Maine to Santa Monica at slow speed

Sent out 10 press releases to newspapers in towns I know I will pass through. In a way, its easy to send out stuff to newspapers, but they are now so deluged with information, that they are well-armored against outside news. Just getting an email address from their websites is a long process!

Then spent a few hours with a friend who's building an electric three-wheeler here in Maine. There is sometimes absolute magic in such encounters. Convergent thinking. New angles. We men often need the medium of 'projects' to come closely together. Women, perhaps, can do it directly...

My new acquaintance mentioned the patents he's considering, so we got fired up about intellectual property: patents, copywrites, etc. I've always considered them like tariffs--noxious restraints on free trade. He is exploring the opposite idea. Good gardens need good fences to grow. Also making a good idea into a commodity could perhaps disseminate it faster than otherwise--bringing an intangible into the realm of capital. Sort of like making greenhouse gasses a tradeable commodity to enforce their limitation. We scanned the humble Moonbeam and quickly concluded there wasn't a thing remotely patent-able there, except possibly the overhead door...

Then a TV station arrived with camera gear for an interview. Sometimes an interviewer is a real 'bird of the feather' and you find yourself opening up in a new way. Somehow he got me talking about the life passage of turning 65. We wonder how we can still be creative and have some impact, when society seems to lead us out to pasture. And how a project like Moonbeam blasts us out of that doldrum. Maybe age is just a self-imposed fiction.

If you want to watch the video we made, see http://wm.wcsh-wlbz.gannett.edgestreams.net/news/111906_car_wcsh.wmv And finally the flurry of packing. I reminded myself I would never be far from civilization and supplies. We need three things: enough money, enough tools, and enough skills. Money can buy tools, if necessary. When we pack our skills, that is the central thing. That wonderous ability to problem-solve.

Sunday, Nov 19, 6AM--I can't believe I'm off. On the one hand: Confucious said, "It's not good for a man to leave his valley". On the other--I always think like a Geminii--everyone should be REQUIRED to travel now and then. Turn over and freshen up the soil...

Travelled 600 miles to Rochester, which felt like my travel limit, arriving at dusk amid falling snow. This rather dull prosperous town was my home for 6 years, studying Buddhism in the early 70's. I don't know if 'study' is the best word for sitting on a cushion facing a wall, trying to solve an impossible riddle; but they were years I wouldn't trade for anything. They added a direction and grounding for everything which followed. My old-time friend and I talked until fatigue finally took over. The grey morning light let me slip out for my usual 6 AM rendezvous with the YMCA pool.

Monday--The road again: you can't help noticing that gas prices have dropped. I hope America doesn't go to sleep again, as she did after the 70's crunch. The quest for alternative transportation has nothing to do with gas prices. They may prod us into action, but the central fact is the 'social cost' of fossil fuel, which has nothing to do with 'immediate cost'.

Fossil fuels costs us much more than the pump price, because of pollution, road maintance, oil wars, smog health problems, and many more risks and costs of producing, transporting, and using the fuels. You might say gas really costs us about $15 a gallon.

Tuesday--contacted three newspapers here, but after many unanswered calls and one desultory interview, I'm pretty sure Detroit is too busy for a 'man bites dog' story like Moonbeam. Perhaps, too, Detroit is again showing its well-established indifference to alternatives in transportation.

Wednesday. East-west travel is bottlenecked by Lake Michigan at Chicago, and I languished in an hour of gridlock. The right two lanes formed one long square worm of semi-trailers as far as the eye could see ahead and behind. Roads have become our favored transport.

At Springfield, Illinois, I passed a massive coal-fired power plant, whose black plume turned quickly white and disappeared, thanks no doubt to high-tech scrubbing. What is not scrubbed, alas, are the finer pollutants which give us such poor air quality in Maine. The coal is also partly moved by truck, compounding the dubvious reputation of coal-fired electricity.

Hannibal, Missouri--I arrived at 7PM after the 12 hour drive from Detroit and homed in on the Mark Twain Dinette, where Mark Twain fried chicken--cleverly disguised as every fried chicken you ever ate--filled the void. I climbed up to the lighthouse on the Mississippi's high bluff and watched the sliver of a new moon set above this glassy sweep of river. A sigh came from deep within.

Backing the trailer as close to the river as possible, I hunkered down to a lovely rest. Hour by hour, long freight trains hooted and lumbered lazily by the nearby crossing. Why do I feel so happy and content? Perhaps it's the safety of small town America. Perhaps it's also a sailor's return to his watery home, after holding his breath for long flat land-locked miles.

Great Bend, Kansas--a ten hour drive through the rolling hills of Missouri--a welcome change from corn belt flatness--brought me to this Walmart's parking lot. These lots are known welcome places for self-contained travellors. I got up at 5AM and was shocked to see the lot was almost full! Inside this biggest of building, lighted squinty bright, customers of substance were peering over their full carts as they navigated back to their cars. A 32" LCD TV was a favorite, I noted. Then I remembered that this is the day after Thanksgiving, an orgasm every merchant encourages.

