American Road Trip

I stopped for lunch in Edwards, Colorado the other day.  I was looking for a decent hamburger; I found the future of America.

____________________

Edwards, on the outskirts of the ski resort of Vail, is not quite a town.  In fact, at first glance, it appears to be little more than a handful of strip malls clustered about a spur road to I-70.  On second glance, it still appears to be little more than a handful of strip malls clustered about a spur road to I-70.

Apparently, though, it’s got enough of a population to be categorized as a “census-designated place.”  Of course, if the only thing that makes a place a place is the fact that the census-takers are out there counting bodies, that doesn’t sound like much of a place to me.  If Gertrude Stein thought there was “no there” in Oakland, California she had clearly never visited Edwards, Colorado.

At least, that’s what I thought before I had lunch.  We were trying to find a place called Larkburger on a street called Edwards Village Boulevard.  Naturally, we were looking for both a village and a boulevard; the environs of Larkburger had neither.

What it did have were all the trappings of a lifestyle center, one of those retail/leisure environments catering to upscale consumers.

As we walked around marveling at the added expense of amenities like wide sidewalks, stylish street furniture, legible signage, bike racks, and one or two thoughtful design details on the buildings, I realized that the Corner at Edwards also had something else: something that kind of, sort of, maybe, looked like the beginning of something that kind of, sort of, maybe could be called community.

Most of the buildings in the Corner had two stories and in Riverwalk, the development across the road, some of the buildings lining its “Main Street” had three stories.  These were not frontier false fronts (though Riverwalk had plenty of execrable Victorian falseness overall) they were real, occupiable spaces with just the sort of tenancy that made sense: lawyers, dentists, accountants, insurance agencies and even residences.

Somehow these additional stories were transformative; they created an aura of density and urbanism.  Admittedly, it was more accurately a simulacrum of density and urbanism, but the effect was nearly the same.  Combined with the restaurants, markets, drycleaners and even a first-run movie theater (the developers MUST be subsidizing this place), it was possible to do exactly what the sign said: Live-Work-Play.

I’m not sure if it is funny or depressing that, as my companion dryly observed, people need multi-use explained to them.  Of course, if you assume that those people are members of the generations of Americans raised in single-use suburbs, perhaps gentle didacticism is to be expected.

And for those readers who are wondering, that was a vanilla shake I drank at lunch, not New Urbanist Kool-Aid.

I left Los Angeles on April 29th to begin my long, meandering, journey towards the Atlantic.  Meandering is key here because my planned route involves several deviations from a single-minded east-bound trajectory.  Since I’ve long embraced deviance, these excursions didn’t seem like a big deal.  What are a few hundred extra miles when the trip is going to clock in at 15,000?

___________________

For weeks, my most recent road trip companion had been describing my east bound journey this way: “you’re going backwards.”  My backwardness took us to the Canyonlands and the Spiral Jetty so there’s not really much to complain about.

It also took us to what has to be the whitest place on the planet, northern Utah.  In Brigham City, we ate what has to be the whitest pie on the planet, banana cream.

This slice was the epitome of pale food: the crust was baked, but not browned in the slightest; the custard lacked a defining color; the slightly unripe banana slices were yellow mainly by contrast; the whipped cream was as white as, well, milk.  The pie tasted of comforting blandness, not bad, just a little dull.

I know there are some who will refuse to acknowledge that I am homeward-bound until the Clubman is heading down that metaphorical sunrise highway, and I apologize to all of you for delaying my return to the City.  I’ve heard the place isn’t the same without me, but I beg your indulgence for a few more weeks and can assure you that my extra time on the road will produce a series of worthy anecdotes.

Just yesterday, for example, I was eating lunch while sitting in the plaza of the Salt Lake City Library, designed by Moshe Safdie.  (I left my camera battery in the hotel; this is a Flickr photo).

It was a pleasant enough spot; the sun was shining and my sandwich and root beer were tasty.  For a while there was a homeless guy keeping me company, but otherwise the plaza was empty even though the library was open.

I ate half my sandwich contentedly and then twisted off the cap from my long-necked soda bottle.  Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a cop appeared.  With a blond brush cut, mesh cap, bulging arms, and pimples, he looked like a member of a junior swat team.  He walked directly to my table and leaned in to take a close look at my soda, lifting his mirrored sunglasses to read the label.  “Root beer, very good,” he stated as he straightened up and briskly walked away.

I looked around the empty plaza and realized how many surveillance cameras there were.  Had the cop really been monitoring my activity?  Had he been waiting until I opened my bottle in order to catch me flagrantly drinking a carbonated beverage in a public place?  Had he seen me jay-walk when I crossed the street to get to the plaza?  Was he reading the emails I was sending from my phone?  This is why very clean places filled with very white people make me nervous.

For the first time on my road trip I felt homesick for New York.

