Hotel Hazards

Here we are on the road and I woke up this morning and had a realization. I can't completely relax during this vacation.

Not until we get to our Sunday night destination and stop staying in overnight lodgings. You see, hotels and motels are a problem for the Van Winkles of the world.

I opened up my room door this morning and this is what I saw.

A USA Today at my feet. USA Todays up and down the hall way. A veritable USA Today news minefield.

I tiptoed around these visual temptations and made it safely to the elevator without glimpsing a headline.

Then the breakfast room assaulted me. Of course, there's an HD screen  blaring the morning news, weather, and road reports.

I was able to grab my much needed coffee and get out like a soldier who had wandered into no-man's land and somehow made it back to his trench without any bullets hitting him.

I did see the weather report numbers, which is all right since that's the kind of news that's personal and unavoidable. Also, because it didn't tell me anything I didn't know.

Straight 100+-degree F. days for the next five days. Absurd!

But the good news is that we're driving north today. We should start to see daily highs "only" in the mid-90s.

Is there a lesson or a moral in all this? Only that I haven't been on vacation in a while and a good feeling is starting to come back. It's one of shedding my known life and daily routine.

Now someone else is making the morning pot of coffee. Someone else is going to make our beds. Someone else is going to cook dinner every time we decide to eat out.

It's nice too that I don't have a bunch of clothing choices, only what's in my bag. No office to go to. Reading email? Let's just call that "optional."

And there's a different view outside each morning.

Sunrise over the hotel parking lot. Not Eden, but not the same old same old either...

The effect of being on vacation is that a little more of who I normally am falls off each hour as the wheels of the car keep rolling and my familiar world becomes just an accumulation of miles behind me.

Sometimes it's good not to be "me," even if for a while longer I can't get around the fact that I still have to be "Van Winkle." - V.W.


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Van Winkle Plans a Vacation

It's that time of the year. Many Americans are hitting the open road for their family vacations. Here at The Van Winkle Project, we're about to do the same.

Planning phase.

America is such a large country with so many roads and sights to see that it invites this kind of diversion. All you need is a car, money for gas, and a hotel or campground to stay at when the end of the driving day comes.

I grew up in a family in which the parents had a vehicle especially well suited for the road trip: a station wagon.

By the time it was over we would have owned two Ford wagons, each with all that luxurious space behind the passenger seat for three small boys to spread out in. And unlike a mini-van, which was yet to be invented, a station wagon rode just like a car.

Cruisin' and smooth!

We made 18-hour drives between Wyoming and Oklahoma. We drove to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park.

Trusty vacation road machine: Our 1957 Ford Country Sedan...

After we moved to Alaska long road trips would cease by necessity. Places in Alaska tended to be connected by airplane, not asphalt. Motivated by the lure of salmon to catch, though, we still made plenty of 100-200 mile day trips in the last of those Ford station wagons, the one we boys called "the Golden Pig." We hauled our aluminum boat on the rooftop.

How We Did It

Preparations for road trips in those days were fairly simple. My dad bought a case of motor oil because the 427 engine in the '57 wagon had a leak in the valve cover and we had to pull over every couple of hours and add a quart. He got some maps at the gas station.


Part of the vacation "goodie box." Disgusting,

metallic tasting store-brand soft drinks.

Cheaper than Coke or Pepsi, our parents considered it

a "bargain."

 As for our mom, she prepared the "goodie box" which contained chips, cookies, and soft drinks.

And, of course, she packed our suitcases, standard hinged affairs with snap locks.

We loaded up and we hit the highway.


Our second car, the famous "Golden Pig" which
took us on trips in Alaska.


There was very little in the way of radio stations to listen to. We had no battery-powered devices to help us out. If we had a breakdown, we would have to stand at the side of the road and look pathetic because there was no such thing yet as a cell phone.

But we had a good time.

In the back seat, my brothers and I squished together in a fraternal way we were long used to. We read books, dozed.

I used to stare at the blur of landscape and try to hear symphonies in my head. Time's passage was a slow, aching bruise, but I think somehow we were better able to bear boredom in those days. Having very little to do seemed closer to the daily norm than something exceptional and unbearable.

Gotta Get Away

So there's this family reunion we're heading to in Branson, Missouri, a place I will not write about at this time, even though there's much that could be said about it as a tourist destination.

The reunion begins this Sunday.

For a variety of reasons we're going to make our way north slowly,  never driving more than 300 miles at a time over the next four days.

