Second chapter of my travel diary in the U.S. of A. And the delay to write and post is already huge... Quite. It looks like finding a quiet pleasant and cosy little hollow of the world with computers and an internet access - plus, say, a fan - is way more difficult in this western developed and modern country than in Laos or India. Yeah, I know, it makes sense: backpackers traveling through India or Laos with nothing but sweat, motorcycle burns and mosquito bites need those internet cafes much more than any of the average local Americans on a daily shuttle between work, shopping mall and home. And each and every single store, museum, park, pharmacy or gas station has its free wi-fi access for customers. Then, what I don't have -it’s my fault- is the neat brand new smooth and trendy ivory whitish Macbook with long-lasting ion-battery to just keep in touch with the world... If there's a crisis in this country, and almost everything around indicates there is one, then Apple (after receiving all the money Bill Gates didn't manage to waste in ridiculously expensive malaria-vaccine programs) is probably the wealthy little brother of the big We-rule-the-world companies' family. I had never seen so many Macbooks in my life!
Anyway… I arrived in New Orleans 3 days ago, and I’ve been looking for this moment since last Sunday, and I'm running soooooo late. If I belonged to the half-full bottle seeing kind of people, I would say I'm early for the third week report. I also realized I gave no title to the first episode (something like "New York, New York", although easy, would definitely work). The second's will be : “An Appalaches paradox” (any suggestion for titles is welcome. i won't pay for them, though)
Well, we left Brooklyn on a sunny sunday morning. The trunk was filled with stuff, and so was the gas tank. Not with stuff, obviously. With gas. And so our stomachs got filled too, I bought these delicious chocolate and pumpkin, bran and mango, squash and blueberry muffins. A good series of highways and bridges and junctions, all being Memorial of something or somebody, took us very easily through New Jersey and Delaware, then Maryland, to Washington DC. Laura was supposed to meet some friends and family there, so I took the car on my own (woooooooooo!) and wandered around Columbia and the northern suburbs of DC, cruise control on, speed regulator on 25mph, automatic gearbox on D4, coffee with milk in its recycled plastic mug (CAUTION, LIQUID INSIDE MAY BE HOT) just by the side of the hand brake and Mr. Dylan on the stereo. Sweet. No use of your feet, no need of your hands. Driving becomes an experience of total irresponsability and peaceful passivity. Later in the evening, went downtown to meet my friend Zia. She was one of my very first CS guests from Toulouse, about 5 years ago now. She’s from the Phillipines, has been living in DC for 2 years now, after almost 2 years travelling and couchsurfing around Europe, then through Turkey and the middle-east to Pakistan, on her own, and back to South-East Asia. She’s now studying and working there. And enjoying, as strange at it may seem, this bizarre heterogenous and un-natural city. To me, DC looked like a huge residential area built around a fake, artificial core of pretentious administrative palaces. They all look like those birthday cakes we drew as kids, massive pre-colombian pyramids of cream and fruits and candles, with columns and greco-baptist-latino-colonial-empire-rococo stuff. Everything is set up with gardens and fountains and memorials and large avenues whose pattern you can easily imagine to be, from the sky, that of a proud fishing eagle or something like that... DC probably gives that sensation because this is exactly what it is, though.
While walking around looking for Zia and not understanding exactly where she was supposed to be waiting for me, "with white trousers and a big brown hat", I remembered with a tender smile the megalomaniac cities I used to built on Caesar III or Ages of empire. With all the impresive big temples and universities and hospitals and oracles and coliseums in the middle, with a star-shaped main square, then geometric, rigid, square streets with monotonous, homogeneous housing lots... Well, I guess either they programmed those video games after DC's architectonic concepts, or they've been playing Caesar III for years without leeting us know and it influenced the way they then drew this towns' map !
We wandered around the Capitole, Obelisc, Ministeries and Memorials. Saw this awkward Monument to the Wars, whose stone rhetorics and golden lettering seems to glorify war, death, conflicts and VICTORY all around the world. When it maybe should, instead, quietly and humbly call for memory and future peace. Especially, this thing about victory confused me a little bit. I thought that in the end, nobody was victorious in a war. And if we talk about Korea, Vietnam and WWII, I'm not sure victory means a lot. I remembered them some of my feelings and emotions in Hiroshima's peace park and Paris Memorial de la déportation, and, honestly, had that bitter taste in my mooth. Imagine the gravity point of the core of the very center of Washington DC. Try to see it from the sky and see how it's the heart of the administrative and political machine of this country which pretends to be ruling the world. And see how this very center of everything is a memorial glorifying horror, glorifying hundreds of thousands, millions of death, as the price for victory and freedom... Scary shit, isn't it ?
Okay. Enough about that. The Potomac river and all the heavy official stuff were really nice in the evening light and I recognized in just a second this big statue of president Jefferson (is it Jefferson?) Lisa Simpson visits and shares her existential doubts with... Who said TV sitcoms couldn't teach you anything about Culture ? I took some hopefully nice pictures and experienced a subway problem with improbable delays. Talking about the subway, I loved the James Bond stylish design, like a 50's secret cave labyrinth of deep, dark, impressive concrete corridors and tunnels, then spent the night at one of Laura's friend.
