17. All Good Things

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION CAME TO A GLORIOUS END sometime in my elementary school years. I know this because the night of the series finale I had a little league game and my mother taped the episode on something archaeologists will one day refer to as a "VCR".

Back then, I played third base for Ditmars Bakery. I wasn't any good at baseball--neither at hitting nor fielding nor throwing--but what I did do well, and I hope that counted for something, was block the ball.

If a scorcher came down the third base line, I'd throw my body and keep the ball in front of me. This was good training for the years I would play goalkeeper on a soccer pitch, where, essentially, the only skill you need, is to throw your body in front of the ball.

I wasn't the greatest keeper on the planet, but you could do worse than send me between the posts.

By the time I was old enough to understand Star Trek, I didn't want to be a baseball player when I grew up. By then, I knew that wasn't in the cards for me. Not in baseball. Not in soccer.

You could tell the other kids were faster and more skilled.

They cared more, too, about the game. They didn't just accept that they might be good enough to be ballplayers--in the daily, narcissistic delusions we indulge in to get through our days, they thought of themselves as ballplayers.

Meanwhile, what I really wanted to be, what I walked around the halls of PS 85 thinking of myself as, was Commander of the Star Trek Enterprise.

That, at least, was realistic.

And so, the current commander of the Star Trek Enterprise, William Riker, was more or less my role model.

Riker was brave and confident and tall and good-looking and courageous and most importantly, he was trusted by the captain, by Jean-Luc Picard, the Frenchman with the British accent.

Picard called Riker "Number One" and he sent Riker on the away team missions, and whenever Picard had to disappear to host a diplomatic envoy, Riker would be left in charge of the ship.

"The bridge is yours, Number One," Picard would say, and Riker would get gassed up with a big cheese ball grin and take the captain's chair.

After spending time learning from the best, it was assumed that Riker would take over the Enterprise and be the best.

He was considered the up-and-coming star in Starfleet command. He was respected by his peers and adored by his subordinates. He could lead. He cared about others. He believed in service and discipline.

He afforded his officers leeway and encouraged their independent thought.

By all measures, Riker was the man. And by all the measures I could count, I wanted to be Riker.

But sometime early, in my elementary school years, in an episode titled, "All Good Things," the show ended.

I could no longer watch an episode of Star Trek and think, in my end, before the captain would act, what I would do as captain. I could no longer pretend I was Riker, and think, in my head, what Riker would do, before he would do it.

The end of the show took that away from me. From then on out, I knew the turns and twists, the gambits and losses, and it was all just a review.

It had all come to an end.



SO IT IS WITH THIS ROAD TRIP. I am now back in Queens, NY, after having traveled to Stroutsburg and Buffalo and Ann Arbor and Mackinac and Minneapolis and West Branch and St. Louis and Columbia and Independence and Rapid City and Cody and Yellowstone and Jackson and Bozeman and Calgary and Edmonton and Dawson's Creek and Whitehorse and Tok and Fairbanks and Anchorage and Juneau and Minnedosa and Winnipeg and the mother fucking George Washington Bridge.

It was a good trip.

And now that I'm sort of on the spot to produce a more substantive statement than "it was a good trip", I'm sort of at a loss. Am I supposed to say it was amazing or super or unbelievable?

Am I supposed to say that I got something out of it that's changed my life forever?

I don't know.

But I'll share something I wrote this on a rest area, on I-80, most of the way back home. I hope it has that sort of sweeping arc one expects out of cross-country road trips.

It's not exactly Melville about to send Ishmael on the Pequod, but I hope it'll do. I wrote this in a Hyundai after all. It came to me in Pennsylvania.

That's the moral of road trips. You keep moving all you want. The world isn't going anywhere.

So, ahem...

It is important to be great. We must all be great. Have the courage to aspire to greatness and surround ourselves with those who share this ambition. We are, none of us, in competition with the Joneses of the world. Not of the Smiths.

We are in competition with the Lincolns, the Gandhis, the Darwins, the Salks, and the Bartons. Some of these men and women achieved greatness by tackling the obvious injustices of their era. Others through ingenuity and innovation.

If the struggles of our era are not obvious, we must find them.

All achieved greatness through service.

As I return to New York, my journey has not ended. It has begun with an awesome new vigor.

I encourage all to a commitment to greatness. I have committed to greatness. The day I return to New York will be the anniversary of this day and every year this day will mark our progress.

Service is not rendered and greatness is not achieved without sacrifice. We must establish greatness as our first priority and be willing to decide and lead with this priority to guide.

Thank you.

I literally wrote "Thank you" in my notebook and spoke in the first-person plural as if I was Bill Pullman in Independence Day giving a speech to the last air wing of the human resistance: "We will not go quietly into the night, we will not go down without a fight...today will be our Independence Day."

But I stand by it.

October 3rd. That is the day that, from this point forward, I will measure my life. Not some random fluke like my birthday, just counting the years since I was born, and estimating when I will die. But a Ground Zero for the balance of my story.

Wherein the narrator has his moment of epiphany, followed by an epilogue, which previews a sequel.

Hopefully I'll stick to this ambition. It is my intention to stick to this ambition--read more books, drink less scotch, put the nose to the grindstone--and hope to see results. We'll check back in a year.