For entertainment on the road we have:

• Sirius satellite radio*
• Great Courses lectures on CDs
• Music CDs
• Music stored on an iPhone
• MP3 player
• Books

*NB: The Van Winkle Project travels with me, so there will be no news or sports programming allowed to reach our ears.

Where will we stay? In the old days my dad hardly ever planned for such eventualities. It would have meant the difficulty of digging up the information about a hotel in another state, then making an expensive long distance phone call to get a room reservation. 

So we looked for a hotel when the time came, usually an hour after the sun dropped below the horizon and we started seeing the highway courtesy of our headlights.

Vacation research question: Will this Comfort Inn
really be comfortable?

But I don't like to subject us to chance and roaches.

Last week I spent hours reseraching lodging on-line and read guest reviews. Then I booked us rooms for each night. Even eating options have been noted.

Of course, one could just hop in the car and see what happens. Which seems to me a major difference between 21st Century road travel and the 20th Century's version of the same.

These days we have way more choices about how to approach our adventure.

Will we be like Columbus who sailed off with nothing more firm in his mind than that surely he would eventually reach India (about which he was completely wrong). Alternatively, will our road trip be more like a NASA moonshot with every possible contingency planned for?

Or perhaps something in-between?

I suspect many readers can testify that their best road trip moments have happened after a wrong turn. Or unexpected weather. Or an encounter with a stranger.

Mystery should be part of the lure of leaving home, too. Let's close the travel guide for a moment, fold up the maps, and just wonder. America's a big country. What is out there that I can't even imagine? - V.W.

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Books For Sale

Today is the day above all days in the year that I look forward to. . .

No, it's not Christmas.

It's not my birthday.

And, it's not "Judgment Day."

Did Van Winkle "sleep" through this?

Yes, we were one of the lucky thousands of cities to be graced with a billboard declaring that the world as we know it was ending in May. The merry month of May came and went. Nothing seems to have happened. No Rapture. No Tribulation. No Mark of the Beast. No nothing.

Or am I mistaken because of my Van Winkle Project vow not to follow the news for just a while longer?

Did I miss Judgment Day?

Whatever the case, the day I most anticipate has managed to roll around again. This marks the 13th year I've been able to attend, spend an hour or so blissing out, then write a check and walk out the door, a satisfied man.

With both hands gripping bags of books purchased for pennies on the dollar.

The Reading Generation
One of the more interesting facts about the city I live in is that it has more than its share of retired folks. Many of them grew up here. They either never left or they moved back to spend their golden years stretching their twig-like limbs beneath the familiar hot sun.

The older folks are attracted by the relatively hospitable cost of living (you can still by a perfectly adequate used home for under $100,000), the low crime rate, the many churches, the patriotism (we are home to a major Air Force base), and the cultural life spawned by three major universities, including free concerts and lectures.

1998 Buick Park Avenue: the Septuagenarian's choice
to drive slower than the speed limit.

Whenever I go out I can spot the old people quite easily. 

I come upon a car going down a straight, otherwise empty street and it's moving along slower than the speed limit. The car is almost always a 10-year-old Buick. Yep, that's one of them behind the wheel.

Or they're the gray or silver or bald heads that are already in their seats at the movie or theater twenty minutes before the show begins. It's a senior paradox: they like to be on time so they always make sure they arrive early.

But, "bless their hearts" (a Southern politeness phrase I've learned is used to mask what actually amounts to a sharp criticism) these old people have one especially favorable characteristic as far as I'm concerned.


Call me crazy, but I smile
whenever I see an old person reading.


They were part of a generation that reached adulthood before the arrival of television. Much more than the people who would be born after them, they always knew how to make their own entertainment.

They played  cards. They knitted. They collected coins and stamps. Another manifestation of this pre-TV/computer screen DIY mentality toward leisure?

They've always been readers.

Think of the implications... As the rigors of aging require them to move into smaller houses or assisted living or nursing homes or, worse case, settle into the turf beneath Forest Lawn, they have to unencumber themselves of some of their possessions. You've probably guessed what they are casting aside at a prodigious rate.

Their books. Lifetime collections of books.

This is why the annual Friends of the Library Book Sale is a bibliophile's dream.

At 9:55 the line is almost out the door...

The Hunt Is On
I walk into the Civic Center downtown and elbow my way past the crowds toward the long rows of tables groaning beneath the weight of "Fiction."

I'm always excited about what I might find in hardback. Give me a nice stiff spine. Un-yellowed pages. Perhaps a dust jacket that is still intact. I'll pick up a copy for $1.75. As I said, pennies on the dollar.