Enough of DC, at least for me. Monday morning, we took the car again and left. A sunny day, a light traffic, a fresh breeze. After a dozen of housing blocks with neat lawn and trees, I'm suddenly driving this average automatic gearbox big car on the mythical Road 66, surrounded by huge long trucks, heading west to Front Royal and the Shenandoah National Park, just on the northern part of the Appalaches. A few days before, checking a route on Google maps, we had discovered a secondary road called Blue Ridge Parkway, going all the way down from Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, and decided we might want to drive it instead of a highway... Shenandoah is a beautiful mountainous park and we camped there for the first night after a couple of hours hiking under a bright green canopy with mosquitoes, mosquitoes and mosquitoes. A bunch of lovely adorable park rangers in their early forties, a bit fat in their tight sexy brown uniforms, proudly wearing their beards and hats as if they were to be shot for a show of the Village People, introduced us to the rules of the park and made sure we had enough specific knowledge and strong ropes to hang the food and toothpaste properly... because of the inquisitive clumsy dreadful dangerous black bears that would sure enough come visit our camp during the night. Oh my god, the bears, the bears! We actually met no bear at all. And on the whole, let me think… nobody at all. Hey, wait! Not true. There was this young stupid tender and probably motherless deer which pretended to have dinner with us and share my air mattress. No way. Get out of the tent you half-civilized piece of wildlife. If you ever happened to have a conscience, you would be ashamed of your lack of self-esttem and consideration for your wildlife condition. Hem, always trying to give lessons… We named it Jean-Claude (because its sweet eyes and cute look were those of a famous kungfu master from Belgium), thought about slaughtering it so as to smoke one of its skinny gigots into a piece of coppa, and finally had to throw stones at it until it gave up following us. Believe me or not, the wildlife is not what it used to be.
Next day, had a 7 hour long hike along and around the mythical Appalachian Trail. For those who ignore about hiking, who don’t shiver and sigh at the sound of the letters HRP or think GR10 is a post-traduction variant of an obscure Glycosaminoside Receptor, the Appalachian Trail (AT) is a hiking trail that goes 2000 miles along the Appalachian range from North Carolina to Maine. It is hiked by old hippies and bums with white beards and dogs, young hippish freshly graduated students, middle-aged hippies on their way to somewhere else and other kinds of walking hippies. Quite in the spirit of Kerouac's dharma bums. Nice. Indeed.
Saw some waterfalls and some disgusting reddish pale legged worms and glittering insects Olivier Esnault would have been glad to meet. Took the car and drove down the Blue Ridge Pkway again. So beautiful. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. These views and landscape and the Harley Davidson low riders we kept crossing! Oh, the places you’ll go, said the other, once… Stopped by a lovely lake (Sherando lake, if I remember it well) to swim a little bit (Beark. Oh, the disgusting soft material I have to step on before actually swimming) to the small desertic island in the middle. Surprisingly got attacked by some ticks there. What the hell do they do on a desert island where there are no animals at all? Is that why they yawned and screamed and jumped on me the second I stepped on the shore? Were they zombie mutant ticks waiting for a prey to haunt on this cursed island? All I know is I now have to check for some erythema migrans and other Lyme's disease symptoms. Played Go on the bank of the lake’s small creek until the park rangers abandoned the place, then crawled into the campsite restrooms to meticulously shower and check for extra ticks, do the washing-up and fill all the water bottles we had. Then took the car to Jefferson National Forest where we set the camp in a bizarre creepy round field in the middle of high dark pines (or maybe spruces). I spent the night awake listening to strange forest sounds, fearing a nightmare mutant zombie psycho-killer would come and murder us. Or even worse, take my soul and eat it with garlic and wild chives until the end of eternity. Brrrr!
The next morning, we left Virginia for West Virginia, to Beckley then Rock Creek, kind of an end-of-the-world remote area where cell phone service doesn't even exist. We wanted to meet there, and spend some time with, a bunch of eco-activists living on a squatting-in-the-woods community called Climate Ground Zero. Check for them on the net! These guys have been fighting and volunteering and non-violently acting against Mountain Top Removal (MTR, check for this too) for years, now. MTR is a really cheap technique to extract coal. You basically burst mountains off with tons of dynamite, from the top, and then shake the hundreds of tons of rocks you get to separate the coal. Once it's done, you fuck up hundreds of thousands of gallons of pure river water to rinse the coal and throw all the stones and trees and natural garbage you produced down in the valleys, burying square miles of villages, fields, forests, streams and such. As you can imagine, the whole process needs huge amounts of heavy metals, chemicals and such, so as to purify and prepare the coal. And the incidence of cancers, selenium poisoning, asthma and other allergies in this area is of the highest in the country. West Virginia, the coal country, is poor, very poor, just so poor, among the poorest of the USA. And coal extraction brings jobs and wages, but basically brings money to the few big oil companies which bought those mountains for nothing 50 years ago (quite often, for just a box of cheap booze – the price of a good hangover and a signature) and are simply making this lovely region a dirty flat sterile ground. We met the community and spent 24 hours with them. Visited Larry Gibson (check for him), the lill' ol' man who spent his whole life fighting MTR to save the small piece of mountain he calls his home. Very impacting, charismatic, old guy. We followed one of his young activist followers (following a follower, ain't that something Jacques Brel talked about in one of his songs, uh?) to the edge of an active MTR site, about 200 yards behind his solar-powered eco-friendly non-Ikea home-made little cabin. I took some pictures and could try to talk about it but it's hard to do. And to imagine. Or make you imagine it. "It's difficult to see what is not here", says Larry. And after a while he adds, sadly "people here don't do anything. They just don't realize MTR is killing us". He walks a bit more. I almost step on a big copper head viper taking a nap on a warm stone in the shade under a tree, and don't realize until they tell me to just move on the right, fast... He he he. I now got a lovely picture of it. Beautiful animal. Yyyyyks. He also says (Larry, not the viper) something like "When you breathe it, when you eat it, when you live it everyday of your life, you just cannot see it. Go and tell people". That’s what I'm doing right now, I guess. Well, I’m trying, at least.
