Chinese Broccoli

I went away again for a few weeks, to Western Massachusetts, which I just learned to spell a few years ago, and to Vermont, which as always, is perfect. I had a wonderful time, and saw many good friends scattered along the way, and also enjoyed my second spring of the year as I sat under flowering pink things in Amherst and Northampton and was startled by ice on trees as I glided serenely along the Molly Stark Trail from coffee to maple syrup to pancake. (That's a lie. The maple syrup was actually in the coffee.)

Sometimes coming home is a little bit disappointing, especially if there's not another exciting trip planned soon, but this time I was happy to be back, and as I rolled up to Toronto on Monday I decided to drive through the Exhibition grounds because they're so strange, and pretty, and sprawlingly weirdly uniquely Toronto. It was good to be back and to embrace something especially special about my city. There was, I'll admit, a moment of reverie.

And then pretty much the first thing I saw was a pigeon eating horse shit off the ground.

Welcome home!

Posted by liz at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let me talk a little about how much I love Kensington Market. It is dirty. It smells bad. It is not super convenient for me to get to on transit, and it is generally covered in filth. I don't like to shop much for vintage clothing, nor do I usually find myself in need of a wide selection of South American legumes.

That said, and it's no controversial stance or great statement to say this, I find its total chaos and griminess so perfect sometimes I can hardly stand it. I tried to imagine, today, some kind of situation—city mandated or even grassroots—that would involve actually de-grossifying Kensington, and I just can't ever see it flying. We love it in its cat-pee-smelling messy crowded annoying multicultural dirty glory.

(Or, as Carol said, "I find I need it as a contrast to the rest of Toronto.")

Another thing that's a good contrast to the rest of Toronto, besides the absolute squalour, is Kensington's seeming obliviousness to statutory holidays. On Friday (that's "Good Friday" to you xians) I wandered down to the market with Andrea to see if we could pick up a birthday present for our pal Linds. We didn't, but we did enounter multiple fishmongers open for business—and grilling up free, intensely smoke-creating fish, and handing them out to passersby. How fucking cool is that?

There are spring days when you walk around your city and you run into people, or you see a beautiful plant, or you stumble into a gigantic cloud of billowing smoke and find someone just handing out fish on the street that you think, "My god. I really love my city." (P.S. we also saw some girl walking around with her pet iguana.)

Today I participated—along with my lovely neighbours Dave, Carol and Laurel—in the second annual newmindspace Easter Egg Hunt. newmindspace aren't cynical and tired like me or most of the people I spend my time with. They're basically a two-person fueled citywide love-in run by people that simply want everyone to stop, observe and be struck awesome by the world around them, and celebrate that. They feel so much younger than me, but they rule.

newmindspace were planning to hide 5,000 plastic eggs filled with notes and candy in Kensington last night (starting at 4am!) By the time my friends and I finished our brunch, almost all of the eggs were gone. We didn't run into many people searching—a happy family, a couple of disaffected hipsters—but we did find four eggs, and a lot of eggless and abandoned easter candies. My first egg had a note inside that urged me to "Start calling out for 'Harold' frantically", and you had better believe that I did.

Inititally my pals were a little less completely excited by this game than I was (I did actually jump up and down several times when I spotted the first one wedged behind a panel of sheet metal), but by the end we were all hunting high and low and, occasionally, eating candy we found on the street. My god, I really love my city.

Posted by liz at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(Map by Jeff Chapman, 1988.)

Tote board:
3264 miles
11 days
13 states
0 trips to Starbucks

And thus the story closes with, if not a happy 50th state, a happy ending. I've seen every state in the USA by the tender age of 31. Not all of them were good, and some of them weren't even memorable enough for me to realize I'd already seen them (thanks again for the Delaware trip, Paul!) But the fun, as they say, is in the journey, and all the journeys have been good.

I mean no slight to the midwest (it's my home after all) when I say the most wonderful part of driving a really, really long distance is reaching water. The ocean, ideally. Sometimes when I get to the end of the land, I feel less like I've found my destination and more like the ocean found me. Getting the first breathtaking glimpse of mountains on the horizon—be they Green or Rocky or San Bernardino—is also unlike anything else I've ever felt. Even though I'm from far far inland, even though I'm from where it's flat, those endless waters, moody mountains and breezy palmettos stir something in me I grew up never knowing was even there.

