Writer Wednesday - Episode Twenty-Three: Along the Road

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour 

By Jill Culiner 

Episode Twenty-Three: Along the Road 

Outside, the sky is still night black and, as I wait for the shuttle taxi that will take me into town, a young woman comes up to the hotel’s reception desk. Slender with fine features hidden under large unattractive eyeglasses, a baseball cap covers her thin braided orange hair, and an unlit cigarette dangles from the corner of her mouth. She looks like a toughie, but smiling seductively she leans across the counter in a flirtatious way. 

        The male receptionist isn’t indifferent to her charm. Amused, he grins back at her then shakes a rueful head. “You had someone else in your room last night.”

        “He was only there for a little while,” she says. “He left at 4:30.”
        “Yeah, well, sorry. The management says you still have to pay for the extra guest.”
        “Doesn’t matter.” She shrugs an indifferent shoulder, hands over her credit card, and then slumps onto the couch where I’m sitting. “Hate having to get up this early but I have to get to the airport. Got an early flight.”
        “Where are you going?”
        “Seattle.”
        “For work?”
        She tugs down the brim of her cap. “I’m a dancer.”
        “That’s nice,” I say, but she doesn’t answer.

Three middle-aged women barrel through the lobby, give us both suspicious looks, but the toughie is still slouched down, so I think she has no desire for further conversation. Only when we are settled in the shuttle that will drop her off at the airport, does she say with some embarrassment (as though she’s making things clear to an easily shocked granny), “Actually, I’m a lap dancer. You know, dancer, stripper, that sort of thing.”
        I only nod, but she wants me to understand. “It’s an itinerant life, but not a nice one.”
        I nod again. “I can imagine.”
        “You can’t even trust the girls you work with; you have to keep your door locked all the time. You feel so alone all the time. I asked my best friend to come with me on this trip, but she has two dogs and cats and couldn’t.” She stares out at the bleak industrial wasteland we’re passing through. “You have to want to get up in the morning.”
        Her loneliness is touching. What can I tell her that will make things right? “Isn’t there something else you can do eventually? Something you’d really like?”
        “Yeah. What I really want to do is be a dog cop, work for the humane society.”
        “I never heard of a dog cop. What is it? Can you get a job like that easily?”
        “Oh, I saw it on television. You can do it in some cities. Look out for abused animals, bring them to safety. I’m going to look into it. I don’t want this kind of life forever.”
        “Then go for it. And best of luck to you.” I wish (as I often do) for a magic wand.

Downtown in the station, buses going north are crowded. Our driver is a woman, but this is not to the taste of one huge square-bodied mama. “I’m not goin’ with her. She has an attitude.” Fashionable husband with his dernier cri hairdo says nothing, shows only self-centered boredom.
        After several hours, we stop in some ungodly place for a long pause. Two police agents are handcuffing a screaming fellow passenger.
        “What's going on?” I ask a lady in a fussy green go-to-church hat. She had been sitting across the aisle from me.
        “He just refused to show his ticket to the driver, and he was rude. Now he’s been arrested. You show respect to someone in an authoritative uniform, that’s what you do. My own son is a bus driver and yesterday he was driving towards Charlotte when he sees this police car with flashing lights right behind him. He knows he’s not going over the speed limit so he pulls over. The police tell him to get out — they didn’t want to talk to him in the bus, you see — and the police asks him, ‘you got some people from…’ oh I can’t remember the name of the place… something east, you know what I mean?”
        “The Middle East?” I offer.
        “Yeah, that’s it! Middle East. So they ask him, ‘You got people from Middle East on your bus?’ And he says, ‘yes, four of them. They’re wearing them long robes and all, you know.’ So the police says, ‘that’s the ones we’re lookin’ for,’ and they pull them right off. Then he has to wait for an hour somewheres because someone’s gonna blow up a Wallmart.”

The newspapers are silent on this subject. Is it true? Who knows? She informs she is the leader of a church group, was the deaconess for a while. Then she gets down to brass tacks, preaching “the good word,” and there’s no discouraging her. Fortunately, she suddenly discovers she has left her cell phone on the last bus, and she tells me to watch her bag while goes off in search of her errant phone. “You keep your eye on that bag of mine. I only got the one, left the others with my son. I had to leave in a hurry, you see. My best friend just died, and I have to get to her fast.”
        Rather after the fact, I think, but don’t say.
        She returns shortly, telephone snug in her purse. “You see? God looks after me.”

I tell her my own story of losing a telephone one morning on a train in France while accompanying a friend to the airport near St. Malo. By the time I discovered my loss in the city of Rennes, the train had gone on, heading for the far west of Brittany before shunting back across country to Paris. We appealed to the stationmaster, and he phoned one of the controllers who went to our seats and had a look. The phone was gone. For the next six hours I had thoughts of someone calling Brazil and Tahiti and racking up a phone bill I’d never be able to pay.

After a longish bus trip to St. Malo, my friend took a plane to London. I returned by bus to Rennes and bought a ticket to the city of Laval where I had left my car. There was an early evening train leaving immediately, and I had to run to catch it. Certainly it would have been easier to wait for the next train that left half-an-hour later, but the station was cold and cheerless.

I scraped in just as the doors were closing and took a seat. And suddenly I heard a telephone ring, a familiar sound coming from somewhere beneath me. I took a peek under my seat — and there was my phone, exactly where it had fallen after dropping out of my purse so many hours earlier. It had travelled back and forth for over a thousand miles, and no one had seen it. By pure chance, I had managed to step into the same compartment and take the same seat of the same train I had been on earlier in the day.