We then had a beautiful dinner back at the community, played this game of throwing horseshoes to touch a stick, like our pétanque, talked with this bunch of eco-hippies, all coming from different parts of the country and from different walks of life, to just volunteer for the project. Only a minority of them is from West Virginia. But some are. One of the youngest, not even twenty, was born in Rock Creek. As soon as 16, he began working as a nightguard for B & M, on an MTR site, and about 2 years after, decided to quit and join the community… he explains to me, half proud, half cynical, that he went to THE elementary school. And survived it, he adds. I’ve heard about THE elementary school earlier in the day: there’s only one elementary school in the whole area, and it’s about 600 yards under the gigantic pond where the coal is soaked and rinsed. The shadow of the coal silos run through the school’s playground everyday, more or less by the hour the kids are out playing. Neither the county, nor the state, nor the federal government, nor the oil companies did anything to move the school. And one of the community's biggest victories, after more than ten years, is the volunteers raised the money and got the ground to build a new elem school far away from the pond. Not a big deal, but something. Somewhere in one of the dirty houses and tents, between cooking dinner, doing the dishes and playing music by the fire, I read or heard this phrase from Gandhi I liked : "if you believe one single being cannot make a difference, then you've never been in bed with a mosquito"... This was my good night chewing sentence at climate ground zero...
The next morning, had breakfast and talked with them all, gardening a little bit, or better said strumming an old cheap guitar while they were gardening, watching at my coffee with milk getting cold on the wooden porch of a house on its way to fall apart. White and grey waters tanks, solar panels, compost, green restrooms, home made greenhouse with tomatoes, avocados, radishes and strawberries. Nothing is thrown away, everything eventually serves and lives a second (third, fourth) life. Military camp equipment, old wooden boards, rusty nails and all you can imagine is abandoned around in a fancy romantic bohemian mess. Ah, and there's no shower. NO SHOWER !!! Fuck. Why do you have to be dirty and sweaty and eventually have scabies (don't laugh, they had had scabies at the camp a few months earlier) to be a good eco-activist volunteer? You cannot be half the way to something else, do you? Is this right? Or maybe? Or at least clean a little bit? Just a little bit? No way? Sweep the kitchen floor once a... month? Nope? Okay... I couldn't stay much longer I'm afraid.
Noon: the car is packed. We leave after sharing hugs and hand shakes (scabies... uuuuugh!) and emails. Those people are nice and their work really inspiring. Amazing, actually. If you manage to forget about scabies and this young ascarides-stuffed puppy sleeping on the kitchen table, eating in the plates to be washed and licking everybody's mouth after licking its ass... Sigh! Veterinary studies don't make it easy to live with hippies ;) Even though they may change the world…
We head back to Virginia and drive all day to the south and finally enter North Carolina as the sunset goes down and the skyes are so beautiful and pinkish. On a desert road on the way to Asheville we stop for dinner at an odd desert restaurant. A tired middle-aged blonde waitress, sweet and smiling, serves us decent truckers’ food. A phone call to Monica, our Couchsurfer host for the night, to tell her we won't make it tonight because we're still so far away. Just a bit later, we’re driving in circles in a residential suburb of Black Mountain, desperately trying to find a place to set the tent. Hem, not that easy. On the next morning, we reach Asheville, a lovely arty hippy-chic little town. Monica said there were basically two streets: the fashion one with expensive art galleries and the boheme one with vegan fair-trade shops and cafes. That's not exactly true. There is also a huge Greenlife organic store where we fill the backpacks with grains and fruits and cheese before going hiking in the Great Smokey Moutains.On the parking, just in front of the store’s door is a street electric bass player. Tall, black, in his fifties and with a mustache, he's the local version of both Danny (for the look) and Roger (for the bass) Glover. And he sure knows what to do with a bass. Somewhere between Marcus Miller and Mr. Wooten, he stands smiling, slapping his incredibly phat grooves with a steady thumb and a tambourine under his right foot. Not even sweating. I have my watery fair trade organic french-brew Nicaragua coffee with milk listening to him and have a look around before going back to the car. Even the old mamas with their groceries trolley seem to be shaking their asses off the walkways while dude’s grooving. Won’t you take me to… funky town? A long hour later we enter Cherokee, gate of the Great Smokeys. I won't be long about Cherokee and the indian reservation. Imagine a zoo where the sick, sad, depressed, fat animals would be human beings in ridiculous costumes and paintings. With little road signs showing them RAIN DANCING and mimicking THE WAR TRAIL or such. Well, if you can imagine it, plus the cheap booze and the dozens of gift and indian craft and souvenir stores and the poor fat old men covered with feathers and face paintings trying to smile for the cameras for one dollar, you have a pretty accurate idea of what Cherokee and the indian reservation are. Ah, almost forgot. This, plus all the black bears souvenirs, posters, magnets, tee-shirts, liquors, skin or furry hats, jewelry made out of bears teeth and so on. Ah, almost forgot. This, plus all the restaurants having mountain river trout on their menu. I'm surprised to be in Montmartre, in LaRambla, in Lourdes and in Sigean at the same time. If it wasn't so sad, it would be revolting, I guess...
