The Lost Weekend

Abdul and Roy have decided that they want to go somewhere out of town for the Memorial Day weekend. After holding a conference in Abdul's room upstairs, they came to us with three ideas for a place to go:

1. Seattle.
2. Lincoln City (the beach).
3. Canada.

Roy, having the better command of English, took the role of spokesperson.

"We want go Seattle," he said. "How far?"

"Well, just about 3 hours from Portland. By car."

"Car?"

"Yes."

"How long by bus?"

"Three days."

"Ahhhhhh!"

At this point Abdul interjects, "I want Canada."

"It's nice to hear someone does," I say.

"Canada?"

"Yes."

"How far?" Roy says.

"Farther than it's worth. Much father, in fact."

"Farther than Seattle?"

"Much farther."

"We will go to Seattle," Roy says, sounding pretty definite.

"How will you get there?"

"How?"

"Yes. I mean, you could take the bus, but it is much shorter by car. You could rent a car."

"Rent?"

"Yeah rent, you know, menyewa."

For some reason I continually slip into the Indonesian language when trying to explain things to Roy and Abdul, even though they are, respectively, Japanese and Saudi Arabian.

"Okay, we will rent. How much the price?"

"Well we can look online."

"Ahhhhh . . . I don't have license."

"Okay. That's a problem then. We're back to the bus. But, where will you guys stay in Seattle?"

"Stay?"

"Yes, once you get there. What will you do, where will you stay."

"Ahhhhh . . ."

"How about you just take a bus around Portland? There's a lot you haven't seen yet right here at home."

"Maybe Canada," Abdul says.

So goes, so far, the planning phase of the journey. The point of destination is leaning more and more toward a day at the mall . . . but nothing is yet written in stone.

Advertisement for an Advertisement

Soon Jim Dandy may display an advertisement for a travel agency located in Singapore. I received a request from the same for permission to advertise, along with an offer to pay $50 for the privilege. And so I figured, why not? Fifty bucks is fifty bucks, right? Though it is not a sum that will take me as far as Singapore, every little bit helps these days just getting from one side of the city to the other.

Besides, Singapore sounds so exotic. The very idea of travel sounds exotic. Who doesn't like to travel?

So if y'all see this advertisement in the future, click on it--for, you see, I make an extra half dollar or so from every click.

Incidentally, a refill of plain old coffee at Starbucks costs the buyer 50 cents.

Travel II

As a matter of fact, while the rest of the fam went to the Tennessee aquarium to gawk over other peoples shoulders at the sea life they could have otherwise seen just down the street from our house in Oregon, I excused myself (claiming to feel seasick), and struck out instead into the unseen, undiscovered heart of Chattanooga. Ambling ever so happily under the rusty October sun, I passed by pre-Civil War churches, houses with blue and red shutters, over train tracks that spilled off the looming slopes of Lookout Mountain like frozen streams. I saluted everyone I passed, listening for accents, weighing the nuances that made one person Tennessee and another Georgia.

By the time the family stumbled blinky-eyed out of the stuffy aquarium, I had found a wonderful restaurant called Sticky Fingers, offering barbecued chicken and ribs, cornbread and greens and beans, and hand tossed biscuits which the employees actually threw at the diners from the balcony above the main floor.

Now does that beat sand crabs and squid, or what? Honestly, what is better--a live shrimp drifting through the murky green water behind three inches of glass, or one that's sitting on your plate next to a little amber pool of Carolina honey sauce?

You tell me.

Travel I

For as long as I can remember I have had this dream of traveling, of wandering wheresoever the whim might take me. The trouble is, I have always been either poor or married, neither of which works well for carefree excursions.

Poverty provides its own definition in this case, so we will say no more.

Marriage . . . well, let me offer an example:

Some years back my second wife and I flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to visit our daughter, living there were her husband and their child. How strange and wonderful it seemed--for one who had rarely been out of Oregon, anyway--the red clay, the humid days, the enormous bugs--June Bugs! It seemed perfectly exotic.

Best of all (or so I had initially thought) was the ocean of history lying all about, just waiting for me to dive in. Specifically, I am talking about Civil War history, in which I had long been an avid reader. Here was the chance to visit the battlefields around the city of Atlanta itself--Peach Tree Creek, Jonesboro! From the city you could drive North and follow in reverse the route taken by William Tecumseh Sherman in his investment of this hub of the Confederacy.

Yet farther north, just short of Tennessee, lay the battlefield called Chickamauga, after the stream running through. Here is where Hood's Texans split the center of the Union line. Here is the gentle knoll where General Thomas, the rock of Chickamauga, held off the final Rebel push in pursuit of the fleeing fragments of the Federal army.

And here, on that same hallowed battlefield, is where the potential of fascination in travel vanished. For what my wife and daughter had in mind was to drive straight through, entry to exit, ten minutes of history from the passenger seat of a rental car.

You can roll down the window, my wife said. I can drive through slowly.

I insisted on getting out of the car. I walked through the grass, upon the ground where thousands had struggled in combat well over one hundred years ago, where thousands had fallen, their country's fate in the balance.

I was thinking I might be standing on the very spot occupied by General James Longstreet's horse when my wife honked the horn.

And then on to Chattanooga and the Sea Life Aquarium.

Sea life in Tennessee? What did they do, truck it in from the Oregon Coast?

This is not travel. Not in my book, anyway.