The green hat lady smiles happily. “You see? God took care of you, too. He knew that was your phone and he wanted you to have it.”
        Which is a comfort (since I’m a sloppy sort of person). I can’t help wondering, however, if there aren’t more important issues for a god to busy himself with.

In Philadelphia, I wander through city streets where townhouses are lovely, and the beautiful 30th Street train station, is a glory — especially to me since I live in France where elegant nineteenth-century stations are being converted into shopping malls. Of course, nothing is certain: there are plans afoot to change even this beauty and increase retail space within the station. People just can’t leave nice things alone.

Philadelphia was founded in 1682 as the capital of the Pennsylvania colony, and it remained so until the Philadelphia Mutiny. In 1783, the Continental Army of more than 10,000 soldiers was camped on the nearby estate of Jockey Hollow. Feeding such a large force put great a burden on the local community, and the strain resulted in hungry, poorly clothed soldiers — many went barefoot in the snow — who hadn’t been paid for almost a whole year year despite their appeals to Congress.
        Over one thousand deserted, another 100 died in the brigade hospital, and the rest mutinied. Raging through the countryside, foraging, stealing horses and whatever they could carry away, they marched into Philadelphia, surrounded the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), and threatened Congress at bayonet point.

Instead of resolving the problem, Congress took refuge in the first-floor room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, begged the Pennsylvania government to make the mob go away, and pleaded with George Washington to send reinforcements. Then, terrified, they pushed through the jostling rowdies and fled the city.

When he heard of the mutiny, Washington was incensed: “I cannot sufficiently express my surprise and indignation at the arrogance, the folly, and the wickedness of the mutineers.”
        He dispatched 1,500 troops to disperse the crowd and arrest the ringleaders. He did, however, urge Congress to provide supplies and deliver pay.
In July 1790, the new national capital of Washington was created on the Potomac River, and Philadelphia lost its important status.

There’s a fairly large audience at the Historical Society for my book talk, which is certainly satisfying. Okay…I only sign and sell two or three copies, but there is compensation: the president of the Historical Society just happens to own a very chic fish restaurant in the city and, after the talk, that’s where he takes me. Learning of my passion for oysters, he presents me with a huge plate loaded with two of every variety available on the east and west coast of North America. The oysters and the lovely white wine I’m served are hedonistic treats, and they easily outweigh unloading a few books.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories. http://www.j-arleneculiner.com/

Writer Wednesday - Episode Twenty-Two: Inside the Yellow Windows

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour 

By Jill Culiner 

Episode Twenty-Two: Inside the Yellow Windows 

“The harvest is always richer in another man’s field,” Ovid wrote over two thousand years ago, and so it seems when I pass through towns and villages. In the night, wooden frame houses with lit windows have me longing to leave the bus, take a peek, step into another life, one that seems warm, stable, and perfect. It’s what I call, “The Yellow Window Syndrome.” Of course, nothing is really better elsewhere.

A book talk in Raleigh and an invitation to stay with Susan, a long-lost relative, and her husband Don, does give me a chance to see how others live. My own life, often itinerant and always on a shoestring, is usually pared down to simple good food, small villages, houses made of natural materials, wood-burning stoves, and a garden patch. Security is out of reach, but dirt trails have always been invitations to adventure. With my dogs, I’ve followed many into deep forests, scooped valleys, onto flat plains, and into other countries.

I now find myself ensconced in Susan’s huge house with six bathrooms and six bedrooms. Beautiful wood floors are covered by expensive carpets in neutral colors, and in the “basement” apartment where I’m lodged, broad windows give out to a luxuriant garden. Even the guest bathroom is filled with so many perfumes, oils, and beauty products that a professional salon would find it hard to compete.

In the oversize kitchen, dernier cri, nothing much is going on: “We aren’t really into cooking. We eat out most of the time. We’re taking you to a Japanese restaurant tonight.” But the deep cupboards are filled with the latest equipment, and the enormous refrigerator is packed full with food. Most will certainly be wasted—in the USA, 40 million tons end up in landfills each year. What is important is purchasing the food, having it here, and then going out for something fancy. The many other cupboards in this huge house are equally filled with clothes, cloths, linens—who could possibly use all of that in a lifetime? No one. The average American throws away eighty-one pounds of clothing every year. Why all the excess?
Perhaps to underline security, to show that disaster has been kept at bay.
    Yet fragility is here, after all. Don is overweight, has heart problems, and, because of financial difficulties, he has no life insurance. He’s a doctor, and under a lot of stress—not because his patients have worrying illnesses, but because he needs to attract more clients into the clinic. If he doesn’t, his partners will ask him to leave.
    “Basically, a doctor should be seeing 30 to 50 new patients every single month, and that means publicity, putting your face out there, offering competitive services and reasonable pricing.”
    “Since when is being a doctor a business?” Obviously, I live in another world.
    He laughs at my naivety. “Times have changed in healthcare. You have to keep your eye on the competition, know how other practices are performing, what they’re offering for similar services, the insurance plans they’re accepted, and their availability for patient scheduling.”
    “So what are you going to do?”
    “Hire a sales rep, start using marketing techniques and social media. On top of that, we have to be very careful about lawsuits. Awhile back, I worked with a nurse who was excellent at her job, but she was so inconsistent you couldn’t count on her. Eventually, we fired her, but when people called us up for references, all we could say was, ‘Yes, she worked here,’ but nothing else. That caller could have been anyone, a lawyer, a friend of hers trying to get us to perjure ourselves so she could sue. Believe me, this is life on a tightrope.”

