

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

Drood

A disagreeable thing about Blogs, one among many; they are displayed in ascending date order from bottom to top --  and most often read from top to bottom newest calendar date first.  If you missed the recent exposition on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, please see the posting for September 15^th.

The word “Drood” was copywriten by Mr. Dickens, or his heirs, in 1870 but the word has long been fair game. You may suppose the word to mean whatever it amuses you to imagine, but if you really want to know….

Drood is a common, non-medical term for Periorbital puffiness, the bags some folks have under their eyes.  “Look at the droods on Susan; she must have been working on the Smithers report all night.”   

Two outstanding examples of rampant Droodism are shown below.

Mother T, hawk eyed and well drooded in search of good deeds to do.

 

Neither Gandalf nor even mutant, but you gotta love those droods on Sir Ian.

 In another perhaps more just world, there would have been a picture of the Colonel here, drooded extravagantly, but executive privilege prevents this.  Good taste, also.

Road Names

 

Road names are a tradition that probably goes back to Cain on the road, fugitive and vagabond.  As long as there have been highways, people to travel on them and highwaymen to come riding (riding, riding, up to the old inn door,) anyone leaving home has had an opportunity to become, for the nonce, someone else.  I mean, who’s gonna know different when a city boy is somewhere severely rural on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

In this light, one had to wonder who those people really were who gathered at the Tabard Inn for the pilgrimage to Canterbury. 

The Tabard inn, Southwark, mid-19th century.

Oddly, some people who need a road name don’t have one – consider Phineas Fogg, supposed bank robber.  

 

Phileas Fogg by Alphonse de Neuville & Léon Benett  in the first (1873) edition of Around the World....

While other people who need a road name display a dandy example of the type –  William Bonney, well known psychopath. 

 

Mr Bonney, badly in need of new haberdashery.  You can tell him.

And still other people, who you would think to be severely in need a road name, don’t have one not even of any kind – I give you Bonnie and Clyde, repeat diagnosis above.

The Colonel mulled a number of possibilities as submitted for his consideration by the One Lap ad hoc committee on tasteful road name selection:

Some were too close to home:  Crazy Cooter

Some were much too cute:  Lost Sheep

Some were too silly:  Nanner Puddin’

Some really good ones were already taken:  Tater Salad

Some were simply too much: Preston Trombly III

Some required more chutzpa than even the Colonel can muster: Yakub Bageloff

So after mature consideration of this is a very important matter, which effects the tone of the entire One Lap enterprise, the Colonel decided to avoid the nom de road question entirely and remain simply who he is, yours truly …

Wellington Boot, Col.

One Lap 9/19/2013

Date: 9/19/2013

Day: -8

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

So, how about the logo?

This logo above, which is exactly what the Colonel had in mind as necessary to establish proper panache for the One Lap project, was drawn by the noted Berkeley polymath, Mr. Dan Schiff.  Did someone ask who is Dan Schiff?  Seriously?  Can there be anyone who does not know??  Perhaps you have been living with your head in a bucket of bolts (or in some place other than Berkeley, California, Yellow Springs, Ohio, or the James Joyce Stiftung [Foundation] in Zurich.)  If so, Mr. Schiff is, among far too many other things to note here:

• A publishing mogul – founder and chief potentate of Wonderworker Press, see www.wonderworkerpress.com.  If you don't know what a wonderworker is, you need to read Ulysses again.  

  

  Stolen from Wonderworker Press, but at least we supplied attribution

•  A DJ who created the music files which will form the acoustic background for the One Lap project.   

• A noted bassist.
  

  

  Stolen from... That would be the hand of Mr. S on the left.

• Al respected Joycean scholar with sufficient publications in academic journals to merit tenure at most colleges.  Selah! 

• The world expert on Joyce and cartooning – a more important topic than you might think.  When next you meet him, ask about Ally Sloper and find a place to sit down; it’s a good story.

Stolen from .....

• A cartoonist of such fecundity and power that he was able to create our logo with one hand while eating Cajun shrimp from Easy Creole in Berkeley with the other.  Really.

It's not about what it is not, but what it is.

•       An proponent of large hair for men.

Mr. Schiff, our blogflogger and all around good guy.  Ask him about the watch.

• He has been referred to on the astral plane by Margaret Dumont as the Harpo Marx of Joyce criticism, but not so by the Colonel.  The Colonel thinks Gummo closer to the mark.