Another while driving along a silvery stream and we enter the natural park. We let the car where our 3 day hike is supposed to end a get a lift from une gentille française living in Atlanta, to get where our 3 day hike is supposed to begin. After 20 minutes walking along the trail, civilization is behind us. Fresh crystal waters on small singing creeks, big trees, butterflies and flowers and bushes and scents and stones and fuck, nature in the Appalaches is so amazingly beautiful. We last 4 hours to reach Mount Leconte, the second summit of the range, and to set the camp at a shelter there. Anti-bear equipments to hang the backpacks, anti-bear recommandations, anti-bear ladders to the shelter, anti-bear prohibition to cook in and around the shelter... Looks like we are in a remake of Romero's Dawn of the Bears. Ah ah ah. Actually, I won't see any bear in the next 3 days, although their presence is almost touchable. On the trees and the trails, at least. 8 hours of hiking the next day, a good positive and negative elevation and my 18kg backpack remind me I'm not so young anymore. We cross and follow the Appalachian Trail again, meet some old hippies with long white beards but no dogs because due to the bears, this is the only section of the AT they cannot take the dogs with them... Meet two nice guys working for Alsthom in Knoxville, and a nice couple from Birmingham at the second shelter. We make a fire and talk with them. I look for any possible occasion to fill my camping shower bag with water, let it in the sun for a couple of hours and then hang it to a branch and enjoy a delicious warm shower in the woods. Rhaaaaa. I'm really sure of it now: home is not a place, it's a state of mind. And a foldable camping shower makes it easier to get in the apropriate state of mind!
On the morning of the third day, we finish the hike with a long steep 3 hour trail from the bottom of the valley up to the ridge, where the car is waiting for us. Feeling dirty and sweaty but the weather is perfect and the breeze is fresh at about 5000 feet. We drive the Cherolahah Skyway, another secondary little road following the Appalachian range, then enter Tennessee and head south to Chattanooga where Andy is waiting for us. We easily find him at a bar, silently talking to his pint of amber ale, then follow his rusty westfalia VW van to his place. He's a thirty something tall blond hippy with dreadlocks, works 3 nights a weeks at a bar downtown and lives in a small wooden house with 2 friends, surrounded by trees, bicycle parts and pictures from his travels. A genuine sports freak, he climbs, rides, hikes, paraglides and rafts. Plus, he’s saving money to make it to Toronto by bike this summer: more than 2000 miles riding (is it what he said? isn't it too much?). Eh! Pas mal! He’s a charming guy, has a nice conversation, and a delicious sense of home-made design. Makes us feel comfortable and at home in about two minutes. So easy-going and friendly. Why does Couchsurfing gather the nicest people on earth? Or, better say, how comes all the nicest people on earth decided to gather on Couchsurfing?