Susan, on the other hand, radiates stability. A solid-looking woman with practical hair and glasses, (although in the family photo album, she had once been a lovely slender princess with waist length golden hair) she dedicates herself to charities, to women’s associations, and brings in speakers (like me). Her job is to make life look easy, to reign over her expensive doll collection from France, the plush sofas, the very many table and chair arrangements, the baby grand piano no one can play, the huge TV screens, expensive hi fi equipment, and the framed art on every wall.

Life also revolves around her grandchildren and her daughter, with whom she shares long conversations about illnesses and allergies, undiagnosed, imagined, and improbable. “She’s married to a very ambitious and successful man. The problem is, he loves to travel, but she’s terrified of the outside world.”

Of course, disaster can come crashing in at any moment, Susan admits that. Take her friend Cynthia, a lovely woman, a doormat wife who worked hard to please a husband who was definitely not good to her, putting her down in public, letting doors slam in her face. If anyone dared take her side, he forbade Cynthia to contact them again.
    Hubby began spending a lot of time in Chicago, taking care of their business. Cynthia knew he had friends there, and that he’d run into a childhood sweetheart who had eventually become a close colleague. One day he came home and announced that the sweetheart was his soul mate, his “true love”. That he was leaving Cynthia, their children, and their home.
    “You think you have a partnership,” Cynthia said, “and it’s only an illusion.”
    Hubby moved to Chicago, lived with true love for six months. “He was wracked with guilt,” says Susan with great satisfaction. “About the children, about the wife he left behind. Then, one night, when she was driving home from work, true love fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the white line in the road, and was killed. Hubby had lost everything. His love was gone; his marriage was over. He went to stay at his mother’s house, but she died suddenly. Then what happened? He had a stroke. Now he can’t move or take care of himself. You see? He was punished by fate.”
    “Well…fate has its hands awfully full, these days,” I say.
    “Meaning what?”
    “Mistresses and lovers are an everyday occurrence. They are part of life.”
    “Not my life,” Susan says stubbornly. “I don’t even want to talk about them.”
    I’ll bet Cynthia said the same thing, once upon a time.

The next day, we visit Susan’s friend Debby, another woman snug in a luxury palace. “Sure, walk around, take a look. The house is for sale anyway, three quarters of million. It’s too big for us.”
    Here, there are faux classical Greek pillars, burbling indoor fountains, a hot tub, canopied beds, badly painted murals, froufrou curtains, all the kitsch a lot of money can buy. But the business Debby runs with her husband—selling expensive beds and mattresses—is going badly.

“Too many entitlement people out there. Like, this woman comes into the shop, finds a mattress she likes, lies down on it, tries it out, and then orders it. When it’s delivered, she raises hell. Claims it isn’t the bed from the showroom, the one she’d ordered. Okay fine. So we have it picked up, and we deliver the identical one that’s in the showroom, even though it’s forbidden to sell showroom models. After she receives it, she comes in, says she’s sure there’s no latex in the mattress, even though we claimed there was. She starts shouting: ‘You’re all a pack of dishonest thieves. You come and pick that mattress up and give me the mattress from the showroom with a guarantee that there’s latex inside.’ Then she tells us to cut the showroom mattress open so she can see what’s inside. So that’s what we do. Then she says, ‘Okay. But how do I know this is the one I’ll be getting?’ So I say, ‘take a marker, put your name on it.’
    “When it arrives at her house, she then tells the delivery men she wants them to remove all traces of the marker. They say, ‘No wa-a-ay, lady.’”

Debby sighed. “You see what I mean? Fifty percent of our clients are like this now, so we’ve decided to close down the showrooms, sell directly from the warehouse: what you order is what you get.”

Both Debby and Susan are horrified that I’m traveling by bus. “My son was going on a Greyhound trip,” said Debby. “But when we saw the sort of people getting on the bus, we dragged him over to the airport and bought him a plane ticket. There are dangerous people on buses, people with knives. How can you take risks like that?”

But tonight, as I climb into my luxury bed in the silent huge bedroom, I find myself thinking of the bus station downtown, right next to the colossal new mall that Debby and Susan love to haunt. At this very moment, life is humming in the station: buses pulling in and out, security men moving people back. There are odd conversations; there are strange meetings. Yes, bus stations can be chaotic and uncomfortable places, but there’s always something going on.
    I miss them, the bus station crowd, the drivers with their opinions, travel tales, and good nature, and all the people with their stories. Good to know everyone’s out there, and that I’ll soon be back in there with them.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories. 

http://www.j-arleneculiner.com/

A Writer's Words - Episode Twenty One: Swami

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour 

By Jill Culiner

Episode Twenty One: Swami 

“Used to drive a truck,” says Bill. “Thirty-five years on the road. But driving a bus beats that any day. Sure, I sometimes encounter problems — all the aggression comes from boredom and eating high energy junk food, that’s what I think. How do I cope? I just listen to people, hear them out. 

“Of course, you can’t solve all the problems all the time. One day this guy on the bus tells me he wants to get out, right in the middle of nowhere. He was getting aggressive, too, screaming at me. Just as soon as I got to a town, I pulled into the driveway of a fire station, opened the door, and told him I could let him out now. But suddenly, this guy, he just doesn’t want to leave anymore. So I talked to him calmly, told him to step out for a minute, that I had to move the bus a little further along in case a fire truck needed to leave the station. And, as soon as he got out, I slammed the door shut and drove off. 

“A few weeks later, I heard one of the other drivers had the same experience — possibly it was the same man. Suddenly, as they were rolling full speed down the highway, the guy started screaming that he wanted to get out. Then he somehow managed to force the door open and jump. He hit the metal marker and was cut right in two. After that, the driver quit. He was an ex Vietnam veteran. Perhaps that experience brought back nightmares.

