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By the time I get to Gary
When it finally ended, I was passing Comiskey Park, heading south onI-94 for Indiana. Six hours and seven minutes ago, the May Day game had started inMilwaukee--Brewers and White Sox in fifty-something-degree temperature with winds ateighteen miles per hour, gusting to thirty. I had Uecker's seat, front row, upper deck,right about at third base. Turned out to be the wind seat.
By the sixth inning the temperature had fallen enough that every halfinning I started for the exit, only to be stopped by the voice of John Calvin in my head,reminding me, through my mother, of all the baseball-starved children in China. I live inMiami, Florida, where this was like a rotten day in early February, so ol' John had to bepretty persuasive.
The game was tied at the end of regulation, as it was at the end oftwelve, when I gave up. I needed to be in Indianapolis the next night, then Cincinnati,then Atlanta. I did not need to be in a hospital in Racine with pneumonia.
Back out on the road, I took a car nap at a rest stop. When I came to itwas the bottom of the fifteenth, and the guys were scoring three runs to re-tie the Sox.As I drove south, Ueck kept telling me on the radio what a great game it was, how much thefans were enjoying it. Bullshit! I'd seen them shiver and freeze. They were living on thegood brew. Milwaukee County Stadium is one of the few places that doesn't stop sellingbeer in the eighth inning. It'd be like banning guns in Texas.
I got to thinking, maybe I'll get to Gary before this thing ends--twostates away from where I left the game, in the thirteenth inning no less. Maybe I'll evenbe in a different time zone. Calvin was gone. Now I was singing Glen Campbell geography asI slid through the tan Chicago air.
But, nooo! Willie Randolph ended things in the nineteenth, and in reliefI grabbed a motel room just across the Indiana line. Just in time to see Nolan Ryan finishhis seventh no-hitter on ESPN.
What I was doing was driving around the middle of the country seeingbaseball games. The year had been pretty much of a disaster. My marriage had ended. Mygrandmother had gone into a nursing home, taking her pension and social security with her.She had been living with my mother, who was now broke. I had been trying to round up somefinancial support for her from my siblings, but without too much luck. So I was going toget stuck with the bulk of it, just as my daughter's college loans were coming due.
I wasn't getting much response about the book into which I had justdonated a few years of my life. The place where I had been teaching anthropology for awhile was changing significantly for the worse, betraying much of its earlier promise. Myroof was starting to leak and two of my teeth had recently cracked off.
All this was going on in the context of Bush's War, a national and localrecession, a rising incidence of racial incidents and police brutality, global warming,etc. Things were bleak in this cruel April. I had pretty much come to an edge.
I had thought to go to Boston, to see some friends and get mybearings--maybe to recapture a bit of optimism; but enough were going out of town that,when the airlines doubled their ticket prices, it wasn't worth it. I had to find adifferent fantasy.
Now, April may be cruel, but Chaucer reminds us that its "showressoote" also bring the time of pilgrimmage, a time to offer thanks for another year ofsurvival and to mark the beginning of a new round of life and promises. More than oncebefore--out of the blue and in spite of myself--I had been hauled out of the deepest ofdepression by the first pitch in Cincinnati, the first Cubs game on cable. Like SusanSarandon's "Baseball Annie" in (r)MDRV¯Bull Durham, I belong to the Church ofBaseball. In the dead of winter I sometimes forget.
So, in my forty-seventh year, a week before a break in my work schedule,I decided to get in my car and seek the sacrament of bratwurst and beer--to drive aroundthe south and midwest for thirteen days, watching the plowing, smelling the cut grass, andgoing to professional baseball games.
When I decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to make this trip, Ihad to figure out where to go. I could start in the east and make a loop to Baltimore,Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Atlanta; or I could head for Missouriand then work my way east. Since Detroit and Cleveland would be on the road during myvacation, the western loop was it.
This would be a good-sized journey, given the time available. Therewould be some long days, and in the case of the Kansas City to Minneapolis leg, one longnight. I would be taking a mirror-image run around the bases, from home (Miami) to third(Kansas City), then a big looping turn (through Minneapolis) to second (Chicago/Comiskey).
