Tales of Three Cities

I. Boston: Literally Little Italy

After four days in New England we departed on Wednesday after emotional farewells with with our aunties and cousins. Cousin Thea was sensibly still asleep on her midweek day off, so I forbore to wake her when Greg and Scott came by at 6:45 to spirit me away; the hurried note I left for her in the kitchen was a poor expression of gratitude for her many kindnesses.

We'd spent much of the previous day in Boston, arriving by commuter rail from Lowell early in the afternoon. After a bit of aimless wandering, and some wilting in the generous humidity, we ducked into an air-conditioned tavern for some lunch and some cooling adult beverages while we plotted our next move, which was in the event to place ourselves in the hands of one of the many tour operators haunting downtown. We took an “on-again, off-again (certain restrictions apply*)” tour that included a spin around the harbor and an hour stay at the Charlestown naval shipyard, where Grandfather Fleming worked during WW II.

Following the tour we set off to the “North End,” which proved in the event a delightful little Italian district of winding streets and enticing aromas. Alas, lunch was still too recent to make dinner a realistic proposition, so we merely knocked around the neighborhood for another couple of hours absorbing the local color, both ethnic and historic (e.g., the Old North Church and its weathered nearby burial ground, and Paul Revere’s charming pied-à-terre, the latter locked up tighter’n a drum by early evening) before taking the commuter train back to Lowell. In the course of that ride we sat near a young man who talked business (marketing, heaven help us) volubly and at high volume to a friend or colleague before he was obliged to take a call from his mother. Thereafter his conversation consisted of soft grunts at longish intervals.

*Among the unexpected restrictions: at one point we were commanded, while awaiting the arrival of an “on again” tour bus, to line up in the sweltering sun rather than under the shelter of a nearby shade tree. When we politely protested, and explained our reasoning, we were told to go pound sand and again directed to stand in line under the glare of a Beantown afternoon. The “Silver Trolley” does not receive our custom again.

II. Mensches Take Manhattan

From Cousin Thea’s rustic New Hampshire dacha we headed for our night’s lodging in Jersey City, stopping for breakfast at Chet’s Diner in Northboro (?) MA and making an unscheduled stop at Mystic Seaport, a scenic little theme park of a town, in Connecticut. With an abundance of neither time nor funds we skipped the paid admission (too bad, in a way, because the sailing ship Joseph Conrad, on which der Alte trained during his brief stint [pre-USMC] as a merchant marine cadet, was docked in the paid area) but availed ourselves of the well-stocked gift shop, where Rand, who had up to this point rather been letting down the side in this respect, purchased his first souvenir tee-shirt.

With young Kinster at the wheel now we proceeded on to Jersey City via Manhattan, at one point overruling Eleanor, our onboard GPS-based navigation thingum, when she directed us onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Recalculating,” she replied sullenly, plotting her eventual revenge, which she was to savor nicely chilled—but I anticipate myself. Our hotel was in a slightly seedy section of Jersey City (if there are posh districts of the town we contrived to miss them), but conveniently close to the Port Authority train into Manhattan, and thence, once having settled ourselves, we ventured without Jeanne, who begged off pleading exhaustion and a lowered resistance to crowds.

With just six hours to take in Manhattan we could scarcely give first-timers Kinsey and Scott a comprehensive tour, particularly since Greg’s impressions were fourteen years out of date and Rand’s twenty-seven, but we wandered around sundry parks and squares, through packed streets bustling with low-end storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past awe-inspiring architecture old and new, to Times Square, to Radio City Music Hall (breaking from our rambling for long enough to enjoy a nice dinner in the theatre district), through Central Park, to “The Dakota” and “Strawberry Fields,” via cab to the Chrysler Building, and finally, via a series of Turkish baths cunningly disguised as subway stations (ah, but the cars themselves are air conditioned: how unimaginably awful the waits would have been without that in prospect!) back to the PATH terminus for the ride to Joisey City. And the evening and the morning were the eleventh hour.

III. Byzantium on the Potomac; Après moi, le déluge

We rolled through the grimy industrial suburbs of northern New Jersey and only gradually noticed that the passing scenery was starting to take on a bucolic (OK, comparatively bucolic) character during the hour or so we approached northern Delaware. An untimely sneeze caused Rand to miss our transit of that state, and before we knew it we were in Maryland heading for Baltimore as traffic thickened around us and the skies darkened above. As we crawled around Baw’mer a couple of premonitory raindrops spattered our windshield, following which the clouds disgorged a volume of water approximately equivalent to a January’s worth of rainfall in Northern California. Greg, at the wheel, was steely-nerved as he steered us through the onslaught; the same cannot be said, alas, of Eleanor, whose behavior started becoming erratic as she developed an arbitrary preference for congested surface streets over freeways and, as we drew near our motel in Alexandria, for obscure airport service roads over broad city thoroughfares. We finally had to disconnect the poor thing over her piteous protests (“I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission”) and proceed to our destination under manual control with advice from The Great Gazoogle delivered over the magical team of Greg’s iPad and Rand’s magic MiFi card. Just as we arrived, the weather really went berserk, drenching the entire party as we sprinted across the twenty feet between our parking spot and the motel office.

