Ann Arbor

I went to an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed burlesque show in Hamtramck, Michigan with my friends from Ann Arbor. It was in a towering, abandoned factory, remade into a performance space. We took a freight elevator to the fifth floor. The hallways up there were as wide as my living room, lined with dust-clouded windows.

“Listen,” my friend said, pointing down the hall. “The train is coming.”

It came barreling around the corner, a motorized engine trailing three passenger cars, something children would ride at an amusement park. It zigzagged across the broad hallway like a startled cockroach, passing us by fifteen feet, breaking, driving backwards until it landed right in front of us.

“Get on! Quick! Everyone get on!” yelled the conductor, as throngs of giddy hipsters threw themselves aboard for the ride down the long hallway, around the corner, and to the doors of the giant production floor that would serve as the theater.

Inside there was a full band, sounding ready to play back-up for Tom Waits, while a tall, stately chanteuse purred songs about Alice, tea parties, things growing curiouser and curiouser. A Bettie Page look-alike pranced around the stage, dropping successive articles of baby blue clothing in her wake as she encountered the juggling Cheshire cat, the break-dancing playing cards, the Mad Hatter and March Hair suspended from the ceiling by hooks stuck under their skin.

In Oakland, where I live, or in San Francisco, this all never would have happened. Okay, maybe it would have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened in a hulking factory. And if it did, you would have missed it amidst the throng of culturally enriching activities happening every single night. And if you did go, your friend wouldn’t be dating the bass player and your other friend wouldn’t have slept with the singer. The performers would be part of a specialized scene, and they would have spent years cultivating the appearance, style, clothing, mannerisms, and jargon of that scene. You might be able to get into the scene, but it wouldn’t be easy.

The thing the local weekly newspapers always said about Detroit is: cultural isolation breeds creativity. It sounds condescending until you go to Detroit, which is like going to another planet where everything is backwards. Downtown neighborhoods look like abandoned farms, there are more boarded-over storefronts than populated ones, twenty-three year olds own giant houses, ethnic enclaves are the fanciest and safest places to live. It’s an incredibly beautiful, surreal place, a place that feels outside America, a place where anything is possible.

And so in Detroit, and in the cities that surround it, people create their own scenes and ways of making art. There’s not much to be daunted by: you just start, and people show up, because they probably know you from work or high school or the bar, and anyway there aren’t all that many things to do on a given night.

When I first moved to Ann Arbor, it reminded me of my hometown, Palo Alto. Not modern, Facebook-era Palo Alto, but the pre-dot-com Palo Alto of my youth. It was a quirky college town, affluent but not wealthy, smug about its own artsiness. The main difference was, when young people in Palo Alto wanted to go somewhere, we got on the train to San Francisco or Berkeley where we could sit in grungy coffee shops, have picnics in the park, buy ourselves used books and CDs and absurd clothing, wander past the street vendors and the real beggers and the other beggars who were kids just like us, only dirtier.

Ann Arbor is an hour from Detroit, but there’s no train. This is a car town, people told me. Why would the rich people in the suburbs vote for a train? They don’t want to take a train, they don’t want to go to Detroit, and they sure as hell don’t want poor people from Detroit taking a train into their town.

You can drive an hour to Detroit, but then there’s the question of what to do when you get there. There are lots of amazing things to do: there are great bars and music venues, museums, historical sites. But Detroit isn’t the kind of place you can just wander around. You’ve got to have a plan, a course of action, a series of places to go. Every trip I ever took to Detroit was like this: exit freeway, drive straight to destination, park in front (there will be plenty of parking) go in. If there is a second destination in mind, get back in car, get back on freeway, drive to second destination, go in. Repeat as needed. Try to sober up for the long drive home down dark country highways.

But like the Detroit Metro Times was always saying: the lack of ready-to-wear, easily consumable culture spurred people to create this culture for themselves. I never met so many people doing creative things as in Ann Arbor. Even a simple act like getting dressed was an artistic project. In California, when you wanted bizarre, interesting clothes, there were a million stores ready to sell them to you. In Ann Arbor, the clothing stores catered to practical Midwestern adults and preppy Midwestern teenagers, and if you did find something good, four of your friends would have the same one. I learned the art of customization from people in Ann Arbor: making legwarmers out of socks, decorating shirts and hats with colored sharpies, ripping the sleeves and necks and ankles off of things to make them cooler and better.

