Roads From the Ashes

by Megan Edwards

  Mark was eager to be back because he’s a born logistician. Nothing delights him more than the complex managerial challenges afforded by extreme pageantry. In years past, he had, among a wide variety of other assignments, shepherded individual floats from design to ‘roll-out,’ served an ocean of coffee and an Everest of donuts to out-of-town visitors, and driven a truck carrying a portable toilet to volunteers manning street barricades on New Year’s Eve.

  This year, Mark was one of two “White Suiters” charged with running a temporary city that began to take shape in one of the Rose Bowl’s parking lots shortly after Thanksgiving. Its centerpiece was an enormous tent which was unique in possessing no interior upright poles. Supported by a series of metal spans, the thing was big enough to hold a dozen mammoth parade floats and all the people, scaffolding, and paraphernalia required for final decoration. Day by day, equipment and activity increased until, by December 29, the place was the teeming home of 1600 people.

  Mark’s title was “Barn Chief,” and his job amounted to being the enlightened despot of four competing float building firms, one university, scores of employees, hundreds of volunteers, cadres of sponsoring VIPs, visiting Rose princesses, float judges, media entourages, food vendors, souvenir hawkers, and the general public. They needed water, toilets, telephones, electricity, food, lights, and heat. The builders needed space to park refrigerated trucks full of flowers, and tents in which they could sort and prepare them for the floats.

  The rule that has created the need for extreme measures in the decorating arena is that every superficial inch of every float must be covered with real flowers or other natural vegetative material. It can be shredded, dried, or cut, but it can’t be dyed. In their search for a full spectrum of natural colors and textures, float designers scour the world for exotic petals, leaves, bark, seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Their ingenuity is boundless, and nothing is too expensive or too mundane to consider as long as it meets the requirement of being natural. A black surface is often achieved with onion seed, and an orange one with dried lentils. Halved limes become bumps on a dinosaur’s back, whole potatoes serve as cobblestones, and a metallic look emerges with the smooth application of silvery eucalyptus leaves.

  But millions of fresh flowers rule the day, and it’s their short shelf life that makes the Rose Parade not only an ephemeral wonder, but also a logistical miracle. Seven million flowers converge on Pasadena from all over the world in those few short days at the end of December, nearly a million-and-a-half roses, and over two million exotics. Chrysanthemums are the most heavily used bloom. Not only are they bright, long-lasting and cheap, they stick well. While fragile flowers must be housed in individual vials of water, mums are sturdy enough to be glued directly onto the plastic-coated metal frameworks of the floats.

  Did I say cheap? It’s all relative, of course. Fresh flowers are luxury items, and there is nothing cheap about a Rose Parade float. Even the most modest small town entries, the ones built by volunteers and paid for by a year’s worth of raffles and pancake breakfasts, cost $75,000. The ones financed by major companies like Kodak and Microsoft can cost four times that much.

  And even the most expensive floats end up getting their flowers applied by volunteers. In the last hectic days before “rollout,” thousands of hands are needed. The professional float builders amass those hands by making donations to charitable organizations. The organizations, in return, supply free labor between Christmas and New Year’s. They arrive in small armies at the decorating arenas, of which the big tent at the Rose Bowl was only one. Floats are stashed all over Pasadena and the surrounding communities, and each one is a beehive of round-the-clock activity.

  Having grown up in Rose Parade country, I’d been a member of a beehive many a year, covering floats in flowers and myself in glue. It was a traditional feature of winter vacation, something to look forward to after the excitement of Christmas. This year, however, I was getting the queen’s eye view. Parked inside the enclave at the Rose Bowl, between the mammoth tent and three refrigerated trucks, the Phoenix was at the nerve center of a grand spectacle, and I was living inside it. My only responsibility was to look, marvel, and take Marvin for walks. He was privileged, too. He was the only animal allowed inside the compound.

  I watched as Brookside Pavilion began to hum with activity the day after Christmas, and as the hum grew to a roar as New Year’s Day approached. I sat in the eye as the hurricane swirled around me. It was exhilarating, energizing, hilarious. It united people in the shared anticipation of an inexorable deadline, and it had all the excitement of a natural disaster without any death or destruction. Best of all, it smelled wonderful. For a week, I lived in a bower, surrounded by the scent of a million roses.

  Virtual Guinea Pigs

  As I walked among the giant floral sculptures and watched the labor of a thousand hands emerge, I let my mind wander back to the beginning of our journey. Pasadena was no longer our home, but once it had been. Spiraling back to where our adventure had started gave me the chance to pause, assess, consider. It made me look back and forward and around. As 1995 came to a close, as I wondered where our travels might take us next, I thought again about the revolution in electronic communication.