And children's books? They go for $1 an inch. Your purchase is measured with a ruler at check-out. What a deal!

As I browse these tables crammed with the castoffs of someone else's cultural life, I notice that most of what was purchased came from the bestseller list. It's interesting to see how quickly these authors sank from sight. Does anyone talk anymore about Sidney Sheldon? Rebecca West? Frank G. Slaughter? Whatever happened to Arthur Hailey who wrote about the perils and loves in a different industry in each of his novels? Airport, The Moneychangers, Hotel. Did Mr. Hailey ever write about steel? Silicon? Wal-mart?

I  begin in my favorite section - fiction.



Look at all these hardbacks...

 I keep searching, hoping to find my version of treasure. Like the year I picked up a hardbound copy of The Writer's Chapbook, a collection of writers' advice on their craft, edited by George Plimpton. It turned out to be signed by Mr. Plimpton, himself--famous writer, founder and editor of the Paris Review, and affable host of America's most celebrated late-20th Century literary salon.

Or our son found on the special items table (i.e., $5/book) a hardbound tribute to the Wallace and Gromet movies signed by their creator, Nick Parks.

What "treasure" might be lurking in one of these rows, I wonder.

And even without an author signature it was nice to pick up hardbound copies of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, Truman Capote's Music for Chameleons, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, and any book by my favorite, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut.

What an upgrade! This moving from paperback to hardcover is like trading in T-shirt and jeans for a nice Italian suit!

Today's Finds
So I walked away with fewer books than some years, but there was still enough to please. Such as the first really LONG book I ever read from beginning to end. That honor goes to A Thousand Days by Arthur Schlesinger who told the story of JFK's abbreviated presidency in this book. I read it in fifth grade and wrote a book report. I was so impressed with myself! A Thousand Days was 1027 pages long!



I'm also happy to have picked up the only novel written by F. X. Toole who spent most of his life as a cornerman for a succession of boxers. As anyone knows whose read his short story collection that gave Clint Eastwood the material for the film Million Dollar Baby, nobody has ever written with more authority about punching the speedbag, climbing into the ring, or hitting the canvas.

And a first edition Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is not too shabby of an acquisition either.

I also had another bit of good fortune...


I found all three of Cormac McCarthy's novels that are part of his "Border Trilogy," I now have a nice uniform edition of some of the best work of the best living American writer.

But there's still one more book I have to show off. It wins the prize for the "Most Unexpected" volume.

Did you know that Charles Lindbergh wrote a lengthy book recounting his adventures in aviation up to and including his historic crossing of the Atlantic?

As I could tell from the price listed on the dust jacket, this book came out in the 1950s. What was most surprising, though, was that the entire memoir is written in present tense. Who was writing nonfiction in present tense back then? I can't think of anyone. Yet it's a wonderful gamble on the part of the writer. All of those present tense verbs can make us feel we are climbing into the cockpit with Lucky Lindy.

So I walked out of the Civic Center without anything by Kurt Vonnegut this year, but I still feel fine. In fact, I strongly suspect that there may have been a book or two by Kurt and I just overlooked them among the thousands of competing volumes. Oh well, my loss can be someone else's gain. And there's always next year - V.W.



Nine Men on a Roof

It began with the seriously grim clouds that moved in like an invading army on Easter afternoon.

Soon hail was bouncing off roofs and lawns and piling up in the street. The hail started out dime size. Then it grew. By the end, some of what was falling was the size of baseballs.

At NOAA.gov they show how hail is formed.

The hail pelted a wide area for more than an hour, but it only took a few minutes for it to change economic realities in these parts.

Once hail reaches quarter size the damage is assured. No prophet was needed to predict what would happen next.

Money would flow from insurance companies to thousands of other people.

Until the clouds came that afternoon, many of these people had been sitting around under-employed or unemployed.

Now they were dialing numbers on cell phones and looking around in the garage for their tool belts.

Millions of dollars' worth of roofs would have to be replaced in our fair city, including my own.

The roofers were about to arrive.

Rhythm of the Roof
Last week nine men came at 8 a.m., unloaded ladders, and started in. They removed all the old shingles. They nailed down a new under layer and they covered that with a sort of foil wrapper. On the second day they nailed down the new shingles. Not with pneumatic or electric nail guns, but the old-fashioned way. With arms and hammers.

During this time the temperature hovered near 100 degrees with not a cloud in sight. The shingles they were putting down were black. Can you imagine how hot it was up on the roof?

My wife and son and I were inside the house. We listened to the rhythm that had begun to take over the neighborhood. From early in the morning until near sunset somewhere there was the sound of...