At second, I would "fiddle and diddle" for a while, aslong-time Celtics radio broadcaster Johnny Most would say, making a trip into the infieldto the mound (St. Louis) and back (Chicago/Wrigley), then a short run to center(Milwaukee) to pick up a bratwurst wrapper. I might also run into some traces of mychildhood here--the summers I spent with Gram and Gramps outside Chicago and in southernWisconsin.
Finally, I would go on to first (Cincinnati) and then, touching in atAtlanta on the way, drive on home.
Journeys begin with themes, just as do pilgrimmages, ostensible reasonsfor departing from our normal everyday lives. We may have a single goal for which we areheading, an event, a place. Or we may have a concept, a plan whose particulars we fill inas we go. But making a journey, "being on the road," usually becomes somethingquite entirely its own self, especially if the trip takes a while. It develops themes outof its own material, and sometimes out of our own unconscious. It's a bit like evolution.Potential themes pop up in the early stages. Some are discarded, pruned away in a kind of"unnatural selection" of interest. Others are kept, followed as they set a keythat makes sense out of the trip. Often we begin to "collect" things that wehadn't thought about at all--historical sites, college campuses, crafts shops, naturalwonders, the stories of people we meet along the way.
Best of all, we're anonymous, carrying as little or as much of ournormal identities as we want. Unless we make special provisions, there's lots of time on ajourney when absolutely nobody we know has any idea where we are.
The trip was about baseball, and a kind of soul-cleansing anonymity. Itwas set in serendipity, seeking its meaning as I moved along. I would aim for baseballfields, but I would find other things--Elvis, Lincoln, and Berea College among them. Theywould turn out to be as important as the baseball. I would cross the tracks of goodpeople, one of whom was Gramma.
When I was a kid I used to spend summers with Gram and Gramps in asuburb west of Chicago. I remember heat, bikes, wrestling from Marigold Arena on TV everySaturday night, with Grampa's fudge hidden in the popcorn. The next morning came theunchanging ritual of pancakes and then fire and brimstone at the Evangel Lutheran Churchacross the street, where Gramps was a deacon. But most of all what there was was baseball.
Gram and Gramps were Cub fans. Jack Brickhouse spent his afternoons intheir living room, telling us what was going on as we watched Phil Caveretta and HankSauer and Hal Jeffcoat and their buddies run around in the Chicago sun. A few times everysummer Gramma would take me to Wrigley on the Aurora and Elgin Railroad and its downtownconnections, once shooing me along to get Willie Mays's autograph.
When Grampa stopped working at the factory, they moved to Florida, wheremy mother was already living. Grampa died and a few years later Gramma remarried. GrampaTed seduced her into becoming a Braves fan. At least they were in a different division.
Gramma said she wouldn't die until the Cubs won the World Series. Latershe added the Braves. Either one would do. But they haven't won, and she's nowninety-three and her mind doesn't work so well. She pretty much talks word salad anddoesn't remember who the Cubs or the Braves are. Perhaps that's clinical evidence ofdeath.
Anyway, it turned out--one of those surprises--that a bunch of this tripwas about Gramma. And so, maybe, is a good bit of my adherence to the gospel of Yaz.Although I now live in Florida, I'm a New Englander--a Red Sox fan to the bone.
So, in the early spring I headed north, across the Everglades and up thewest coast of Florida, looking to disappear on my own "road of dreams." I wouldclimb the map, heading up to Minneapolis, where I would turn around and drift back downthrough the road atlas, heading south and home.
DAYS 1 & 2: Way up upon the Suwanee River.
Journeys of any length find their own rhythms--the length of the drivingday, the frequency and duration of stops, the ratio of day to night driving. These emergeafter a while, on the second or third day, when the line has been crossed from normal,stationary life to the movement of the road. Time speeds up, slows down, almost stops aswe try to keep our eyes open on hot, sunny late afternoons. The choice is to fight thetrip--"are we there yet?"--or to enter its mantra, blending with the flow ofmovement and pause.
My particular trip had its constraints. While I could stop along theway, as "Roadside America" called, I had 7:30 deadlines. Barring rain delay, thegames would start on their own schedules, in cities sometimes 450 miles apart. I couldstop and start, I could drive "blue highways" until time pressed. Then I neededthe interstate and a good city map.