Now all this natural beauty is majestic and lovely and moving and shit, but anyone who knows me also knows I'm a sucker for a Stuckey's and a lover of the truckstop gift boutique. It was with this in mind that I commemorated the last day of my trip—a rainy, truly crappy drive from Pittsburgh to Toronto—with a trip to the gift shop. West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania were strangely bereft of good truckstop souvenirs, but at the handsome Angola Service Plaza on the New York State Thruway, I managed to complete my final 50-state goal:

I bought all the magnets at once!

(The only thing cooler than doing this at all, and yes, it was expensive, was that the cashier thought I was 19.)

In travelling the great United States I learned many things about myself, other people, and all the places you can live. I also learned that in 2006, you can travel with someone with a Treo, which makes roadtripping completely different than it used to be. Simple disputes are easily settled with Google, hotel reservations made, restaurant directions found, the meaning of "apiary" confirmed—all from the middle of what looked like nowhere. At times I loved the technology and at times I hated it, but it's sure a different way of life than I remember when I first climbed into a car headed for New York City, MapQuest not even a twinkle in the internet's eye.

Another thing I learned is that while Roadfood is a very fine book, it makes an exceptionally poor road map. It turns out I-79 does not run north out of Charleston, West Virginia, and thus I never did get my apple dumpling. Possibly that would have been the saving grace of No.50 for me, but you never know. (Jane and Michael Stern, you will be getting a letter.)

And finally, I stick by what I've been saying for nearly ten years now: two of the best things you can ever do are take a long driving trip with someone, and take a long driving trip by yourself. I was lucky enough to do both this time, and it was great on either end. Thanks again to all the dear friends, boyfriends, and somewhere-in-betweens that have crossed state lines with me. And if you've never been anywhere with me, well...I guess you just don't know what a good time is.

Posted by liz at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For some reason (hopeless romantic?) I fully expected my 50th state to be auspicious, adventurous, marked with excitement. This could possibly have been true if I'd touched down in Hawaii, driven to Alaska, or even crossed the Skyway Toll Bridge into Illinois. But alas, all I did was stumble foolishly into West Virginia.

This state pretty much sucks. Everyone who has been there will be unsurprised to hear my poor review. Frankly, I'd put it in my bottom ten United States. It's not a shock to see why I put off visiting it my entire life—I'd even come very close to going on two other occasions. And yet, it was on my list, and I had to go, and well. Now I've been.

I think I thought when I crossed the state line it was going to feel somehow exciting in a way that I'd feel I'd changed, grown, somehow morphed into a magical, more experienced being—kind of like you expect losing your virginity to make you feel, which it doesn't. This didn't either.

I crossed the border around 1:00pm on Thursday, April 6. I headed straight for the welcome center, planning to, if not actually pop a bottle of champagne, at least gleefully announce to the welcome center staff that I had now achieved my 50th state, and boy wasn't it exciting that that state was West Virginia! The welcome center turned out to be on a city street across from a Wal-Mart, and the woman at the counter was in an extremely bad mood. There wasn't even a sign-in book, or an offer of a free map, and all I got out of the woman herself were some gruff directions given to me in a tone that assured me I was a complete idiot for even considering going to Pittsburgh by way of Charleston.

The rest of my day in the state that professes to be "Wild, Wonderful" was equally uninspiring. Other than a fairly impressive gorge, I saw little more than grouchy hill people and a lot of brown barren mountains that weren't even pretty. The restaurant in Clarksburg that was recommended in Roadfood was closed by 5:05 pm. The state highways run 65 mph, slowing to only 55 for intersections. My cell phone didn't work in the entire state. And I saw a bumper sticker asking: "Do you worship animals, or God?" The best part of my day were some cherry blossoms I sat under in a McDonald's parking lot. And while that was really nice, it should give you some perspective.

Towards the end of my drive, I finally saw an Ontario plate for the first time in more than a week, and also, a license plate from Hawaii. Good lord must the people in that car have been so deeply, deeply disappointed.

Posted by liz at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I have tossed the idea around in my head for years that each state is somehow distinguishable from the one next to it. I don't know if this is romantic fantasy or not, but when I crossed into North Carolina, it smelled new. Piney, smokey, different than any place I'd been before. I'd never quite figured out what North Carolina was supposed to be like—a touch of the south, a touch of the Pacific Northwest—but it slowly unravelled itself to me as I drove north into a long, lingering, golden-pink sunset that lasted for a long, long time.