Moonbeam and I have left our mouse-hole in Maine not just to hobnob with California eco-dreamers, but to lay hands on America's pulse, ask those embarrasing life-style questions a good doctor asks, and size up her health. Is she flexing healthy middle-aged muscles, or showing the first signs of degenerative disease?

It's hard not to be sad, passing the steady stream of dying towns in Kansas. Half-abandoned they soldier on with elderly populations or are sold at bargain prices to new immigrants. Their square hip-roofed bungalows never housed the wealthy, but rather the shop-keepers and librarians who served the small farms beyond. Was there no wealth in farming? Grey and peeling, they now huddle against the constant dusty wind. Is this the dust bowl, come again?

On the other hand, I did pass two separate 'wind farms' or wind power plants, both near Dodge City, Kansas. This area is the windiest part of the US. with an average wind speed of 15 MPH. Each 'farm' consisted of about 100 metal towers, 250' tall with lazily twirling--bird friendly?--three bladed propellers. The farm covered a square about a half mile on a side. I noted: 1) that this type of energy production is rather dilute, with each farm empowering about 50,000 homes, 2) that the installation didn't take long to set up: 6 months, 3) that after 4 days of looking at grain elevators, no one could call this situation ugly, 4) that if economically worthwhile, you could put up many of these farms in such vast spaces, while using the land for other things, and 5) that compared to strip-mining coal with heavy equipment, transporting coal partly by road, burning coal with residual unhealthy by-products; wind farms sure look good!

Toward the end of my Kansas sojourn, I spied my first small mountain in the distance. Amazing, to see something with a vertical dimension. This marked the entrance to New Mexico, and a whole different topography, resembling southern Spain. In Santa Fe, I settled down to a 5 day reprieve from the road life, as before, visiting friends from old Buddhist community days.

I left Santa Fe on Wednesday with the reality of Global Warming very much on my mind: the dirty trickle of the Santa Fe river, once the year-round water source which brought the town into existance; the masses of drought-killed pinon pines whose grey bodies littered the roadsides; and a friend, planning a move to the coast, who talked of the weariness of a persistant drought.

I ran into a first class blizzard after Albuquerque--high altitude is such a crapshoot-- and then took it slowly until I finally decided to splurge on a $20 motel in Holbrook, Arizona. Leaving early, thru the snowy highlands, I went over one last pass, then down, down, down with the temp rising, the snow disappearing, until the relative warmth of Scottsdale welcomed me.

The wonder of old friends is that we bonded with them before we had too many opinions. So here I am with my old classmate: he, a Vietnam bomber pilot, while I was a conscientious objector. We usually avoid political discussions, but a 3-way dinner including another feisty democrat lured us into the inevitable impasses--global warming, Iraq exit strategies, etc. We might have done better wrestling on the floor...

It was helpful to have my combat friend define, 'winning a war'. You win when you have overcome your enemy's determination to fight. By this definition, we can clearly see that we are losing the Iraq war, since our popular determination is fast waning. Only our presidential determination remains! Since my friend flew 300 missions in Vietnam and has a very sharp mind, I was listening carefully to his debate about Iraq.

Of course, I was hoping to hear: "Using strong unilateral military force hardens the hearts and strengthens the stubbornness of both parties. The underdog will find ingenious means to bring the stronger side to a stalemate, which is, itself, a victory." I have a few veteran friends who have returned from frustrating combat years with this nearly pacifist position.

Failing that, I was at least hoping to hear: "Look! I've been thru this movie before: trying to fight a war that, with rising popular discontent at home, cannot be won without the escalation militarily necessary. Staying on, just to save face, is not worth the cost in lives"

But alas I didn't hear that either. Rather, the argument came back to the present-day variation of the old Vietnam justification. We fought in Vietnam to keep the Chinese hordes from overrunning southeast asia. We fight the Iraqi to keep the terrorists from our own soil. The trade-off of known, immediate horrific sacrifice, for unknown and questionable future problems.

We eventually moved on the global warming. I see this purely as a scientific question, and as such, we can get down and dirty and look at each side's sources, and then at those sources' scientific data. Rather quickly, a consensus emerges, as it presently has, with perhaps 90% of the scientific community acknowleging this unique greenhouse gas-caused climate change.

Can't believe I'm only one day out of Santa Monica. There will be another auto show in LA this next week, a pretty glitzy gathering, but I hope to talk our way into it.. Meanwhile, I'm skipping meals, getting ready to be with 'the beautiful people'....

I left Scottsdale with a real and unexpected tenderness. Though the area is impossibly sprawled out, my walks in the surrounding hills through wonderlands of cactus, were as good as walks ever get. There was a mysterious greenness and softness to that arid landscape.

