by Mike Farrell
It’s amazing! This trip has really brought people out of the woodwork, but this is stunning. My father’s youngest brother, an Army Air Corps officer, was killed in an automobile accident shortly before the end of World War II and left behind his wife and baby daughter Joanne. Gracie, his wife, left California and our families lost touch. About thirty years or so ago, my cousin Joanne came to Los Angeles and contacted me and we met and visited for a while. She then left for Houston and we somehow lost contact again. I had tried to find her, but to no avail. And here she is, three decades later.
Unbelievable! Bob has made plans to take me to dinner at a natural food restaurant, so when Joanne asks if I’ll go somewhere with them, I tell her of our plans and invite the two of them to join us. It turns out that she not only knows the restaurant, but is close to the owner, so we all go out to dinner and reconnect. And this time we won’t lose touch.
Life, huh?
DAY NINE
Sunday, May 18, 2008
CITY OF ORIGIN: AUSTIN, TX
CITY OF DESTINATION: HOUSTON, TX
MILES TRAVELED: 162
VENUE: BRAZOS BOOKSTORE
EVENT COSPONSOR
Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
After sending an e-mail to my brother and sister about finding Joanne, I load up Mule and we head east to Houston. Rolling down the highway, I decide it’s time for a little self-punishment, so I turn on the radio and am treated to a lecture from Focus on the Family about the danger to America that will result from the California Supreme Court’s decision overturning the law against same-sex marriage. If allowed to stand, it’s a disaster, I’m told, of cataclysmic proportions. I must say, though, that the legal expert who the host brings in to speak to the question does so in relatively sane tones, parsing and analyzing the decision relatively fairly. I mean, he clearly disagreed with it and feels that the decision is somehow a threat to right-thinking Christians, but I was impressed with the reasonable tone he brought to his analysis.
Then a news break informs me that our fearless leader decided to lecture the Arab world before heading home. He told them, the announcer says, in no uncertain terms, that they must release all political prisoners and allow for free, democratic elections. I wonder, as I’m hearing this galling pronouncement, if anyone bothered to ask him to do the same thing? What are the people in Guantánamo who have had no charges filed against them, if not political prisoners? What was the 2000 election in Florida, if not an insult to the idea of “free, democratic elections”? What about the free election that put Hamas in power in Gaza that the U.S. refuses to acknowledge? What an incredible—and embarrassing—fool the man is!
After an unsuccessful search in three stores for an apple or a banana, I’m back to the radio. Now a different guy is telling me that the California decision is a triumph for the “homosexual lobby” and it may just force “believing Christians” to ask themselves this question: “Do you support God or do you support your country?”
It’s a powerful force, this homosexual lobby, he says, and though he doesn’t want to get into spreading rumors, we all know about Arnold Schwarzenegger and his homosexual friends …
He actually said that. Then this guy continues, saying to his listeners that we might just find ourselves having to make a choice. They are going to put us in a situation where “obeying the law could put us in jeopardy with God.”
This guy is a beaut. Later, when asked by a caller what “we” can do, he says (after demurring, saying he’s not telling others what to do, but if it was up to him …), “All incumbents should be booted out.” (Actually, if they’re all in Texas, I kind of hope they take his advice.) He goes on to say that “Clinton, Obama and McCain are the embodiment of evil!”
Ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not.
I get to Houston and find the hotel, change and head out to an afternoon book gig, this one again cosponsored by TCADP at an independent outfit called the Brazos Bookstore. (Though I have done and will in the future do events at chains like Barnes & Noble, the folks at Akashic Books are very interested in supporting independent bookstores.) Brazos was here, the new proprietor tells me, for over twenty years until the owner decided to sell out two years ago. Unwilling to lose it, twenty-eight people in the neighborhood came together and put up the money to buy the store and keep it going.
Again, a lively discussion about good issues with thoughtful people. Then Dave, one of the founders of TCADP, his wife, and three people who do a lot of volunteer work with the group take me out to dinner.
And I get to turn in early before heading out to New Orleans tomorrow.
DAY TEN
Monday, May 19, 2008
CITY OF ORIGIN: HOUSTON, TX
CITY OF DESTINATION: NEW ORLEANS, LA
MILES TRAVELED: 348
TRAVEL DAY
Another day, another city, another state—and another … hiccup … but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Up and out of the hotel early for an interview for a local PBS station here. Not knowing Houston very well, I leave early because I want to allow plenty of time to get there. Every time I’ve been through here the traffic has been horrible. And it isn’t wonderful this morning, but I manage to get to the University of Houston, where they shoot, in plenty of time.
Ernie Manouse, the interviewer, is very bright, quite personable, and he has done his homework, so the conversation—and it is just that—is easy and fun. For some reason I thought it was going to be a radio interview, so I didn’t shave, but I guess if it’s noticeable at all it gives me that cool Hollywood look that so many affect today.