My route was such that I wasn't sure until the morning I left Charleston exactly what parts of North Carolina I would try to see. As it turned out, I let fate decide for me—Lalitree, the only person I seem to know in North Carolina, said she was free for dinner that night, so I routed myself up to Durham by way of a long slow drive up the Atlantic coast in South Carolina. I took a break in Myrtle Beach State Park, napping to the sound of a little girl using a metal detector on the sand. I waded far into the ocean and felt as happy as I had at any time on the whole trip.

Durham was dark when I reached it, a mystery of woodsy charm and strip mall blight. Lalitree gave me a little driving tour after our stop at a seemingly characteristic North Carolina indie-rocker tavern. (My view of almonds, by the way, is forever changed.) I visited with her at her house for awhile, came close to kidnapping amazing cat Gretzky, and then hit the road again to get a head start on my last big drive through state No. 50: West Virginia.

I spent the night in Winston-Salem at a Microtel, a chain I love, tipped off to me by the Coctails more than a decade ago. Microtel gives you a tiny, awesome little room, mostly clean, and certainly more comfortable than Motel Six. All the rooms have weird window-seats, which mean you could stow a third adult there, or your kid, or all your suitcases. They all also have free long distance and WiFi, and if you pay more than $50 you've done something horribly, horribly wrong. Microtel was lovely to me and in the morning I drove around Winston-Salem, had a cup of the local hippie coffee brew, and admired the oddly serene, jubilantly spring surroundings.

North Carolina would be the last state where I saw everything happy and in bloom, and if I have to wait a week or two in Toronto before I get to double-dip my spring experiences for the year, I guess I will, but right now, at home, where it's cold, I already ache for these trees and all their promise.

Posted by liz at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unlike pretty much all the states that came before it in this trip, South Carolina was (is, as I write this) very much as I expected. The road is a little roughshod, the trees range from delicate to windblown greybeard. The back highways spun across miles of dogwood, palmetto, BBQ sheds only open Friday and Saturday, and every now and then, a boiled peanut stand.

It's amazing to take roadtrips where you drive to the -end- of something, I think — the Gulf Coast a few days ago, the Atlantic Ocean now. I checked into my hotel, and found it physically attached to one of the two Charleston restaurants in Roadfood: cause for celebration with a piece of yellow cake. From there I set out to Battery Park, hoping to see the architecture my mom's best friend loved, and, if lucky, come across perhaps a Stephen Colbert Museum and Interpretive Historical Site.

What I found among the manicured, fountained, columned houses were fragrant gardens (and hordes of milling seniors on an annual garden walk), and at the end of the houses, the water. I walked and sat and paced and pondered along the edge of the water, staring at mossy rocks, sunset, and sea creatures which I didn't even understand.

From the seashore I wandered the city for a few hours before realizing I hadn't even eaten yet. In Marion Square I came across a night-lit fountain, which for some reason was echoing my own thoughts for the day in inscriptions like "Does it benefit all involved?" and "Is it the truth?" etched into benches along the base. If only I could answer those questions for you, fountain, I would. I splashed my weary feet in it for a good while, and wandered off to find some shrimp grits.

An apparent delicacy of the lowcountry, shrimp grits are grits covered in, yes, shrimp, but also cheese and bacon (if you want it) and, wait for it, gravy. I have to say I thought it was kind of gross. Per Andrea's vicarious request, I also ordered a Po' Boy, which as expected I was barely able to consume.

Throughout all this attempted dining, I kept getting drawn into a chat with another solo traveler seated next to me, and our waiter, about television and the current cinema. I hadn't been feeling super-social, and it's hard to get your face around a buffalo shrimp Po' Boy when your waiter is trying to spoil the ending of Everything is Illuminated for you, but it turned out both guys were really cool and the co-diner liked all the same shows I did. He took his leave, saying he was going to go back to the hotel and watch DVDs, and I said, "Yeah, I'm going to go back to the hotel and watch Stephen Colbert while I'm in his native city," at which point my waiter, trying to help prove that everything in my life is a ridiculous parody of what I might imagine to be my fantasy world, suggests I might like to meet Colbert's niece who is working upstairs in that very restaurant right this moment. He disappears and returns, literally dragging this young woman by the hand, to my table, and introduces Catherine, a very sweet Charlestonian who admits she doesn't catch the show too much, is extremly gracious, and seems happy I think her uncle is so funny. (I guess when you have 3,421,900 siblings, you're bound to have family littered in every square foot of your hometown, but seriously, I only pretend to stalk Stephen as a joke. Sort of.)