The idea is, if I work hard enough, maybe, just maybe, one day I'll even get to ride shotgun on the Enterprise.




BOX SCORE
Total time: 54 days
Total mileage: 13,000 (Oil changes: Elmurst, NY; Springfield, IL; Bozeman, MT; Fairbanks, AK; Edmonton, AB)
Miles per day: 240.75

Nights slept in WalMart: 6
Nights slept in a rest stop in Minnedosa, Manitoba: 1
Nights slept in weather so cold it produced frost on tent: 3

Furthest west I saw a bear: On the wilderness tour of Denali National Park.
Furthest east I saw a bear: On the mile 224 marker on I-80 in Pennsylvania.

Most amazing: Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota
Least amazing: Customs official's ass crack hanging out my driver's compartment

Number of bugs killed on windshield: 1983745621390874921308471239084079. As the saying goes, "Kill one bug and you're a murderer, kill a thousand, and you should change your oil at places that offer free car washes."

Speeding tickets: 1 (Anchorage, AK), 78 in a 65. Kind of schmaltzy if you ask me. Lucky they didn't catch me going 110 through the sandhills of Nebraska. Would've been hard to explain that one. "But officer, I didn't know people lived around here."

Number of people who rode in car besides me: Pascal, Queens to Rochester; Pannda, Rapid City to Jackson; Cavester, Calgary to Anchorage; Staplez, Anchorage to Edmonton; God, Queens to Queens.

Backyards of former vice-presidential candidates visited: 1 (Palin's lake in Wasilla, AK)

Best meal: Alaskan snow crab at that place in Juneau. You know the one.
Worst meal: French fries from Burger King in Toledo, OH. They were cooked in rat poison, I'm sure of it.

Favorite vocabulary word of the trip: hirsute (n.), meaning hairy. As in Z came back from Alaska fairly hirsute. The word can, for fun, be pronounced like "hair suit." Like, Z came back from Alaska in a hirsute.

Driving time-waster, 1st place: Pannda reading aloud the Presidential Flash Cards I bought in Truman's library. Who knew Woodrow Wilson used to be President of Princeton before he was Governor of New Jersey?

Driving time-waster, 2nd place: Trivial Pursuit. There is an inordinate amount of trivia about Africa, Arabs, and Egyptian history in this game, which comes in kind of handy if you're, like, an Egyptian-American.

Driving time-waster, honorable mention: Country music. "God is great, beer is good, people are crazy." You can't make up lyrics like that. Well, actually, you could. If you were guy making up those lyrics...




SO THAT'S ALL FOR THE ROAD TRIP, but what about being back to Queens? On the way across America, whenever someone would notice my New York license plate, they would instinctively ask: "You're not really from New York, are you?"

"Yup, Queens."

My sister, who is also from Queens, would find it surprising that I would say "Queens" and not "New York City" as she does, Queens, technically being, the largest component of said metropolis.

"I don't want people thinking I'm some pansy from Manhattan."

"But it's OK that you're a pansy?"

"As long as they don't think I'm a pansy from Manhattan."

She was skeptical as to whether or not people from across America, and many parts of Canada would know where Queens is. They do. They all do. I've never had one person ask, "Where is that?"

It's the home of two of the three airports you would use to fly into New York. We've got the Mets in Flushing. We also have a grand slam tennis tournament. There's been a major sitcom based in Queens for two generations: "All in the Family" and then "King of Queens."

Not to mention that George Costanza lives in Queens. He actually "lives" in the block down from my grandma.

The great Carol O'Connor was even from Queens himself. So is John McEnroe, Rodney Dangerfield, Tony Bennet, and Christopher Walken. To name a few. Oh, yeah, Simon & Garfunkel.

They filmed King Kong in Queens.

Who doesn't know Queens?

But to be away from Queens from so long, and then to suddenly return, incurs a bit of a culture shock. You never quite get used to the death trap of Queens Boulevard. Not to the tangling subway lines at Roosevelt Ave, and especially not to the Queens attitude problem.

And if you're away for awhile, your resistance to said attitude problem can atrophy.

It even did with me.

Went down to the Kew Gardens County Clerk's office my second day back. Wanted to register for a rifle license so I could legally buy a gun and learn to hunt. (Alaska puts these things in a man's mind.)

Parked my car, bought a cold bottle of water from a Korean grocer, and headed down to the basement of the clerk's office. Around the corner from their post office, through rusty, paint-pealing doors, behind a counter stood a woman all of five-feet tall with curly blond hair.

She was not happy to be working in the basement of the clerk's office on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens.

"What do you want?" she asked me, a proud public servant, serving the needs of no one in particular.

I told her I would like to apply for a rifle license.

She handed me the application. "Here!" she literally screamed at me, "Go!"

"Somewhere else?"

"Read the instructions."

She didn't give me much time to follow her own advice. "Um, can I get another one for my friend?"

She snatched the application back from my hand. "You got a computer a home?"

"Yes."

She wrote down a URL for me to download another application. "Then use it."

Ah. Welcome back to Queens, fucker. Your hairy ass wasn't missed. Not even for a second.








Wherein the narrator returns from his trip in a hair suit.







Wherein the narrator is arrested for stealing cereal from the Pannda's lair.

