I've collected some of Hallie's travel pieces together on this page. Some are from long journeys, and some are just observations on the kind of travel we all do every day.

*****

Adventures on the 10

I am waiting for the #10 again, this time to go downtown. The bus stop is directly across from my house. The bus arrives. I get on. I sit in the back. I'm tired. Tired of myself. Too many migraines.

A pretty girl with long, brown hair gets on, and a voice that speaks from a group of high school boys says, "I don't even mind riding the bus anymore." A few seconds earlier, she was running to catch the bus and one of the boys was looking out for her. He said indignantly to the driver,

"Driver, somebody is running for the bus."

Somebody.

I could throw up, cry and sleep all at the same time. The migraines are kicking my ass.

We drive by The Vespa shop on NE Broadway. When we come to The Metro Foot Clinic at NE 28th, a man in his forties, in a wheelchair, bearded, complaining, gets on the bus. Everyone on the bus starts complaining and giving lessons in morality. A lady to my left, loudly says the following,

"You know what you do? You be assertive. You ask them to move their bag.. It's just people being rude. That's all."

We cross a bridge to downtown. Beautiful. Beautiful city. Beautiful view of the water. B. gets on the bus. The seventy-year old, who comes into the record store and is fascinated with the Hells Angels. He is here, and he boards to my left. I am incognito in dark sunglasses with my hair up. My t-shirt says "But what I really want to do is direct". He does not recognize me. He reminds me of a white Ray Charles. He wishes.

I overhear that Portland's public transportation system is in the top five in the country. On the back of each of our buses, is a bumper sticker. It reads: "249 cars are at home because I am on the road."

The number 249 always drives me a little crazy. Why not round it off to 250?

Downtown, we pass by hoards of social service industry types milling around, wearing their plastic badges that tie around the neck.

On the bus, I overhear B. talking about ..The Hells Angels, this time they are in Palm Springs...he is oddly obsessed with them.

Tune in next time to see where we take the #10, if we run into B. and which location he imagines the Hells Angels to be in.

*****

Thursday, July 07, 2005

waiting for the 10

Yesterday, July 6, 2005 6pm: Citylog

I am standing on Fifth street in downtown Portland. At the corner of NE Washington. I am waiting for the notoriously slow #10 bus, which comes technically on the half hour, but realistically whenever it wants. A large business man, built like a football player waits in front of me. Five other buses stop here. I lean against a tree. My sunglasses are on so I can observe and not be seen observing. To my right, walking across Fifth, is a group of fashionistas; a photographer, his camera and two models. He crosses with the blond, and leaves the brunette on my side of the street.

He takes a picture of the brunette crossing the street. All of the surrounding downtown jungle life, stops what it is doing to look at this most simple act; A woman crossing the street. Only she does not cross. She prances. She prances like a Tennessee Walker. Her hair and skirt both fly up into the wind. The photographer crouches low by a storm drain to shoot up at her coming towards him. Time stands still for this little moment as everyone looks.

He talks to her like a circus animal. The first time she crosses, he sends her right back. He says..."Good, good! O.K. do it again, only watch the mouth." I expect him to throw up a snack, like a peanut. She returns to my corner in a normal stride, then walks towards him with the prance. He says, "Thatta girl! Good! Good! That's it!" Evidently she watched the mouth and he got his shot.

While she is in mid prance, a cop car pulls up right in front of me. The officers try to mask their amusement slash delight over the models, since there is an arrest in progress immediately to my right, in front of Camera World. There is a world filled only with cameras and it is called Camera World. Three very different looking criminals each get cuffed and placed inside a cop car, all on the block to my right. Models to the front, criminals to the right.

The #10 bus comes, I get on. I go home. The end.

*****

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

fourth of July

Last night was the fourth of July in case any of you missed it. And I was alone because my significant other had to work. He had to take a client from the new mental hospital out for a night of fireworks watching.

Anyway, I was alone and decided to watch something on TV. I saw Donald Trump and his wife. They were watching fireworks. They had a whole group of people on NBC sitting there with Trump watching the display. It was nice enough. I noticed a lack of pointing. No one in the audience was pointing to the sky in that fourth of July way. I watched the PBS version of the same thing. Outside my window, it sounded like a war zone. Car alarms were going off from the booms of firework explosions.

The reality of war hit me with each window-cracking boom...so strong in the east-side of the city…last night…

The war here, the war over there…and the explosions accentuated these thoughts…opening up, then connecting a divide in my mind…

How real it is. How unreal it seems. With each firework boom, I can hear real people dying somewhere in the desert.

Things are in flux and I like that. It excites me. It makes me happy. I sense joy in between the cracks of flux.

I will fall there. I will throw myself in.

*****

Sunday, July 03, 2005

End of trip-back diagnosis

I have no more travel writing energy to post the final leg of my trip, I'm afraid. Just know that on the last day, I lost my ticket at the train station for a few hours and cried with joy when I found it in between the pages of a People magazine, featuring a story about Tom Cruise and his similarly soulless girlfriend Katie Holmes.