Mr. Schiff is also a blogflogger to whom we are grateful for flogging the Colonel into the early parts of the twenty-first century.  Impelling the Colonel far enough, at least, to be able to post words and images to this blog no matter where he might be -- so long that it is within range of Starbucks WI-Fi or a Sprint cell tower. This is no small accomplishment, since the Colonel still mourns the loss of rotary dial phones with little light-up buttons that show which lines are busy.  He thinks communications have been all down hill since then, internet be damned.  Crusty follow, the Colonel.

 

In a gentler age we would have said Mr. Schiff was our mentor, kind and very generous with his time, who taught us how to manage this task, but what the modern age gains in rapid access to data, it loses in couth.

So blogflogger is what he is.

Tomorrow, an answer to the pressing question of Drood and some thoughts on road names.

Wellington Boot, Col.

Date: 9/16/2013

Day: -11

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

 

The Emporium

The Colonel hopes to have the One Lap emporium open for business by departure day, now so near.  You will be pleased to learn that a tasteful One Lap logo has been approved by the tasteful logo approval committee.  The winning design (drawn from the many hundreds submitted to the committee from all over this great land) shows a solid white image of the Continental United States with the border hugging One Lap route traced in red.  The words "One lap" in black are centered on the part of the country the Colonel will never see on this trip.  (The term  "Fly Over People" is rude and will not be used here, appropriate as it may -- or may not -- be.)

The usual swag will be available from the emporium, all featuring our tasteful logo: the One Lap baseball cap with optional forward facing  reading lights, a double deck of One Lap playing cards, the soft side One Lap laptop bag, a One Lap grill master apron with extra large BBQ mitt pocket, the moisture wicking One lap t-shirt, and both long sleeve and short sleeve One Lap polo shirts for men and women available in a variety of colors.    Bidding is intense at this point between Tom Tom and Garmin for licensing rights to the One Lap logo on a suitable GPS device.  The deal should close shortly.  The list goes on, please down load our catalog.

Interest has been fevered concerning the Colonel Wellington Boot bobble head.  Unfortunately, delivery of this item will be delayed somewhat.  There is heated debate among the One Lap marketing team concerning just what sort of Colonel the Colonel is.  Apparently, he's not telling.  Apparently, none of these folks have ever seen him, which may seem odd to you but not to the Colonel.  One faction proposes a figure with an iron grey buzz cut, dressed in cammos, wearing jump boots, holding a squad automatic weapon.  The other crowd wants fairly long white hair done in a (yes, tasteful,)  subdued pompadour, dressed to recall both the Colonels confrere Harlan Sanders and Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz.  This figure would be wearing, of course, Wellies, probably in red.  The intern who suggested that the Colonel be depicted holding crossed chicken drum sticks is no longer with the firm.  There does not seem to be a lot of room for compromise between the two factions so availability of the anxiously awaited bobble head cannot be projected at this time.  Perhaps Mr. Putin can suggest a compromise.

What is yet to come

 

The following images were not taken by the Colonel, but derive from research done during map reconnaissance on line.  How could anyone not want to go to the places shown?  And this is just the Northern Route! 

Somewhere in North Dakota

Somewhere else in North Dakota

Yet somewhere else in ....

Looking back at North Dakota, probably not a good thing to do at speed.

The Colonel expects to get a drink of ice water there as tradition demands.

One reason you might want to come on this trip -- PIE!

One reason you might not.

A definitive reason  why you might not.

Insufficient reason to move to South Grand Forks N. D.  Which is certainly a very nice place.

Some farmer folks have way too much time.

More to come.

Wellington Boot, Col

Date: 9/15/2013

Day: -12

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

 

The Colonel finds himself with a head full of Drood. 

This circumstance is courtesy of some friends who provided the excuse for spending a month with that most interesting half novel: Drood, Edwin: The Mystery of, as the Army would put it.  

Drood.  

Droooood.  

No one ever created names like Mr. Dickens.  “Don’t step in the Drood.”  “You know, and I say this as a friend, a little plastic surgery would remove those unsightly Droods.”  “Droods are being worn longer in the back this year and in very sudden plaid.” “Oh no! They got Louie …  right in the Droods!”  

"Droodlocks.”