But other than that, what really struck me tonight was the freedom and specialness of wandering around a strange city for the first time, completely on your own. Not to knock any of my travelling companions of the last few days or years (because they have all been splendid), but there's something really special about getting yourself lost and taking everything in quietly. And it makes you receptive to totally different experiences than you would with someone else, of course—I probably wouldn't have started talking to strangers in the restaurant, or had so much thinking time at the battery, or seen the same things, like the moon in the sky over the trees, echoing the crescent and palmetto of this beautiful state's flag, had I not been here, alone, blowing through the streets on the ocean breeze.

Posted by liz at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We visited Alabama twice on this trip, once on the way to Louisiana, which was less memorable, and once on the way across to Atlanta, which was longer and involved more meat.

A thing I've experienced many times when traveling the world is surprise at how greenly similar so much of our planet is. Flying over England, "hey, that looks like rural Indiana!", flying into Hawaii "Hey, it's covered in grass!", etc. Perhaps I sound like a complete idiot, but I didn't expect Alabama to be green, rolling. I was expecting burnt orange, hot red somehow, but it turns out it mostly resembled southern Ohio.

Thoroughly confident in the latest edition of Roadfood (it was 2/2 with excellent suggestions on the way down in Louisville and Nashville), we decided our dining stop on the long drive back to Georgia would be at Mobile's "Brick Pit", an oversized shack offering up pulled pork slow-cooked for 30 hours, drenched in house BBQ sauce and served with enormous slices of white bread. I ordered the most delicious sweet tea of the whole trip, and a pork sandwich, while Allenn ordered the platter.

It might be germane at this point to mention that I have been a fish-eating vegetarian for more than two years, and although I have faltered once before, I had not touched the meat of pig since a fairly debaucherous sausage and bacon birthday frenzy Robbie and I threw for our combined birthdays a couple of years ago. (That night, Susan and Jeff and I would dare each other to give up land meat completely.) I confessed this to our young waitress, who smiled and said, "Yes. I was a vegetarian, too. Until I started working here."

It was amazing, of course, and while we ate and drank our tea, we listened in on our waitress advising her co-worker on possible career streams available through the community college course book she was working for. By the time we left, she was still undecided on whether to go into occupational therapy, marketing, or cosmetology, but I'm trusting she made the right choice.

As a footnote, downtown Mobile is a really lovely place, surprisingly well-kept (if completely closed up by 4:30pm, and I'm guessing earlier than that, too.) The streets are warm and clean and the architecture charming. I would have thought it idyllic if anyone would have let me use their bathroom, but everyone was pretty rude about it, making me think Mobile is sorely in need of Washroom Quest. Eventually some nice Mormons directed me to the Subway sandwich shop, where I used an unnaturally large bathroom (public bathroom phobia #1!) with no lock whatsoever (public bathroom phobia #2!).

Finally, my favourite part of any southern roadtrip is viewing the myriad combinations of burned-out letters in Waffle House signs along the highway. It appeals to the kitsch-lover and Scrabble-player in me both, and Alabama's waffle emporia did not disappoint. This trip's highlights: WAFFLE USE and F HOSE. (Note: enjoying the signs is much more pleasurable than actually eating at an AFFLE HO.)

Had no time to stop and visit Guy in Auburn, but I think I'll be back, Alabama.

Posted by liz at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My mental impression of Mississippi was that it was going to be a bad place, Confederate-imbued, somehow full of malice. What I saw instead was one of the strangest things in my life: a town completely decimated, much more so than New Orleans, by the wrath of Katrina and the folly of man.

Driving across Mississippi on the way to Louisiana was dark and alienating, but driving along the Gulf coast towards the east was blinding. We tried to follow US 90 as much as we could, me somehow thinking I was going to dip my toes in the Gulf waters for the first time, enticed by promises of white sand beaches and a heavenly landscape made by a Cobourg, Ontario woman we encountered at a rest area on the way down. She must have been talking about Florida. The white sand beaches were here, it's true, and they were gorgeous—but the ones that weren't overtly strewn with debris were taped off, and the temptation to bask was easily squelched by the desire to not wade through rebar and the earthly remains of an Outback Steakhouse.