The station manager, a Mexican man who's little dog was named Panchito, was very kind, and let me use the telephone while Panchito yapped in the background. I sat next to a woman who had been imprisoned twice the night before and she prayed for me while I searched for my ticket in the San Rafael station. She watched my bags afterwards when I went to go get us a couple sodas to celebrate finding the ticket. She was a slow talker, but a constant talker. I moved from her bench to yet another bench and she still continued her saga. Someone called the cops on her and her boyfriend the night before...a domestic disturbance, they were evidently getting loud.

Then they arrested her because she had a previous warrant. She kept trying to convince me that he would never hit her, that she would be the first to admit if he had hit her. She was slow and calm, working up her anger from below, the way a bull paws the ground, calling it up, getting it ready--so that I had a heads up of sorts.

Then the cops let her go, dropping her off somewhere on the road and then they picked her right back up again. Twice in one night. Finally, she was let off at the train station and she slept there the rest of the night. She had a kind of patience that I admired. She told me her son was a practicing addict...not someone you could currently trust. She said she wanted to marry her boyfriend.

*****

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

fat hamster cages

Driving up towards Watsonville. There are Cypress trees lining valleys of green in the great Salinas Valley. The Monterey Bay comes in briefly here by Moss Landing, nearing the highway, where we have fruit stands, cherries, oranges, and garlic...the bounty of the Salinas Valley...rows and rows of planted crops, lettuce, artichoke, broccoli and cauliflower. Cumulus Nimbus grandly oversees the farmland below, like mighty Zeus on Mount Olympus.

I put my hand to my face, and feel the strange emptiness of it. I feel the essential nobody-ness. Round, puffy clouds, look like cupid's body parts. Like something out of Michelangelo's tool kit, with his pallette of round, cherub-like faces...they pile on top of each other so spectacular yet essentially empty and made of only the thinnest of air.

About to arrive in Oakland. A male voice behind me speaks into a cell phone, "Hey, does your work sell fat hamster cages? Cause my mom took me to Petco and they had fat hamster cages that were like three feet long and three feet wide and they were like fifty bucks."

In my mind, I dwell on and put together the three words, "fat hamster cages", sort of like the Foreigner song, "Dirty White Boy". I hum the new tune for a while and this amuses me.

A different guy recognizes me from the trip down from Portland two weeks ago. He was sweet. I said to him it was his Greyhound Groundhog Day, so he better get ready. Getting off in Oaktown. Door #4 to San Rafael. Going to see my long lost friend A. Even though I am thirty-five (deep shudder), when we hang out, I often feel like we are in high school...in a good way.

*****

Monday, June 27, 2005

Travel Log 3:

The sun is setting and we are heading over Grants Pass. Beautiful. It's that magical, movie-makers light. It makes me think of the word "glory". Here is a diagram of what I see:

-clouds

-light

-mountain

I close my eyes...and there is no there, there...no place to land. No me to build upon.

Grants Pass is majestic.

Can't these bus women control their runts? I used to be a nanny. I'm not some kid-hater. She, the mom, is gabbing while her #2 runt whines. We all suffer while she does this. My liver must be acting up…as I am very irritated by her. Liver and anger go together.

Drove past Mt. Shasta about 45 minutes ago and now it's officially night time. The overweight Mexican mother flaps her lips incessantly, talking to the mullet man, a grown-up version of my bat-son, while her #1 runt cries and whines loudly. So we get to hear not one, but two of her family's not-so mellifluous sounds.

I am perilously close to pelting her in the head with my empty bottle of Starbucks frappe-fucking-chino…which I paid $2.45 for at the last bus station. She is now talking to her Mexican girlfriend, equally loudly. I keep reassuring myself, "eventually these hell hounds have to sleep."

Want the new White Stripes record. One of the few Rock bands that really rock.

Currently listening to "Mountain Stream." A CD that gives me the sounds of trickling water, the occasional bird, etc. This is an attempt to drown out "The Runt" and its mother. Left kidney hurts where I have the cyst.

I now sit alone in an alley waiting to get back on the bus. We are in Redding, CA. It's about 11pm. I just called J. from a pay phone. A man down the alley sings and plays guitar. We are here on an hour break at the greyhound station, surely a cultural low point for the good, old U. S. of A.

It is strangely comforting to me, the American hustle-bustle of these Greyhound stations, the murmur and flash of American voice and face, so quintessentially captured there. And poverty is usually more interesting than wealth. "Low-point" for me does not translate to "less than"...in fact, it is usually quite the opposite. The rich aren't bad people. They can just afford to be removed from the dirtiness of life.