We cook together a vegetarian lasagna, a colombian salad with fresh cilantro plus a delicious guacamole he prepares adding sprouted lentils and soy beans to the genuine recipe : excellent! I also tried some arepas with a non-conventional corn-flour. It's been a complete disaster although we survived eating them... Hem... We then spend a while talking around local beers before showering and falling dead in bed. Next morning, supposed to go rock climbing, the rain starts falling right after breakfast so we spend the morning crashing on the couches in the living room, watching the rain on the bright green of the garden, talking about life and everything and nothing in particular and finishing the lasagna and the beers and doing some laundry. Then we say goodbye and he goes to work and we drive south through Tennessee, on our way to Alabama. We cross Birmingham: an abandoned, desert, ghost, depressing as much as depressed zombie town and found no place to have dinner on a cold grey monday evening. We make it to Tuscaloosa and have the best hamburgers one can possibly dream of. Huge. Heavy. Fat. Juicy. Tasty. Way too big. So totally unhealthy it's a pleasure to just imagine the triglycerides filling my arteries. Plus, the french fries are battered in beer before being soaked in the boiling oil. Jesus! It's so fucking good it has to be a sin! Spend 2 hours looking for a national forest or something around Tuscaloosa to set the tent and finally hide both the car and the tent behind some trees and bushes, hoping nobody will come by. Quiet night. The next morning, as usually in these circumstances, seeing the place you chose the night before, when it was dark, with the bright light of the day is a funny experience. The main highway is way closer than it seemed and all the trucks would probably see the tent if the trucks' drivers were looking at the road while they drove. We're lucky enough they all watch TV and read the newspapers while driving on cruise mode... We cross Greensboro, a small town severely hit by the crisis, and enter a pies’ café called PieLab. Check for www.pielab.org, it's worth it. In the middle of the deepest crisis, a bunch of cook and graphic designers built this unique cosy space to both cook and sell pies and create sustainable design and ads and stuff. Nice people, creative and positive, they create jobs and life and activity and workshops for children and adults in a deeply sinistered neighborhood. No need to say the pies are fantabulous and the coffee, organic, fair trade and… watery. ;)
The rest of the day is not especially exciting, driving south through Alabama. We listen listening to Janis Joplin, Taj Mahal and a bluegrass band whose name i cannot remember. They’re good and their tunes take us until we enter, and while we go all the way through Mississippi, down to Louisiana. After meeting a scary hostess at the Alabama welcoming center, who asked for our passport numbers and phone numbers and address and blood type and about how long and where we planned to stay in Alabama, just "so as to help us have the best possible stay there", we stopped at a lovely Trucks' kitchen by the hughway. Fuck, this creepy old fat women looking exactly like the one in Stephen King's Misery. And the trucks' kitchen was exactly like in my dreams (from the american road movies of my childhood): sitting at the bar, eating eggs and sausage and grits with the TV news. And this middle-aged fat woman, named Shirley, with a white and red shirt and curly hair, refilling for free your mug of watery cafe and calling you Babe. Well, she was a Tracy but everything else was pretty similar to the cliché of the Shirley waitress... I then spent several hours sighing, nose against the window, as miles went by, couting the road kills along the highway 59. Interestingly enough, the raccoons disappeared progressively as an important quantity of armadillos began to settle at the top of my charts. Maybe twenty to thirty dead armadillos just on the right side of the 59 South. They look so cute! I wanted to stop and take one and stuff it. And shivered each time I imagined them alive... We reached Louisiana in the evening and entered New Orleans with the sunset to meet Rachel, our Couchsurfing host for the first night. But that's another story.
As a conclusion? Well, an amazing week, full of beautiful spaces and people. A very impacting, very inspiring week. Dense and full of great ideas, causes and fights. And an interesting contrast, all along this 1000 miles long moutainous range. A contrast between the most preserved and protected natural spaces and the most devastated ones ; between acute environmental awareness and aberrant industrial development ; between sustainable alternative consciouness and crazy blind straight-in-the-wall capitalist behaviour and consuming ; between creative, positive solutions and huge, massive problems ; between indians in cages and hippies at war ; between coal and trees ; between shopping malls with KFCs and virgin nature ; between crisis and wealth ; between yesterdays' mistakes and today's consequences... and tomorrow's solutions?
Love to all. Take care of what's important for you!
Anyway… I arrived in New Orleans 3 days ago, and I’ve been looking for this moment since last Sunday, and I'm running soooooo late. If I belonged to the half-full bottle seeing kind of people, I would say I'm early for the third week report. I also realized I gave no title to the first episode (something like "New York, New York", although easy, would definitely work). The second's will be : “An Appalaches paradox” (any suggestion for titles is welcome. i won't pay for them, though)
Well, we left Brooklyn on a sunny sunday morning. The trunk was filled with stuff, and so was the gas tank. Not with stuff, obviously. With gas. And so our stomachs got filled too, I bought these delicious chocolate and pumpkin, bran and mango, squash and blueberry muffins. A good series of highways and bridges and junctions, all being Memorial of something or somebody, took us very easily through New Jersey and Delaware, then Maryland, to Washington DC. Laura was supposed to meet some friends and family there, so I took the car on my own (woooooooooo!) and wandered around Columbia and the northern suburbs of DC, cruise control on, speed regulator on 25mph, automatic gearbox on D4, coffee with milk in its recycled plastic mug (CAUTION, LIQUID INSIDE MAY BE HOT) just by the side of the hand brake and Mr. Dylan on the stereo. Sweet. No use of your feet, no need of your hands. Driving becomes an experience of total irresponsability and peaceful passivity. Later in the evening, went downtown to meet my friend Zia. She was one of my very first CS guests from Toulouse, about 5 years ago now. She’s from the Phillipines, has been living in DC for 2 years now, after almost 2 years travelling and couchsurfing around Europe, then through Turkey and the middle-east to Pakistan, on her own, and back to South-East Asia. She’s now studying and working there. And enjoying, as strange at it may seem, this bizarre heterogenous and un-natural city. To me, DC looked like a huge residential area built around a fake, artificial core of pretentious administrative palaces. They all look like those birthday cakes we drew as kids, massive pre-colombian pyramids of cream and fruits and candles, with columns and greco-baptist-latino-colonial-empire-rococo stuff. Everything is set up with gardens and fountains and memorials and large avenues whose pattern you can easily imagine to be, from the sky, that of a proud fishing eagle or something like that... DC probably gives that sensation because this is exactly what it is, though.
