Walt Lockley - Travel Pieces

ten American places I couldn't wait to get out
of

written October 2000

Cranky and fueled with the milk of
human bitterness this evening, ten travel destinations I just couldn't wait to part
from. In no particular order.

5. North St. Louis. Years ago, on an illegal late-evening errand to
the near north side, rolling up Skinker then right somewhere, left
somewhere, and I remember this was a Wednesday night, I was
shocked to discover an entire, like, permanent carnival/block
party for eight or ten blocks in a row. People out on the sidewalks
and in the street, laughing and drinking and openly shooting up on
stoops; loud loud loud rap rattling our windows as we rolled by;
every car I saw had been wrecked, and every face I saw gave
this white lad a good hard look. Say what you like about East St.
Louis, but I think the near north side consistently beat it for drug
use, forcible rapes and homicides statistics. Especially on a
certain street called Cote Brilliante. An excellent place to stay
away from.

6. 55th Street east of I-90, south Chicago. Smart guy.
Map-literate big shot. We can get from the highway over to Lake
Shore Drive if we cut through here; look, there's a park, no
problem. Problem. Only some of the most brutal housing projects
in the country, the name escapes me -- is this Cabrini Green?
This was a cloudy wet morning but dread and some murderous
threat still hung in the air, you could taste it. Smart guy has to
stop at McDonald's for coffee, thinking McDonald's is surely safe,
but there's three tense-looking cops standing in the doorway.
The biggest fattest cop looks at me and shakes his head. Smart
guy. Message received. Goodbye.

2. Kansas. I have nothing against Kansas or Kansans, as far as
I'm concerned they're a fine crop of people, but in denial about
the relative attractiveness of their tourist attractions. True, they
try to make the most of what they have. They'd like you to stop
at the Little House on the Prairie, at the world's largest hand-dug
well, at the birthplaces of Walter Chrysler and Bob Dole and a
couple of astronauts, and, oh my, the folk-art mecca called the
Garden of Eden, essentially a bunch of misshapen mannequins in
some old geezer's front yard. The old geezer is also on display.
Kansas is not made to be enjoyed casually, it's just a fact. One
small exception is Salina's fine collection of neon signs, but
generally it's better just to concentrate on getting to the horizon.

8. San Augustine Texas. By some freak of history, I was born in
San Augustine Texas, which lies in the heart of red-dirt
pine-forest deep east Texas where the accents are as slow and
sweet as molasses, where it doesn't seem like Texas a'tall, more
like Louisiana. Louisiana twenty years ago. Racial divisions still run
deep down here -- not friction, necessarily, but spooky social
divisions that still sort of assume that blacks and whites belong
to separate species. That uniquely horrifying dragging incident
happened not too far from here. Logging trucks sweep up and
down the main roads without even slowing down for smaller
vehicles -- you just have to know to get out of the way.
Strangers are carefully gauged. They don't see many. I'm thankful
for my Texas citizenship and twice as thankful that my parents
moved to Bismarck North Dakota when I was -- let's see -- four.

9. Bismarck / Mandan North Dakota. Only because of the
crushing, blistering, isolating winters that force these Swedes and
Norwegian sons and daughters into the house for seven months
at a time. They raise hardy mixed-breed cattle and winter wheat,
there's no city to speak of and really nothing to do but drink, the
prices are high, and the cold becomes a personal enemy. It was
so bad that my parents started going to church as a regular
thing. Mom took up Seagram's. And you know, when it's summer,
and it's summer for about 12 days, it can easily get over a
hundred degrees. What a cruel trick.

1. Downtown Las Vegas. Even after the installation of the
Fremont Street Experience and the outdoor neon museum --
museum is stretching it don't you think -- downtown LV is seedy.
That's always the word, seedy. Of course all of Vegas is a
machine to separate you from your money, but downtown style
means doing it to you without any kind of lubrication. Go take a
good look at those porn-star videotron monitors, or look into the
eyes of those retirees at the penny slots. A desperate, nasty,
hellish mantrap.

3. Tustin Market Place, Tustin CA. I don't know if I can
adequately describe this one -- most of my venom has come out
by now, thank you for the catharsis -- but the TMP is an Orange
County phenomenon, a developer's wet dream of a huge, huge,
huge collection of huge, huge big-box retailers with e-z highway
access. The IKEA store we visited sat on the edge of this
mammoth complex but we still felt lost and confused and
disoriented by so much merchandise. Unbelievable streams of
cars, acres and acres of hot asphalt crammed with hundreds and
hundreds of OC SUV's. My God. You could probably see this place
from the moon. It was like seeing the Evil Palace of Consumer
Culture as a Little Nemo nightmare. It makes you want to go
catalog for the rest of your life.

10. Hartford CT. To be fair, this was a bad business trip, but
everywhere I turned in Hartford I found more Cliff-and-Normie
sort of guys, except hostile. Hostile enough to hassle my friend
and I at a bar, for nothing. Bad, used-up vibes from the
countryside. Bad vibes all the way. Just what I would have
expected from the worldwide home of insurance. I'm sure there
are some dazzling, loving and deeply tanned people in Hartford,
and I'm pretty sure I'll hear from at least one of 'em, but I didn't
see you then.

4. The Pennsylvania Turnpike. Bad road. Picture four crumbling
lanes twisting and snaking their way through a landscape of
unpredictable hills, graded off by early highway engineers still
experimenting with their newfangled protractors, add a fleet of
superaggressive east-coast truckers full of them little white pills,
add an exit every fifty miles, add a frequent layer of ice and wet
snow, potholes and lane closings to taste, and you have a driving
experience fit for those who dream of dying in a steel and glass
pinata known as a Honda Prelude.

7. The South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I can't be sarcastic about
this one. It breaks my heart to see all those chuffing cars lined
up to pay twenty dollars to drive to Grand Canyon Village and
fight their way into line at the old lodge, then to go stand on the
very edge of this unknowably huge canyon complex, this world,
to stand there for 10 minutes, then back to the car. I don't have
an alternative. I don't think you should have to take some kind of
Mother Nature loyalty oath to get inside. But it still breaks my
heart.

There! I feel much better! Thank you!