Afterward, back on good old 10E toward New Orleans, I turn on the radio for another exercise in frustration. And I get it. I pick up a local New Orleans talk show host who’s interviewing people about the energy crunch and making me grind my teeth in the process. He has on a series of “experts” who think the solution to our dependency on foreign oil is to drill in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to build more nuclear power plants. Drilling in ANWR will spoil one of the last and most critically irreplaceable wilderness areas and wildlife preserves in North America. It will also take years to realize any serious oil production from the area, and if we do, it is only estimated to hold enough oil to provide what is essentially a drop in the bucket in terms of U.S. consumption. As far as nuclear power is concerned, it has always seemed to me a lunatic notion to rely for energy on a process that creates waste that is lethal to human life for 250,000 years, with no safe way to dispose of it.
None of these geniuses mention conservation, which is said to have the ability to cut our energy consumption by a significant degree in and of itself, nor did they talk about solar, wind, geothermal or any of the other alternative methods available. Though it’s clear that none of these are at this point far enough advanced to do the job themselves, together they can make a huge dent in our consumption of fossil fuel and wean us, to a large degree, from our oil dependency.
It’s startling to hear these people casually suggest that the problem is with “the lawyers” in Washington and with all these bothersome restrictions laid on by the Environmental Protection Agency. All we have to do, to hear them say it, is blow off the clean air standards we’ve fought so hard to get implemented and let the oil companies drown us in their garbage while they continue to reap huge profits.
Sick of listening to this bilge, I turn to another station and hear a guy who’s sitting in for Rush Limbaugh (who’s probably at home sticking pins into Obama dolls) rage on about the “global warming hoax.” It’s a lie, it’s a trick, they’re trying to take away our right to our way of life!
Astonishing. I truly worry about the people who listen to this crap all the time.
Searching for something to soothe my fevered brow, I find an NPR station in which a woman is having a conversation, both verbally and musically, with Oscar Peterson. They talk for a while and then one or the other plays something on the piano, and then they talk again
and then play again. It is really a treat.
And when that’s over, the BBC comes on. Spending a few minutes listening to real newspeople reporting real news is enough to make one want to run the poseurs, pundits, panderers, proselytizers, pompous pronouncers, and product pimps out of their plush positions.
The BBC reports on a company that has developed—or perhaps redeveloped—a technology that produces electricity through a wind-up mechanism that they’ve made work for a radio. The idea is that in much of the underdeveloped world there is insufficient electricity—or no electricity at all—to operate radios and other such devices. A small, inexpensive thing like this can make a huge difference in the lives of people who are otherwise cut off from communicating with the rest of the world. They’re also making it work with a lamp. And he mentions the fact that this process will eliminate the need for batteries, which are not only expensive for people in the underdeveloped world, but the disposal of which becomes a huge toxic waste problem. And these folks are doing all this through a not-for-profit organization!
It is so easy to do good in the world … Sometimes the blindness of people intent only on getting rich makes you want to weep.
Crossing into southeastern Louisiana, I stop in Lake Charles, find a health food store and then drive a ways off the highway to eat lunch in a quiet place. The next leg of the trip, starting about fifty miles into Louisiana and stretching all the way to Baton Rouge, just knocks me out. The Atchafalaya Basin is the largest swamp in the U.S., and the engineering feat necessary to build the “bridge,” or elevated highway, that stretches across it, simply amazes me. The “bridge” (I guess it has to be considered that) runs for miles, probably twenty or more to cross the Atchafalaya, and is basically a highway set up on huge pillars that allows traffic to pass over this unbelievable expanse of bayous, cypress swamps, thick, apparently impenetrable forests, rivers, deltas, swamp grass, lakes and wetlands that stretches northward about 150 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s wild and mysterious and beautiful and largely uninhabited, and when I think about the work that had to go into building this road standing above it, it bends my mind.
People had to dig down into the swampy water and gouge out bases for the pillars, they had to set the pillars and lay the beams and the cement thirty feet or so above it all, and they had to do it when they were literally up to their asses in alligators and water moccasins and every kind of swimming, creeping and flying creature imaginable. For miles!
Despite the fact that it disturbed nature, and I think I’m fairly sensitive to that, I just find the creation of this structure to be a colossal, actually heroic feat. I’d love to read about the construction of the road.
I must have been over it before, but I first became truly aware of the miracle of it only six or seven years ago when my son Mike made this drive with me. I’d been asked by Greenpeace to take part in a tour they were arranging of what is known as Cancer Alley, a swatch of land between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, situated between the Mississippi River on the west and Interstate 10 on the east. Laced with small communities of mostly black and poor white people, it is dotted with oil and chemical refineries and attendant industries that spill crap into the ground, the water, and the air. It became known as Cancer Alley because of the outrageous amount of disease that cropped up among the people who lived in the midst of this assault. (If curious, take a look at www.mikefarrell.org/publications/cancer.html.)
The highway blows me away—and the mysterious swamp intrigues me. So Mule and I pull off and explore it a bit, though one can’t get too far into it from where we start. But instead of staying on 10E, I decide to pick my way down and see if I can find some of the poor communities we visited on that Greenpeace venture.