I thought I had been fully moved by the pathos of Louisiana's wreckage until I saw Biloxi, at which point I started to feel a bit sick. There's something more comical, of course (and less heartbreaking) about an endless string of destroyed casinos and daiquiri shacks, as opposed to entire neighbourhoods of displaced and needlessly killed poor people, but it's just as visually surreal. Biloxi, or anything like what it used to be, is basically gone. By the time we got to the bridge to Ocean Springs, now half-underwater and snapped in sections like a tossed package of crackers, I could no longer even enjoy the experience for its unreal, once-in-a-lifetime, photographic amazingness.

As we stood alongside the ruined bridge, I had a strange sensation I had heretofore only experienced while exploring abandoned buildings. I used to think that feeling I got—a little sick in the pit of my stomach, a little nervous, a little tired—just came from bad environmental conditions, too many stairs, fear of injury or getting caught, the fatigue of exhilaration—any of those. But standing along the shores of the ruined highway, I felt that same thing, and it reminded me of Jeff and how he hated to see dying trees, because it awakened something in him that made him deeply sad—it was a hint of an apocalyptic vision for him, and he hated to see the world that way. And I realized, standing there, feeling a little light-headed, that for all the beauty I see in decay, it scares me, moves me like that, too. We weren't alone here: two vansful of Amish and Mennonite missionaries were exploring alongside us, the young men spilling out across the broken structure, climbing on the highway's rails like a balance beam, almost dancing, quietly wild and unrestrained.

Posted by liz at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There was a time in my life when I used to go on expansive roadtrips more often: I've driven to California three times from the midwest, and once from LA all the way back to Massachussetts. It was my love of roadtripping that led me to many of my favourite experiences in life, and also to a point where, by age 29, I had seen 44 of the 50 states.

My plan to cover them all by age 30 was thwarted by at least one significant act of God, but I decided to finally take the plunge this year by turning a simple trip to visit my friend Allenn in Atlanta into a giant, multi-state Southern quest in which I would fill out the rest of my proverbial magnet map: AL, MS, LA, SC, NC and WV were the targets. I rented a car, loaded up Allenn as a roadtrip companion (he's one of the finest) for the first half of the journey, and set off.

While our trip took wind through Detroit and Nashville, it was New Orleans I was really headed for. Beyond simply scratching Louisiana off my list, New Orleans was the last big American city I had really been dying to see, and to get a glimpse of it in its slowly reawakening state was irresistible to me. Greg had warned me of potholes, absent traffic signals, and a general sense of destruction, but what we found was a hopeful, broken city, functioning more than I'd expect and yet with more work to do than I can reasonably imagine ever being accomplished.

Though I'd somehow become Canadian-phobicized to the potential dangers of already notorious New Orleans, I realized quickly that my time spent in Detroit and Gary were fine preparation for any sketchiness we might encounter. But it really wasn't the Mad Max landscape I might've imagined: it was a bruised, half-wrecked, beautiful city, with all the incongruity of a perfect spring taking hold of the gutted houses and FEMA trailers, slowly drawing in a steady stream of the city's backbone of generally awful tourists. Tired and cranky the first night, my swell travelling companion and I had a bitter argument, finally got dinner, and walked home covered in powdered sugar.

We stayed near the reasonably unscathed French Quarter, and enjoyed a day or two of completely incongruous strolls along some of the country's most ancient and beautiful streets juxtaposed with drives through Gentilly and Lakeview, past high-water marks on houses of six feet or more, past rescue effort spray paint on every house noting casualties, inspection teams, number of pets. Past the homeowners' own graffiti of "PLEASE HELP US" and "FEMA KILLS". Past neighbourhood after entire neighbourhood of no one left at all, past Mardi Gras beads hung on absolutely everything, and more signs about coming home than I'd ever known I could see. When I had my own mini-emergency, requiring me to FedEx keys to my cat-sitter from the only open FedEx outlet in the still-largely-cut-off city, I was quickly humbled by a fax that had been left poignantly on the counter from August. It read simply, "LEVEE BROKE", and then a phone number.

I do not know what will happen here, but I have never seen so many people take so much and still manage to smile.

Posted by liz at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)