“What I really like about driving a bus is all the free time. I’m on the road one day, get the next day free. My wife does crafts, so she’s a busy woman. On my free days we go shopping, do housework together. It’s the ideal life. My daughter and son live near by. She keeps chickens; my son keeps a snake. One day, at my son’s house, I opened the fridge and a frozen rat fell out. The snake had killed two but could only eat one, so my son saved the extra one for later. I like animals too. I had a horse but it was shot by poachers in the night. It would have cost too much to have the body towed away, so I just dug a big hole and buried it in place. Broke my heart because I loved that animal. Still breaks my heart every time I pass that spot in the field.”

“Why not plant a tree right there,” I say. “That way the horse becomes a living tree.”

“Never thought of that. I like that idea. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”

On the next bus, a huge woman eating a hamburger and a pile of fries squeezes into the seat beside mine and pushes me against the window.

“I just got married,” she says, but her tone is dreary, quite resigned. Perhaps she is merely grateful to have found a mate. “I’m educated, have a real big vacabalary. I’m different too. At that job in Wallmart I had, they din use my potential.”

She begins a conversation with an even larger woman one seat up who is on her way to Ohio, to start a new life. “My boyfriend broke off our relationship after four years, broke off on New Years Eve. Then what happens? I get drunk and total out my car, no water in the raduator.”

Soon best buddies, they brag about weight they’ve lost. The lady in front has lost one hundred pounds; the one beside me claims to have lost 200. Is this possible? What size could these woman have been?

“I used to be real skinny but I had this accident? Was laid up for three years. That’s what put the weight on. Jus’ sittin’ aroun.”

When the bus makes a stop, both stock up on hamburgers, more fries, and packaged cakes.

Waves of people fill the streets of Savannah — some kind of festival is taking place — and there’s not a hotel room to be had for love or money. An overhead television entertains us with slaughter, missiles, bombs, aggressive killer types, much foul language, terrified screams, and considerable sadism: bravo for freedom of expression in the arts and in entertainment. I jump back on the bus.

One o’clock in the morning by the time we reach the next city. No hotels in this part of town, and there are strange characters wandering through the night streets: not quite the right time for a stroll.
“You wanna hotel? Take a taxi out to the strip,” says the sulky woman in the office
“How far is that?”
“Gotta take a taxi,” says the man standing behind her. He is obviously a taxi driver.
“How much will it cost to get out there?”
“It’s on the meter.”
“Of course, it will be on the meter, but approximately how much will it be?”
“It’s on the meter.”
We continue the fascinating dialogue until I give up.

I am searching for a phone book when Don, the last bus driver, approaches. “I was thinking. You could share my hotel room. Two beds, no sex, no obligation. Out at Howard Johnson’s. They might charge you for the extra person, but maybe not. I have a car coming to take me out there.” 

I accept the offer with alacrity, not because spending the night with Don is a dream come true, but once out there, there might be another room available or other hotels in the vicinity. In any case, since I’m on a book tour, Howard Johnson’s does have at least one literary reference in its history.

Back in 1929, the mayor of Boston banned Eugene O’Neill’s play, Strange Interlude — the heroine embarked on many affairs, had an abortion, and was unfaithful to her husband — and the production moved to neighboring, less reticent Quincy. The five-hour long play was presented in two parts with a dinner break in the middle, and since the first Howard Johnson’s restaurant just happened to be right near the theater, hundreds of playgoers dined there. Thus, through word of mouth, Howard Johnson’s slowly became a well-known name, was eventually able to develop into a large restaurant and hotel chain.

The chain did, however, maintain a whites-only policy throughout the 1950s, and this provoked an international crisis in 1957, when one Delaware restaurant refused service to Ghana’s very respectable finance minister. Eisenhower did make a public apology, but protests and sit-ins against Howard Johnson’s racist policy continued into the 1960s. In 1962, one of the protest organizers in Illinois was Bernie Saunders.

Don and I go outside, wait in the icy drizzle behind the bus station. And suddenly Don is nervous. I can see he’s regretting he made the offer.
“You got a violent husband who will suddenly come out of nowhere and kill me?”
“Even if I did, it would take a while for him to arrive from Europe.”
But his agitation increases: is he wondering when I’ll figure out that the “no sex, no obligation” is only a lure.

To pass the time and calm him down, I tell Don I’m a writer and a photographer traveling around the country. This seems to comfort him for some reason— or maybe it makes me seem more human. He tells me he plays guitar, will soon start recording his songs in his home studio. The CDs will be distributed by a man he met on the bus, “a guy who says he has international connections. The real trouble with most songs today is they have no meaning. I write words that do. I write about God, because He has entered inside me. He protects me. I’m not religious, none of that dead, hypocritical church-going, but I’m spiritual because I’ve opened my heart and mind to receive personal messages. My wife’s the same. God talks to us both on a daily basis.”

Listening to God also gave him the strength to fight a heroin addiction in Chicago. “It also stopped me from killing two people — I was evil, back then. It’s also made me open to everything, like sharing a room with a woman and not having sex.” He repeats this four times: easy to see this is uppermost in his mind.

I should be alarmed, standing out here with a self-confessed potential killer who receives messages from supernatural sources, but I’m not. Perhaps I’m unconsciously receiving personal messages telling me to keep cool.

Finally, a long black car with a license plate that reads, SWAMI stops in front of us. The driver is a very doubtful looking man, with a dark pointy beard and shifty eyes. He and Don seem to know each other well — Don mutters something that I can’t hear, then slides into the front seat beside him. Will this be a kidnapping? The beginning of a long and painful death? Am I really going to climb into the back of this car, travel into the dark night with these two? Of course I am. And soon we’re off, rolling for endless miles along rain-slick highways. Only after a long tense moment do the glowing lights of Howard Johnson’s appear like a modern Nirvana.