Travellers cross boundaries as they move about the land. Some areofficial, like state boundaries--marked by "welcome" signs, new mileage markers,sometimes new pavement materials, sometimes a phalanx of liquor stores among the"Stateline" this and "Stateline" that--or time zone lines, where wehave to decide what to do about the car clock.
Other boundaries are different, less formal, more geographical,historical, cultural. Rivers, like the Mississippi and the Ohio are boundaries like that.Yet to cross the former at St. Louis, the Gateway Arch marking the beginning of onehistorical version of the West, is to cross a line quite different from the one inMinneapolis, where a wrong turn leads me across the Mississippi for the sixth time in anhour.
I had already crossed one such informal boundary when I left thecosmopolitan, international tone of Dade County, with its Caribbean/Latin/Creole blend ofsoul and neo-fascism for the bland, scared, censoring middle class whiteness of Broward. Ihad passed the border into America, where the graffiti painted on highway overpasses wasin English. Now, heading north from Mom's in my Chevrolet in search of baseball, I crossedsome more.
First, the ecology changed. I had left the palm, banyan, and Australianpine of Miami for the grass and sugar cane of the northern everglades. On U.S. 27 I wasflanked to the west by power lines, held up by huge steel supports marching up through thesod farms like giant insects or alien ships from (r)MDRV¯War of the Worlds.
Through Clewiston--"America's Sweetest Town"--the road led tothe citrus groves of the state's center, to Arcadia, where school zone driving laws are ineffect from 7:42 until 8:12 in the morning. Now, driving north on U.S. 19, past the golden"sails" of the new Sunshine Skyway bridge and the endless urban sprawl ofTampa Bay, deciduous green flanked the road. It would become richer and lusher as I movednorth until, beyond Tallahassee, I entered the red clay farmland of Alabama. I began inthe hot steam of south Florida, looking for spring. Further north the leaves would thinout as I drove back into early Spring, ending with the hint of chartreuse on spare branchin Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Through the trees I could see God's own passel of cows, dairy cows forthe most part. I am told that Florida has the third largest state-wide contingent of cowsin the country. I had seen my first ones grazing behind a mall just off the PalmettoExpressway in Miami Lakes.
Second, by the time I got to Port Richey, I had traded the northernculture of south Florida for the southern culture of central and north Florida. I hadcrossed the paranoia line from pay-first, pump-later self-serve gas to pump-first,pay-later. I was adrift in a strange, new land.
In Florida, all roads lead through Haines City to Perry. Throughout thestate, at the oddest places, there are official highway signs giving the mileage to theseplaces. At the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and 54th street in Miami, where the hookershang out and peoples' interest in driving probably extends about twenty blocks, there is asign for Haines City--209 miles. No flies on the these Chambers of Commerce.
Past Weekie-Watchie, south of Homosassa Springs and Chassahowitzka, is astretch of road marked by signs announcing "Bear Habitat-- Next 12 Miles."
I am now entering Dixie. In Crystal River, "Home of theManatee," the Crystal River Inn advertises that it is "American owned."Maybe it's the same people who put up the "reduced speed ahead" sign. Some cheapspeed might help those ubiquitous "slow children crossing." With fasterchildren, we probably wouldn't need any signs.
Heeding the Lighthouse Church's message, "If you don't answer thecall, you don't know the caller," (do you suppose God wants us to have an answeringmachine?) I answer my first "call of the road," pulling into the Suwannee RiverRoadside Park. A busload of European tourists is enjoying the river, in spite of the"poisonous snakes" sign. To the left is a section of the original Suwanee Riverbridge, with the original Stephen Foster plaque on it. At the entrance a sign marks thisas a "Crime Watch Neighborhood."
This is my first example of a strange American version of touristicfame. The Suwanee is a river made internationally famous not for anything intrinsic toitself--its peaceful beauty, its fishing, its access to the Gulf of Mexico--but because itscanned. Searching for a name to put in his song, Stephen Foster, who had never seen theriver, or even heard of it until he began hunting for a generic name to evoke the deepsouth, made the Suwanee into an American icon. The River is famous not for itself, but forits symbolic value. One can imagine a billboard on the George Washington Bridge welcomingus to the city made famous by the song, "New York, New York."