  It had been nearly two years since I first slid an America Online disk into the side of my laptop, and eighteen months since I’d first awakened the black box and succeeded in sending e-mail on the fly. I’d driven from peak to peak in the Rockies in search of a cellular signal, and I’d cajoled the Iguana into boondocking with alien pay phones in border zones. I’d read a ream of press releases, scoured a thousand magazines in search of better answers, but the only improvement in my situation had come in the cellular arena. Cell sites had multiplied across the continent, and the likelihood that our telephone would work at a given time and place had increased. Other than that, things hadn’t changed since that momentous day in Susanville when I first coaxed the black box to speak. The explosions were all happening on another front. Across the continent, e-mail and America Online were catching on faster than hula hoops.

  Back in March, 1994, when I first established my address in cyberspace, I immediately sent messages to the handful of friends who had preceded me there. Two were college professors, and another worked for a computer company. E-mail came with their jobs. I had only one friend who could send and receive e-mail at home, and I was the only person I knew who had it to make a mobile lifestyle possible. Over the next eighteen months, the most common e-mail message Mark and I received went something like this:

  “HI. JUST GOT EMAIL AND THIS IS FIRST ATTEMPT TO SEND MESSAGE. DON’T KNOW IF THIS WILL WORK BUT WILL TRY. OVER AND OUT.”

  One of the reasons that we were the lucky recipients of so many virgin e-mail missives is that we’d been writing and sending a newsletter every month since we’d hit the road. Staying in touch was high on our list of priorities, and we knew we’d never send enough post cards to bridge the gap. The Phoenix One Journal went out every month with our e-mail address printed in the masthead, and as our friends and families joined us in cyberspace, it was a handy target for their virtual guinea pigs.

  When we left town, the Phoenix One Journal’s mailing list had just under a hundred names on it. Each month, Mark and I would tap out stories for it on our laptop computer, and I would pummel our musings into a format we could photocopy on two sides of a sheet of white paper. We included a picture or two, which meant we’d have to seek out a print shop with the machinery required to convert a photograph into a format that a Xerox machine could reproduce.

  It usually took us a week to complete the whole process, from writing to licking the stamps, mostly because we were always in new territory, always having to ask, “Where’s the post office?” or “Where can we buy a new printer cartridge?” If you want to run an office on the road, you have to allow extra time.

  The mailing list for the Phoenix One journal grew as we traveled, and so did our elect
ronic address book. Not long before we arrived at the Rose Bowl at the end of 1995, we began to get e-mail messages akin to these:

  “Have you ever thought about sending your newsletter by e-mail? It would save you a lot on postage,” and “It’s easy to visualize your newsletter on a home page.”

  Home page. I’d heard the term. Since I was still limited in my access to the World Wide Web by my tenuous and slow cellular connection and my membership in the not-quite-the-Internet club of America Online, I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked. What I grasped immediately was that if you put something on a home page, anyone in the whole wide world with Internet access could look at it. “It’s perfect for us,” I said to Mark. “We should put our newsletter on the Internet.”

  But Mark was unimpressed. “I just don’t like it,” he said. “Not very many people look at home pages, and our mailing list is full of people who probably never will.”

  While Rose Parade 1996 took shape around me, while I lived in the vortex of that splendid floral storm, I made use of another privilege that came with our exclusive address. There at the Rose Bowl, the Phoenix One had real phone service. In the shadow of the big tent, I wiggled through the AOL wormhole to the World Wide Web. By the time the floats rolled out to meet the new year, I was ready to roll, too, on a whole new highway. Once again, I’d have to sell Mark on the concept, but the World Wide Web was calling me to a new adventure. No longer would e-mail on the fly be enough. If I was really going to live and work on the road, I needed to stake a claim in cyberspace.

  Road Trip to Cyberspace

  There are two long-standing traditions that govern the Rose Parade. A million people attend, and it never rains. If you move to Pasadena, remember these two legends and state them frequently, with authority. You’ll immediately be mistaken for someone who grew up spending New Year’s Eve in a sleeping bag on Colorado Boulevard.

  But you better know a few other things about Pasadena, too, because on the 364 parade-free days of the year, other things come up besides roses. It’s the home of the California Institute of Technology and its famous offspring, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s got the Planetary Society, Art Center College of Design, and several large engineering firms with global reputations. What all of this means is that a lot of creative nerds call Pasadena home.

  Because Pasadena is the ancestral stomping ground of such a prodigious number of engineers, graphic designers, scientists, and intellectuals, it’s not surprising that it became an Internet boomtown early on in the Web rush. After the last parade float went back into hibernation and 1996 was officially launched, we began to notice how quickly our old home town was launching itself into cyberspace.

  Web rush fever was epidemic in Pasadena at the beginning of 1996. It seemed as though everyone had either caught it or was looking for a vaccination, but nobody could avoid the subject. I was eager to join the fray, and Mark had changed his tune since I’d first suggested the idea of publishing the Phoenix One Journal on the Internet. He still didn’t think posting our newsletter was a great idea, but the Internet seemed to offer some other seductive possibilities. We might resurrect our retail business online, we thought, and sell games, toys, and crafts from across the continent. E-mail had given us the ability to stay connected while we roamed. Virtual commerce dovetailed perfectly with our expanded dreams of totally connected mobility.