16. Coming to America

I WENT TO STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY."

"And what is it you said you do for work?"

"I'm in advertising."

"At what company?"

"Well...you see. I'm sort of between companies."

"You were fired or laid off?"

"Not exactly."

"Well which one was it?"

"I quit so I could drive to Alaska."

Outside, a thousand pitter-patts crashed against the south-facing window. A custom official escorted a father and his son into the main lobby. "He's got bears," he announced to the room. "Two of them."

My own personal customs official--I don't know his name--he didn't share--even the state trooper who pulled me over in Anchorage gave me his name--let's call him Short, Fat, and Bald, or ShoFaBa, asks me to empty the contents of my pockets.

On the counter I place my wallet, a receipt from a motel on the AlCan Highway, three pens of varying colors, an iPhone with its rubber sleeve ripped at the receiver, and my car keys.

"Turn your pockets inside out, sir," he asks me.

I do.

"They call that a Hoover wallet," I inform him. "From the Great Depression. When no one had money. They blamed it on Hoover."

"Turn the waistband of your pants inside out for me."

He examines and finds nothing.

"I can see where this is going, sir."

"Lift up your pant legs for me."

He sees wicker socks I've worn for the last three days.

"And I just want to put it on the table, that I neither consume nor transport any illegal drugs, nor firearms."

"Your cap sir."

I hand it over.

"There is some alcohol in my trunk, but this will probably be a waste of time for both of us."

He pulls out my license from my wallet.

"The address on your wallet doesn't match the address you gave me."

"The address on my wallet is my summer house," I inform him. It is unclear whether I should tell him that I keep the remote Suffolk Country address so I can save money on my car insurance. This might be fraud. Or something. I don't know if customs is concerned with fraud. But he might have friends he can call. "Lived out there when I went to college. Never bothered to change that address."

"So do you live in Riverhead or in Queens?"

"Queens, sir."

"And you work in Queens."

"No, I don't work."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you said you were in advertising."

"I'm between companies."

"Which ones?"

"PantherBrain to Ogilvy & Mather."

"Never heard of them."

We are sitting in a customs office in International Falls, and a man who rifles through tourist's underwear bags for a living is telling me he's never heard of the most famous ad agency in existence. This does not surprise me.

"They're kind of a big deal."

"And that's where you'll be working soon?"

I am now officially lying to a U.S. Customs Official. "Yes, sir."

He nods his head, up and down, like an inverted grandfather clock, counting a second like any other second. "Is your car unlocked?"

I tap my keys sitting on the counter.

"This will only take a minute and I can get you on your way?"

"Is that like a metaphorical minute?"

"Have a seat, please."

Behind us are a line-up of office chairs manufactured at the pasty gray office chair depot in the sky. I take the one closest to the door. Sitting three chairs down for me is another young scruffy male traveling alone.

"What are you in for?" I ask him.

"Excuse me?"

"What are you in for?" Did he not get the joke or just not understand my mumbling? Could have been both.

"They just stopped me," he said.

"Where you coming from?"

"Nova Scotia."

"No shit. I didn't know you could drive off of Nova Scotia."

"It's the long way. The ferry is shorter."

"I'm coming from Alaska." In my head there is a map. There is string pulled taut from Alaska to International Falls, Minnesota, and another line pulled taut from Nova Scotia, Canada to International Falls, Minnesota. "We kind of traveled from the exact opposite sides of the continent," I said to him. "And ended up in the same place."

He takes a second to do the geometry himself. A car is leaving Nova Scotia traveling at 60 miles per hour..."Yeah."

"Where's your final destination?" I'm hoping he says Los Angeles. Then I would say New York. And we would live in a bizarro world of wayward travelers. But he disappoints. He tells me "North Dakota."

"On purpose?"

"Um, yeah."

"That's cool. That's like the one place I haven't been." That, and Los Angeles. Which would have been cooler. He disappoints me. He makes me want to settle for Oakland.

I take my throne.

I have a vague recollection of my friend, Pascal, who is almost a lawyer, arguing that the customs process is a violation of 4th Amendment principles. I do not remember drawing my own opinion on the matter. This is not serving me well.

It is four PM, I think Central Time. I lost count somewhere in Canada. I think Manitoba. I like the name Minnedosa. Minnedosa, Manitoba. That's even better than Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And that's a hard name to beat.

Outside, my customs official is walking away from my opened trunk back into the building.

"Is everything in that car yours?"

"Everything, everything?"

"Everything."

"Not the quilt in the back seat. That is definitely not mine."

"Who does it belong to?"

"A friend of mine."

"Where is your friend?"

"Yonkers."

"And he gave it to you?"

"I am transporting it back from Alaska on his behalf."

"Is there anything special about this quilt I should know about?"

"It might smell like drool." I think this over a second. "It might also smell like I slept with it in my car in a Manitoba rest stop."

He fixes his stare on me a second too long and then returns to the trunk. The seconds on the wall clock keep ticking along, but nothing is moving. I pull my phone out of my pocket. I open it to Paper Toss and set it to Easy.

A tiny, digital crump of paper is moved, left to right, by the gentle hum of an office fan. The paper hits the left rim of the waste-basket, bounces straight up in the air and falls in.

