Book signing in Kansas City

'Tis the season for icy roads. It looks like our first big winter blast will be icing I-70 across Kansas starting tomorrow. Luckily, the worst of it should be over by Wednesday when Ted drives east from Manhattan and I drive south from St. Joseph and we meet in the middle in Kansas City, Kansas for a book signing.

We're having a signing of both Driving Across Kansas: A Guide to I-70 and Driving Across Missouri: A Guide to I-70 at the Books-a-Million (BAM) in the Legends shopping center from 1p.m.-4p.m. Seems like a great spot, just off the Interstate on the border of both states.

A Love of Lamps

Wabash Avenue

When I was in Chicago last spring, little did I know that I would start a love affair. It was a love affair of street lamps.  Each street from State, Erie, Wabash, and Michigan Avenue had their own style of illumination. 

Michigan Avenue

So romantic, the candlelight of the city; tapers that stand tall and formal, whose single flames line the walkways, and ornate candelabras that adorn the table of the city where lovers can feast their eyes upon one another under the moonlight. Tall, dark (the post, that is), and handsome for me comes in the lamp posts of downtown Chicago.

Erie Street

                                

Along Erie street the gold accents gave such a royal flair to the coal black coat underneath. Or perhaps it’s just the naturalist in me that loves the golden leaves swirling around the post from the Windy City’s breath. 

The lamp posts along Wabash have the same Y pattern, but without the gold bling. Their simple strength lines the streets like tailored waiters, poised steadily with platters balanced above their shoulders.

 On Michigan Avenue, round globes circled the lamp like pearls.

Michigan Avenue

Chicago just recently spent $25 million to renovate the lamp posts, in the mile stretch between Wacker Drive and Congress Parkway, back to their 1926 style. Architects Anderson, Graham, Probst, and White designed the original lamp posts whose Y frame represented the confluence of the north and south branches of the Chicago River.

Cool Crest Miniature Golf in St. Joseph, MO

Along Wabash in front of Chicago Public Library

In Chicago, my attraction to the lamp posts was like, dare I say it?—a moth to a flame. But it was just the beginning of my infatuation. Smitten by street lamps, I started snapping shots of bulbs on poles as I drove across the country on a family trip, in strangers’ front lawns, and even at the miniature golf establishment where my daughter had her 2^nd grade field trip. While other good parents were snapping pictures of their child making memories with their classmates, I had my lens pointed at the interesting gothic lamp post that illuminated the ticket counter near the parking lot. It was a combination of the bulbs of Michigan Avenue and the Gothic background of the Chicago Public Library from Wabash.

Blend of Michigan/Wabash at Cool Crest

Nakuru, Kenya

As my insanity was mounting, my co-author fanned the flames of interest by sending me pictures of lamp posts from around the world. Ted’s travels illuminated my vision with even more interesting street light sculpture. In Kenya he found one of the most artistic street lights I’d ever seen. 

They were flamingo-shaped street light fixtures in Nakuru. Nakuru is famous for the millions of flamingos that congregate on the lake in Nakuru National Park. 

Flamingo in Nakuru

Back in Louisiana and Indiana we found more of the “Y” design street lamps.

Shreveport, LA

Evansville, IN

A book on decorative street lamps would be very interesting to me—and no shortage of models out there. Sitting back here at home, typing away on my keyboard, I look out the window and see my street’s own antique lamps lined up along the lane.  Street lamps make me think in black and white, of big cities and small down towns, of old postcards, of fedora hats and fishnet stockings, of Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and of short-stature simplicity and strength. 

Downtown Atlanta, IL

Lamp post on the lane

 But looking out my window I remember now that they also remind me of home—the nights I’ve watched a soft snowfall glow orange in the simple lamp light or watched colorful autumn leaves swirl around its base. It is the candle outside my window—the beacon that inspires dreams of traveling and that brings comfort when I come back home.

Rolling Down the HIV Highway

POSTED BY TED:

I took one last glance over my shoulder at Mount Kilimanjaro. Flat topped, white-capped, it seemed to hang ghost-like above the hazy horizon. We turned onto hwy A 109 and headed west toward Nairobi.  This highway is called by various names. Sometimes it’s called The Mombasa Road, or the Trans-African Highway, or the Great North Road, but most often it is called the HIV Highway.  It is the thin, fragile and clogged artery that feeds and fuels the heart of Africa.  The road brings goods, including a stream of diesel and gasoline from the port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to the interior of Kenya, and on to Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. Its not only freight and fuel that move along the highway, but the road “fuels” the HIV epidemic across all of central Africa.  They tell me that it is possible to move cargo (and disease) all the way across the African continent, even into West Africa as far as Lagos, Nigeria, on this highway.

