RichEisbrouch
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Wednesday, June 30, 1999 Leaving Freeport was almost as frustrating as getting in. We took a wrong turn so had to go back, a couple of times, then ended up learning far more about the place than we ever needed to. Finally, we were heading south. Though it wasn't pretty. It should've been, seeing we were edging the Gulf and driving through towns with great names like Brazoria, Matagorda, Palacios, and Magnolia Beach. But when we got to each, it proved disappointingly serviceable.
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Nah, there just aren't going to be any overt romantic happenings. We'd already been seeing each other for over a year when I mentioned the trip and Tom asked if he could come along. I asked if he could get a couple of months off, and when he said "Yes," that finalized it. He said he'd get someone to watch the dog, and I said, "Nah, she's coming along. A good friend of mine always traveled with her dog and said it was a great way to make friends." Then Tom suggested using the truck instead of my car. As you can tell by the journal, we had a pretty good, easy-going relationship to start with, and that just got better as we drove along. That was the romance.
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Tuesday, June 29, 1999 And sometimes communication fails. Cathy had mentioned a plantation town at dinner, kind of in the direction we were headed, and Tom had seemed interested. I said it sounded like a good idea, but the next morning, when humidity hit, the thought of walking around for two hours in moist mist made it less interesting. Besides, after Williamsburg, Charleston, and Savannah, this would be more of the same. So I made other plans, told Tom, and he said fine. Still, I
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Monday, June 28, 1999 There'd been an even better solution to finding a place to stay last night. We just didn't know it. A short drive west led to Civil War-era Fort Morgan, long abandoned on a hot spit of sand. There, a ferry left to Dauphin Island, where a tasteful billboard boasted No Buildings Over Three Stories High, a welcome contrast to overstacked Gulf Shores. The island had once been called Dauphine, after the wife of the son of the king of France. We might have stayed a
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Sunday, June 27, 1999 Eventually, something was gonna happen to the truck: A flat tire. A busted belt. Some leaky valve. Tom had been terrific, maintaining it on the road, changing the oil every three-thousand miles, having everything steadily checked. But he couldn't have allowed for me. He was asleep. I'd been writing. I finished and went out to check the day's mileage, my last entry each night. As I left the room, the dog barely stirred. In the lot, I got into a conversation
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Saturday, June 26, 1999 In Georgia, we got wet. Not only clinging humidity. Squalling rain. "Pull over," I told Tom, after six weeks of barely interfering with his driving. "Here?" he asked. The rain was coming down so hard we couldn't even see out the windshield. The wipers couldn't keep up. Even the dog was making sinking sounds. "Or take the next exit and park under something dry." Tom didn't want to pull over, afraid someone might hit us. But since no one
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Nah, we were mainly driving the perimeter -- though we didn't quite make it to the tip of Florida nor the tip of Texas. And if you want to know what happened south of the border, read Mexico.
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That's neat, that you can go back that far. My family's graves in the US only go back to my great-grandparents -- and I have no idea where most of those are, though I know where all my grandparents are, having known them all. The earliest part of Tom's family came to the US around 1650, and while we have his extensive family tree, I think our immediate knowledge of the graves only goes back to around 1900. There's a fictional account of his family, based on parts of his family tree and assorted anecdotes, and centered around the very long life of one of his aunts, but it's not suited to this site. It's called Bodark Creek, and you can find it online for less than a buck. But I warn you: no gay men.
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But this was 1999 -- before The Big Ditch -- and I haven't driven that area of Boston since the tunnel was created. I think Tom would have found that as claustrophobic.
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There probably was fish chowder, but I guess we skipped it. And glad you liked the chapter. It may be the funniest thing I've ever written.