Anyone could found an institution in Ann Arbor. Every wildly popular thing was created by someone we knew, often someone in their twenties. We all knew the guy who started the karaoke night at the local club, and the three kids who ran the mixed-tape dance party, the women who organized the Totally Kickball tournament and the Burly Girly mud wrestling. And if you grew up in Ann Arbor, you would also know every family who had owned the barn where the wrestling was held and every kid who had lived in that barn when his or her parents kicked him or her out of the house. The odds were that if something interesting was going on, you would know the person doing it.

The last time I visited Ann Arbor, my friends had started a burlesque troupe. The house where they prepare and rehearse seemed familiar, and then I remembered I had been to a few parties there. Houses in Ann Arbor are like people; you seem to keep running into the same ones over and over. At one of the parties, people had spun flame-tipped chains in circles in the back yard. But most of the parties had been normal, just lots of drunk people getting drunker and dancing at 3 a.m., after the bars closed. Now the house is filled with drawers of glitter and lace and construction paper and the basement is a rehearsal hall filled with wrestling mats and trapezes. The performers make all their costumes and props out of cardboard and paint and things they find at the Salvation Army Store.

Their performances are pure Ann Arbor aesthetics: everything is rough and homespun and nerdy and badass. Unicorns prance to disco music, girls in pasties wash themselves in bathtubs filled with sparkling shards of broken glass, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock strip off their uniforms accompanied by the spoken words of William Shatner. I watched them rehearse—I would be back in California by the date of the performance—and thought about how I loved my adopted hometown, the place where I spent my mid-twenties writing a dissertation and trying to pretend I wasn’t a graduate student.

I can’t believe I am wasting my youth in the Midwest, I used to think sometimes, as I made the reverse-commute back home to California every winter vacation, just as all the other young people were leaving San Francisco to visit their families in the boring middle states. But now I think that there was no better place to be young, where the world was a canvas begging to be painted and anything you could imagine was possible.

This illustration depicts the lovely and talented Annie Thing of Ann Arbor's Tickled Fancy Burlesque Company. Check out their videos, especially the ones about Star Trek and unicorns.

Road Rage

The other day, while I was exiting the freeway, something came flying off of the car in front of me. It looked like a dog. A spread-eagle, floppy-eared dog, flying from their car, about to smash into mine.

Instinctively, I moved my head to the side like I was slipping a punch, as though that would be of any help once this thing came crashing through my windshield.

But when the thing hit the glass, it flattened out and slid innocuously down the side of my car. Turns out it was a plastic bag, momentarily inflated by the wind of the freeway into a surprisingly dog-like shape.

When I first started commuting on the freeway, incidents like this—everyday incidents of imminent or seemingly-imminent danger—used to spike my adrenaline for ten minutes. A car swerving into my lane, water obstructing my windshield in a rainstorm, cars braking suddenly ahead of me. These situations occurred almost every day during my half-hour commute. If they went wrong, any one of them could injure or kill me or another driver. It was terrifying. How did people deal with this, the stress of a life-or-death struggle for survival each day, on the way to and from work?

Now, after years of my commute, my adrenal system has adjusted to these constant assaults. I recover from the terror of impending death quickly, in seconds rather than minutes. Ah yes, almost died again! Back to business! If I were safely aboard a roller-coaster, a scare like this would leave me shaken, frightened, exhilarated. But faced with an actual brush with death, drivers are calm, nonchalant, fiddling with the radio and thinking about lunch.

When we fly in airplanes, we are aware of the unnaturalness of the process. We are four-thousand feet in the air, hurtling forward at 500 miles per hour. This is nothing our bodies were designed to experience. We think about the space below us, between us and the ground, about what would happen if the bottom of that plane weren’t there. Even the more calm passengers gasp when the plane buckles and drops in a patch of rough air.

We should feel like that in a car. Our bodies weren’t made to move at eighty or even twenty-five miles per hour any more than they were made to fly thousands of feet in the air. We should have the same feelings of wrongness, of recognizing our own fragility as we pretend to be birds or cheetahs. But we are raised in cars, lulled to sleep as children by their gentle rocking motions, packed into their backseats for family trips, told that we are true adults when we learn how to command one ourselves. So we minimize the terror, or even come to enjoy it. People who are scared of driving are told they are crazy, that they have anxiety, that they require medication. They are not told, Navigating a two-ton vehicle that could easily kill you or someone else is pretty stressful. Maybe you shouldn’t do it.

