Greetings, friends. I am writing this in a hotel room in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Since midday Saturday, I have driven or ridden 1,600 miles. I’m tired.
I left Epsom as mentioned after writing my last journal entry. Getting out of New Hampshire is slow if you are trying to go east or west. The entire state, as well as that of Vermont, are oriented north to south, following the Connecticut River and its tributaries, not to mention the passes in the White and Green Mountains. Getting from Concord to Albany involves multiple winding two-lane highways through the foothills.
My initial goal had been to pick up my co-pilot Suzy in Buffalo on Sunday. Suzy had been visiting her family in Ontario, and, being in between jobs at the moment, had graciously agreed to split the driving back to the West Coast in exchange for a free cross-country road trip followed by a flight home to the East Bay. On top of that, Suzy is excellent, easy-going company, and our musical tastes are both ecumenical and well-aligned. Suzy is not the type to object to a four hour Genesis singalong. I would have been a fool to pass up the chance to bring her along.
But the New York Thruway is boring and, moreover, I realized on pondering a map of New York State that my friends Christopher and Marina had recently moved to Elmira, which was only an hour’s detour. Amazingly so, given the geography of New York State. Truth be told, I am unsure when our paths will cross again, because, bless them, they live in Elmira, so I decided the extra driving was well worth it.
But then I realized that driving to Elmira would take me through the part of the Twin Tiers where my father was born, and where his family come from. In particular I wanted to visit the graves of his paternal ancestors, since, thanks to the Internet, I know where they are. Which meant another couple detours on the way to Buffalo, but since I wasn’t picking up Suzy until midday Sunday, I figured I had plenty of time.
The drive to Elmira was drizzly but uneventful. From Albany up towards Binghamton, Interstate 88 climbs out of the Hudson Valley and onto the Alleghany Plateau, winding along the north slopes of the Catskills. I have always loved the Catskill Mountains. I do not know why. Also, apparently they are not mountains in the normal sense, but rather a dissected plateau, which according to Wikipedia means that the “mountain range” is actually a block of Devonian sedimentary seafloor that was pushed above the ocean surface and has had watercourses gradually eroded into it by weather and glaciers until the original plateau is unrecognizable except as a collection of peaks. They are magical nonetheless.
With one thing and another, I could tell I wasn’t going to get to Elmira until basically dinnertime, which meant no cemetery visit and definitely no driving the rest of the way to Buffalo. So I booked a hotel room in Sayre, just over the Pennsylvania border.
The visit with Marina and Christopher was lovely. They live in a very nice part of Elmira, where you can get a lot of very nice house for your money, because you’re in Elmira. They seem to like it. Their dog Bandit has plenty of room to run around, and they can both comfortably work from home, both of which are a big improvement from their apartment in San Francisco.
They fed me pizza and told me the saga of their cross-country move. Christopher updated me on the status of his ongoing intellectual passion, which is developing (and I’m sure I’m misrepresenting this) a philosophy, or maybe a linguistic theory, of narrative. He is posting his notes in a Substack journal that I encourage you to follow if you are interested in such things.
I went back to Sayre and got up yesterday morning at a quarter to six to go and visit my departed ancestors.
If you’re reading this, please forgive me, I should already be in bed. I’ve been wanting to write for days, but I’m having the same problem I did the last time I tried to journal a road trip, which is that too much stuff happens too fast to write it all down. I hope Suzy will do a bunch of the driving tomorrow. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam est.