Letter

I haven’t been alone on my trip west. My copilot’s been dead over forty years and he’s scary as fuck. I’m writing this in a motel room in Weatherford, Oklahoma and have driven well over three thousand miles over the past five days. Robert Moses has been along through the majority of those miles.

I’m roughly halfway through Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It’s a relentless and thorough accounting of a public official who used every trick in the book and invented many of his own to impose his will on those he came into contact with. He’s known best for building bridges and roadways and parks, but his greatest skill seemed to be leaving a trail of destruction wherever he went.

I listen to his exploits from the hills of Iowa, through the nondescript taiga of Nebraska, and into Colorado as night falls. More accounts of scorched earth follow the next morning as, outside the car window, nature is showing off by throwing one dramatic mountain in my way after another. I sit through a traffic jam that lasts a couple hours, the road glutted with skiers, as Moses is forcing the hand of mayors, governors, and the odd president to get what he wants.

He keeps riding shotgun all the way till I hit the lights of LA and tags along as I ride back east through the nonspaces of eastern California and Arizona, on to New Mexico.

I take a break from the monster every five or six hours and listen to music or silence. But it feels like he’s still in the passenger seat, waiting patiently——as he never would, were he alive——till I turn his story back on.

Even now as I sit in this motel room, I know he’s waiting. Because he knows I want to know how his story ends. Whether the author ever finds out what really drove the man, aside from some animal zeal for monopolizing power and control. Were all those bridges, roads, and parks worth the damage and pain he inflicted to realize them?

I wonder if Moses will stay in the Hertz lot when I drop off the car at Midway or get on the Orange Line and follow me home? I know he hated the subway, so maybe there’s light at the end of this tunnel.

I’m sitting in a t-shirt by a pool behind a house in LA. I like visiting other people’s houses, especially when those people are related to me. I’ve seen three of one brother’s houses and this is the first one of the other’s. House-owning has been a bone of contention between myself and others. I just don’t get why anyone would do it. Of course I’ve been very lucky with landlords, but I’m very happy to rent and have never considered the other thing. Seems like a nightmare of endless chores and responsibilities. I lived with a woman once who was very proud to own her home. For a time there was talk of us buying a house together. But I could never see the point. It was one of the reasons we broke up.

If I play my cards right, I will never even own a car again. The knowledge that, once I return from my Western sojourn, I can drop the vehicle I’ll have put over four thousand miles on and never think of it again, is immensely satisfying. The whole concept of ownership feels more and more suspect as the years pass.

I learned about Swedish Death Cleaning before leaving on my trip. It’s a thing I’ve been talking about for awhile but have never had a good name for——the idea of leaving as little mess as possible for friends and loved ones when you pass. A goal has crystallized lately of having nothing when I’m ready to go. To leave an empty room. The Swedes have branded and marketed my wish.

This is the polar opposite of what our society is geared for. Ownership is the American Dream. It’s a dream that reminds me I’m a foreigner. I wish it was as simple as becoming an ascetic. A monk in a bare cell. The trouble is I keep making things. Generating more and more crap that will have to be disposed of one way or another, sooner or later.

It’s an impossible situation. Perhaps that’s the human condition: wanting one thing but doing the opposite.

I don’t begrudge anyone wanting to own things. If I did, I’d be out of a job. It’s mostly an internal thing. I can’t shake the image of an apartment full of paintings, books, records, and worn furnishings that no one will want. Workmen hauling it all away to the landfill.

A friend and I visited an apartment like that a couple weeks ago. The dead woman’s nephew invited us to pick through her studio and take whatever we wanted. She’d made art for probably fifty years and, judging by the amount of unused supplies, planned to work for fifty more. This stuff cost her many thousand dollars but to the nephew it was just garbage to be rid of so he could put her place on the market.

At least, when my time comes, whichever relative draws the short straw won’t have to sell my house. They’ll thank me for being a lifelong renter.

I’m sitting in the basement of a suburban home. Outside there’s a snowstorm but I can’t see it through the frosted windows. I’m here a couple days, then I’m driving west. The reason is that today or tomorrow construction workers will rip a hole through the wall above my kitchen sink to get at the nerve center of the house’s plumbing. If all goes well, I’ll be back home ten days from today.

The contractors hadn’t decided whether they’d go in through the bathroom or the kitchen, so I took down everything off the intended walls on both sides. Dish rack, mirror, shelf of coffee cups, paintings, drawings, and many many pushpins and nails. It’s strange to remove these things that together help make up my daily environment. Disconcerting. I wait until the very last day so I won’t have to live with those stripped walls.

I pack all I think I’ll need into a rolling suitcase and a couple courier bags, give the contractor my house key, ask her half-jokingly to leave the place somewhat the way they found it, and leave. I kill some time at the coffeeshop, hoping to get some work done but feel too unsettled to do much but answer a couple emails.

I take the bus to a favorite old breakfast spot by the train station but find it closed. The plague has changed the working hours of everything. Get a sandwich instead, then catch the Metra. It’s five hours before my friend will be home to let me in the house where I’ll be crashing.

A cold rain is falling when I get off the train. A precursor of the storm which will close everthing the next day. I thought there was a coffeeshop nearby, but either it has closed or I’ve misremembered. I catch a bus northbound till I spot a Starbucks. Never been a fan but itinerants can’t be fussy. This one is clearly configured for carryout service, though there are a few uncomfortable spots to sit. I order a tea and spread out all my crap for a couple hours.

Since I can’t seem to concentrate enough to work, I decide to search for something to listen to on my upcoming trip. I settle on Caro’s The Power Broker. Sixty-six hours of audio. That will do. The download itself takes over half an hour.

I check the directions to my friend’s house and start walking. The sidewalks are lousy and often flooded, so I walk in the roadway half the time. I keep switching arms but there’s no comfortable way to roll the suitcase.

My friend’s town was laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of city parks in America. He conceived of this town as some kind of enchanted village. For me, the enchantment consists of getting lost every time I visit. It’s one of the few places in the vicinity where Chicago’s beautiful grid completely breaks down. It’s no accident, since Olmstead is from Boston, where streets all started as meandering cowpaths.

I curse Olmstead the entire hour and a half it takes me to find the house. But the next day the ordeal is mostly forgotten. Now I’m grateful to have shelter and try not to think of the workers who are currently wrecking my home.

I miss it even though I’ve only been gone twenty-four hours.