This is one of the more dangerous and congested highways in Africa. It is not an interstate per se (it is actually inter-nation) but it carries the traffic of our interstates and yet it is only two-lanes. Can you imagine I-70 between Kansas City and St. Louis or I-55 between St. Louis and Chicago with all of that truck traffic, if there was only one lane in each direction? Well if you can picture that scenario then you can picture this highway.

Lines of trucks, most holding containers recently taken off ocean-going ships, spew black smoke as they huff and puff their way up the gentle hills.  They carry the goods that will stock store shelves in Kampala, be bartered for in open-air markets of Kigali, or furnish modern office buildings in Nairobi.

Although we had left Amboseli National Park behind, a “giraffe crossing” sign and several “gazelle crossing” signs warned drivers to be on the lookout, just as we have “deer crossing” signs in America. Sure enough, there was a family of giraffes, surprisingly close to the bumper-to-bumper truck traffic. This was no road through Safari Land. Four giraffes walked beside the highway with their graceful gait. (Giraffes appear graceful because, like camels, they walk with two legs on each side moving in unison).  Giraffes are often depicted in carvings and artwork as standing straight up, but as they stride along they appear to be leaning into a strong head wind or maybe they are stretching their necks for the finish line – so they can win by a nose.

Besides gazelle and giraffe crossing signs, many other surprising signs lined the highway. In Africa you never know what signs you will see along the way.  For example, in the grazing and farming areas, dozens of signs announced, “This Land is NOT for sale.”  We all know about For Sale signs, but I had never seen “Not For Sale” signs on land or buildings.  I asked my driver Ken why landowners post “Not for Sale” signs?  Can’t that be assumed unless we see a For Sale sign? Apparently not in Kenya!  There is a widespread problem of deceitful individuals posing as real estate agents selling other people’s land or buildings that are not for sale. The owner, of course, doesn’t know that some unfortunate person just paid for the owner’s property, property the buyer can’t ever own. Land being sold out from under the true landowner has caused all sorts of problems (sometimes with violent consequences) for both the owner and the buyer, while the unscrupulous salesman disappears down the highway.

Other surprising signs along the way included the Serena Williams School (apparently she visited the area and donated a lot of money for the school so they named it after her) and the Michele Obama Grocery Store (President Obama is hugely popular in Kenya because his father was of Kenyan heritage. His face shows up on buses, taxis, and t-shirts). In Kenya, as throughout most of Africa, an exclamation point in a red and white triangle indicated an emphatic, if not specific, warning to be alert. Hand painted signs often lead to confusion. Is it NU DESIGNS? Or NUDE SIGNS? Much like the Mail Pouch or See Rock City barns in North America, in Kenya most of the buildings were covered in advertisements – Orange for the Orange Cell Phone company; Green for its competitor, bright Red buildings covered by Coca-Cola logos.  I wondered if the owners got paid for allowing this, or maybe like some of the early Mail Pouch Barn owners, they just wanted a coat of paint on the barn.

Along the road, little children with their mothers in tow walk hand in hand to school, sometimes a couple of miles away.  The brightly-colored clothes of the mother contrast with the navy blue or burgundy school uniforms of the children. Clusters of older students, also dressed in smart formal uniforms, lollygag to school. Many of the older youths also held hands as they walked. The children would invariably yell and wave when they saw this white person pass by in the car. Other women, many of them quite elderly, walked bent over with large sacks of produce on their backs. They were carrying their goods to market. Some walk as many as 10 or 12 miles on market day with these loads on their backs.  I asked Ken why Kenyans consistently did so well in marathons and Olympic distance running events. He said he thought it was because at a young age they walk – and often run – to school. He said he ran up to 10 miles to school each day when he was a boy.

The remains of long-dead and destroyed trucks litter the roadside like the rusting exoskeletons of large insects.  Every few miles a large semi would be broken down on the highway. Lacking flares to give warning, truck drivers place twigs and branches in the road to indicate moving off to the side to avoid a broken down vehicle. Putting branches in the road is a common rule of the road throughout Africa, but I was surprised to see it in the relatively well-developed country of Kenya, particularly on this heavily traveled highway. Many of these broken down trucks had been totally overloaded. Freight would be stacked amazingly high, impressive packing jobs! A pick-up passed with a bed in its bed.  