One could go on, but out of human kindness, one should not.  You are invited to define the noun Drood and pass it along here to be passed along.  America wants to know.

The book is particularly interesting because it is a novel by a great story teller, completed ready to publish up to what we are told is the exact halfway point; at which point the author died.  Ink, the story goes, was still wet on that last page when he checked out.  

Should you send time with E. D.?  Perhaps.  Dickens is not to everyone's taste.  It is clear that he was writing to fill empty columns in a monthly magazine.  Like much of Mark Twain, his story feels a bit elongated at times.  But, since it is Dickens, it is a great story with absolutely wonderful characters.  Mr Sapsea, the jackass, is perfect in every way except the content of his character.  Stony Durdles and Deputy, who stones him home, are again perfect and could have sprung from no mind but that of Dickens.  I flatter J. K. Rowling when I say that some of her characters carry a whiff of Dickens about them.

The game of Drood, inevitably, is to propose a solution to the mystery that is congruent with all the information Mr. Dickens gave us without stepping beyond the spirit of the thing.  Both the zombie apocalypse and space aliens are popular right now, but they don't fit my idea of 1850's rural England any more than does Abraham Lincoln in 1850 with a bloody ax out looking for the not quite sufficiently dead.  (What a bad movie that was!)

It will not, perhaps, be a surprise to you to learn that the Colonel -- after a month marinating in the book -- was visited by the ghost of the Mr. Dickens. He was not wrapped in chains like Marley, but appeared mummy-like in swath after swath of uncompleted manuscript pages with tomes, not money boxes, bound tight about his body.  He was followed by a regiment of barely visible characters staring at him reproachfully, Bill Sykes Nancy first among them.  As a result, the Colonel possesses the only real and true answer to the riddle.  

More about the trip and exiting items from the One Lap emporium next time.

Wellington Boot, Col.

Date: 9/6/2013

Day: -21

Location: Home

Miles Today: 0

Total Miles:  0

I am thinking about what it will be like being gone for a long time.  There are, as always in life, pluses and minuses.  This is how we know we are a fallen race.

When Professor Tolkien was asked what motivated him to embark on the enormous task that was creating The Lord of the Rings, he said he wanted to try his hand at a really long story.

[I recently read the suggestion that the greatest single work of human imagination was Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  Assuming the four operas to be a unity and not in competition with a chunk of Shakespeare, this is plausible enough. The Ring is overwhelming; a mass of inexpressibly wonderful music and many, many hours of libretto.  And you can whistle the tunes as you walk out!  It is stunning to think that the avalanche of words, music and stage craft spring from a single brain.  That said, and with a respectful nod to Wagner both nasty and great, I suspect Tolkien takes the biscuit in this regard.  TLOTR is a more complete story with (what I find to be) more plausible albeit mostly nonhuman characters.  It exists in a world furnished with a more detailed back story, multiple complete languages and is ultimately about the struggle against distilled evil.  That he was doing unsurpassed work as an academic literary critic while he created this universe is boggling.  You are, of course, welcome to disagree.]

I have always imagined taking a really long road trip.  Not a Neal Cassidy type trip, running away from or towards something undefined, leaving destruction and unhappiness in my wake.  Nor either a Travels with Charley type trip, with the clear if unexpressed aim to leave a travel book as residue of the undertaking.  I have always imagined a trip determined only by fancy and happenstance.  I once had a few days ‘at leisure’ in Canada with a car someone else was paying for.  For much of that time I took every third left turn just to see where the road might go.  It was liberating.

This trip, the aim and title of which are One Lap, is to make that long trip approximately around the perimeter of the continental United States.  In draft, the plan is simple.  Even someone who was once an infantry Lieutenant can manage it without, probably, getting much lost:

•       Drive north from Oakland to Seattle, turn right.  People speaking Canadian indicates having gone too far.
•       Drive east to Portland, Maine, or until the tires get salt water on them, turn right.
•       Drive south to Key West or, again, until the tires get salty.  Turn around, drive north on a different path.
•       Drive west at the first plausible opportunity which avoids the Gulf of Mexico to San Diego or…..the wet tire thing again.
•        Drive north until the best place on earth appears.
•        Stop.

A trip defined by the absence of Canadians or salt water.  Seems simple enough.  More details to follow before the departure date of 9/27/2013.

Wellington Boot, Col.