Travel Postcard: US HWY 89

Travel Postcard: U.S. HWY89. 

The earth has begun to reclaim most of the parking lots in Gray Mountain but for now it remains in the early stages of decay. As I sweat through perfecting a shot a group of people stop to inspect the apocalyptic scene; an abandoned hotel and gas station. Then I hear windows begin to break. It's hard not to be irritated. You can't help but wonder, do they feel comfortable because it's abandoned on indigenous land or do they just feel comfortable? (If you have to ask yes they were and yes, they were).

Over the last 30 years I've passed Gray Mountain a thousand times while traveling to Page. What seemed like a decent business dwindled over the years, parking lots emptied and the vibrant southwestern paint faded. Not long after art work began to appear on the boarded up gas station. Every few years a installation would be completely made anew. Though most of the artist's names or handles are hard to find, @jetsonorama remains a constant presence with large black & white large format prints depicting Diné life. It's a reminder that our assumptions of creative life; a thing thought to be mostly cloistered in large cities, are deeply flawed and the existence of rural and indigenous artists, if not next to a major highway, mostly go unnoticed. The people breaking windows and taking selfies in the abandoned rooms never came near the art work. Maybe to them even if it's on an abandoned building its still just "graffiti".

Not for nothin'

There are two threads I feel in the dark, one takes me toward self-preservation and, on good days, hope. And on the tough days the other thread takes me to an end like Anthony Bourdain. Like most I knew him through the a screen, through his words and like most can lay no special claim to him. My mind felt the distinct surface of those barriers on last Friday. As I had a drink in his honor, whiskey neat, sitting alone next to the back yard pool watching the light fade on the water. I rambled a bit. An atheist talking to a dead atheist I thought might make him laugh, as it should any good atheist. Prayers to nowhere. 

The impulse to wonder what anyone could have done in those final hours is strong. To wonder how a man who curiously devoured life, who filled the last 30 years of his life with more experiences than most of us could given an extra lifetime, who seemed to have achieved that dreaded phrase that Americans are obsessed with: having it all. For depressed people “having it all” can mean greater risk; more people to fail and a deeper darkness. On a micro level, I know the self hate that waits on the other side; when I was musician and I performed the best I could, or after filming when you have wrapped, all that you experienced and achieved for that moment is now gone. It's just you left. The process is over. And then you start wondering if it ever happened at all. It’s like trying to touch fog.  

When you are in that hotel room alone that is what the room is made of. The certainty that you can never have that again and it would be better not to try. To not want. To not hold on so tight. I don’t know what he went through in the room but I know on certain days the thread I follow through the fog in my mind leads there. What I focus on is one aspect of Bourdain that truly inspired me: his relentless reinvention and curiosity. He didn’t allow his background or age to keep him from transforming himself, from addict/chef, from chef to writer, from writer to tv host and finally to something bigger - a force that demonstrated that empathy can conquer the fear.

Havana Taxi Ride

Your first time visiting New Orleans might give you just a hint but doesn't come close.  You realize the United States you have built in your mind - the State of whatever region you're in -is an overlay of a more recent past. For most it seems the turn of the century is as "old timey" as it gets. New Orleans can't or more accurately won't- reconstruct the influence of indigenous, African, Spanish and French culture to a homogenized, easy narrative despite white supremacy's best efforts.

Where New Orleans gives you a hint of where the past and future seems to live simultaneously, Cuba seems to exist in these extremes and it's stunning.  Walking through Havana, or even by way of a "yank tank", it’s time travel of the order that the best science fiction aspires to. French colonial architecture juxtaposed against 57 Chevys, the skeletons of new hotels in foreground of century old embattlements, brand new Chinese-made buses rolling through tobacco fields passing horse drawn carriages. It's easy to call it a time capsule, some living breathing anomaly, but that dismisses an entire island in the midst of profound decisions about it's future and misses the struggle that is ahead.

In the weeks prior to my trip a lot of people suddenly seemed to have expert level opinions of the island and grave concerns of Cuba "changing". Anyone who travels there, myself included, are why new hotels are being built and why a Starbucks could end up there. I don't have answers for that. But as I have witnessed how unbelievably repulsive Americans behave in Mexico I know no one wants that. Cuba needs to do the best thing for Cuba. 

As an extremely drunk American who cornered me at a bar famous for Hemingway being a humorless drunk at detailed partying through Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba, stock piling rum and cigars for upper management at his company. I can imagine most Cubans don’t want their country to be a drunken pit stop on some boring dudes mission to impress his boss.