It was starting to look as though we might have to confine our visit to the DC metro area not merely to leafy Alexandria but to our modest rooms at the Travelodge, but an hour later the storm had petered out and the sun was shining, so we girded our loins and strolled half a mile to the nearby rail station and rode into Washington, emerging at the “Federal Triangle” station, and thence to the National Mall, where we variously inspected or favored with our passing glances the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial (regarding which it occurred to me that it might be a nice gesture to record the names of all the Vietnamese who perished by the force of American arms during the same period, but a moment’s reflection persuaded me that this would be impractical, since a comparable treatment would require a wall seventy feet at its highest point and stretching nearly the length of the Mall) and the FDR Memorial, this last being visited by Greg and Scott only, and proving farther away than our cheap not-to-exact-scale tourist map suggested. When they rejoined us after the better part of an hour we decided to catch a bus down Constitution Avenue to the center of town, where both eateries and DC Metro stations might be expected to be thicker on the ground. As we waited for a scheduled bus, clouds swiftly congealed anew overhead and opened up on us, so a quick Plan B, involving two taxicabs, was improvised. We agreed to rendezvous at the Capitol, where the brief storm conveniently dissipated. Although we had all been soaked during the few minutes before we flagged our taxis, everyone was in good humor about it, because what with the walking through the heat and humidity we’d each of us been feeling slightly oppressed. The magic of evaporation as we dried off in the newly cooler air post-cloudburst cheered everyone up, and we strolled to the magnificently-restored Union Station retail complex for dinner and a ride home.

This morning Scott departed by air back to California (demands of work) and the rest of us soldier on to Greensboro NC, where we’ll pass the night, and from the ride toward which—somewhere north of Richmond at the moment—I post this update.

Above: Expedition staff photographer Kinsey G in Times Square

Blog is down for routine maintenance

In Jersey City this evening after an afternoon in Manhattan (and yesterday in Boston) with DC on the morrow. Thank god for hotel air conditioning. I'm far too exhausted to post tonight.

Full Metal Fleming

We have now been forty-eight hours and change in the bosom of our Fleming aunts, uncles and cousins, and are overwhelmed (not to say overfed! —fatted calves have been slain, and barbecued) at our reception. We arrived Saturday evening at Aunt Alice’s home in Billerica MA after a marvelous morning at Viagra Falls just north of Buffalo, and stayed up late catching up on family histories and meeting the 450 some-odd cousins once-removed, second cousins, cousins-in-law and parties at interest who have accreted since our last visits (in 1960, 1971 and 1983 for Jeanne, Greg & Scott, and Rand respectively). On Sunday there was a lavish garden party at Aunt Theo’s in Nashua NH, with much of the heavy lifting (including the assembly of a canopy and the masterful grilling of the aforementioned fatted calves) undertaken by Cousin Eddie Kepka. Also on Sunday we visited the ancestral residence in Malden, built in 1904 by our great-great grandmother and still occupied by our grandparents when I was born.

Since we are a largish party we’ve been portioned out among the aunts and cousins, and I have been the beneficiary of Cousin Thea’s hospitality at her handsomely rustic, spacious and almost absurdly comfortable home (think pre-revolutionary Russian dacha and you’re not far off) in the piney woods of Amherst NH. Today we headed up the Maine coast a modest distance to Boothbay Harbor, which was pleasant, but if we had the day to do over again we all agreed that we’d have brought our swimming togs and made more time for the beach at Kennebunkport where, under clement skies and the vigilant surveillance of Secret Service snipers, we dipped our toes in the Atlantic surf (or surflet, really, as against a surfeit of wave action) and reveled in the salt breeze. Tomorrow we venture into Boston to sip American revolutionary iconography from the source.

Above: Top—Niecelet KG discovers the Atlantic. Bottom—The ancestral manse in Malden. Our elder brother passed his earliest days here, I believe.