While walking around looking for Zia and not understanding exactly where she was supposed to be waiting for me, "with white trousers and a big brown hat", I remembered with a tender smile the megalomaniac cities I used to built on Caesar III or Ages of empire. With all the impresive big temples and universities and hospitals and oracles and coliseums in the middle, with a star-shaped main square, then geometric, rigid, square streets with monotonous, homogeneous housing lots... Well, I guess either they programmed those video games after DC's architectonic concepts, or they've been playing Caesar III for years without leeting us know and it influenced the way they then drew this towns' map !
We wandered around the Capitole, Obelisc, Ministeries and Memorials. Saw this awkward Monument to the Wars, whose stone rhetorics and golden lettering seems to glorify war, death, conflicts and VICTORY all around the world. When it maybe should, instead, quietly and humbly call for memory and future peace. Especially, this thing about victory confused me a little bit. I thought that in the end, nobody was victorious in a war. And if we talk about Korea, Vietnam and WWII, I'm not sure victory means a lot. I remembered them some of my feelings and emotions in Hiroshima's peace park and Paris Memorial de la déportation, and, honestly, had that bitter taste in my mooth. Imagine the gravity point of the core of the very center of Washington DC. Try to see it from the sky and see how it's the heart of the administrative and political machine of this country which pretends to be ruling the world. And see how this very center of everything is a memorial glorifying horror, glorifying hundreds of thousands, millions of death, as the price for victory and freedom... Scary shit, isn't it ?
Okay. Enough about that. The Potomac river and all the heavy official stuff were really nice in the evening light and I recognized in just a second this big statue of president Jefferson (is it Jefferson?) Lisa Simpson visits and shares her existential doubts with... Who said TV sitcoms couldn't teach you anything about Culture ? I took some hopefully nice pictures and experienced a subway problem with improbable delays. Talking about the subway, I loved the James Bond stylish design, like a 50's secret cave labyrinth of deep, dark, impressive concrete corridors and tunnels, then spent the night at one of Laura's friend.
Enough of DC, at least for me. Monday morning, we took the car again and left. A sunny day, a light traffic, a fresh breeze. After a dozen of housing blocks with neat lawn and trees, I'm suddenly driving this average automatic gearbox big car on the mythical Road 66, surrounded by huge long trucks, heading west to Front Royal and the Shenandoah National Park, just on the northern part of the Appalaches. A few days before, checking a route on Google maps, we had discovered a secondary road called Blue Ridge Parkway, going all the way down from Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, and decided we might want to drive it instead of a highway... Shenandoah is a beautiful mountainous park and we camped there for the first night after a couple of hours hiking under a bright green canopy with mosquitoes, mosquitoes and mosquitoes. A bunch of lovely adorable park rangers in their early forties, a bit fat in their tight sexy brown uniforms, proudly wearing their beards and hats as if they were to be shot for a show of the Village People, introduced us to the rules of the park and made sure we had enough specific knowledge and strong ropes to hang the food and toothpaste properly... because of the inquisitive clumsy dreadful dangerous black bears that would sure enough come visit our camp during the night. Oh my god, the bears, the bears! We actually met no bear at all. And on the whole, let me think… nobody at all. Hey, wait! Not true. There was this young stupid tender and probably motherless deer which pretended to have dinner with us and share my air mattress. No way. Get out of the tent you half-civilized piece of wildlife. If you ever happened to have a conscience, you would be ashamed of your lack of self-esttem and consideration for your wildlife condition. Hem, always trying to give lessons… We named it Jean-Claude (because its sweet eyes and cute look were those of a famous kungfu master from Belgium), thought about slaughtering it so as to smoke one of its skinny gigots into a piece of coppa, and finally had to throw stones at it until it gave up following us. Believe me or not, the wildlife is not what it used to be.
Next day, had a 7 hour long hike along and around the mythical Appalachian Trail. For those who ignore about hiking, who don’t shiver and sigh at the sound of the letters HRP or think GR10 is a post-traduction variant of an obscure Glycosaminoside Receptor, the Appalachian Trail (AT) is a hiking trail that goes 2000 miles along the Appalachian range from North Carolina to Maine. It is hiked by old hippies and bums with white beards and dogs, young hippish freshly graduated students, middle-aged hippies on their way to somewhere else and other kinds of walking hippies. Quite in the spirit of Kerouac's dharma bums. Nice. Indeed.
Saw some waterfalls and some disgusting reddish pale legged worms and glittering insects Olivier Esnault would have been glad to meet. Took the car and drove down the Blue Ridge Pkway again. So beautiful. Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. These views and landscape and the Harley Davidson low riders we kept crossing! Oh, the places you’ll go, said the other, once… Stopped by a lovely lake (Sherando lake, if I remember it well) to swim a little bit (Beark. Oh, the disgusting soft material I have to step on before actually swimming) to the small desertic island in the middle. Surprisingly got attacked by some ticks there. What the hell do they do on a desert island where there are no animals at all? Is that why they yawned and screamed and jumped on me the second I stepped on the shore? Were they zombie mutant ticks waiting for a prey to haunt on this cursed island? All I know is I now have to check for some erythema migrans and other Lyme's disease symptoms. Played Go on the bank of the lake’s small creek until the park rangers abandoned the place, then crawled into the campsite restrooms to meticulously shower and check for extra ticks, do the washing-up and fill all the water bottles we had. Then took the car to Jefferson National Forest where we set the camp in a bizarre creepy round field in the middle of high dark pines (or maybe spruces). I spent the night awake listening to strange forest sounds, fearing a nightmare mutant zombie psycho-killer would come and murder us. Or even worse, take my soul and eat it with garlic and wild chives until the end of eternity. Brrrr!