"Sir, you can't use that here." Another customs official has taken time away from important paperwork to inform me of this.

"Use what?"

"Your phone."

"I'm not using my phone."

"What's that in your hand?"

"It's a video game system."

"It's a phone sir."

"It's a computer, that has a phone as one of its functions. A function, I am not currently using."

"In any case, it's not allowed."

"Is that the law?"

"It's our rules, sir."

It doesn't seem fair that they can make up whatever rules they want in their little customs office and I am expected to comply by this. My congressional representative is Carolyn Maloney. I make a note of this. There's also Schumer and Gillenbrand in the Senate. Maybe I'll write them.

If I ever get back to New York.

I put the phone away.

"So you must see a lot of weird stuff come through here."

If he won't let me distract myself, then I'm going to distract him.

"Excuse me?"

"You must see a lot of weird things around here."

"Sure."

"What do people try to smuggle?"

"All sorts of things."

"What's the craziest thing you ever saw?"

He puts his papers down and takes off his glasses. "It's not that we see weird things," he tells me, "It's that we meet weird people."

I don't appreciate the tone of his voice. "Guess it takes one to know one."

He rolls his eyes and goes back to his keyboard.

I turn around to watch the customs official go back through my car. The poor guy is now hanging out my driver's door, his ass against wet asphalt. There have to be better jobs in the world.

Like writing advertisements for big pharmaceutical companies.

Or driving to Alaska on a whim.

"Do you find that interesting?"

"Excuse me." I turn and it's my old friend the video-game fascist pestering me again.

"You seem to be pretty interested in the affairs of our office."

"I'm sort of a captive audience."

"Be that as it may, is there something you want to tell me?"

"What would I want to tell you?"

"Anything that would make this afternoon go more smoothly."

"Oh, I see."

He gives me one of those looks you see on the cop shows on TV when the cop wants to pretend that he's your friend.

"There is this one thing."

The face gets friendlier. We are now golf buddies. Our wives exchange pot roast recipes.

"Well..." I look back at the car. The customs official is going through my glove compartment. He is finding Radiohead CDs and a speeding ticket from Alaska. "How long does it take to get to Duluth from here?"

"Duluth?"

"Yeah, that's a city around here right."

"About three hours."

"Three real hours or three Google hours, because Google directions say they take longer than they actually do."

"Three hours sir."

"Is that driving like a girl, three hours, or driving like--"

"That's driving with a healthy respect for the safety and well being of oneself and others."

So, like two, two and a half hours. It's been a long road trip. I can't respect speed limits anymore. It's just me and the road out there. Me and God.

And points don't transfer over between states. I think. My friend, The Great Sha Rhu Khan, told me that. He's almost a doctor. I didn't double check myself.

And then I sit down again. And I am out of clever things to say and cool games to play. At the pace I am traveling, zero inches per hour, I will never make it to Duluth or Mackinac Island or Ann Arbor or DC or home, and I will die, right here, in my chair, in Minnesota.

Minnesota. At least that's a cool name. Not as good as Minnidosa. Not as good as Manitoba. But much better than Queens.

"We'll have you on your way shortly," the customs official promises. And two hours later, after they've checked through my laundry bag, camera bag, laptop bag, through my suitcase full of clothes, through my camping gear and sleeping bag, through my glove department and fuse box, under my floor guards and in my engine, with that mirror that goes under the bumper, takes out my spare and checks the rims, I am finally, mercifully, free to go.

My official hands me back my keys.

"Sorry about the mess," I tell him.

"That's alright. Have a nice day sir."

Yeah, what's left of it. "Thanks," I tell him.

Out at my car, the customs official has strangely moved the trash from my front seat and set it down on the floor. My map is stacked nicely. So are my tissues. In the back seat, my quilt is folded and my boxes of mac & cheese lined up in a row. He zipped up my suitcase.

Of all things, this custom official spent more time cleaning up after me than I spent cleaning up after myself.

Exactly two more hours.

15. Seven Things I Always Wanted To Know About Alaska

BEFORE EMBARKING ON THIS TRIP TO ALASKA, I cracked open my journal and wrote down seven questions, about Alaska, that I wanted to answer in Alaska.

As I sit in a clean motel right outside downtown Anchorage, it's about time to get to the bottom of these epic mysteries.

1. What does "Alaska" mean and in what language does it mean it?
"The great land" in the Aleut language.

Learned this as the border on the AlCan highway. You can tell it was the border because they blazed out a path through the forest to mark the border. God forbid we planted a few trees and Americans and Canadians confused who owned them.

2. When and how did Alaska become a state?
Turns out that Alaska become the 49th state exactly 50 years ago.

I know this because they have hung banners all over this state to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Alaska becoming a state.

Alaskans had been petitioning for statehood for years, at least from 1916, but hadn't gained traction. Many were resentful of the US Congress, who ruled over their fate but wouldn't grant Alaskans their own representatives.

That changed when in 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a petition to accept Alaska as the 49th state of the union, supposedly in honor for their role in World War II.

3. What were the Japanese doing in the Aleuts during World War II?
They were waging war with America, that's what they were doing. Besides Pearl Harbor, the Aleutian Islands were the only American land to see combat during World War II.