Without meeting my eye, Don asks for one room two beds. I smile nicely at the desk clerk, ask if there he has another room for me at a good price.
“I’ll tell you what,” says that young man who, thankfully, seems to have picked up on the situation. “It’s late. I’ll give you a room for the cheap service price. Twenty-eight dollars, is that okay?”
“Wonderful!”
Defeated, Don scuttles away without a word or a backward glance.

I stay with the clerk for a while, chewing the fat. He’s thrilled to discover I’m a writer — he also writes, unpublished stories with a frustrated love theme — but he wants to hear about my books, my research. He wants details, images, flavors, tales of other countries and different horizons.

So, under the lobby’s bleak neon we settle on unspeakable orange Naugahyde, and to the accompanying hum of a soft drinks dispenser, I give a full-fledged book talk. And, believe me, the experience is just as much fun as jawing away in front of a whole crowd.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories. http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

A Writer's Words - Episode Twenty: Those Met on Buses

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour 

By Jill Culiner 

Episode Twenty: Those Met on Buses 

We head up through Florida, passing housing tracts, shopping centers, vast properties in pseudo ‘hacienda’ style, and so many of those water-guzzling golf courses that are kept green by vast quantities of herbicides and pesticides (four to seven times the average amount used in agriculture). Right around them, are tidy neighborhoods where golf course runoff causes asthma, headaches, rashes, birth defects, learning disabilities, infertility, and various cancers. Apparently this is common knowledge, but doesn’t it bother anyone? 

People are more raucous on the buses in Florida, and the squawks and rustles seeping from bad headphones are very audible — something bus drivers are quick to condemn elsewhere. The drivers, too, are unfriendly, as if we are the bottom of the barrel. As one woman explains: “In Florida, everyone’s all obsessed with cars. Only transients take buses.”

This attitude certainly won’t help the environment. Single occupant cars produce 80% more carbon monoxide per passenger mile than buses. Bus and train travel is one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, road congestion, and to reduce the great number of animals injured or killed while crossing roads. Just think about all the countryside that’s being swallowed up by new roads. However, such a change in mentality is unlikely: federal investment has always boosted the road system; suburbs and cities are built around the car; people equate car ownership with personal freedom.

Travelers really are calmer once we leave the state. “People down in Florida?” Martin, our new driver smirks. “They’re spoilt because they have it too easy. Get hungry? Pluck an orange. Besides, everyone’s in a holiday mood. There’s no restraining them. What I do is treat people like little kids. They don’t obey, after the third warning I go over and take away their ‘toys’. Other drivers, they just pull off to the side of the road until the person stops behaving badly. That way, the other passengers put pressure on the offender.” 

The last time I traveled this way, was back in the 1950s, when, with my parents, we took U.S. Highway Number 1 from Canada to Florida for the annual holiday. I remember the dense vegetation along the highway, also the rows of cardboard boxes in which people — largely African Americans — lived. It was a strange sight for Canadian eyes — although, as a child, I thought that inhabiting a cardboard box would be far more fun than life in a normal banal house.

Equally strange to Canadian eyes were the separate drinking fountains and toilets: good ones for whites,

small, dirty ones for blacks. But, despite the widespread belief that Canada was very different from the USA, it was not uncommon for Canadian restaurants to refuse service to people of color. In Windsor, in the early 1950s, the United Auto Workers-Congress of Industrial Organizations filed a complaint against a café that refused to serve a black member of the Canadian armed forces.

I intend to stop for the night in Brunswick, Georgia, but Martin tells me that all reasonably priced motels are miles from the bus station. “Savannah is better,” he says. So I climb back onto the bus, find myself seated in the vicinity a loud know-it-all who, after a short visit to the British Isles is intent on giving us the ‘facts’ — all of them incorrect. Seated around her, a fascinated gaggle of women are taking in her every word.

“In England, nobody speaks English. Below London, everyone speaks Cockney; above London, they all speak Geordie. There’s this island in Scotland where, when the tide pulls out, it leaves it stranded. The castle there was built by Muslims, but then it was conquered by the Vikings.”

She’s referring to the monastery (not castle) of Lindisfarne, which dates from the 6th century (Islam originated at the start of the 7th.) In 793 and 875 Vikings did indeed sack Lindisfarne, and the monks abandoned the site. Yes, there is a castle, but it was built with stones from the ruined priory. But our loquacious lady is ready with even more fake news: “The British medical system is way behind the American system. They don’t have important drugs or pain killers, so people just have to suffer and die.”

She’s obviously never heard of Britain’s National Health Service, implemented in 1948. Nor does she seem to know that health care facilities in the United States are largely owned and operated by the private sector, and that the prohibitively high cost of medical care results in Americans delaying, avoiding, or stopping medical treatment altogether. In 2018, 27.8 million Americans had no health insurance.
      On and on she goes, misinforming, deforming, spilling out falsehoods with all the confidence of a snake oil saleswoman. I think — only very briefly — about intervening, but know that’s the hill I’m likely to die on. Instead, I chat with the rather ancient African American woman by my side who can’t be bothered listening to big mouth.
      “What were you doing down in Florida?”
      “My son ‘passed’ there a year ago.”
      Is this an explanation? If so, it’s a confusing one. But seemingly untroubled, she goes on to name at least six other children living all over the USA. “I also once worked for the social services removing children from their families — potentially a violent job. You take kids away, parents gonna get angry. But those children I saw… malnourished… abused. Yes, I sure saw some ugly things. What can you do? Laws is laws, and they’re made for everyone so you can keep order.”