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

The ceilings vibrated as the roofers walked around above us and dropped new stacks of shingles on the roofing deck. We shrugged it off. Since moving to what I sometimes call the Apocalyptic Plains, this was the third roof we had replaced after a hailstorm. Three roofs in 14 years! Think how upset they must be at the insurance company.

Overhead
My roofers took breaks in the shade every couple of hours. They drank lots of water. Most of them were Latino, but it wasn't true that none of them spoke English. A polite, brown skinned man knocked on the front door and asked me to unlock the gate to the backyard so he could collect debris being pushed off the roof. He didn't say "por favor"; he said "please."

I found myself thinking about these men and how this might be their chance to make good money until, finally, the last roof gets replaced, probably sometime in the fall. It's steady employment, six days a week.

At the same time I'm guessing that relatively speaking the money isn't exactly staggering, only a fraction of the substantial amount the insurance company is paying out for the roof. There's the cost of the materials and the money the roofing company is going to take. After that the rest of the money is divided nine ways. How much does each man get for two 12-hour days of work? I'd guess $200.

Then I was thinking of how much money those of us make who have college education and never work with our hands. We usually have a pretty good health plan, too.

My thoughts led me face to face with a well known paradox: the worse the job and the harder it is to do, the less it pays. Examples: coal mining, garbage collecting, putting on roofs.

The better the job and the easier it is to do, the better it pays. Ask most managers, accountants, and college professors.

There are some exceptions. Doctors make excellent money, but many of them work ferociously hard. And there are some unionized factory workers who draw high wages that somewhat compensate them for how hard and mind numbing is their work.

But still it's odd how humans things arrange themselves economically in a way that might seem to be counter intuitive. I remember as a kid thinking that the hardest, nastiest jobs surely had to pay the most.

A roofer, for example, ought to receive an annual salary decent enough that he could live in a house like the one whose roof he's putting on instead of renting an apartment or living in a fallen down two-bedroom bungalow.

And you would think anyone who is lucky enough to indulge in the pure pleasure of playing football or basketball or hitting a golf ball for a few months out of the year, and is compensated further with the adulation of adoring fans, wouldn't need to draw a mind boggling salary in the multi-millions on top of that.

That's not how it goes.

Why My Father Always Said, "Go to College, Son!"
I listened to the hammer blows coming through the ceiling above. I watched sweaty men coming down the ladder smiling. I saw them sacked out in the shade for a mid-afternoon siesta. I heard them the next morning singing songs as they started to work at 7:30. 

There was time enough to compare the roofing crew to myself sitting in my bathrobe, punching some keys or reading some books, or driving over to campus to sit around a table and say a few words in a meeting.

I was glad that the men didn't seem to detest their work. At the same time what I felt was the farthest thing from envy.

As the years go by, if all continues as is, each month lots of money will flow into my bank account. A much lesser amount will be deposited into those men's accounts (if they even have bank accounts). I'll sleep well at night while their bodies will ache. I'll stay employed even if the skies are always sunny. To add to it all, I'll probably live longer than them because my semi-protected lifestyle and access to extravagant medical care is amenable to longevity.

I and millions of others who proudly button the white collar are, in a sense, gaming the system, a system that quite often pays a person more to do less. How did we manage it? I'd say the key factor is that we got college degrees. This allowed us to turn our backs forever on crap jobs that pay crap wages.

But getting a college degree isn't an easy proposition. Never mind getting good enough grades and test scores to be admitted and all the studying once you're enrolled, college is an expensive undertaking. The university where I teach is like others--it raises its tuition every year at least 7%, even during a recession. Students grumble, pay up, incur more debt, and keep on enrolling. Why? Well, I now have a more vivid way of thinking about this economic outrageousness.

As is often stated, the cost of college these days is a trade-off. It's a matter of enduring steep financial pain in the short term so as to reap larger rewards, in the form of higher income, later. But I appreciate more than ever that it's not just about the money. A B.A. or B.S. degree is a form of bulleltproof vest. It also allows one to avoid certain kinds of lifetime pain--the body and soul-grinding forms.

College tuition is the price you pay not to go to work every morning in a crowded white panel van. It's the price you pay not to have callouses on your palms. It's the price you pay not to pee in  a can during the day. It's the price you pay not to come home filthy sometime after 8 p.m. every night.

It's the price you pay to stay off my roof.

So the next time it rains and my ceiling doesn't leak, I'm going to sing the praises of these most worthy of men. Those roofers, working class heroes who climb up and down the steep hot slopes most of us will never know. - V.W.