As we approached Nairobi, cement plants lined the highway. Rhino Cement, Co., Mombasa Cement Co, and many others, producing the cement demanded by the growing population and associated development. Suburban sprawl, business parks, buildings with familiar names like Caterpillar, Coca Cola and FedEx, and even the Belle View Outdoor Drive-In Movie Theatre made this stretch seem much like the approach to any major city.

In Nairobi, this constricted artery became a completely clogged artery.  There is no bypass around Nairobi. This road, carrying all of the freight from the continent’s coast into Africa’s interior, passes right through downtown. Traffic lights and round a-bouts provide resistance, pushing back against forward movement of traffic.  Can you imagine I-70 feeding all of its traffic into a city street in St. Louis? That is the situation in Nairobi which is why Nairobi is notorious for having some of the worst traffic problems in the world.

In the city, Hadada Ibis and enormous five-foot-tall Marabou Storks, with wingspans exceeding 10 feet, replace the pigeons and sparrows that we see in urban environments. Hadadas and Marabous perch on street lights, road signs, and the tops of skyscrapers. Even in cities, Africa wildlife is spectacular.

After inching your way through Nairobi, you soon reach the rim of the Rift Valley. The Rift Valley is one of those places where the earth’s crust is being ripped apart. The Great Rift Valley was originally described as the spectacular geographic trench which stretched almost 4,000 miles from Syria in the Mid-East to Mozambique in southeast Africa. Today, the term Rift Valley usually refers to the valley of the East African Rift which extends from the Red Sea near Ethiopia down to Mozambique. It was into this tear in the earth’s crust that the highway descends. At the rim of the escarpment, red wooden shops, with wood curious and white sheep skins on display, hang over the edge offering a free scenic view to entice tourists to pull over and take a look. Within seconds of aiming your camera down to the expansive valley below, the sales people accost you with their wares in tow. Through the blue-brown haze you can see two large satellite dishes that receive and send global communications, odd in that Maasi youth herd goats around their base as they have done for eons.  The view of the Rift Valley is spectacular and from a distance the scene is placid, if not pastoral. But a closer look reveals blemishes.  Clusters of white tents can be seen.  In January 2008, post-election violence displaced thousands of Kenyans.  Several “Internally Displaced People” camps sprung up in this area on what are not lush pastures but desolate dusty plains. Three thousand people still live there in tents or makeshift homes with no shade, running water, electricity, or protection from the elements.

The road winds its way perilously down the steep escarpment. Overloaded and poorly maintained semis, with long lines of vehicles lined up behind them , struggled to make it up the cliff face.  In fact they would be traveling so slow that boys who had roasted corn over open fires could trot alongside the trucks and sell the corn to the driver while the truck struggled uphill. Impatient drivers would attempt to pass the trucks, chugging their way up the hill and willing to roll the dice on whether an approaching car is flying downhill around the next curve.  Passing on curves is a contact sport on the escarpment. Debris from head-on collisions is a reminder that this form of Automobile Russian Roulette sometimes ends tragically. (See for example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmEHr60KDYQ)

If you are fortunate enough to survive the trip down the escarpment, you are released into the Rift Valley town of Maai Mahiu. Towns like Maai Mahiu give the highway its name as the AIDS Highway or HIV Highway. The truckers and other transient men, often from other African countries, stream through town along the road. It is too dry to do farming and poverty leaves many children and women hungry and homeless. With no other way of surviving, many of the girls and women turn to prostitution.  In fact the only two sustainable and significant industries in Maai Mahiu are trucking and prostitution. The highway artery brings a steady stream of new customers every night.  The most striking thing about the town is the astounding numbers of bars and hotels for a town this size lining the highway. With thousands of truckers passing through and who knows how many women serving them, HIV/AIDS is rampant. One study estimated that possibly as many as one-third of all truck drivers along this road are HIV positive. Although Maai Mahiu may be the nexus of this problem, towns all along this highway have the same problem to varying degrees, hence the highway’s name of shame. Opportunities for vices seem to gravitate toward highways, even in America. The transient and anonymous nature of travel lends itself to indulging in such behaviors and there are generally individuals willing and waiting to profit from it, particularly when they themselves are desperate and lack other alternatives for income. But on this highway, the temptations, like the trip up and down the escarpment, can be particularly deadly.