America is full of things made famous as symbols of other things thanthemselves. It is also full of simulations, commemorations, and such, of people and eventsthat existed elsewhere. Some of these events have not yet happened. The original"field of dreams"--in W. P. Kinsella's novel (r)MDRV¯Shoeless Joe and the"Field of Dreams" movie made from it--was built following the message "ifyou build it, they will come." This seems the central tenet of the American touristicentrepreneur. In self-fulfilling meta-prophesy, the Iowa cornfield containing part of thefield built for the movie has become a tourist site in its own regard.
Past Perry, through the piney woods and into the first small hills, therecession has clearly hit rural America. Roadside restaurants, motels, other smallbusinesses, many carry for sale signs. Many are boarded up. Despite the smell of the woodpulp mills, there isn't much prosperity here.
Things are better in Tallahassee. The city surrounds the bizarrephallicity of its state capital building with the commerce of state government andeducation. Florida State University and Florida A & M fill the center of town. I hadspent much of two very unpleasant years engaged in collective bargaining with the FloridaBoard of Regents here in Tallahassee. The bureaucratic meanness of their guys was matchedby the interpersonal cruelties of our guys to give me the beginnings of an ulcer. Nexttime I'll drive around the city.
At the Appalachicola River, I change time zones. Miami is more or lessdue south of Pittsburgh. Pensacola, at the end of the panhandle, is almost as far west asChicago. I've driven some 600 miles, and as I turn north toward Marianna and on intoAlabama, Florida still stretches 150 miles to the west. A quarter of a trip from Miami toSan Francisco lies inside Florida.
This is farm country--Marianna north to Montgomery. Green shoots peek upthrough the red clay soil. Flowering trees scent the air. The Alabama welcome stationoffers complementary soft drinks--a welcome southern welcome. This is peanut country,Dothan, Troy, across the border from Jimmy Carter's Plains, Georgia. In Dothan I see thefirst trash thrown out of the window of a pick-up truck.
I also see the first signs for a program that seems to have caught onall over the south and midwest--the Adopt-a-Highway cleanup program. Throughout my trip Iwill see signs announcing that such and such an organization, business, fraternity, evenfamily, have pledged to keep a mile or two- long stretch of road cleaned of roadsidetrash. Once or twice I will see volunteers in orange safety slickers out fulfilling theirpromise. This is nice, but I hope it doesn't use up all of Bush's "thousand points oflight."
Here also I become aware of another thing I will find throughout mytravels. Yellow ribbons are everywhere, commemorating the war in the Gulf. Flags fly.Billboards welcome back the troops, often listing the names of local soldiers. Each townseems to have offered a number of its young to the military. Must be a southern army.
The rural south seems to live up to its caricature of jingoisticpatriotism. On the road I will see state after state in the south issuing red, white andblue license plates--Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas. Thank god for theGeorgia peach. It also may be true that a lot of families are supporting children andsiblings who have left the hardscrabble for a better life-chance in the military.
Montgomery. The southern outskirts are just like those of other Americancities of its size. The franchise strip. Car dealerships. Plastic road food. This isAmerica--familiar, unremarkable in its banal zoning. I could be anywhere in the U.S.America's urban outskirts have been designed to comfort amnesiacs. No matter what one hasforgotten or where one wakes up, everything looks familiar. There is nothing here to jarone back into a previous life.
This is one of the country's mythical cities. I pass Rosa Parks Avenue,marking the heroine of the Montgomery bus boycott. This is the first time I feel thedirect presence of Martin Luther King, although, just like home, I will pass countlessstreets, schools, and other public spaces named in his honor.
As with all American journeys, contemporary time-space is indeliblyconnected to history through the medium of the human icon. Sometimes large, sometimessmall, the shadows of these people hang over the map, marketed by state tourist bureausand local chambers of commerce as sources of sacred energy and charisma. On my journey tothe heartland I will find King, Elvis, Harry Truman, Lincoln, Mother Jones, Daniel Boone.
Sailing north on I-65, I see downtown Montgomery from a distance, rangedalong the bank of the Alabama River. I wish I could stop, but the Birmingham Barons (andmy first game) call, an hour and a half up the road, between the tendons at the start ofthe southern Appalachians.