Technically not a reunion

We sprinted from Greater Indianapolis to Greater Cleveland yesterday, beating our ETA by five minutes and arriving at the University Heights home of Cousin Roger just before one o’clock. None of us had met Roger before: he's a retired policeman (Shaker Heights: he was on hand for the excitement when they had their police station blown up there in 1970) and the senior member by some years of this generation of Careagas. He and his wife MarnyJean and sons Clay and Brett (who design and manufacture jewelry in precious metals! —that Careaga "art" gene is a persistent one) could not have been more gracious. MarnyJean served us a lavish lunch of salmon quiche, a salad with exotic greens and bits of chopped mango, and a wonderful concoction called "Scotch eggs," which I'll attempt to duplicate upon return to my own kitchen and after suitable research. A shout-out to our Cleveland cousins, and thank you again for your many kindnesses. We look forward to connecting later in the trip with the St. Louis contingent of the clan.

This morning we depart Buffalo, where we overnighted, stop by—let me check my notes—Nigeria Falls, apparently quite the regional tourist attraction, where several abandoned bank accounts from sundry equatorial despots await us, before crossing New York into Massachusetts, and thence to the ancestral Fleming precincts of Greater Boston this evening. Billerica, here we come!

Roger’s Version: L-R: Clay, Brett, Roger, MarnyJean

We Five

L-R: Greg, Scott, Jeanne, Rand, Kinsey

Plains speaking

We are enjoying a day of downtime here in Greenwood, a presentable if slightly humid suburb of Indianapolis, and appreciating the lavish hospitality of my eldest niece and her husband. Despite the best efforts on both sides we did not contrive to dine with Cousin Dave, whose workday hours vary with the vagaries of the regional power grid, but we did talk to him for an hour that evening thanks to the miracle of modern wireless technology. A shout-out to Dave F, and we’ll connect another time.

Wednesday was spent in a sprint across the plains along I-80, stopping only for fuel and micturation. Although lusher than South Dakota, Iowa was a bit short on scenic wonder than the Black Hills or the Columbia gorge; we are advised nevertheless that compared to the view from I-80 through Nebraska, Iowa is Yosemite. We actually traversed Illinois without stopping, although some poorly-executed signage did cause us to traverse the same eleven-mile stretch of highway twice shortly after we entered the state from Iowa.

Last night we relaxed under a pleasantly sultry midwestern sky, sipping adult beverages, marveling at the fireflies (or "lightning bugs" in local parlance) and reminiscing over a three- or four-decade range of family memories (there will be a lot of that before this expedition winds up next month), which would certainly have bored the wits out of the grandnephews had Greatuncle Gregory not cleverly distracted them with a cunning iPod astronomy app. The grandnieces are a little young to be bored by grownup conversation (I suspect they merely tune it out as superfluous noise, which, come to think of it, much grownup conversation actually is), and are also cautious and reserved in the presence of three massive male strangers.

My eldest niece, our gracious hostess, and my youngest, our staff photographer (she has taken over nine hundred photos since Saturday morning with her Canon digital SLR, none of which have appeared on this blog), are separated by twenty years of age, but enjoy nevertheless a tender sisterly bond that they expressed last night by going out to a local body modification emporium, there to have matching posts inserted into the sides of their noses. Myself, I've always thought that one of the objectives of a life rationally conducted ought to be to get through it with as few additional holes in oneself above and beyond the original factory specs as possible, but this sentiment is clearly not shared by the under-forty set. Stick around long enough and we all of us eventually become exiles in the culture, garrulous expats reminiscing about the lost precincts of our formative years, the blue remembered hills…whoops.

Above: We have observed this chain throughout the midwest. A shout-out to Facebook chum Bob Evens, benefactor to humankind.

Monumental Folly

Day the fourth: We rose early for a serviceable breakfast (accompanied, unfortunately, by anaemic coffee) and betook ourselves to the Mt. Rushmore visitor center, a considerably more elaborate facility than I remembered from my 1991 visit. My friends know that I am ordinarily scornful of American iconography, but there was a lump in my throat as I gazed up at the familiar visages: James Mason…Cary Grant…Leo G. Carroll…Martin Landau. We lingered for an hour and then hit the road, Rand at the wheel and Greg riding shotgun, east across South Dakota on I-90. The state’s set designers appear to have blown their budget on the Black Hills, because the scenery was pretty thin thereafter, but we did make a side trip to Mitchell SD to see the aptly-named “Corn Palace,” which looks like something a chamber of commerce might come up with if you spiked the punch with acid at the Rotary Club dinner.

After a longish day on the road we have arrived by mutual arrangement in Omaha, where we are chilling out* while waiting to touch base with Cousin Dave, a resident of this city, with whom we had made tentative (perhaps too tentative) plans to dine this evening. Tomorrow, on to Indianapolis, or rather a suburb thereof, provided the weather doesn’t interfere.