Last week, after many long hours exploring the desert , I spent the night in a tipi.  It would be easy to say the tipi was in the middle of nowhere because the closest town, Tecopa, is 230 miles from Los Angeles and has a population of 99.  But, in the middle of the Mojave, on the edge of Death Valley, at the bottom of a canyon riddled with abandoned gypsum mines, surrounded by a date farm, the tipi was definitely somewhere.

When we pulled into Tecopa to check in at the tipi office, my companion was skeptical.  Practically the only sign of life we had seen for miles, it was little more than a trailer surrounded by a few dusty, run-down buildings.

I’d have assumed the place was abandoned myself if I hadn’t been instructed to stop there.  It didn’t help that there were no visible tipis.  In the desert appearances can be deceiving: inside the office the clerk was so cheerful and enthusiastic as she greeted us by name and assured us that we’d make it to the hot springs before they closed, that she put our concerns to rest.

When she gave us directions to the tipi our concerns returned.  It was several miles away on unpaved, unnamed roads; it was almost dark; the directions were complicated.  Still, we set off  feeling the spirit of adventure.  How often does a New Yorker get to sleep in a tipi?  I once slept in a chicken coop in the Catskills, but a chicken coop in the Catskills is not a tipi in the Mojave.

Why is the prospect of sleeping in a tipi so appealing?  It must have something to do with its otherness as shelter in 21^st century America. In cultural terms, the tipi is as far removed from the Cape Cod cottage that inspired the iconic American detached house as Mojave is from the Plains.

I was dimly aware of tipis growing up on the east coast, but my knowledge was limited to reruns of westerns on UHF.  And since I didn’t play with Jane and Johnny West dolls, I missed the opportunity to erect a mini-tipi of my very own.  In college studying the paintings of George Catlin marginally expanded my understanding, but, truthfully, the tipi remained in the realm of native exoticism, a buckskin version of architecture’s fabled primitive hut.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this as we turned onto a dirt road that narrowed ominously as it dropped down into a steep canyon.  It felt like driving in a maze.  As our eyes adjusted to the dark, the moonlight revealed a landscape of craggy, pockmarked beauty that gradually gave way to a wide bottom filled with date palms.  Further ahead, the canyon’s strange beauty gave way to plain strangeness: in a small clearing sat a ramshackle house and three large tipis.

Though based on a traditional design, these tipis were hardly the demountable, portable structures of the Plains Indians.  They were more like mobile homes in a trailer park: theoretically, they could move but such an occurrence was highly unlikely.  Inside, it was Lawrence of Arabia meets Ralph Lauren.  This wasn’t surprising since the proprietor of the place was an interior decorator from Las Vegas who dropped out to the desert a few years ago.

At the center of the tipi was a granite-topped, gas-powered fire pit: the hearth, that most elemental symbol of human gathering and community, deftly transformed into an object of middle bourgeois luxury.  Since I long ago gave up being offended by objects of middle bourgeois luxury, I was delighted with the fire pit.  It didn’t even matter that the fire provided atmosphere rather than heat.  The beds inside the tipi had electric mattress pads.

Laying in bed that night I saw stars through the tipis’ smoke hole and heard coyotes howling in the distance.  Laying in bed the following morning, I watched the sun make dappled patterns on the tipi’s canvas cover.

I got up feeling so refreshed and satisfied with my night in a tipi that I tried to convince my companion to build one in her backyard.  Wouldn’t a tipi in el barrio be almost as good as a tipi in the Mojave?  She thought not; upon further reflection I’m inclined to agree (the Manhattan rat lacks the allure of Mojave coyote), but I stand by my initial enthusiasm.

*****

A few days later, I tried to sleep in a tipi again; this time in Holbrook, Arizona.  More precisely, I tried to sleep in a building shaped like a tipi calling itself a wigwam.  It was part of a “village” built in the early 1940s, one of several wigwam motels that once lined the roadsides of Route 66 from Illinois to California.  I stayed here once before, more than a decade ago, and was excited to stay again because I liked the symmetry of sleeping in two tipis in one week, even if the second tipi was a building shaped like a tipi calling itself a wigwam.

Sadly, when we rolled into Holbrook after 8 pm all the tipis were booked.   Apparently, we were not the only people seeking what J.B. Jackson called “the different and temporary identity” that the road bestows on the traveler.  I retired for the night to the Best Western next door.  It was far less romantic, but at least it had WiFi.

__________

I went to the Lightning Field.

I didn’t see lightning.

I saw god.

_____

A few days ago, after several long, hot hours of looking at buildings, my friends and I were thirsty.  This was understandable.  We had driven from Los Feliz to Watts in 95º heat and then from Watts to downtown in 100º heat.

Viewing Simon Rodia’s towers meant total exposure, so the shadowy depth of the public plaza of Thom Mayne’s Cal Trans District 7 Headquarters offered welcome respite.  Unfortunately, because it was Sunday the café was closed and we couldn’t even take our ease in the shade because a security guard told us it was state property.

So much for bold civic gestures; I decided not to ask if he had a water fountain.