The next morning, we left Virginia for West Virginia, to Beckley then Rock Creek, kind of an end-of-the-world remote area where cell phone service doesn't even exist. We wanted to meet there, and spend some time with, a bunch of eco-activists living on a squatting-in-the-woods community called Climate Ground Zero. Check for them on the net! These guys have been fighting and volunteering and non-violently acting against Mountain Top Removal (MTR, check for this too) for years, now. MTR is a really cheap technique to extract coal. You basically burst mountains off with tons of dynamite, from the top, and then shake the hundreds of tons of rocks you get to separate the coal. Once it's done, you fuck up hundreds of thousands of gallons of pure river water to rinse the coal and throw all the stones and trees and natural garbage you produced down in the valleys, burying square miles of villages, fields, forests, streams and such. As you can imagine, the whole process needs huge amounts of heavy metals, chemicals and such, so as to purify and prepare the coal. And the incidence of cancers, selenium poisoning, asthma and other allergies in this area is of the highest in the country. West Virginia, the coal country, is poor, very poor, just so poor, among the poorest of the USA. And coal extraction brings jobs and wages, but basically brings money to the few big oil companies which bought those mountains for nothing 50 years ago (quite often, for just a box of cheap booze – the price of a good hangover and a signature) and are simply making this lovely region a dirty flat sterile ground. We met the community and spent 24 hours with them. Visited Larry Gibson (check for him), the lill' ol' man who spent his whole life fighting MTR to save the small piece of mountain he calls his home. Very impacting, charismatic, old guy. We followed one of his young activist followers (following a follower, ain't that something Jacques Brel talked about in one of his songs, uh?) to the edge of an active MTR site, about 200 yards behind his solar-powered eco-friendly non-Ikea home-made little cabin. I took some pictures and could try to talk about it but it's hard to do. And to imagine. Or make you imagine it. "It's difficult to see what is not here", says Larry. And after a while he adds, sadly "people here don't do anything. They just don't realize MTR is killing us". He walks a bit more. I almost step on a big copper head viper taking a nap on a warm stone in the shade under a tree, and don't realize until they tell me to just move on the right, fast... He he he. I now got a lovely picture of it. Beautiful animal. Yyyyyks. He also says (Larry, not the viper) something like "When you breathe it, when you eat it, when you live it everyday of your life, you just cannot see it. Go and tell people". That’s what I'm doing right now, I guess. Well, I’m trying, at least.
We then had a beautiful dinner back at the community, played this game of throwing horseshoes to touch a stick, like our pétanque, talked with this bunch of eco-hippies, all coming from different parts of the country and from different walks of life, to just volunteer for the project. Only a minority of them is from West Virginia. But some are. One of the youngest, not even twenty, was born in Rock Creek. As soon as 16, he began working as a nightguard for B & M, on an MTR site, and about 2 years after, decided to quit and join the community… he explains to me, half proud, half cynical, that he went to THE elementary school. And survived it, he adds. I’ve heard about THE elementary school earlier in the day: there’s only one elementary school in the whole area, and it’s about 600 yards under the gigantic pond where the coal is soaked and rinsed. The shadow of the coal silos run through the school’s playground everyday, more or less by the hour the kids are out playing. Neither the county, nor the state, nor the federal government, nor the oil companies did anything to move the school. And one of the community's biggest victories, after more than ten years, is the volunteers raised the money and got the ground to build a new elem school far away from the pond. Not a big deal, but something. Somewhere in one of the dirty houses and tents, between cooking dinner, doing the dishes and playing music by the fire, I read or heard this phrase from Gandhi I liked : "if you believe one single being cannot make a difference, then you've never been in bed with a mosquito"... This was my good night chewing sentence at climate ground zero...
The next morning, had breakfast and talked with them all, gardening a little bit, or better said strumming an old cheap guitar while they were gardening, watching at my coffee with milk getting cold on the wooden porch of a house on its way to fall apart. White and grey waters tanks, solar panels, compost, green restrooms, home made greenhouse with tomatoes, avocados, radishes and strawberries. Nothing is thrown away, everything eventually serves and lives a second (third, fourth) life. Military camp equipment, old wooden boards, rusty nails and all you can imagine is abandoned around in a fancy romantic bohemian mess. Ah, and there's no shower. NO SHOWER !!! Fuck. Why do you have to be dirty and sweaty and eventually have scabies (don't laugh, they had had scabies at the camp a few months earlier) to be a good eco-activist volunteer? You cannot be half the way to something else, do you? Is this right? Or maybe? Or at least clean a little bit? Just a little bit? No way? Sweep the kitchen floor once a... month? Nope? Okay... I couldn't stay much longer I'm afraid.