Across the aisle is a curly-haired blond wearing huge eyeglasses. Thick black lines of makeup surround her eyes, her purple lipstick bleeds around a mouth with far too many teeth, and purple polish adorns the tips of beautiful long fingers. Her tiny Lolita figure is clothed in giddy preteen pink net ornamented by sparkles — a strange frock on a bus headed for snowy climes. Yet, she is hardly young, the grey roots of her hair testify to that. She is wonderfully strange-looking, fascinatingly ugly, and quite definitely a beauty — what one would call, in French, a jolie laide or a beautiful ugly.

She is deeply absorbed in a romance, and I wonder what her life is like. Does she dream of true love and passion on tropical islands? Is that window dressing an effort to find Prince Charming? Is she lonely, or does she have an ardent lover who appreciates her efforts?

In the end, at one of the stops along the way, I discover she is chatty and open. She’s on her way to wintry Cleveland where Tom, her sweetheart, will be waiting for her at the bus station. He’ll have warm clothes with him — she didn’t want to walk around Miami lugging a suitcase. Anyway, she wasn’t in Florida for very long: she flew down on Thursday. Now, on Saturday night, she’s on her way back by bus, a fifty-hour trip.
      I must be staring at her in astonishment, but she only smiles.
      “I had a great time. I never been to Florida before. Everybody’s always talking about how wonderful it is and I was dreaming about it for years.” 

      “Why not stay for longer?”
      “Can’t. I work part-time cleaning, and you don’t get no holiday time if you’re part-time. The lady I work for told me if I take off longer, I won’t have a job waiting for me when I get back.”
      She also has another full-time cleaning job, and gets a week’s holiday every year — unpaid, of course.
      I am appalled. Living on a continent where everyone has the right to four or five weeks paid vacation, I had forgotten about this aspect of American life. Yet, she’s a delightfully cheery woman, accepting all with good nature. Life is just like that. She is so charming she has me wishing I were a fairy godmother with a magic wand to sweep her into Wonderland. But I’m not.

So, silently, I wish her many delightful romance books with happy ends, and I keep her in mind every time I write one.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories.
http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

A Writer's Words - Episode Nineteen: Traveler’s Blues

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour

By Jill Culiner Episode 

Nineteen: Traveler’s Blues 

Helped by the driver, a huge woman boards the bus, her flesh hanging skirt-like over her thighs. Because she could never move further, she gets to sit in the “forbidden” first seat of the bus, right across from the driver. Worse than her physical condition is her voice, nasal, loud, and complaining: size and noise define her position.

She’s on her way to Fort Lauderdale to see her husband. “Visiting hours at the jail are from three, but if you’re late they make you wait, and then I can’t get to see him no more ‘cause I’ll miss the bus, you can’t trust no taxi driver down there, they charge you eight dollars when everyone knows it’s only four.” She repeats this five times.
      “Husband’s in jail for drunk driving, hit a woman, just cut her two inches and now she’s suing, and the police let her keep all the money and it’s from prostitution too. Only two inches and don’t she know the longer they keep my husband in jail the longer she’s gonna wait for her money ‘cause if he ain’t allowed out to drive his truck, how’s he gonna make money to pay her back? I tried to call her and tell her that. Sure, my husband’s got a drink problem but these eleven months he’s been in jail will dry him out all right. It’s discrimination because he’s part Mexican. I called the civil liberties but they said they only handle group cases. It’s unfair. Last time they took his license away for drunk driving he earned it back so he’s not no criminal. He earned it back, you hear? And you know what? Now they’re threatening him with five years.” She pops open a cola. “Weighed myself this morning, so it’s low enough today.”
      To escape her, I flee to the back of the bus.

Along the road, we pass older wooden houses tucked into trees, but more often used car lots, fast food chains, DIY centers, All-U-Can-Eat buffets, malls, office supply emporiums, and endless concrete ditches. Hard to imagine that not very long ago — before 1900 — this was a land of pine forests, dunes, and mangroves, where bear, deer, wildcats, coons, opossums, alligators, crocodiles, even a few panthers thrived. Isolated groups of the indigenous Calusa and Tequesta people lived here, too, those whose ancestors had survived war and disease, who had avoided being transported to Havana as slaves when the Spanish colonists departed. Joined by incoming Creek, free blacks, and escaped slaves, they lived in houses with palmetto roofs and built out of scavenged lumber. Traveling through the heart of the Everglades but rarely living within it, they grew pumpkins and sweet potatoes, ate turtles and turtle eggs.

But by 1900, Florida had become a land speculator’s paradise. Using convict labor, ironwood trees, considered too hard to be cut down, were blown to pieces with dynamite. Machineel and Jamaican dogwood were burned out and replaced with coconut palms, orange and lime trees, banana palms. Ancient Tequesta Indian burial mounds were dug up, the remains and artifacts were either buried in pits or given away. The Miami River was dynamited to provide water for the Royal Palm Hotel, and wildlife was exterminated. By the 1920s, Florida had become a luxury holiday venue, and native people were working on local farms, ranches, and at souvenir stands. Yet, dream vacation destination or no, this state had the highest rate of lynching per capita, and the violence continued well into the 1950s.

The state’s population has grown from 529,000 in 1900, to 21,993,000 today, and Florida has one of the most endangered ecosystems in the USA.