The Japanese forces, led by the great Admiral Yamamoto, were supposedly protecting Japan's northern flank from American counterattack. The invasion was of no great consequence, but due to the difficulty of the islands' terrains, it took America over a year to evict the Japanese from this perch.

4. Can you see Russia from Alaska?
You can. Head to the west coast and you can peek over the Bering Straight and catch a glimpse of Siberia. You cannot, however, see Russia from Wasilla. You cannot see Russia from Wasilla for two geological reasons: 1. there's a mountain range in the way; and, 2. the Earth is round.

This is now a linguistic argument. When Sarah Palin say she could see Russia from her backyard, did she mean her backyard in Wasilla, or the royal, collective, her backyard, which, as governor of Alaska, included, or was pertaining to the Western coast?

The world will never know.

5. Does Alaska have Native American reservations?
Actually, no. Alaska is the only state in the union without Native American reservations--and the Native Americans are much better off for it.

As it turns out, the Native Americans had sued Congress for land rights. Congress ignored them for years--until oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay and they needed to build a pipeline through indigenous territory.

The indigenous people of Alaska settled for land rights in exchange for giving America a 10-mile swath of land in which they could build said pipeline and Dalton's highway to accompany it.

The natives then formed corporations, of which each member of the community was a shareholder, and in which only members of the community and their descendants could own shares.

If I married in, I couldn't become a shareholder, but my children would be. I learned this from the tour guide after I signed up to take a United States Postal Service plane into the arctic circle.

6. Why is Juneau the capital of Alaska when you can't even drive there?
The city limit of Juneau are larger than either Rhode Island or Delaware, and almost as big as both states combined. That should just give you an idea of just how big Alaska is.

It's the largest state in the union, and they love showing maps up here of Alaska's political boundaries superimposed on a map of the "lower 48" which makes the 49th state look like that birthmark on Gorbachev's head.

Alaska makes Texas look small.

Juneau was actually the first city established after Seward's purchase. There were gold in them there hills, and Joe Juneau, of which the town is named after, went out to find it.

The Alaskans have tried to move the capital a more convenient location, but a couple of public referendums didn't pass--supposedly because Alaskans were concerned about Anchorage assuming too much importance in the state.

Over half the population of Alaska lives in the greater Anchorage municipality. Most of the interior is either pristine, or populated by tiny villages. There are no roads to connect the villages in the interior.

Juneau is the only state capital to border Canada or Mexico. Obviously, it borders Canada.

I cheated to find out this answer by looking it up in Google. Won't get to Juneau for another five days.

7. Is there archaeology in Alaska?
Not only is there archaeology in Alaska, there's in archaeology in Antarctica! They dig in the effing snow.

I learned this at the Museum of the North, at the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks. There they have the official state fossil, the Mammoth.

Back when I was in anthropology school, the cultural anthropologists, of whom I broke bread with, used to make fun of the archaeologists for digging in dirt for three long summer months a year.

If we only knew some of them had fun by digging in ice for three long summer months a year!

Let's not get started on what we said about the primatologists, who had to trek through the jungle for three long summer months, just to catch falling monkey poop in buckets.

It was all in good fun.

14. On The Alaska-Canada Highway

MORNING GREETS US WITH FRESH BUGS SPLATTERED against our windshield. A rock, kicked out from under a hulking semi leaves a crack in the passenger's vantage.

Loose gravel sent us into fishtails on curved mountain roads without guardrails. Bison chomping on grass. A caribou's carcass against the side of the road. Blood pooled in the right lane. The early effects of rigor mortis.

We hurled forward. Because we had the day to chase. Because we had another town to make. Because we could not stop for death.


A LOG TRUCK, TWO CARGOES DEEP, ASSUMES THE RIGHT LANE, lollygagging at forty kilometers on a downward slope where we could be doing one-hundred or better. The ravines run deep. A car, we find, turned upside down, shards of glass strewn against an untamed lawn.

The sun bursts into our cabin. Dust seeps through the air vents.

No room to pass him on the winding roads through the Canadian Rockies. Finally, with a turnout appearing on the road, and an opportunity to let us pass, he kindly stopped for us.


FINALLY IN WATSON LAKE, WHERE WE WILL make camp for the night. Pitching the tent is our new virtuosity, completed with perfect coordination and tame silence. Stakes go in the ground, one by one, and then they are six.

Head out again for food. On the corner sits a young man. Beard either tamed or impotent. A pipe in his mouth. A dog by his side. He wears a green, wool sweater. The kind you where at holiday Christmas parties.

He holds his thumb in the air. No room in back for the hitchhiker, his pipe, or his dog. We rolled on dinner. The carriage held but ourselves.


WE ARE HERE RACING AGAINST TIME. Against the days getting shorter and colder. Against the winter. Against the limits of our bodies and our wills. Against the Yukon.

Against Alaska. It is almost freezing in Fairbanks. It will be freezing in Denali. Already the ferries are returning from Anchorage. Where is Juneau, but lost within the glaciers.

We are out here, with nothing but ourselves. A few sandwiches. A map. And a compass. And the road. And immortality.

13. The Thing About Canada...

...is even when you make it all the way up to Edmonton, which is about as far North as anyone you know ever really goes, you're still about 20349850398503928058934 miles away from Alaska.