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Friday, June 25, 1999 I first learned about the islands off Beaufort (byou-fert), South Carolina the way maybe a lot of people did---from Pat Conroy novels. I'm not sure I saw Conrack before reading The Water Is Wide, the book it was based on, or if I read the book first, eager to learn how people in other parts of our country lived. Then I heard about the Gullah settlement, established by freed Civil War slaves, from another book-movie combination, and that made the area even more i
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Thursday, June 24, 1999 Old Savannah is as different from Historic Charleston as both those cities are from Restored Williamsburg. For one thing the streets are wider. For another, there are more trees. But mainly, the focus isn't on buildings. It's on squares. My map lists twenty-one, though Tom and I only hiked fifteen, and not just 'cause the dog slowed us by sticking her nose in everything. Again, walking seemed best, though I counted three different trolley tours---red, green,
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Wednesday, June 23, 1999 The easy comparison to Charleston is Williamsburg, but they're hardly long-separated twins. Yeah, both were once far more important than they are today. And for years both were nearly buried under commercial rot. And maybe even Rockefeller's money, rescuing Williamsburg, made folks in South Carolina realize they needed to clean up their own wreck. But there are no reenactors tramping Charleston, pretending to live in another century. "Buses? I don't know anyt
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Tuesday, June 22, 1999 It's an odd day that starts off nicely, ends up nicely, and has such howling ugliness in between. The start was a two-hour ferry ride on a boat small enough---fifty cars---for the dog to stay with us on deck. We eased through Pamlico Sound and Raleigh Bay, heading for Cedar Island. At busier times, reservations were often taken a month in advance, but this morning the ferry was less than half-full, and most people stayed outside rather than crowding the cramped
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Monday, June 21, 1999 The first plane flight was shorter than the average distance from first class to coach in a modern jet. But it freed the Wright brothers from a life of fixing bicycles in Dayton. The first flight was also shorter than the height of the Wright Brothers Monument on Kill Devil Hill. That's where they actually flew---Kitty Hawk only sounds prettier. The monument is granite, art deco, and wind-blown. Out front, Wilbur and Orville's heads, in life-size bronze, ma
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Sunday, June 20, 1999 The most amazing thing about Colonial Williamsburg---CW as the locals call it---is it's a furniture museum. There are no water slides. Yet it's mobbed every year. And it's not like they trot out new history. The place does change, though strangely, not always getting prettier. In the '30's, the Foundation was happy enough to have anything that even looked like it belonged in the 1700's. With success, came accuracy---always a shock---and restoration sometime
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Saturday, June 19, 1999 "This is why the Civil War was so hard to fight," I told Tom. We were rambling on one of those completely overgrown roads, both at the sides and above. "What do you mean?" "The whole area once looked like this." "Too bad it still doesn't." It was pretty, if isolated---all dense trees, separating almost hidden pastures. In another place, one that almost mirrored this though was in Lower Manhattan during the Revolution, two enemy armies mis
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Friday, June 18, 1999 The wonder of the National Gallery is it's free---once you find a place to park. For some reason, despite other steady improvements, Washington's so far declined to build a National Garage. We could have taken the subway. But from the friend's where we were staying, we'd have to take a bus to reach that, so it seemed easier to drive. And we found parking soon enough, for only twelve bucks, all day, cheap. Though for twenty minutes we'd stupidly hunted a nearer
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Thursday, June 17, 1999 The first time I saw Washington, I was in high school. It was Easter, and my best friend Jeff and I were taking a bike trip, our longest so far. Because we didn't really have enough time, we took the train there, then planned to cycle back. My cousin Larry met us, soon after we checked into the Y. That seemed only fair since he was the one who'd started us long-distance-riding. He was my model for other things as well: not only did he own the first ten-sp
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Wednesday, June 16, 1999 Unlike my father's grave, which we found pretty quickly with my mother's help, Tom's dad's plot was harder to locate. For one thing, its across the country from most of his family, so there was hardly anyone to guide us. For another, even Tom, his mother, and sister had only been there once. "Why so far away?" I asked, not that distance alone kept me from my relations. "It's where my mother was born. Where she'll be buried." It was also on a be
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Tuesday, June 15, 1999 You keep hearing about people getting jobs, or raises, or simply not being fired just because they know where the bodies are buried. In my family, not only have we lost track of where we came from, we also don't know where we've gone. I know where my dad's buried, not only because Mom goes there a lot, but because it's near a roller-skating rink I used to use in junior high. And if we dig through my father's old desk, we can probably find certificates loca
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Monday, June 14, 1999 I wouldn't have dragged Tom into New York---again, because this wasn't the city tour---but I had to meet my great-aunt Phyllis. And I mean meet: I'd never seen her before. On my dad's side, my grandfather was one of nine kids. But he was the only one who managed to goose that litter to a third generation, and even he barely made it. "What happened?" I'd once asked my father. Who'd kind of shrugged. Politely, it seems. Turns out my granddad and his brother
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Sunday, June 13, 1999 The Ride of the Valkyries is nothing compared to the arrival of my relatives. They all come in shouting gleefully, bearing cakes. Some aren't even real relations. But they've been with the family so long who remembers. First came my brother Mike, his wife Grace, and their granddaughter Alexis. Alexis Victoria, technically, her young parents being romantics. Then, before anyone else arrived, my mother decided to redecorate. Actually, she just wanted to
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Saturday, June 12, 1999 "Just another minute," my mother said as I walked in the house. She quickly kissed me, and I introduced Tom. "I've got to see if they win." She was sitting in half-darkness in the living room where she usually watched television, watching the Knicks try to get into the playoffs. During commercials, which were frequent in the final "seconds," she asked if we were hungry, if we wanted anything to drink, how the drive was, if we were tired, and "Where is the
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Yep, I learned to love that dog. But I was still learning on the trip.
