Truck Nation...Traveling "The 40," part one

I-40, New Mexico

 I've probably spent more time on what is now I-40 than any other highway. I traveled it before it was I-40 when it was Route 66, while it was under construction, and uncountable times since, especially between Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Most recently and increasingly, I'm fascinated by what I've come to call "Truck Nation." My wife hates traveling the road because of the big rigs, and I'll admit, it is much more heavily traveled than some other interstates, but still, a day on I-40 is exhilarating to the imagination.

I have two games on the road--mapping the different license plates, and counting the trucks per mile. That's where this article comes from. Based on several trips, I can safely estimate that during daylight there are about 10 semi-trucks barreling along every mile of I-40 between here and Albuquerque--on one side. 

If you double it, that means there are roughly 1,000 semis on that stretch of road right now, and every hour--not counting  the ones in truck stops or parked alongside the road. Multiply that times all the Interstates, especially in heavily populated areas, and boggles the mind.

Consider the costs. Consider the people. Consider the jobs. Consider the cargos. Consider the food in the grocery stories. Consider the finances and incomes and environment and sociology and families.

Writer Larry McMurtry has traveled many of them and written about them in "Roads." http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=larry+mcmurtry+roadsWhile he hasn't traveled I-40, he has "The 35," as he calls them all as specific names. Makes sense, because he compares them, not to America's railroads, but to America's rivers for delivering commerce--like the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Ohio.

And traveling The 40, you have to conclude that Ike's brainstorm of a national defense highway network is no longer that. In fact, we don't need Interstates for cars. The main reason for Interstates? Modern rivers for semi-trucks.

If you want to know what it's like driving one of these modern day river boats, here's the best source. My favorite writer, John McPhee http://www.amazon.com/John-McPhee/e/B000AQ4582/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1in his book "Uncommon Carriers," fulfills every boys dream of stepping up in such a cab. In both the initial and concluding essays in the book, McPhee crossed the United States on two different trips with Don Ainsworth, the driver  an 80,000-pound eighteen-wheeler--a gleaming chemical tank carrier. What skill and adventure.

As I was heading home recently, somewhere west of Sana Rosa, I started wondering about the the costs and the numbers.

The exclamation point came up the railroad behind Burlington Northern Santa Fe (that name is obscene to me--it's the Santa Fe) locomotives and a container train....heading for more trucks.

If it's a little blurry, consider the conditions  when it was taken. While between me and it, more trucks...

So i stopped at an Oklahoma company  truck stop, Love's, to get a sandwich and gas up. Doesn't that tell you how Truck Nation is dominant. More questions to be answered.

Turning a phrase, or several

If you go through the books I read, you will find a multitude of varied marks...no real code, except may for a star by something exceptional, and I know I've told you this.

Although I didn't mark much in John McPhee's last book, Silk Parachute, each of the essays grabbed me. A reviewer wrote that McPhee can make anything interesting, and I started to disagree, seeing the essay on golf. But he did that too.

One essay was about his daughter and her photography partner who take large format photographs. Thus the title, "Under the Cloth."  Anyone familiar with large format cameras will love it.  Here are a few well-turned phrases I marked or underlined.. McPhee's ability to see in detail, and thus write great non-fiction:

"When they study the ground glass under the dark cloth, they are cropping the landscape rather than the picture."

"The darkly outlined final product was brightened by motion:...the ninety minute brushstroke of the moon."

"...the Deardorf spent ten evening minutes drinking in the Bridge Street bridge."

"...Laura and Virginia were drawn off the turnpike and into the kipukas of Carteret, where bungalows with picket fences survived the industrial magma."

From "Season on the Chalk," (the chalk of Europe--chalk cliffs of Dover and French champagne country) he goes into the geology of chalk embedded with flint: "Flints from English chalk ignited the powder that answered the shot heard round the world."

From "My Life List" (food he has eaten): "Sam knows the name and address of every rattlesnake in the northern five thousand acres of the island."

Of humidity in New Jersey:  "You could drink the air."

Enough quotes. Other essays are about Lacrosse, fact checking at The New Yorker, high school basketball, canoeing, and New Jersey.  All with well-turned phrases. Makes one want to write.

The pages of March, 2010

Four books helped fill the pages of the month as they flipped by.

First was Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It makes you want to travle and write.

Second was  George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, a look at the probabilities of the future, which he says will be an American Century. But he predicts  the other emerging powers will be Russia--which is happening now, and headed for another collapse, and the growth of Turkey, Poland and Mexico as regional powers--also happening now.

Third, was John McPhee's Silk Parachute, my favorite author's rare look inside his own life in a series of essays. He can make almost anything interesting, including the last essay, Rip Van Golfer.

And last night, I finished poet Billy Collins latest book Ballistics. His fresh way of looking at the everyday is refreshing. And yes, I've underlined and checked and marked and circled lines and words throughout all four

Hmmm, a non-fiction month. Yes, you have to take Collins' poetry as non-fiction.

In April, I don't know. A pretty good year so far. Too bad there's not another Harry Potter book coming out.

Selections soon.


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Fresh coffee and new blends

We're always looking for new, better coffee, knowing that there is still much to be discovered in flavor and taste. So it is with this blog. I keep finding new blends, new flavors I hope enrich its taste.

I've added some of those to the right sidebar, under Coffee Cups.

They're links to other sites I consider robust offerings for thought and pleasure. I hope you'll sample them soon.