It is here at Maai Mahiu that I left the HIV Highway. I headed south to the Maasai Mara Game Reserve where the only congestion would be among the thousands of wildebeests migrating to greener pastures, where the honking of horns was replaced by the snorting of zebras, and the only dangers were from the lions crouching in the grass.

Mile 78 Masterpiece in the I-55 Gallery

What's the difference between art and graffiti along the highway? There is a beautiful painting under a concrete overpass at mile 78 (best seen southbound) along Interstate 55 in Illinois that I enjoy every time I drive by. It looks like a spinning propeller or rectangular shards of glass spinning and blending in various shades of dark and light blue. It took time and care to create this professional-looking image hung in the I-55 gallery. It's no haphazardly sprayed peace sign or "So-and-so loves So-and-so" message. It hangs nicely under the bridge, protected from the sun’s bleaching rays and the scrapes of hailstones and tornado debris. I want to know who the artist was, why it was painted here, and why the highway department has allowed it to remain.

1960s Road Trip

In 1967, my grandparents took a road trip from Springfield, Illinois south to New Orleans and then west through San Antonio, Mexico City, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and back through Kansas City and St. Louis.  At 7:15a.m. on 10-7-67 they pulled out of their driveway, carrying with them $1,000.87. They’d return at approximately 4:30p.m. on 10-27-67, coming home with $249.91. Only $2.45 was unaccounted for. During their 20-day trip they spent a total of $230.03 on motels, $123.74 on gas, $192.31 on food, $9.50 on tips, and $220.86 on gifts and miscellaneous items. They recorded 4 movies and 7 slides. They traveled 4,599 miles, and at 12:20 p.m., on 10-26, on a rainy Topeka bridge 109, on the Kansas Turnpike, their odometer turned 40,000 miles. How do I know all this? My late grandmother was meticulous in recording all of the details of their travels in her Stenographer’s Notebooks, and I had the pleasure of reading them. On her trips to Chicago, New York, Florida, California, and more she recorded every expense from a cup of coffee to a museum fee. Precision and care was taken with each day’s entry.  

I attempted to keep an expedition expenditure list when my family drove to Virginia one year. It worked for a while, but then I forgot to add the extra Twix bar at the gas station or the groceries we bought for dinner. Details of the outgoing journey were written with honest and excited dedication to the task, but my hand and head failed to keep up to those initial standards on the return trip home. I wonder how many people still keep detailed records of trips. Is it a lost art? Now, our cars can record some of those details in trip odometers and GPS units, but I’m sure there are still folks out there who enjoy making columns in notebooks and filling in little squares by hand—the joy of flipping back pages and comparing the gas prices in Tennessee and Florida, checking for a fair price of a hotel by their past days’ travels, and tallying up how much they’d spent at the end.

On their first day out they spent $26.48. Today that is practically absorbed by my family on our first stop for 4 hefty lunches at Hardee’s. Here’s a list of their expenses on that first day:

Coffee—Litchfield, IL                                        .31

Gas—Standard—Fairview, IL                            2.70

Lunch—Cape Girardeau, MO                             .72

Motel—Travel Lodge, Memphis, TN             10.40

Gas—Phillips—Howardville, TN                     4.60

Dinner—“The Flame”—Memphis, TN            7.50

Dinner Tip                                                           .25

I’m a detail person. I’m shocked at myself that I’ve only completed one of these detailed trip logs before. Rereading my grandmother’s methodical travel log stirs a new desire to try it again.  

Memorial Drive, Joplin MO

It was a sad road that I traveled yesterday. One of destruction, of loss, death, depression, and heartbreak in Joplin, Missouri. From Schifferdecker Avenue to 32^nd Street to 20^th Street, across Main Street and Range Line Road and Interstate 44, each street felt like a funeral procession. The May 22 tornado had traveled these same roads—an unlicensed, reckless and deadly driver that left miles of emptiness and pain behind.

The twig-like trees stood out among the expanse of twisted metal and splintered wood that covered miles of land. They were stripped of their leaves, with trunks pock-marked where flying objects had pummeled them on their way by. But little green leaves sprouted in irregular clusters as they fought to regain their composure—a small sign of renewal in a ravaged land. Many trees had trapped the twisted metal of someone’s home. They had captured someone’s quilts and blankets and held their shredded fibers like massive spiderwebs among their branches.