*“Chilling out” in that the room originally assigned to the men of the party lacked functional air conditioning, or even ventilation. We are native Californians all; we don't do the heat-and-humidity thing.

Above, upper: The Great Stone Faces. L-R: Mason, Grant, Carroll, Landau.

Above, lower: The Corn Palace. I am going to turn this into such a San Francisco in-joke when I get it into Photoshop.

Transit of Mordor

From Whitehall we barreled east on Interstate 90 across Montana today, Jeanne taking the helm for the first few hours and her daughter, who did yeoman work at the wheel, for the rest of the way, including side trips to the Little Big Horn battle site (where monuments erected in different eras variously explained that US troops were "clearing the area of hostile Indians" and that the other side were "defending the Cheyenne way of life." You pays yer wampum and you takes yer choice, sez I) and Devil's Tower, the impressive basaltic column not far from the South Dakota Border. This evening we bed down, to the accompaniment of distant flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, in Keystone SD in what would be the shadow of Mount Rushmore were it still daylight.

A good portion of the day we spent traversing the Land of Mordor, formerly known as Wyoming until we rechristened it this morning in recognition of kindly, avuncular, nakedly sinister Dick Cheney, its favorite son. Throughout the afternoon the weather grew increasingly fraught, its baneful aspect being augmented at one point by what appeared to be clouds of dark, oily smoke rolling and roiling across the highway in front of us, black against the grey thunderheads. This proved in the event to be not smoke but thick clouds of coal dust from...an open pit mine? Impossible to tell, but the particulates lent an appropriately stygian element to an already infernal landscape.

The weather was worrisome, but it actually struck ahead of us. As we left the main route for the side trip to Devil's Tower we passed through the Mordorian hamlet of Moorcroft, which looked as though it been thrashed to within an inch of its existence (trees down; foliage and debris littering the streets) minutes earlier. The damage was impressive enough that we wondered if it hadn't been caused by a small tornado, although online investigations conducted from the car suggest that it was rather a violent, very fast-moving thunderstorm. It never laid a glove, or a hailstone, on our little expedition, and although the sky continued to glower at us intermittently throughout the remaining miles to our destination, everyone is now safely bedded down. Tomorrow: on to Omaha!

Above: At the Little Big Horn cemetery, early collateral damage in the war against junk email.

In enemy territory

Four states in one day. This evening we post from Whitehall MT, a flyspeck of a town in the Mountain Time zone, having followed the Columbia River gorge from The Dalles, stopped in Spokane to pluck Sis from the airport there, cut across the Idaho Panhandle and finally stopped for the night in this quaint burg, which seems characterized by a faltering local economy (to judge from the number of boarded-up establishments in what passes for the commercial district) and a thriving species mosquito that attacks at dusk in large numbers and with great ferocity. The picture above sums up the spirit of the place, and didn't those fine revolutionary sentiments sound more stirring forty years ago from the left, and don't they seem creepy now, o my auditors and only friends? Another long day, another abbreviated entry.

No, really

Alas, it's late and I've driven all day, so expect no prodigies of wit or style at the outset. From a "Super 8" motel in The Dalles, Oregon, a few hundred yards from the mighty Columbia River and just a few steps from a stairwell faintly redolent of powerful insecticides, I tender greetings on behalf of our party of four: brothers Rand, Greg and Scott, and niece Kinsey. Sister Jeanne has lingered in Folsom to be on hand for the birth of her seventh grandchild, and thanks to the miracle of modern cellular communication we were kept informed at intervals throughout the afternoon of the progress of cervical dilation: four centimeters, seven centimeters, nine...oh, sorry, too much information? At somewhere around 8:30 this evening little Tyler Gibson entered the world, and we are advised that mother, grandparents, father and son are all resting comfortably and considerably relieved about it.

We elected to leave Interstate 5 at Weed CA and take the more lightly traveled Route 97, greatly to the consternation of our onboard navigation system, which tried for miles to talk us into turning around, and then sulked for hours, occasionally snarling "Soft left in 800 feet" (where the obviously impractical alternative was a rutted cowpath) while withholding advice at a couple of ambiguous forks in the road. Fortunately it is still the glory of human intelligence, or some human intelligences, to be smarter than automated subroutines. The scenery of central Oregon is far less lush than along the western highways, and along some stretches downright arid, but possessed of an austere beauty, particularly along the last fifty miles—we were too busy admiring that stretch to take pictures, unfortunately.

Jeanne flies into Spokane and joins the expedition there late tomorrow morning as the Careaga/Fleming siblings set forth on the 2010 "Aunties and Cousins World Tour." Better-crafted entries to follow, I hope.