Most people seem to believe the anonymity of the other drivers is what leads to the irrational anger that we feel when we drive, and I agree. It’s easy to be furious with someone you can barely see, someone driving too slowly, or too quickly, someone getting in your way. On foot, we stop for each other, hold doors open, give a wide berth to someone tapping a cane or using a wheelchair. On the road, we see not people but cars, faceless machines, machines that obstruct and endanger us as we maneuver our own machines around them.

But I think our rage must be fueled by a second factor: the constant, low-lying terror of death. The cars that get in our way are not only annoying us, like someone pushing past us on a busy sidewalk; they’re endangering our lives. Even when we are furious about someone too slow, someone getting in our way, the driving equivalent of the old lady pushing her walker down the sidewalk, I think it is our terror that enrages us. Surely, some part of our rational brains must have to shut down in order for us to not experience constant terror when we drive, and so we cannot think rationally. We don’t think, This man driving too slow in the fast lane is probably confused, or from another country with different rules, or unaware of his speed. Poor guy. I should be nice to him. No, we hate the man, make a point to glare at him as we pass by, cut aggressively in front of him as soon as we have passed him on the right. The qualities of kindness and empathy that are so carefully socialized into us as small children disappear, and all that is left is the logic of war.

Walking

When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was walk. I would walk anywhere my protective parents would allow me to. I loved gardens and parks, places where I was allowed to follow trails and explore. When my family visited the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park, I would make sure to cover every bit of terrain, looping back past the same areas again and again so I could follow every detour and alternate path. I felt certain there was some magic hiding where I hadn’t yet walked, that there was some amazing mystery I couldn’t leave unseen.

In high school, I was finally allowed to ride my bike instead of taking a school bus. I did that for about a month, and then I decided that I would rather walk. My parents thought I was being unreasonable the first day I told them I wouldn’t be taking my bike. It was only a mile to school, but adults in the suburbs didn’t walk distances like that. On my walk to school, I discovered all the things I had missed by driving and biking. Careful gardens of drought-resistant plants. Sculptures in windows and yards. Communes where Palo Alto’s persistent enclaves of hippies and artists preserved the Sixties version of our city. Patches of the yellow flowers whose stems tasted like lemon if you sucked on them. Crazy people walking the streets, cats, butterflies, interesting garbage and free things, lost notes and photographs. My walk to and from school was one of the most interesting parts of my day.

Walking became my major hobby outside of school. My friend Therese and I spent the entire summer after freshman year crossing our town from side to side on foot. Every day, we would choose a unexplored territory to walk to. That pedestrian overpass you only usually saw when driving on the freeway. Shoreline Amphitheater. Downtown Menlo Park. That seeming wasteland between downtown Palo Alto and the Stanford Mall.

People often reminisce about their love of their first car, how driving represented freedom. That’s how I felt about walking. You could walk anyplace. It was hard for me to wrap my brain around that kind of limitlessness. Using no resources except your own body, you could get to almost anywhere. You could get to all kinds of places that a car wouldn’t take you: the woods surrounding the Stanford campus, the deep ravine behind the mall, the hill with the giant rope swing on the way out of town. If you added public transportation, you could go to San Francisco, San Jose, or even, in theory, Richmond, Dublin, Pittsburg (wherever those places were).

I spent my twenties in universities. Every morning, from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, I walked twenty minutes or so to the school where I took classes or taught classes. Sometimes I walked to a bus and took the bus to school. At night, I would walk to the coffee shop, the bookstore, the bar. Everywhere I needed to be could be reached by foot, like living in an old European city.

I haven’t walked like that for a while, now. I got one of those jobs that you can’t get to by foot, bike, or public transportation. For the first time in my life, my morning starts with me getting into a car. I used to counter my new driving lifestyle by walking everywhere I could. But over the last few years, I’ve lost my patience for walking, preferring biking or driving for their more immediate gratification of getting me somewhere in minutes.

For the last week, though, my car has been broken. I’ve been walking every day, to the store for groceries, to Piedmont Avenue to get tea and write. It takes longer, but I’ve already seen a lot of things I would have missed if I had been speeding past at fifteen or thirty miles an hour. I found a tree full of ripe loquats, one of my favorite foods. I found a free stepstool, something I’ve been meaning to buy for years. I have exchanged commiserating glances with people under umbrellas in the unseasonable June storm. I have passed lots of people that I see every day in the coffee shop and who I didn’t realize were my neighbors. I’ve stood on the overpass that I usually drive or bike over and watched cars speeding below me, and marveled to think that this is happening all day and night, only a few hundred feet from my apartment. I have learned a lot about where I live, my habitat, and the places between my home and my destination.