Introduced species such as Australian pines and Melaleuca have destroyed turtle nesting grounds, Indian mounds, indigenous plants, and native pine forests — a mere two percent of the original pineland remains. Ecologically priceless marshes and wetlands, so necessary for replenishing and filtering groundwater, have been drained and transformed into beaches, golf courses, manicured lawns, or have become waste receptacles. No lake, river, or bay is free from phosphates, radioactive gypsum, fertilizers, or processing waste from sugar and orange juice plantations. Lakes Griffin, Apopka, and Okeechobee are near death.

Snakes are killed indiscriminately, the water bird population has fallen disastrously, and there is little respect for wildlife outside of park areas: From 1966 to 1970, after particularly heavy rainfall created man-made floods, deer that sought refuge on dry land found themselves at the mercy of frenzied hunters who turned their dogs loose on them or shot them from airboats.

In 2014, the Everglades National Park welcomed over a million visitors who spent $104,476,500 in nearby communities. However, this area is now less than half of its original size and is threatened by encroaching development, pollution, and invasive species. Continued political manipulation and the glitter of financial gain continue to push this fragile ecosystem into potential collapse. Although a plan to help save the area was passed by Congress in 2000, progress has stalled.

I give my book talk to a wealthy crowd in the events center of a luxury apartment complex by the beach in Boca Raton. The audience is attentive, and I am asked what my next project will be. I mention Hungary and investigating a pogrom that took place in 1946.
      “What for?” asks a well-lifted blond woman. “Why are you bothering to do something like that?”
      She’s right, of course. And, suddenly, assailed by doubts, I am naked in the crowd.
      A man comes up to me, a German Jew who managed to escape in ’39: everyone else in his family perished. He has never returned to Germany although he knows the country has changed.
      “You are able to live in those countries,” he says to me. “You can travel in them and investigate. I was born over there. It’s different for me.” He even admires what I am doing, but obviously thinks I have some official capacity as a journalist, or that I’m with the Wiesenthal Center.

Sharing the space for the book talk is a local “art” exhibit — a hearty collection of dreadful schnick schnack: Vogue magazine covers with 3D effects, awkward Japanese calligraphy art, a few senseless abstracts, and many doubtful sewn button paintings.
      “Myra has only been doing art for three years and she’s sold everything she’s made,” says the enthusiastic presenter. She turns to the glowing Myra. “That means you’re a great artist

Thankfully, there are also some surprisingly good watercolors. One is a delicate depiction of a red fox. The artist comes up to me. “He lives in the bushes around this building,” she says. “I feed it dog food so it won’t starve.”
      I stare at her. She is elegant, well-dressed, obviously wealthy, and I am surprised she cares for such a creature. “A fox lives here, in this world of concrete and tamed vegetation?”
      “The other residents are afraid of it, but I do my best to convince them not to have it exterminated. I hope I succeed. They’re all so afraid of nature, but we can get over our fears if we try. I once touched a snake in a nature zoo experience.”
      We chat for quite a while because we like each other. Perhaps could even become good friends, but too many things divide us: my itinerant life,

her luxurious house in the north and this Florida condo; my lack of money, and her wealth. And, unlike her, I have no kindly multi-millionaire husband with a fine European education.

The people around me are polite, smiling, talking enthusiastically, and I’m assailed by faint depression and doubt — just part of the lone traveler’s baggage. Such moments pass, of course, but now I’m wondering if I’ve made a terrible mistake in life. Perhaps there’s still time to sell out, give up on idealism, learn to live happily in a disaster area such as this one and ignore the devastation we humans cause. How easy life could be.

I’m sitting at the table, pen in hand, ready to sign books when a handsome stranger approaches. He is a man who has just stepped out of the pages of a romance novel, and I stare at him, entranced. He bends down, smiles.
      “You have beautiful handwriting.”
      “Well, thank you.” But I’m at a loss for further repartee. I wonder if he could also think I’m beautiful, but know he probably only considers me an oddity with my fast talk, my wild gestures, my exaggerations.
      Then, just like Yahweh in the Zohar, the stranger vanishes, taking with him his smile, the warmth in his eyes. Leaving the crowd and the cocktails behind; leaving me with my piles of books, and my bus ticket on to other places.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories. 

http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

A Writer's Words - Episode Eighteen Panama City, Pelicans, and Jim Bikeman

One Writer’s Journey: The Book Tour 

Jill Culiner 

Episode Eighteen: Panama City, Pelicans, and Jim Bikeman 

      A winter morning in Panama City, but the temperature is hovering at around 90° Fahrenheit. I pass a pawnshop where a mink coat is for sale for $229. Mink? 

      An American flag woman is standing beside me: flag on the front of her t-shirt, flag on her baseball cap, flag trousers. In her arm is a large plant. “I’m originally from Mississippi,” she says apropos of nothing: “I’m here in town to see my son. He’s off to Koo–ate. Now I live in the Keys.” 

     “I knew the Keys years ago,” I say, a trifle unsure. Is she referring to the Florida Keys? “Back in the 1950s, they were quite wild and beautiful.”
      “Now that’s all ruined,” she says. “Cause of all them tourists.”
      “And malls, and roads, and developers,” I add.
      “Yeah, we got some beautiful malls. It’s jus’ the crimes that’s bad. We people gotta be armed against the criminals. I got a permit for a concealed weapon in my car. All my friends do. We’re all of us widows.”
      “Doesn’t surprise me,” I say, as mildly as possible.
      “We have a great time.”
      “I’ll bet you do.”

In the 1500s, Spanish explorers arrived here on the lookout for gold, but there was none to be found. When hurricanes destroyed their colonies, and European-imported disease killed off so many natives that forced agricultural labour was impractical, they decided this was a backwater not worth developing. It was, however, a handy hidey-hole for pirates preying on ships traveling between Mexico and Spain. They buried their treasure deep in these sandy beaches, then forgot to come back or were killed off before they could. As late as the 1800s, there were still plenty of doubloons to be unearthed.