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Under 100 Days to Go!

I've been waiting for this.

Yes, that was me, day by day keeping an eye on the counter over on the right-hand side of this page with the intensity of a gambler staring at a spinning roulette wheel or a slot machine.

The counter has paid off.

Finally, I'm entering the home stretch of The Van Winkle Project. Soon I'll be able to watch TV again. Go to movies. Stop blushing like a shy bride every time I almost glimpse a newspaper headline.

What Keeps Me Going
Why am I so keen to get to the end? The truth is I've grown weary of my regimen. In fact, a couple of days ago I thought, "Why not quit not right now?"

I thought of how people had been dropping hints that I'd missed some REALLY MAJOR STUFF during the first five months of 2011. If that were true, then there was nothing left to prove. I had already made myself one of the least informed, most ignorant people on the planet. Mission accomplished.

Then I thought of the magic "100." With that number about to topple it seemed possible that I could stick this thing out until Sept. 11, 2011, as I promised in the first place...

There was another reason I focused on "100." It reminds me of a day back in November when I posted with some excitement that my first 100 days of the project had passed. Back then I compared my own landmark to the first 100 days of the U.S. presidency, a time when political pundits and prognosticators sit down and analyze just what the president has accomplished in that relatively short time span and predict what lies ahead.

Another reason to continue? Visits to this blog have trended up,
way up, in 2011...

The last 100 days in office of a president don't have quite the same significance. We call the resident of the Oval Office a "lame duck." The new president has already been elected and is waiting in the wings to be inaugurated in January, which makes the current president seem almost irrelevant. The president might as well relax, plan retirement, and gather materials for the inevitable presidential memoir.

I'd like to relax, too, knowing that I don't have that far to go, but I think it's wise not to. It's still too easy to lapse and almost involuntarily violate the terms of this project.

Confessions of a "Wait" Watcher
When I began the Van Winkle Project last fall some people congratulated me on undertaking what they called a "media fast." They said that they've considered a media fast for themselves. They thought media fasts were admirable. They hoped my media fast turned out well.

Wait a minute. Hold on. What's a media fast? Is what I've been doing for 265+ days been a "fast"?

After all this time to think about it, I think I'd like to tweak the metaphor a bit...

When I decided to give up all news, entertainment, sports and weather for a year, it wasn't really a fast from all electronic and print media. It's true I haven't read the news on-line or in newspapers or watched it on TV. Ditto for sporting events, new movies, and the national weather outlook. But it's not been a "fast" because I've still allowed myself plentiful portions of the following:

• Watch as many movies as I wish if they were released before my project began.
• Watch TV reruns and old shows.
• Listen to my old CDs and LPs
• Read books as long as they're not recently released.
• Read and send emails.

That's not exactly a fast.

I think a fast would be someone doing what's referred to as "living off the grid." If you have no electricity and you don't get any mail, then I think that's as close to a media "fast" as I'd want to contemplate. But no one should ever mistake Van Winkle for such an off-the-grid person. I'm not that ambitious or stalwart.

This project has been a bit like banning all traditional
forms of PROTEIN from my diet...

I think what I've been doing is more like a diet.

By giving up key elements of what goes into forming one's personal fabric of memory, social interaction, and conversation—but keeping everything else—I resemble somebody who has sworn off, say, protein derived from animals. They can have all the carbs they wish in the form of pasta, bread, pancakes, fruit, etc., but all meat and eggs and cheese are out.

News, entertainment, sports, and weather are the protein I'm depriving myself of. And sometimes this analogy feels apt. If a person doesn't get protein in some form (e.g., the legumes and tofu that vegetarians make sure to consume), then your body will weaken. Not knowing the following things makes me feel weak and feeble:

• How bad the natural disasters of 2011 have been.
• Why gas prices were going up then seem to have stopped.
• How the economy is doing.
• What's happening between Congress and the President
• What decisions the Supreme Court has issued.
• What's been happening in the Middle East.
• Who won Oscars at the Academy Awards this year.

These are not simply take 'em or leave 'em "desserts"; they're main course items, as far as I'm concerned. I feel semi-deprived and hungry. I'm a "Wait Watcher." I have to wait until I can "watch" again, and like people enrolled in the real "Weight Watchers," it can make a guy a bit grumpy at times.

But, thank heavens, it seems like an end is in sight. I just hope I don't get too big of a stomachache when in about 98 days they feed me the answers to all the questions I have. - V.W.

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