  By the end of January, we’d metamorphosed into latter-day Jayhawkers, emulating our antecedents who’d planned and schemed for months before heading west with the Gold Rush. Like them, we knew we’d need equipment for our journey, and we paid a visit to Wes Ferrari, whose expertise in the hardware arena had been invaluable in outfitting the Phoenix One two years before.

  As we had expected, Wes was a tsunami of information about the latest developments in laptops, modems, and networks. He recommended a company in Los Angeles that hosted Web sites, and Mark called one Friday morning to set a time to visit. “We have an appointment for Tuesday afternoon,” he said as he hung up. “So you have until then to think of all your questions.”

  But actually, I had no time at all. Serendipity intervened in the forms of Bill and Melissa Paule, whom we met unexpectedly the very next day. Melissa and Bill had founded Intelligent Information Innovations less than a year before, a company that offered Website design and hosting. Based in Pasadena, their major clients were companies that made components for cars and motorcycles, and they had just launched an instantly popular site promoting Heidi Wear, a line of clothing marketed by Heidi Fleiss, the “Hollywood Madam.”

  We canceled our Tuesday meeting and met Bill and Melissa in their offices in Old Pasadena on Monday. Before the afternoon was out, a partnership had begun to blossom. Intelligent Information Innovations needed salespeople to market its web design and hosting services, and we were looking for something to sell as we traveled. Bill and Melissa were as eager as we were to stake new claims in the virtual universe, to design Web sites that could generate income.

  The theory was, in those early Web rush days, that a Web site was a hybrid of television and print. Advertisers would be eager to place banners on sites with large audiences, and the price tags would be commensurate with what their counterparts cost in other media. “Content is king,” was the ubiquitous catch phrase, because content would lure surfers whose eyeballs could be counted and used to sell ads.

  It was a playing field the likes of which the world had never seen. Unlike television, you didn’t have to own prohibitively expensive machinery and obtain governmental permission to exploit the medium. Unlike print, you didn’t have to invest huge sums in paper and ink and distribution. The Web brought publishing at a global level into the reach of ordinary mortals, anyone who had access to computers and the willingness to learn some idiosyncratic codes. The field was as level as such arenas ever get, the perfect turf for entrepreneurs with grand dreams.

  Within a week, Bill, Melissa, Mark and I had decided on two courses of action. Mark and I would create marketing materials for Intelligent Information Innovations and sell Web sites and services on commission. The other project was a magazine-style Web site for which we would build an audience and sell advertising. Bill and Melissa would provide technical expertise and support. Mark and I would provide the content. The site would be a virtual version of our travels, with daily updates “posted from the road.”

  After several brainstorming sessions and multiple electronic queries to the agency that oversees the naming of virtual domains, we decided to call the enterprise RoadTrip America. On February 14, 1996, we gathered at the offices of Intelligent Information Innovations. After Bill performed the necessary computer wizardry to bring “www.RoadTripAmerica.com” to life, we drank champagne, ate chocolate cake, and felt very proud. The world was our oyster, and we were sitting on top of it. We were jayhawkers, and we’d just joined the rush to the virtual gold fields.

  The excitement didn’t wear off as we plunged into the endless process of designing and furnishing our new domain, an undertaking that began with hardware. Back we went to Wes Ferrari, who procured for us a new, more powerful laptop and a new, more powerful modem. He also helped us choose a device with which the world was only beginning to become acquainted, a digital camera. Armed with the machine to write and edit, the machine to transmit data, and the machine to trap images in digitized format, we were forty-niners with wagon, horse and shovel. We were ready to roll.

  Well, almost. I had a heck of a lot to learn, and if RoadTrip America was going to be the wonderful Internet oasis we’d envisioned, it was going to take a lot of hours to build it. As anyone who has ever constructed a virtual development knows, it takes as much planning, design, engineering, and plain old brick-laying as anything in the realm of three dimensions. Don’t be fooled by the lack of cement mixers. Building empires on the World Wide Web may be done by troglodytes with soft bellies and carpal tunnel syndrome, but it’s hard labor nonetheless.

&nbs
p; The four of us undertook it with the enthusiasm that only real trail blazing ignites. I spent endless days delving into the intricacies of Adobe Photoshop, and endless nights immersed in HTML code. If my learning curve were to appear in three dimensions, it would rival the Gateway Arch in angle and height, but somehow it was all challenge and no chore. We were creating something exciting and new, scaling the world’s latest Everest. We were making measurable progress in our quest for a life on the road and a business that would keep abreast.

  We kept thinking we were almost done, but it was nearly six weeks later that a full-fledged RoadTrip America appeared on the World Wide Web. It had a home page upon which a new feature would appear every day, and, in addition to pages for Mark, Marvin, the Phoenix One and me, it had eleven other departments for funny road signs, stories about people, places, restaurants, animals, and unusual vehicles, slide shows, a post office, a game, and every single one of the Phoenix One Journals. At the post office, visitors could “send” an electronic postcard to anybody with an e-mail address. The game, called “What IS That Thing?” had pictures of obscure objects whose identity viewers could guess by clicking on possible answers.