To perk your interest, consider:

• The Algonquin Roundtable at the hotel in New York City is the kind of place every artist and community needs  to survive. It was my pleasure to stay in the hotel a few years ago, thanks to the Dart Foundation meeting. The Hotel just oozes thought and creativity.
• If you want to write, or do write, you just have to read Bradbury, especially his little book, "Zen and the art of Writing."
• My favorite writer and book are Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness. This Polish writer learned English and became a master of prose and storytelling, in haunting tales of the sea and humanity.
• The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma I have a long, happy history with, dating from the Oklahoma City bombing. It's dedicated to helping journalists cover traumatic news in an ethical and sensitive way to protect the victims, and the journalists. I have met terrific thinkers, movers and journalists thanks to these people. This is a rich site.
• Shelby Foote wrote prolifically about the Civil War. A true Southern gentleman made his fame in the Ken Burns series on The War. Note: He wrote all his books in longhand, with a fountain pen. He said it gave him time to consider each word. My wife Susan has a signed letter from him, written with the same fountain pen in elegant penmanship. It hangs on the wall with a photograph of one of her Confederate ancestors.
• My favorite living writer is John McPhee, whose non-fiction resounds with detail and style. He also teaches at Princeton.
• Natalie Goldberg does what I want to do, live in Taos and teach writing there. Her books on writing are very influential and good. I steal a lot of her ideas, especially from Writing Down the Bones.
• Ron Ranson is a one-eyed English marvel who I was privileged to study watercolor with a while back in a week long workshop in Taos. He is famous for Watercolor Fast and Loose, a book and style. Most of his paintings are completed with just three brushes. Yes, I bought one of his paintings, and his famous Hake brush.
• TED is a site full of ideas and creativity. Often humorous, always provoking. 
• The Waurika News-Democrat, my old newspaper, where I got my real education, and passion for community journalism.
• Eudora Welty has such grace and power and poetry in her prose. You should read One Writer's Beginnings.
• Walt Whitman--of course.

Poetry corner

 

 Poetry corner shelf--middle shelf with Whitman as a bookend, pix of grandson Max, etc

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In cleaning out the garage the other day, I came across some musty  poetry books, covers faded with age, and I knew I had to bring them in. We have a poetry corner in the front room bookcase, of our favorite poets and other books we've gathered along the way as we've discovered new poets, or remembered ones. So I've added to our poetry corner. It has a soft chair and warm floor lamp beside it, fairly close to the fireplace.

The only place I know in Oklahoma City that actually has a poetry corner, an entire room really, is Full Circle Bookstore.  I've always loved going in there in the winter when the fire is going, pulling a poetry book off the shelves and warming up inside and out.

We don't read poetry often, not often enough, but when you need poetry, you need poetry...even if just a little. It loosens the mind, makes you love the sound of words, and the images of words even more. The fiction writer Ray Bradbury, in his little book, "Zen and the Art of Writing," says writers should read poetry often because "it exercises muscles we don't use much."

So what poets have taken up residence in our house? There are three volumes of Whitman, of course. The old textbook I told you about, then a selection of poetry and photos  on death and dying, and then a small volume Susan gave me a few years ago as a gift, inscribed with a note saying she sees Whitman in my writing.

Then there are several volumes of Pablo Neruda. I love his work because you have the original Spanish on one page, and the English translation on the facing page.  You can see part of his life story in the movie Il Postino. At a writing conference in Albuquerque a few years ago we discovered Jimmy Santiago Baca, theChicano poet and legend, and we have some of his.

Also of southwest note, I have "Earth Apples," poetry and fire from the late Ed Abby, western troublemaker, author, rebel against progress, and icon. One valuable 1928 book "Turquoise Trail" is an anthology of New Mexico poetry with poems by Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Marsden Hartley, Paul Horgan, D.H. Lawrence, Vachel Lindsay, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Carl Sandburg and many more. I pick that book up and I'm back in The Land of Enchantment. Another is V.B. Price's "Chaco Trilogy."

From my years in Waurika, I have old copies of "Listen, The Prairies Speak" autographed by Vera Holding, and "A Prairie Woman Sings," by Waurikan Thelma Largent.

 Former American Laureate Billy Collins is in the house in "Sailing Alone Around the Room," and  "Nine Horses." I've got a 1967 Hallmark reprint of "The Poems of Doctor Zhivago," by Pasternak.

Recently I've started buying, every April,  the Wrangler Award winner in poetry from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. I'm a judge of their non-fiction contest, so we get free tickets. I'm struck by how these western poets--ranchers and rural people you've never hear of, capture images of the contemporary West. From two years ago I have "The Last Buffalo," haunting poems about the  decline of rural population in the Dakotas. And somewhere in this house is last years' winner, "Poems from Dry Creek."

Who else in on the shelf? An old volume of Rod McKuen stuff from hippie days.  John Erskine's 1925 "Sonata and other poems." A  beautifully illustrated 1935 copy of A.E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad." A 1937 first edition of  Everett Wentworth Hill,'s "Toward the Sun."

Still missing somewhere in this house is "Silver in the Sun," a very old book about the Canadian north.

In 2006 my mother's baby brother, E.T. Culp of Nacogdoches, Republic of Texas,  gave me a 1940 volume of Robert Service poetry, "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone." He could even quote from it. It was the last time I saw him, and his signature in it is a special gift now that he has died. No wonder I love the musty smell of old books.

Going through all those books  and arranging the poetry books makes me think I also need a John McPhee shelf, a Tony Hillerman corner, a Larry McMurtry corner,  a Joseph Conrad nook, a Harry Potter line, two New Mexico shelves... and at least a couple of shelves of books about writing. My art books already occupy two full shelves in the studio. But we're running out of shelves and corners and aren't that organized. If it was too organized, it'd be boring.

But having a poetry corner isn't. Why? ...

"When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,

And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,

I mourn'd and yet shall mourn with ever returning spring.

"Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love."