Saturday morning, out through an hour of urban sprawl, chasing my long shadow heading west for the last westward travel day. I passed the nuclear power plant at Palo Verde, its lazy steam plume rising in the still morning air. Comparing this to the Coal plant in Springfield, Missouri belching clear but toxic fumes which effect every lake and lung further East, you can understand how some of the old-guard anti-nukies are reconsidering the issue of nuclear power in the light of global warming. Perhaps nuclear waste disposal and accidents are less of a threat than this known planet-wide catastrophe. Homework to do back home...

Driving west the next day on my last leg, I passed an array of wind generators far more extensive than in Kansas. There must have been a few thousand, confirming that California is our most invested state in wind energy. I admit I wouldn't like to look at this scene every day before breakfast, but there's an honesty in the sacrifice of generating our own energy. Hey, America, do we want to live a lifestyle requiring X amount of energy? Let's not beat up other countries for a cheap way out, but generate it ourselves, and live with the resulting local costs.

I could feel the pulse quicken, the traffic thicken, pulling through the 40 miles of western LA suburbs, until finally I jounced terrifyingly along the cement plains of the tired Santa Monica Freeway. An occasional brown hill reminded me there was indeed a city beyond the embankment.

What better use of my hyper-energy, I thought, having crossed a continent, than to do the LA Auto Show, loudly touted as "the biggest...etc"? So I braved the freeway gridlock and then the parking gridlock and soon found myself at the Convention Hall, in the very heart of American car buyers' total disconnect: Out on the streets lie high gas prices, impossible driving conditons--I'll be there in 10 minutes or two hours!--air turned to brown haze; and inside, under the surreal lighting, chic attendants pass out glossy handouts, as ragtag atendees cram themselves dreamily into Ferraris and Lambroginis.

It is great fun, though, to be in Santa Monica. you soon learn that you're on the mainline of mania. In the east, driving moonbeam, people might smile, give a thumbs up. But here, they pull you off the road with a militant curiosity!

Today, up in Santa Barbara, we're deinitely in the high-rent district ...more walks in the hills, looking out on channel islands. left Santa Monica in moderate traffic at 5:30 AM. Back tonight at 10PM again to avoid traffic. These people live with traffic roulette....

Thursday, Day before the expo! Another headache! Is it the smog or the stimulation? Yesterday was another day of careful traffic avoidance, this time to the south of LA. Yet apart from smog and gridlock, this place is so much fun!

I remember originally driving into the area, when my scan of the lower end of the FM dial turned up KPFK, Out came this blistering in-depth review of American middle-east non-policy. Not the slightest bit polite, this program was a down-and-dirty quantum leap below anything ever broadcast on the East Coast. I felt I was entering an underworld, where the rules had suddenly changed.

I imagine that Californians must look at the other coast with a younger-sibling respect for those rising 3 hours earlier, coupled with a sassy we've-done-that arrogance. The speed and sophistication of activism here, for example, is impressive. A developer need only glance twice at a juicy piece of land, and the next morning a hundred people in holloween costumes will be doing a protest swim-in on the beach with full media coverage. It must come with the California milk...

First daty of the expo--I got up early for a swim at the YMCA, trying to calm this excited person down. Men were excercising naked in the locker room....Only in Santa Monica! Then I packed a healthy lunch, mounted spiffed-up moonbeam, and headed to Santa Monica Pier. The first eco-cars were just arriving in the bright morning sun and especially clear air. By 10:30 about 50 cars had arrived and I faced my usual dillemma: stay by moonbeam and answer questions, or educate myself further by talking with the glorious feast of alternative cars. I did both!

I will post on the "report from Santa Monica's altcarexpo" page all the technical stuff I began learning. Eventually, local luminaries took the platform and made short speeches, and then the police lead the vehicles on an escort to the rally site amid lots of cheers and waves from the parade route.

The Barker Hangar site of the rally, was a rather dark and uninspiring place, but it was fun to see Moonbeam's very own booth. The public was not there until tomorrow, so I spent the rest of the day with the media and with other presenters. To see the video we made, see: http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/12/09/alt-car-expo-moonbeam-video/

Most spiritual traditions encourage us to enter fully into the present moment without running a big story in our heads about it. Then we make our own unique contribution, and let go of every speck of result which might come from our efforts. The theists put it well: Let go and let God. So I know that this little discouragement is just a signal to keep my mind quiet and to forge ahead...