Songs are running through my head--Joan Baez's "From Boulder toBirmingham," Randy Newman's "Birmingham." Neal Young, Lynard Skynard, andWet Willie argue about Alabama. Not counting "Tallahassee Lassie," which I onlyremember later, I will find myself drawn from city to city by musical indices. Oddly,"Please Come to Boston," naming three cities I will not visit (although I'll gothrough Tennessee twice), becomes the road song for the whole trip. I never manage to getit out of my mind.
As I find out at a gas station near the UAB campus, the Barons play intheir new stadium south of the city, in Hoover. The Barons are the AA level farm team ofthe Chicago White Sox, members of the Southern League for over seventy years. On thewhole, players here are two steps away from "The Show." Some never make ithigher. Others, Alex Fernandez and Frank Thomas in 1990, zoom through, pretty muchskipping Triple A altogether.
Since players regularly move up and down through the minors, it isdifficult for local fans to identify with them in the same way that Major League city fansmight connect with the slightly more geographically stable major leaguers. Other than someof the young women, who seem to learn the players' names pretty fast--perhaps auditioningfor future Susan Sarandon roles--the only others who know much about the players are theregulars.
The couple next to me, along the third base line at the HooverMetropolitan Stadium--the Hoover Met--are regulars. He is a retired Law Professor fromSamford University. She is the local baseball ethnographer, filling me in on the playerswho have passed through Birmingham. While visiting with other season ticketholders--people who become "communities" of familiars over the years--she tellsme who to watch for when I get to Comiskey, her favorites whom she has"adopted," in the fashion one sees in minor league cities. She looks for anotherregular in his eighties, a local character who dances up and down the aisles nightly,balanced on two feet and a cane. When he shows up in the top of the fourth, she returnsher attention to the game.
The Hoover Met is set on a hill near the outskirts of town. Traffic onthe long road in, through the trees and toward the glow in the distance, moves slowly asit heads for a sizable concrete parking lot. Tonight an electrolyte-drink company ishaving a promotion. Yellow plastic batting helmets are given to young fans and a patrioticfireworks show--complete with that ubiquitous, jingoistic Lee Greenwood song--will cap theevening. Even though this is football country--the Birmingham Fire is preparing to playits arch-rival Frankfurt Galaxy--some 10,000 people show up, a sizeable minor leaguecrowd, straining the parking facilities and completely overmatching the concession stands.I plead at the door for a helmet, saying that I've come all the way from Miami for thegame, but to no avail. A rule's a rule at the Hoover Met. If I'd gotten one, I wouldmention the company.
Two levels of stands stretch down the foul lines, skyboxes overlookinghome plate and the first base line. In the outfield are piggy-backed levels of ads liningthe outfield wall. The scoreboard, Coca-Cola sign and white light circles on top, is inright center. The stands are full of families. There are lots of young kids here, both forthe helmets and with free tickets from the promotion. This is baseball as it's supposed tobe. A grass field. No waves. No religious signs for television, carried by jerks inrainbow wigs. Just cheering for the home team.
The Barons shut out the Huntsville Stars, an Oakland A's affiliate, 7-0.The game is considerably better than Single A ball. There are a couple of nice doubleplays, some good catches in the outfield. The Birmingham catcher, a kid named Campbell,shows a good arm and hits one out. The Stars' second baseman has a chaw of tobacco in hischeek. He looks like a little kid practicing to be a major leaguer. What strikes me mostabout the skill levels of these AA players is the general lack of arm strength in theinfield. Maybe I've been spoiled watching Shawon Dunston on TV.
The game over, I get in the car and head northwest towards Mississippi.This will set a pattern for the rest of the trip--getting a jump on the next day bydriving for an hour or two after a game. In the hills near Jasper, Alabama, on the redclay of a mobile home lot--only a couple of them left for sale--I haul out my ten dollarbeach chaise lounge from K-Mart, and, hiding it behind my car in the night fog, lay mysleeping bag on it and call it a day. I have come over 650 miles since living my mother'scondo in Sarasota this morning, 930 miles in all, and I've seen my first game. The journeyis well begun this evening and morning of the second day.