And this is not just a regular 5024809238402840218041 mile ride. It's 201402175093128503289 mile ride through the Rockies on roads that are getting colder by the day.

That are one-lane highways for ten or twelve hour stretches, and you hope you can make camp in time to break out your tent and sleeping bag and thermarest and comforter so you don't have to tuck your hands into your shorts just to stave off frost-bite.

I am at the stage right now where I would sell organs for a helicopter.

Spend many nights now having random flashbacks, some of them dreams, some of them nightmares, some of them just memories.

I'm in Spain again, and it's raining in Burgos.

I'm in Stony Brook again, setting up my slides for my first anthropology lecture. I am holding a baseball in my hand. I am saying to 200 undergraduates that there is only one definition for an atom.

My life is full of promise.

I'm in elementary school, memorizing the order of the presidents on a poster where we are lined up everyday. I am tall and I line up in the back. There are four girls who are taller than me. Girls mature faster.

I am on my way to Hunter and stop on the 96th Street sidewalk, to write in chalk, "sometimes, when I'm alone at night, I believe I can fly."

I am parodying the Harlem poet, de Silva, or de Vasco, I forget his name. Some people think I'm being original. I am not. Some people think profound. There is nothinig profound about parody.

I am in elementary school, pulling a folded sheet of paper out of my inside jacket pocket to deliver the valedictorian speech at my graduation. I do not remember what I said.

I do remember the fifth grade. Being Willy Wonka in our play. I remember making a joke about everlasting gobstobbers.

I am in Mt. Glacier national park. I am 27 years-old. It is terribly cold outside. I am alone, and it is getting dark, and I am scared. So I do not sit in my tent. I sit in my car and read the fading pages of "Don't Think of an Elephant!"

I am being punched in the face on the way to swimming class.

I am falling to the ground. Lying to the ground, there are people who step over me to reach the subway. Among those people are my classmates.

They must not be late for swimming.

I am at Stony Brook again and I am raising my hand in class. "My sister," I say aloud, "I'd save my sister and get a new wife." The class laughs.

I am still lying in the ground. The homeless man who I sometimes give spare change to does not help me. My classmates step over me. I am helped to my feet by a nurse.

"Where are you going?" she asks me.

I am crying on the street. "I was on my way to swimming class."

It is raining on my car in Mt. Glacier. It is dark and I hear the distant laughter of a campsite. There are no stars in the sky.

"Anthropologists always say you need your own definition of culture in order to become an anthropologist," I say to the class. They are all listening to me. I have their attention. "That is stupid," I say.

I am in EMT class and the professor puts up a picture of a horse. Then he puts up a picture of a bigger horse and says, "Broncho-dilator." Nobody laughts.

I remember Javier Bardem's cock and Penelope Cruz's tits from "Jamon, Jamon." It is Spain. It is raining in Spain. It's always raining.

The nurse is walking me back to school. She brings me to the school's nurse and she sees me, a welt where my eye used to be. She's seen it before, but it never gets old. She cries with me.

We hold hands and she lets me let it out.

I cannot remember Chester A. Arthur. Or Franklin Pierce. What did they ever do anyway? I know Grover Cleveland was a bachelor when elected. The only one of his kind.

I am driving from Mt. Glacier to Calgary and I don't want to go anymore. I pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car.

When you put on the ambulance siren it goes "wail, wail, wail."

I remember the man whose life I helped save. I do not know his name. I will never know his name. He was not conscious when this happened. He will never know who I am.

I lie down on the grass.

It is cold in Mt. Glacier.

It is cold in Canada.

It will be colder in Alaska.

12. A Bison Pancake

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE I would face mortal danger on this trip. My first, and hopefully, last, near-death experience of this trip came at the horns of the great American bison, a 2,000-lb. beast that is proudly the largest land animal on the continent.

The bison, many claim, is normally a fairly docile creature. But most animals are. Spend a week watching a pride of lions and they will spend ninety-percent of their time yawning at flies.

And the other ten percent of their time killing things.

For a bison, it quietly munches on grass for most of the day, when it is not, itself, lying down, yawning at flies.

But for every ten group of eager wildlife photographers, there will be the odd charge of the bison, and one times out of that ten, there will be a gorging.

Happens every year at the park. Human cars kill about a hundred animals on the road, and bison horns kill a human or two in return.

I knew the danger, and took it as a calculated risk, as I spent much of the afternoon, driving around Yellowstone National Park photographing these bison. I found them on the road in once instance, and tracked my car slowly along its flank to get a few good shots in.

Pulling into a picnic area a few miles down that road I found an entire herd of them quietly nursing their young and looking around, nonplussed by the brilliant colors a fading sun shot across the valley.

I trekked my Hyundai into their midst, an idea that was not exactly motivated by self-preservation to get a couple of good shots of a mother and her calf. The bison looked at my silver carriage without much amusement.

I left their midst without harassment and continued onto the Hayden Valley turnouts.

EVERYTHING THE LIGHT TOUCHES belongs to the bison. You can sit at the turnout and try to count their numbers. I estimated two or three hundred, though I had a hard time keeping count of the dots of beasts across the Yellowstone River (of which Yellowstone Park gets its name.)