After prowling through a number of back roads and having no success in finding the places I was looking for, we head east to try to find the interstate again. Tooling along through some very pretty country, Mule and I eventually find ourselves behind a pickup truck pulling a trailer with a motorcycle strapped to it. As I’m in no hurry and enjoying looking over the motorcycle, we amble along easily and follow him around some sweeping curves, through some trees and up a rise, then slow at the top as he has to stop just ahead and below us for a red light. It appears that we’ve come to a significant highway, so the adventure is behind us. Or so I think.
“Uh oh,” grunts Mule.
“What?”
“Look.”
“Where?”
“Down.”
I do. The rise we’ve stopped on is whatever you call that hump of land they sometimes build up for a train track. And we’re at the top of it, so we’re sitting astride a train track.
“Whoa.”
“Yup.”
The truck with the motorcycle is still ahead of us, waiting for the light to change. I look in the rearview mirror and there’s a pickup truck right behind us, as well.
“Good thing there’s not a train coming.”
“You sure?”
I look both ways. “Don’t see anything.”
“Look again.”
I do. “I don’t … Oh shit.”
“I’d say so.”
It’s hard to believe. There’s a beam that looks a lot like a headlight on a train just coming around a curve a ways up the track.
“Holy shit!”
“Yup.”
What the fuck? I can’t go forward, so I put Mule in reverse and begin to back up, but the guy behind me doesn’t seem to get it. I back up a bit and he moves a bit, but we’re still on the goddamned tracks. Move, damnit! He moves a bit more, so I move a bit more, but the frigging train is actually coming down the track, right at us! Finally, he moves a bit more and we move a bit more, so we’re finally off one set of tracks, but we’re still straddling another set of tracks and I’m not sure which set of tracks the damn train is on. And now I hear him blaring his horn!
Mule grunts, “I don’t like this.”
I wave at the guy behind me, who moves a bit more and I back up as much as I can and just manage to get the front wheels over the second set of tracks without ramming into the asshole, when down comes the arm of the train guard that blocks the road across the tracks ahead of us—and in a split second I realize that there must be another one coming down right on top of us. I hit the gas again just as WHAM! the thing smacks Mule on top of the head and bounces off and down, just missing the hood as we push the guy behind us farther back! And the frigging train roars by as we both sit there shaking.
“What the fuck!”
Mule doesn’t have much more to say. Nor do I. I don’t even much like to think about what might have happened. As I explain to Mule later, “I could have gotten out, stepped away and watched, you know.”
“Asshole,” he mutters.
On the unusually quiet drive down to New Orleans I stop and buy something to clean and soothe the bump on his head.
DAY ELEVEN
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
CITY: NEW ORLEANS, LA
VENUE: OCTAVIA BOOKS
SPECIAL GUEST
Sister Helen Prejean
A bizarre day. More subjects than I can deal with in one day without falling into utter incoherence—as if I haven’t already—are on tap. First thing in the morning I’m live on the air with KPFK radio in Los Angeles, discussing the Israeli/Palestinian issue on Margaret Prescod’s Sojourner Truth show. One of the other guests is a Palestinian man who was, with his family, driven from his home by the Israelis in 1948. Now living in London, he’s understandably angry about the lack of resolution of the Palestinian claims for the right of return or compensation. The other guest is an American Jewish woman who represents an organization, the name of which I can’t remember, that opposes the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its military actions against Gaza. I’m asked about my reasons for supporting President Jimmy Carter’s recent visit to the region, and also about my own trips there and, in particular, about the events I was involved in related to an attempt by the then
-leader of the U.S. branch of Save the Children to suppress a report critical of Israel Defense Forces’ treatment of Palestinian kids and, when that didn’t succeed, to distance Save the Children U.S. from being associated with the report.
Needless to say, the Israeli/Palestinian issue is much too large, too complex and too volatile to be thoroughly discussed in an hour-long radio show, but it’s important that some of these questions be addressed.
That behind me, Mule (who shows no sign of damage—or resentment— from being hit on the head yesterday) and I drive out to the University of New Orleans, in the north-central part of the city, for a live NPR interview with a Baltimore affiliate, which focuses on my appearance at the Enoch Pratt Free Library there next Sunday. It is a delightful hour with a very bright host and a lot of good callers.
Then, getting directions and some advice from the woman at WWNO (the local NPR affiliate) who hooked me up with Baltimore and monitored the call, we go to see some of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina near the university. This kind young woman, who works here every day, says she couldn’t drive to work through this area for weeks after the storm without breaking into tears. Seeing it even now, so long after the events, one can understand the reaction. Vacant lots appear where houses once stood, many of the structures that remain are badly damaged and boarded up, some visibly moved from their foundations, while others have been cleaned up enough that people are able to live in them. It’s very sobering. Work crews are here, still trying to repair the damage, steering traffic around the project at hand, and it’s obvious that much remains to be done. This is—or at least was—a nice, middle-class neighborhood.