Element Days

Let’s see if I can get this right.

This trip began about a year and a half ago, when Reggie asked me, in one of the darker moments, what I would do with my life if I knew I had six months to live. Get a car and drive around the country, I told him. What if I had a year to live? Do the same thing but stop in California and learn to surf.

Well – work, and bills, and all that.

It also began in Atlanta, late in the summer of 2004, when I was traveling at Citibank’s expense to kick the tires of a vendor we thought we might want to do business with. I flew down there a day early to see what I could see of the town, and found myself sitting in the Baptist church on Auburn Avenue where Martin Luther King, Jr., used to preach. They were playing a recording of one of his speeches. I don’t know which one; it doesn’t really matter. I sat and listened to it and thought about what I was trying to accomplish in my life, and reflected that, whatever that might be, making director and helping big shots earn their bonuses weren’t on the critical path.

(I’m not sure serving coffee is, either, which maybe is why that project hasn’t gotten off the ground.)

Anyway, different work, and fundraising and interns, and all that. But there was a clearing this summer, and as Jonathan said to me when we were driving over to pick up chicken wings, when you have the chance to do one of these road trips, you have to take it, because you don’t know when the next chance will come along.

So I made some compromises with the rest of my life and the people in it, and set out from Brooklyn on a Thursday afternoon with the road atlas in my lap and Anna’s voice in the back of my mind saying “I think you’re going to throw off this shell you’ve been carrying.” And a week and a half later, here I am in Michigan, my family behind me, not really knowing what the next few weeks are going to be like, or the next few years after that, for that matter.

I go bike riding, and clean up, and then I venture into the horror of Holland’s real shopping district, mile after mile of strip malls, to see if I can find a Phil Ochs album. I’m planning to go to Gas City, Indiana, tomorrow, and I’m looking for the song “Jim Dean of Indiana,” to get me in the right frame of mind. Barnes and Noble doesn’t have it, but I pick up a different Phil Ochs album to fill the gap in my music collection. Back to downtown Holland, which is Holland’s faux shopping district, for lunch and blogging, which takes longer than planned. Then I drive north as close to the shore as I can come, to see what I can see and also because I've heard there are some terrific roller coasters up there.

You travel because you have an idea of where you’re going, but you don’t quite know what you’ll find when you get there. You might travel for that. Maybe not, maybe you want to know exactly what you’re going to find, and that’s what’s made the shareholders of the Walt Disney Company wealthy. Or worse than that, it’s what’s made wealthy the authors of books that describe in minute detail each ride and restaurant and fencepost and brick in the sidewalk, so that disappointment and delight prostrate themselves equally in submission and what remains is the satisfaction of “Yes, it’s exactly what they said it would be.”

Am I contradicting myself here? Very well then.

On the Phil Ochs album, which is a recording of a concert he gave in Vancouver in 1968, he introduces the song "Pleasures of the Harbor" by noting that the movies of John Ford and John Wayne were among his greatest inspirations when he was a kid.The audience laughs, and he remarks, with some audible frustration, that they always laugh when he says that.

I drive up the coast, past a coal-fired plant run by the folks at Consumer's Power that I photograph for the blog, but then don't use, and a lovely spot called Pigeon River where there are no pigeons in evidence. Occasionally I see the water; mostly I don't. It's a pleasant drive, and the queasy feeling of Saugatuck is starting to wash off.

I pull into Grand Haven. The clock says I gotta keep moving if I'm going to get my fun in, but if there's a Rule #3 to this trip, it's "If it looks interesting, stop." I turn through downtown, past the Coast Guard station and pull in at the beach.

There's glorious surf. Waves over your head. The red flags are flying at the beach to indicate no swimming, but the water is full of families and couples and kids laughing at their own puniness. And the noise.

And surfers. Mostly they're getting kicked around by waves that are coming in from all directions at once. One of them, younger than the rest, is sitting on a rock with blood running off his foot, and if I were a better journalist I'd have a picture to show you, but I refrain. I ask one of the others, who looks at the kid as if he's done his own time looking at his own blood on that very rock, if it's always like this here.

"We usually like it a little cleaner," he laughs. But mostly he seems thrilled.

I wade in the water up to my knees or so, and then walk out on the pier. Carefully: two of my cousins, when they were small, were swept off the South Haven pier on a wavy day much like this one, and signs at the foot of the pier pointedly memorialize two strong, young men who drowned in the last few years when the water took them by surprise. I'm joined by the brave and the foolhardy and the surfers, who rather than paddling out against the current carry their boards out on the pier and then, perilously, leap off the side and try to avoid getting bashed back against the concrete.

I stay a while, take a mess of pictures - most of them inevitably straight into the western sun - talk to a few more folks. Think about getting to California and seeing Pete and and whether that will work out the way I imagine. Maybe because of that, I head back to the car, the pull of the road ahead stronger than the pull of nothing better than this.

Phil Ochs is introducing the last song on the album as I pull out of the parking lot.

"I'll do for you now, you nice people here, a protest song. A protest song is defined as something – a song you don’t hear on the radio. And they’ll say you don’t hear it on the radio because the guy can’t sing or cuz the words are no good or … as they play the shit that they play these days. "

It takes me a minute, I think because this recording hasn't been edited, and then I recognize this as the track I remember from when my mom used to play her Phil Ochs album. He talks about the media, and mindlessness, and the terrible things that were happening in 1968. And then he starts to play the first guitar riff, but suddenly stops himself:

“So what can you do, I mean, here you are, a helpless soul, a helpless piece of flesh amid all this cruel, cruel machinery and terrible, heartless men. So all you can do is turn away from the filth and hopefully start to build something new someday. And it affects all of us, it affects the people here, too.”

Starts for real.

“So here’s a turning away song.”

The light changes, but I don't notice it, because I'm suddenly crying very hard. I don't really know why.

I turn back south, Phil Ochs playing his guitar like a sledge-hammer, through Grand Haven and past Holland, to Saugatuck Dunes State Park. Just because it's away. I've been here before. You walk half a mile through the woods, which may be more than the editors of Conde Nast and MTV are equal to, and suddenly come out in possibly the most unspoiled place I've ever been.

And watch the lake and the sun, and try to be nowhere else but that place and that time.

I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. But you might find yourself climbing Mount Snowdon for the unparalleled view it affords, only to find the view obscured by a wall of clouds. And while you’re staring dejectedly at your feet, the moon awakens you to a landscape more remarkable and moving than any you could have imagined. And it reminds you that the best you can do is to go forward hospitably disposed to whatever may come your way.