Two nurses asked me to take their picture with the bison and I obliged nicely enough. A solitary male lurked in the background, not more than twenty yards from us—less than the distance the park rangers advised us to keep.

But he was just standing there, and though we heard the stories, we figured we were close enough to our cars to make a break for it if events turned hostile.

I snapped their pictures, hauled out my journal and celebrated the freedom of animal and Greek as the valley hemorrhaged an awesome beauty—and the paradox that I could only witness this scene with roads humans had built and fences humans had maintained.

You think too much. Just sit back and enjoy.

After half an hour at the ridge, I turned back on the road to make a campsite by nightfall.

On that road, a caravan had stopped to photograph a group of bison on the North side of the road. Let me explain: take an ice cream cone and flip it upside down. Now, imagine a road that circled the cone, halfway up.

To the left of the road would be the thinner part of the cone, and to the right of the road the flatter part of the cone.

Now, imagine a Hyundai on that road. And a small group of bison on the taller part to the left, separated from the larger group of bison on the fatter part to the right.

These are the ingredients to mortal injury.

I LOWERED MY WINDOW AND STUCK out my camera to get a good shot of the three male bison as, out of nowhere, their docility morphed into territoriality.

The bison, all three of them, started clawing at the ground, like a bull does before it charges.

An RV stood right in front of me. I couldn’t roll forward. But there were no cars behind me.

The bison to my left started grunting.

A car pulled in to block my view. That car, with their passenger taking pictures, stood before me and the bison.

So, it was in order: Bison, Car, Me, Cliff. A cliff that fell down a good ten yards, before, surely, my car would roll over and explode.

The bison’s tension accelerated. In a matter of seconds the two charged at the one, and the one, realizing his imminent defeat, decided against the fight.

The car in front of me hurtled forward and, when, at the last second, the lone bison turned, and with the momentum of a 2,000-lb animal on a slope, barreled towards me.

The bison’s eyes met mine.

A shot of wild panic ran through my balls and yanked the back of my neck.

The bison charged on a collision course into my driver’s side window.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat!

The window was down!

Without another thought, I took my foot off the break and hit the gas.

The bison surged forward.

The car surged forward.

The rear driver’s window was in his sights.

He pulled his head to the right, and the gas lid was in his sights, and stumbled to his right, the rear bumper was in his sights, and tumbled down the southern slope, kicking up dirt in a triangular plume.

Without me knowing, the RV ahead of me had pulled on, giving me just enough space to pass it to the right, and pull into a turnout, and shrieked on the brakes.

Looked into the passenger seat. Just a mess of maps and souvenirs. Nobody saw this with me. Nobody to share it with.

I threw the car in park, and fell out of the driver’s seat, and gripped the floor. My heart was up in my chest. I looked down at the cliff.

If the bison hadn’t succeeded in gorging me, surely the impact would have knocked my car off the cliff. He barely missed me with me shooting forward.

What if I had put the car in park? What if the RV hadn’t pulled up? What if I hesitated for a second?

I looked up. A crowd of onlookers, photographing the bison had just seen what happened.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

A salt-and-pepper grandpa screamed out, “Hell yeah.”

“That bison had it out for me. It was either going to impale me, or knock my car into the ravine.”

“You were going to be a bison pancake!” the old man hollered.

“A bison patty, served rare,” I quipped back.

He laughed with the experience that suggested, in his youth, he had driven a landing boat at D-Day, or fought back the Chinese army on the Korean peninsula: “I thought you were a goner!”

I LOST CONTROL OF MY BREATHING FOR A MOMENT and sat slumped on the pavement, still in my bathing suit from my afternoon’s dip in Jenny Lake.

I lied down on the pavement and looked up into the air. The setting sun was pushing the sky from blue to purple to red.

“What a way to go,” I said to the old man.

“Where you from son?” he asked.

“Queens,” I told him.

“That’s a long way to come to get knocked off a cliff by a bison.”

”Wasn’t exactly in my itinerary,” I confessed.

He helped me off the ground.

“You going to be alright, son? You need some water or something.”

I looked back and the lone bison had made its way back up to his feet and back to the edge of the road. He grunted at his two nemeses playing king of the hill.

“I'm good,” I said to him. “I’ll be fine.”

He patted me on the back and made my way back into the driver’s seat. I grabbed my balls to make sure they were still there. One, two. Had them. My dick, too. All ten fingers.

Ten toes. Two ears. Everything seemed to be in order.

The window was still lowered. And as I pulled out, the old man offered one last bit of advice. “Drive safe, young man!”

“Thanks,” I waved, and pulled out the turnout passed another herd of bison and drove off, carefully and slowly and deliberately before they proved, again, that there is no such thing, as a harmless 2,000-lb animal.

11. Take Me To Your Monument

LOOK AROUND ALL THE great cities of the world, and almost without exception, they will have one thing in common: Water. And lots of it.

Because of the principles of shipping costs, and the obvious need for settlements to have access to water, any group of people looking to establish a permanent civilization will take up shop around water, preferably the fresh, moving variety, what we call rivers.

New York, of course, is fed by the Hudson and East River. (Which isn't so much a river as a tidal strait, but I digress.)

Paris sits on the Seine. London on the Thames. Baghdad sleeps in a nook of the River Tigris.

Delhi feasts on the Yamuna. Cairo has the Nile.