The neighborhoods were eerily quiet. There were no children squealing playfully in their backyards. No one was cutting their grass or trimming flowers to take into the house. No joggers. No walkers. No postal carrier walking from home to home. I wondered where they had all gone. Where they were now. What road had they taken?  Would they come back or could they never return?

As I passed each forgotten toy or recognizable household item, I kept thinking, “This is someone’s shoe, someone’s jacket, someone’s toy.”

While walking the sidewalks of a torn apartment complex, I saw a penny on the sidewalk—heads up. I left it- another small piece of hope for someone. On our journey weaving back through the devastated route, I saw other signs of hope on their road to recovery— on the sign of Joplin High School, where the “J” and “lin” were missing, they had fashioned an “H” and “O” out of duct tape to create “Hope High School.” Spray-painted messages of “We’re ok” and “God Bless Joplin,” with the ever-cheerful Smiley Face accompanying them, brought a brief smile. Work crews who graciously allowed us to drive carefully through, and the smell of fresh lumber and the sound of hammers birthing new homes for someone were hopeful sights and sounds.

For me, these sights from the road were new yesterday morning and I was overcome with that initial shock and heartbreak that comes with being handed a letter of loss. But for others who had lived through it and were beginning to rebuild, the road may appear to them as one of Hope and reconstruction. Where my wheels turned solemnly and slowly, theirs are starting to turn with purpose and strength.

G-70 China or I-70 Missouri?

Posted by Ted:

It was not I-70, but rather G-70 that carried me south into Fujian State.  I had entered this Inter-state highway after landing in Nanchang in Jiangxi State.  I would be traveling on G-70 for 4 hours – the same time it takes to drive across Missouri on I-70. I immediately was struck be the similarity between G-70 in China and I-70 in Missouri.  I imagined what it would be like to do a book like Driving across Missouri for this stretch of highway.  If we did do such a book, an amazing number of the stories would be the same for both books. With this thought in mind, I made a list of how many stories would be the same as the ones in the Missouri book.  That list of identical topics included:

1) transition areas between urban and rural land use,

2) powerlines,

3) rest stops,

4) wetlands,

5) forests,

6) soil conservation,

7) terraces, 

8) grain crops (in this case rice instead of corn),

9) cemeteries,

10) power plants/cooling towers,

11) railroads,

12) quarries,

13) major rivers and associated stories (shipping, irrigation, etc.)

14) Interstate Ponds,

15) cellphone towers,

16) rock cuts

17) tree farms

18) wind farms

19) a mysterious brick chimney

20)  Billboards!

More than anything else the most prominent and common link to I-70 in Missouri were the plethora of billboards.  In China, as in Missouri, it is a challenge to look beyond the billboards.  China may even exceed Missouri with their record number of billboards per mile. Apparently China, like Missouri, doesn’t tightly regulate billboards. Even the first glimpses of the Great Wall as you approach on the highway are blocked by billboards! 

Billboards blocking view of the Great Wall of China

I expected to see Missouri-style fireworks stores since all of the Missouri fireworks are made in China. But I didn’t expect to see a lonely brick chimney like the one described in the Missouri book. It seemed the only story lacking was the RV dealers story!  Of course, Winnebagos are larger than most Chinese homes and are hard for the rickshaw drivers to pull. 

Power lines and Interstate ponds

 

The drive stimulated more roadwriting questions than answers. Are Interstate highways by their nature universally similar? In China’s strong central (and only recently capitalistic) government are there laws governing billboards? In one of the most exotic countries in the world who would have thought that their interstate would look basically the same as it does here in the Midwest, and that over just a few hours of driving there would be at least 20 stories that occurred in the Missouri book that could be lifted for use in a China highway book.  The stories that would differ, of course, are those dealing with history and place names - although this genre of stories is in the Missouri book too. Is there anything new along highways on the other side of the planet?

Roadside cemetery

Would a book “Driving across Jiangxi” be significantly different from “Driving across Missouri”? Apparently not…

Then it occurred to me that a “Driving across Jiangxi” book is exactly what I needed to see the beauty of China beyond the billboards. I needed to know why things were the same, and if indeed they really were the same. So LuAnn doesn’t know this yet, but she better start studying up on rice production and how Jiangxi got its name!