The French arrived, built Fort Crevecoeur (broken-hearted), then left. The British settled, developed a thriving trade network with local Chatot tribes and incoming Creeks pushed out of Alabama and Georgia, but left after the War of Independence. They were replaced by American settlers who decided the native population was unnecessary. Naturally, the natives disagreed. Only after the violent Seminole Wars lasting from 1816 to 1868 were they evicted and sent off to Oklahoma and Arkansas to die of starvation. A few, surviving as trappers, farmers, and lumbermen, hid in the forests and stayed on: only recently have some acknowledged their ancestry.

These days, Panama City is a holiday paradise and new condominiums, well-paved streets, flashy restaurants, extensive housing developments, and chic hotels all pay tribute to pelicans: Pelican Walk, Pelican’s Nest, Pelican Pointe, the Pelican Grill, the Pelican Ice Cream Bar, Pelican’s Peak; and enthusiastic tourist brochures encourage folks to go pelican sighting.

Pelicans are gregarious birds, travelling in flocks, hunting together, breeding in colonies, and nesting on the ground. What the cheery brochures never mention is the rocky relationship between these birds and humans. Accused of competing with the fishing industry, pelicans have been clubbed to death and shot by “sportsmen” from ship decks. Their eggs have been deliberately destroyed, and young birds have been massacred. Feeding and nesting sites have been damaged by disastrous water management schemes and wetland drainage, and in the 1950s and 1960s, DDT pollution was a major cause of pelican death. In Louisiana, the decrease in their population was so drastic, 500 pelicans were imported from Florida: over 300 soon died from pesticide poisoning. In 1990 and 1991, 14,000 Californian pelicans perished from botulism and from eating fish contaminated with neurotoxic domoic acid. Today’s threats include oil spills, fish hooks that are swallowed or caught in their skin and webbed feet, fishing lines that wind around their necks, feet, bills, and cause crippling, starvation, and death.

I wander past condominiums, expensive homes, parking lots, and flashy hotels. Once upon a time, right along this road, there was a tiny cemetery with the graves of John Clark (1766-1832), his wife Nancy (1874-1832), and several of their descendants.

Clark, once governor of Georgia, had come here to protect the extensive oak forests used by the US navy for shipbuilding, but in this swampy mosquito-infested country, both he and his wife soon died of yellow fever. Their graves remained untouched for a hundred years until neighbours began complaining that they couldn’t sleep at night because of the ghostly horses’ hooves that clanked against the gravestones. Their protests increased, and the Daughters of the American Revolution finally raised enough money to have the gravestones and coffins sent back to Georgia. However, when excavated, only coffin handles and one silver coin were found.

Most interestingly (for me) is Clark’s long-forgotten romance: In his younger days, he fell passionately in love with an orphan, a Miss Chivers. It was a bad choice: she was the sister-in-law of Jesse Mercer, a fanatical born-again Christian pastor, and he disapproved of the match. Clark defied him and eloped with his beloved. The two rode for hours through a cold winter night looking for a preacher brave enough to defy the influential Mercer and marry them. They finally found refuge in a friend’s home, but Miss Chivers was feeling poorly. Shortly after, she died of pneumonia; Mercer held Clark responsible for her death.

These days, Harrison Avenue is just another nondescript shopping street with the usual stores and roaring traffic, but, once, it was lined with tall noble oaks. Local men despised these graceful giants, claimed they were a danger to cars and wagons. Town ladies, however, protested that they provided both beauty and shade and rebelliously mounted a guard to protect them. But there was no foiling the men: meeting secretly at night when the ladies were safely tucked away, they cut down every single one.

Some back streets are still tree-lined and hint at paradise lost. One potentially lovely little stream stinks terribly, and pushed under tangled vegetation are Styrofoam cups, truck tires, used baby diapers, condoms, needles, and other horrors.

      “Are you looking for a place to sleep?” asks an open-faced man in a cowboy hat. He has seen me poking around and decided I’m one of the homeless

looking for a place in which to cosy down.
      “You’ve missed the mission dinner,” says another in a baseball cap with a reflector light. He’s pushing a bicycle with myriad sacks hanging from the handlebars, and bundles piled high on the back. There are also a few protest signs, a compass, and a small electric guitar. He unpacks this last and plays a quiet little melody for my benefit.
      I have met the one and only Jim Bikeman, homeless celebrity, self-declared activist, an enemy of police abuse, bad treatment of the homeless, and ugly noise. His office is the local library where he learns all he can, checks his email, prepares to fight cases in court, and keeps up his website https://dirtycopperstopper.com/.
      In his, Poor Man’s Bill of Rights he states: I will at all times treat people in a manner that I would want to be treated and will expect that I will get treated just as harshly as I treat others, especially those who are harmless, homeless, financially poor, and confused.

“Most people think I’m nuts, but here’s my main message.” He points to a sign strapped to the back of his bike: BE NICE.

He’s absolutely right, of course. All we have to do is be as nice as possible. That doesn’t sound nuts to me.

©2021 Jill Culiner All Rights Reserved
Long ago, J. Arlene Culiner set out to have a life of adventure, not one of security and comfort. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, traveled, by bus, train, car, or truck throughout North and Central America, Europe, and the Sahara, has lived in a Hungarian mud house, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, on a Dutch canal, in a haunted stone house on the English moors, and presently in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village. Her experiences in out-of-the-way communities with their strange characters and very odd conversations are incorporated into all her stories.
http://www.j-arleneculiner.com