And then there's the great city of St. Louis, sitting right on the Mississippi.


ST LOUIS WAS FOUNDED in 1763 by colonial French fur traders and sold to the United States by Napolean Bonaparte in what we call the Louisiana Purchase.

The young city figured prominently in America's expansion west, an era now commemorated with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, where the world-famous Gateway Arch now sits.

Jefferson, of course, was the president that bought the territory from Napolean.

The arch was designed by Finnish-American architest Eero Saarinen (who appears regularly in crossword puzzles as either "______ Saarinen," "Architect Saarinen," or "TWA Terminal architect"), and was originally intended to be a perfect parabola.

Unfortunately, the parabola proved too difficult an engineering challenge to be completed, and the monument was modified to a catenary--the shape a chain makes when it hangs according to its own weight.

The Arch's shape can be expressed in a simple mathematical formula, something about the ratio between sines, cosines, tangents, and other ratios of triangles I was too depressed in high school to properly learn.


I FIND MYSELF irresistibly attracted to the Arch. I love its shape. The way sunlight glistens off its base. The way it doesn't look like a building or even a monument--which is bizarre, since it is a monument.

What the Arch feels like to me is math. It's as if we, as a civilization, constructed the Number 1. Not an actual giant Number 1, but the pure, abstraction of the Number 1, and turned it into steel and glass and tiny little elevator carts than can take you up to centrally-placed observation desks.

Christians have the cross. Jews the star of David. Muslims the Crescent.

And we that worship in the halls of Science, that believe in Constants and Forces and Parsimony and Principles, we have this catenary.

If aliens beamed down to a WalMart parking lot, woke me up, and asked me to take me to our leader, I would skip the White House, clean out the back seat of pretzel debris and motor oil stained napkins, and drive them to the Arch.

"There," I would argue, "our leader is science and reasoning and logic and philosophy and law."

"Really?" the aliens would respond, genuinely impressed. "Is that all true?"

"Yes," I would say. "Just look at the arch. We worship math."

They'd nod to each other, and conclude that an intelligent species does inhabit this planet, and I'd hope they'd skip over the civil wars in Eastern Europe, the famines in Africa, the tyranny in North Korea, and the Republicans in America violently opposed to public health care, and deem us worthy of life.


THE GREAT SHAH RUKH, he of Washington University School of Medicine, in the great city of St. Louis, and his young flame, Chevre, took me down to the Arch at night. A bank of high-powered search lights illuminated the bottom edges of the Arch.

The lights are so potent that they cast a shadow of the Arch on low-flying clouds.

We ran up the steps that double as an amphitheater in the summer months when Jimmy Eat World is in town, and catapulted full speed toward the spotlights.

They are strong and blinding. If you look right into their bulbs, your eyes will hurt and soon will your head. Better to stand over them and let the light hit the back of your head, like you do in the shower, when you need to take a second and relax.

You'll be immersed in light and watch the rays stream out to the sky, bouncing off the bottom-facing hull of the Arch, and your head will be a gray shadow on its skin.

Take pictures with your friends while you're at it. All the stupid things you'll do when presented with a giant spotlight beneath a world-famous monument.

All the things you would have done in Paris if they put the lights on the ground and not on the Eiffel Tower itself.

You will run around the legs of the Arch and play in its grasses and laugh about its ways, and then a police office will roll up in his patrol car and announce through his megaphone in a timbre usually reserved for Shakespearean soliloquies: "The park is closed."


"THE PARK CLOSES at 11pm. The park is closed."

So, like any educated, young citizens, we turned and left.

"Where are you going?" asked the voice.

We screamed out that we were leaving the park. We were returning to our cars and heading home. We walked in the opposite direction of the patrol car. The direction of home.

"Come here and tell me where you're going!"

Excuse us?

The voice demanded, "I said come here and tell me where you're going!"

We obeyed. We turned and walked toward the squad car. Our shoulders slumped with the nuisance.

"The park is closed," it barked at us. "The park closes at 11pm."

Yeah, we know, we screamed out. We're leaving.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm."

We turned around. We left the park. It was past 11pm. It was closed.

"The park is closed."

Down the steps, we paused one last time to turn and take another picture of the arch at night. As I framed the catenary, the patrol car rolled in front of us, and barked at a group of teenagers to our right.

"The park is closed. The park closes at 11pm. The park is closed."


IT IS UNFORTUNATE to me that the municipality of St Louis decides to close the Arch at night, when it can be enjoyed with so much delight. Paris never closes the Eiffel Tower's park.

You can sit under it at three in the morning with a bottle of wine and no one will tap you on the shoulder and ask for ID.

What if aliens landed on Earth?

What if we had one chance to prove to them our merit as a modern civilization? What if we had one stroke in the night to take them to our monument of science, if, with their Sonic burgers in one hand, they hopped on the spotlight to make funny shapes and were greeted, in a moment of intergalactic peace, with the gruffy statement: "The park is closed."

Is the last chance of saving mankind then going to be an spaceship parked for the night outside a 24-hour WalMart?

God help us all, St Louis.























Chevre and The Great Shah Rukh strike a pose.





















Wherein the young narrator believes he can fly.
















The Arch at night from the steps after our first encounter with the patrol car but before our second.