We got back in the car and headed west on First Street towards the 110.  The sun hitting the stainless steel skin of the Disney Concert Hall gave me a headache.  (Gehry buildings often give me headaches.  I felt awful at Bilbao, but that might have been the lamb I had for lunch.)

The headache made me thirstier; the jammed freeway ahead of us only made things worse.  We decided to take the surface roads in search of a more picturesque route and a watering hole.

The picturesque appeared as we turned onto North Fremont Street and confronted an abandoned stair in a pyramidal mound.  What unexpected monument was this?  Had it wandered north from Teotihuácan or Chitzén Itzá?  What was its purpose?  Was there a viewing platform at the top?  Was this a designated scenic point of a uniquely Los Angeles sort?  Even unofficially, it would surely offer an excellent prospect of the Harbor Freeway.  Plus, the chain link fence was already rent and there wasn’t much trash piled inside.  It seemed sensible to pull over and have a look.

My companions thought this was a terrible idea.  I was perplexed; this was the sort of thing we did frequently in Newark (the place is lousy with abandoned stairs).  Then, it occurred to me that when you spend most of your time with architecture adventurers, or architecture undergraduates who have no choice, such activities seem normal.  I was having another Reyner Banham moment: “We cheer up on entering wastelands that turn off everybody else,” he wrote in 1982 of Bayonne, New Jersey.  I was on the opposite coast 27 years later but, as usual, his observation was spot on. I relented, but only because I was still thirsty.

Presently we turned onto Sunset Boulevard, confronting many more Sunday-shuttered storefronts than I would have imagined.  As we reached Echo Park our luck changed.  Though the little corner market seemed more liquor store than grocer, the inside of the place was lined with beckoning glass fronted coolers.

In the interest of hydration we should have headed straight for the bottled water, but we had Coca-Cola on our minds, kosher coke to be specific, the kind that makes its appearance in major urban centers every spring just in time for Passover.

Now, the last time I drank a Coca-Cola was in 1987, the year I graduated from college.  I was never much of a soda drinker, but I had great affection for the coke machine in my dorm. Dorms at Smith are mostly old houses and their basements (at least back then) were unfinished and filled with decades’ worth of transient accumulation.  Mine had a particularly dark and dingy back room, one I would have avoided but for that machine.  It was a hulking refrigerated box, all red and white enameled steel, with a compressor that ran constantly, making a dreadful whirring din.

In the mid-eighties, the soda wars were just heating up.  Coke had introduced its infamous “new” formula in 1985 but bottlers in Western Massachusetts were slow to adapt.  So when I went to the coke machine in the basement I knew I was getting “the real thing”–a coke made with cane sugar.  The mechanical groaning and thumping required to eject a small bottle of highly chilled soda were proof of authenticity.

The bottle itself was equally authentic–one of those contoured glass cylinders Raymond Loewy redesigned in the 50s or 60s with swoopy, curved ridges and raised letters.  Plus the thick rounded glass of the bottle’s neck was undeniably appealing in a Freudian-oral-fixation sort of way.  In 1991 when Madonna gave a bottle a blow job in Truth or Dare it was easy to understand the impulse.  Though she wasn’t drinking a coke, Loewy would still have approved.

I don’t remember that I consciously stopped drinking coke after college, but I’m guessing it accompanied a growing interest in health and exercise.  It probably also accompanied a growing fastidiousness about design.  By the time I know I was deliberately avoiding soda it was because I couldn’t stand the sickening sweetness of corn syrup and because I didn’t like the aesthetics of the aluminum can.

I’ve long since started drinking soda again, but only if it’s made with sugar and bottled in glass.  And this is why I’ve never been tempted by kosher coke; it’s got the sugar but, in New York at least, it is only available in plastic jugs and tin cans.

My friends were convinced that in L.A. we were going to find the stuff in glass because coke is always available in glass in the Southland.  We were optimistic as we headed towards the soda section in the back of the store.  The coke display required two sides of an aisle, so numerous were the coke varieties.  Glass bottles gleamed in the florescent light, but no kosher for passover “P” appeared on the labels and further investigation revealed, sadly, nothing but corn syrup.

As we were walking away, dejected and still thirsty, we noticed another section of coke in glass bottles.  We stopped to take a closer look at the stamped on label: Coca-Cola MR, REFRESCO CONT. NET. 355 ml NO RETORNABLE HECHO EN MEXICO.  The ingredients were listed in English and Spanish on a separate paper label.  The first ingredient was carbonated water; the second ingredient was sugar.

We bought a few bottles and I took a sip in the entrance to the store.  I had no Proustian moment but reflected instead on the fact that soda never quenches my thirst.  Still, the Mexican coke gave me pause and made me remember the tonic I drank in India.  Made with real sugar and a fair amount of real quinine, it actually tasted like its name.  To get the same thing in America I have to spend four times what a bottle of Schweppes or Canada Dry costs and make a special trip to a fancy store.  I stood there for a while contemplating slow food and the end of empire and then realized the bottle in my hand was starting to sweat.  I drained the bottle before the Mexican coke got warm.