The expo itself: The first day of the expo was absolutely mobbed! It was open at 9 and by 10 I had lost all doubts about people coming to the party. I gradually learned how to humanize contact with so many people: I put a chair beside Moonbeam with the canopy open, and stuck a sticky saying, 'step in' on the windshield. There I sat with the crowd passing by. The interested ones would approach, especially those with kids, whom I would invite to sit in the car. So all my interactions were in my own parlor, so to speak. It was a great way to pull people into a personal interaction. I did it for 7 hours, taking breaks every few hours to eat and visit other booths. Exhausting, but basically wonderful. People are so enchanting, when you give them some humor and attention. Seeing the bright excited eyes of children, cramming couples into that intimate space together, asking people about their lives, cars, backgrounds...it became effortless.

But I was relieved when 4 oclock came and the lights flashed, signaling the day's end. An old college friend and his fiancee picked me up for some very high-end dining in downtown LA, which put a great ending to the day. What will tomorrow bring?

Sunday, the final day of the expo, brought equal crowds, so I stuck with the same style. Across Moonbeam's doorsill came braids and bangles, tatoos and scarfs, actors and movie techies, old volvo gearheads, and weakening but ardent cyclists. There were nimble orientals entering a Moonbeam suddenly big. There was a 350 pound 6'4"-er who thoroughly tested my polypropalene floor pan and needed three helpers to get out. There were dreamers and tinkers who lingered forever: How did you do this? Did you think about... and the lovely children in rainbow hues, brown eyes as big is pies, amazed that the adult world had suddenly down-sized to their level. Am I driving 6500 miles to brag about my bangings in a dim Maine garage an eon ago? No, I realized I am here to connect almost electrically with this stream of humanity, all of us, like wide-eyed children watching, participating in the mystery of what comes next.

It may be a challenge to keep the energy up heading east, but I started with a stay at Joshua Tree N.P. upon the unanimous recommendation of friends. Been a lot of places....but never saw a moonscape like this! It was snuggly warm in the car, but 12 hours is a long time to sleep.

Tuesday involved some lovely hikes, then more wild scenery as I headed North across the Mohave Dessert National Preserve. I missed a few heartbeats, when the Camry overheated on that desolate road, but it was just low on water. A half-gallon of soymilk in the radiator, and we were good to go!

Only a total killjoy would bypass Las Vegas, so I swept onto the strip. It's always good to touch base with the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyln Bridge, and even the Eiffel Tower. Then on to a welcome motel in Hurricane, Utah which should freshen me up for Zion Nat'l Park. I'm getting better: I used to drive myself into the ground being cheap. Only a year ago, I would have huddled in the car another night, stoically testing my thrift store sleeping bags in the cold of these higher altitudes. Why? So that the sums in a seldom-checked savings account might be larger. Now, at 65, I say, "Can't take it with you!"

They say that in foxholes, we are all believers. In Zion canyon, frost patinas the trees by the clear river, while high above, the just-risen sun coats with pink the color-layered spires of cathedralpeaks. Here too, we believe! What can we say amid such awe? To add anything is 'putting legs on a snake' as the Buddhists say. So, keeping mind at rest, I hike Zion's trails one by one.

West Rim Trail--Pockets full of sardines, I set out hiking up as the sun hikes down the canyon wall. Dizzying heights and drop-offs keep me hugging the inside of the trail, which finally is just a notch hacked in the sheer cliff wall. Tension mounts with the altitude: Where can this trail possibly go--bound in by such cliffs? Then, zapp, an invisible side canyon appears, and we level off inside an echo-y narrow defile. I can only think of Dave Mallot:

I love a national park with lots of hiking. Seeing nature's wonders from a car seat dilutes the wonder. I think we need the humility of walking. Arches didn't let me down in this respect: great walks over all sorts of amazing terrain, seeing the magic of erosion during eons of time.

Arches N.P. is about sandstone arches, of course, and the longest arch, maybe 300 feet in width was being admired from below in 1991 one day after heavy rains. The sandstone had absorbed tons of water and suddenly the tourists heard cracking sounds above them. As they scrambled for cover, masses of rock fell from the arch, and one person got an amazing photo of the rocky pieces in mid-air. The arch remains today, though admired only from a safe distance!

Pulling a trailer behind a car with beaucoup miles on it, I wanted to cross the Rockies with as little downshifting as possible, so Interstate 70 across Colorado was a good choice. It's also possibly the most exciting interstate section in the country. After two passes of about 10K altitude, you finally descend a hill and look across the vast sea of lights which is Denver.

After a day with friends and family, with a sigh, I entered fully into the zen of interstate travel. Good books on tape, sleeping in rest areas beside idling trucks, and finding everything you need in the convience stores at interchanges. The miles swooshed by in a forgetible blur. No humanizing yakks with locals; no hikes and sidetrips to get a feel for the country. Sigh...I guess we have to muscle through certain have-to periods of life.

I stopped in Detroit just long enough to give my 92 year old Mother a spin in Moonbeam and did the last 900 miles in a single day. Then, back in Maine, I settled into the flurry of the Christmas season. Thanks, dear reader, for keeping me company!