We look out for each other's luggage. The basics are provided for; food, drink, phone, bathroom. I get a friendly lecture on the history of Greyhound and the segregated South from a black man who lives in Mississippi. He says he grew up with Jim Crow. He has two cupcakes. He gives me one. I love cupcakes. He tells me he got clean nineteen years ago and is just finding a relationship with God. He says if I met him twenty years ago, I would have run the other way. We talk about community and how important it is. We talk about materialism and California and how easily these two topics go together.

A junkie-looking lady appears, asks me for 50 cents and then crawls away like a spider. Thirty more minutes here. I'm so sleepy. The Runt's mother is wearing a skimpy, red tank top and her breasts are each bigger than her head, which is quite large as it is. She is obviously lactating. Great. Things are now getting difficult.

Experiencing a four hour layover. It is the "challenging" portion of my trip. Waves of intense, narcoleptic, sleepiness wash over me like mini-seizures a hundred times an hour and I want to fall asleep wherever I might be.

Currently though, it's 3:30am., and I happen to be at the Greyhound station in Sacramento on the floor, which is fake green marble. I'm parked in front of door #8. The last bus driver we had was very nice. He showed me where to go. So, now I just sit. I wait.

When I first arrived, at the Pepsi machine, there was a young black man, good looking, maybe 25 years old, tops, "Trouble with a capitol "T"", he was buying a Pepsi too. While making our purchases, I found out more than I could have wanted to know about this guy. He moved here from Dallas. His girlfriend is now pregnant. She ditched him somewhere in Sacramento.

"Right." I manage to respond wearily. It's four o'clock in the morning. Feels like everyone is moving in slow motion.

"Nice to meet you too." I say, taking my soda and moving away. I've got to go sit on my bags like a hen on her golden eggs, in front of door #8 for another two and a half hours. Anything but listen to your confessions, I think to myself.

Strangers confess to other strangers what they cannot tell their friends, like with cabbies or bartenders, or the hapless folks you sit next to on planes or buses. But I'm in no mood to listen. Not tonight.

*****

Friday, June 17, 2005

travel log 2

PART TWO

We pull into the Salem station and I can only get country music on my headphones. I turn the dial, and the same country song plays on every station.

Surely that’s a sign of evil.

I put on a Dirty Three cd.

We drive past a field of yellow dandelions on our way out of town. I think of J's clients at the state hospital here. One of them named Ron now works for a janitorial program that employs the “mentally disabled”. If there are vomit or blood spills in the workplace, Ron is the man to call and come clean them up. I wonder how much they pay him.

It seems to me that America the democracy, has a mighty caste system, often held upright by the mentally ill.

The farther we get out of town into unchartered highway territory, dirty three playing a maniacal beauty in the distance, the more I feel the freedom of temporary unattachment.

Non-attachment, like giant scissor strokes snipping away my personal identity, my connections, the ties back home that bind me, all that reinforces the personality called “Hallie”...

Now on the road, I feel her slip away.

The anonymous exit signs, the generic mini malls, the sprawling views of hills and dales, greens, browns, blues and white.

All the panic of leaving is gone and I have settled in. My bat son is sleeping soundly.

It’s beginning to rain, and the clouds are puffy and dark. In this aliveness everywhere, before my mind has a chance to arise, I am simply at peace.

The road sign reads: “Entering Linn County - Grass Seed Capitol of the World” Just left Eugene. Saw another great sign as we headed out of town. It read: “Fur Fiber Needed”.

PAIN:

Listening to Schumann on the headphones now, on an all classical Portland radio station that broadcasts here. “Supremely romantic” says the announcer. Indeed. “These are love poems put to music.” A tenor begins to sing. The clouds are varying degrees of silver.

My shoulder pain goes up through the left side of my neck, up into my head and conversely, down into my scapula. The pain is constant and nauseating. It tests my strength and patience. I take muscle relaxers and punish myself for doing so.

Oregon is so green and beautiful..tall trees so thick and plenty…

Our state motto: If you can live through it here, you can have it...go ahead, take it... it’s yours…..eventually you will grow to love your captors. It is the Stockholm Syndrome state. This is especially true in winter.

“The silence was everywhere, just underneath the sounds.” Writes Gangaji in Just Like You.

I’ve always known that about silence, that it lies waiting, that it cannot go anywhere, that it has to remain dormant underneath noise, like blackboard under chalk. I close my eyes and find it when migraines hit in public, in crowded, busy places.

There is a Mexican baby on board who has cried for the last five hours and I do not exaggerate. Sometimes I have very negative feelings toward parents who are overly eager to breed and inflict others with this desire. I find it selfish and gross. Five hours. My hair is falling out. I don’t know why.

I’m enjoying myself despite the crying baby. I’m enjoying being away from home, away from our little Calcutta-on-Alberta, with its urine and fecal odors.

Ate some crunchy Cheetos in Eugene, drank them down with a Dr. Pepper. Ate a cheeseburger and fries in Medford. Bought a newspaper. Down to six bucks. Still really enjoying myself...despite the physical pain.

*****

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