The illustration is based on a photograph demonstrating healthy walking posture from Esther Gokhale's Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

Roads

Every morning, I drive on the 580 freeway thirty miles southeast to my workplace in Livermore. I spend at least an hour every day on this freeway—speeding past all sorts of plants and walls and dead animals and garbage and cityscapes and views of the bay that I could barely begin to describe, if I’ve noticed them at all. The freeways are a bizarre no-man’s land, somewhere we go every day, but not anywhere that we think of as a place. In fact, we do all we can to pretend the giant roads don’t exist, building high walls to shelter our neighborhoods from their noise and dirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freeways lately. Like approximately twenty percent of people I know, I recently read Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road. In case you’re one of the other eighty percent, The Road follows the story of a father and his young son as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic world where almost all living creatures have died in some unnamed disaster. The father and son travel by foot down a state highway, pursuing the bleak hope that conditions will be better further south and closer to a coast.

Lots of stories use roads as symbols. In the hero’s journey, the structure described by Joseph Campbell that underlies legends and adventure stories from around the world, the road of trials is the central part of the story, the series of mystical challenges that the hero must overcome.

George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphors helps explain why roads are found in so many narratives. Lakoff points out that almost any event that follows a progression can be symbolized as a journey. People tend to talk about their lives, their romantic relationships, their education, and their careers as journeys. And the metaphor, or perhaps the metonym, for a journey is often the path that it follows, the road itself. So if I ask you how things are going with your significant other, you might say:

We’re at a crossroads.
It’s been bumpy.
We’re encountering obstacles.
We’ve reached a dead end.

This metaphor of road as progress explains why so many stories center on roads. The road becomes a manifestation of the forward movement of the plot. Dorothy follows the yellow brick road as it leads her to every character and obstacle she is destined to encounter; and when she gets to the end of the road, the story reaches its climax. In fact, we might see the road as a symbol for narrative itself.

Roads are such a fundamental part of so many stories that they tend to become invisible, just like the actual freeways we hide out of sight. But the road in McCarthy’s novel is something different. It isn’t just a pathway for the stories and the characters to follow. It’s a thing. The characters walk along it, but they also sleep on it. They kick ash out of it, and climb over dead tree limbs and abandoned vehicles that litter it.

It reminds me of another novel, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which also depicts a journey down a road that has been largely abandoned by a fallen civilization. The two novels share a fascination with how one might use roads after the cars that they were built for are gone, along with all that went with those cars: the anonymity, the safe distance from one’s fellow travelers, the orderly rules. It is jarring to see a freeway as a place where people might walk, eat, sleep, fight, all the things that people usually do at their destinations, not on the roads that take us there.

Since the characters are not flying down the road at seventy miles per hour, readers can see it for what it really is: one of the last, most enduring signifiers of what it means to live in a society. Even after society has crumbled, the roads remain, providing an open path for travel and a promise that they will lead to a destination. When everything around has fallen into chaos and there is no promise of the food, shelter, protection that a society affords, the roads still provide a service, a trusted path, so that travelers don’t need to worry about navigating their journey.

Roads signify civilization because they assert mankind’s dominance over the mystery and disorderliness of nature. They take an uncharted territory and impose human ideas of logic and organization onto it. The Roman Empire was famous for its use of roads to signify their imperial, “civilizing” power. The roads reflected the logic of the empire, all of them leading from Rome to a conquered territory.

In America, roads symbolize social welfare and democracy. They are one amenity that Americans across the political spectrum can agree our government should provide. Conservatives want to limit government’s role in providing education or health care, but no one argues that we should privatize the roads. Roads are for everyone, the ultimate public service, shared equitably by rich and poor alike. Of course, roads in rich areas are better maintained than roads in poor areas, and poor people are often harassed when they drive on roads in affluent neighborhoods. That’s why freeways are the ultimate symbol of democracy, the connectors between places, taking us out of our own neighborhoods and cities and states and into any other place we wish to go.

During recent debates about nationalized health care, Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey wrote, “A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

I thought at the time: we don’t have a right to a lot of things. There is no constitutional right to public education, or transportation, or a fire department, or police or military protection, or roads. But I’m really glad we have all of those things, since they connect us to one another and shape us into a community.