Noon: the car is packed. We leave after sharing hugs and hand shakes (scabies... uuuuugh!) and emails. Those people are nice and their work really inspiring. Amazing, actually. If you manage to forget about scabies and this young ascarides-stuffed puppy sleeping on the kitchen table, eating in the plates to be washed and licking everybody's mouth after licking its ass... Sigh! Veterinary studies don't make it easy to live with hippies ;) Even though they may change the world…
We head back to Virginia and drive all day to the south and finally enter North Carolina as the sunset goes down and the skyes are so beautiful and pinkish. On a desert road on the way to Asheville we stop for dinner at an odd desert restaurant. A tired middle-aged blonde waitress, sweet and smiling, serves us decent truckers’ food. A phone call to Monica, our Couchsurfer host for the night, to tell her we won't make it tonight because we're still so far away. Just a bit later, we’re driving in circles in a residential suburb of Black Mountain, desperately trying to find a place to set the tent. Hem, not that easy. On the next morning, we reach Asheville, a lovely arty hippy-chic little town. Monica said there were basically two streets: the fashion one with expensive art galleries and the boheme one with vegan fair-trade shops and cafes. That's not exactly true. There is also a huge Greenlife organic store where we fill the backpacks with grains and fruits and cheese before going hiking in the Great Smokey Moutains.On the parking, just in front of the store’s door is a street electric bass player. Tall, black, in his fifties and with a mustache, he's the local version of both Danny (for the look) and Roger (for the bass) Glover. And he sure knows what to do with a bass. Somewhere between Marcus Miller and Mr. Wooten, he stands smiling, slapping his incredibly phat grooves with a steady thumb and a tambourine under his right foot. Not even sweating. I have my watery fair trade organic french-brew Nicaragua coffee with milk listening to him and have a look around before going back to the car. Even the old mamas with their groceries trolley seem to be shaking their asses off the walkways while dude’s grooving. Won’t you take me to… funky town? A long hour later we enter Cherokee, gate of the Great Smokeys. I won't be long about Cherokee and the indian reservation. Imagine a zoo where the sick, sad, depressed, fat animals would be human beings in ridiculous costumes and paintings. With little road signs showing them RAIN DANCING and mimicking THE WAR TRAIL or such. Well, if you can imagine it, plus the cheap booze and the dozens of gift and indian craft and souvenir stores and the poor fat old men covered with feathers and face paintings trying to smile for the cameras for one dollar, you have a pretty accurate idea of what Cherokee and the indian reservation are. Ah, almost forgot. This, plus all the black bears souvenirs, posters, magnets, tee-shirts, liquors, skin or furry hats, jewelry made out of bears teeth and so on. Ah, almost forgot. This, plus all the restaurants having mountain river trout on their menu. I'm surprised to be in Montmartre, in LaRambla, in Lourdes and in Sigean at the same time. If it wasn't so sad, it would be revolting, I guess...
Another while driving along a silvery stream and we enter the natural park. We let the car where our 3 day hike is supposed to end a get a lift from une gentille française living in Atlanta, to get where our 3 day hike is supposed to begin. After 20 minutes walking along the trail, civilization is behind us. Fresh crystal waters on small singing creeks, big trees, butterflies and flowers and bushes and scents and stones and fuck, nature in the Appalaches is so amazingly beautiful. We last 4 hours to reach Mount Leconte, the second summit of the range, and to set the camp at a shelter there. Anti-bear equipments to hang the backpacks, anti-bear recommandations, anti-bear ladders to the shelter, anti-bear prohibition to cook in and around the shelter... Looks like we are in a remake of Romero's Dawn of the Bears. Ah ah ah. Actually, I won't see any bear in the next 3 days, although their presence is almost touchable. On the trees and the trails, at least. 8 hours of hiking the next day, a good positive and negative elevation and my 18kg backpack remind me I'm not so young anymore. We cross and follow the Appalachian Trail again, meet some old hippies with long white beards but no dogs because due to the bears, this is the only section of the AT they cannot take the dogs with them... Meet two nice guys working for Alsthom in Knoxville, and a nice couple from Birmingham at the second shelter. We make a fire and talk with them. I look for any possible occasion to fill my camping shower bag with water, let it in the sun for a couple of hours and then hang it to a branch and enjoy a delicious warm shower in the woods. Rhaaaaa. I'm really sure of it now: home is not a place, it's a state of mind. And a foldable camping shower makes it easier to get in the apropriate state of mind!
On the morning of the third day, we finish the hike with a long steep 3 hour trail from the bottom of the valley up to the ridge, where the car is waiting for us. Feeling dirty and sweaty but the weather is perfect and the breeze is fresh at about 5000 feet. We drive the Cherolahah Skyway, another secondary little road following the Appalachian range, then enter Tennessee and head south to Chattanooga where Andy is waiting for us. We easily find him at a bar, silently talking to his pint of amber ale, then follow his rusty westfalia VW van to his place. He's a thirty something tall blond hippy with dreadlocks, works 3 nights a weeks at a bar downtown and lives in a small wooden house with 2 friends, surrounded by trees, bicycle parts and pictures from his travels. A genuine sports freak, he climbs, rides, hikes, paraglides and rafts. Plus, he’s saving money to make it to Toronto by bike this summer: more than 2000 miles riding (is it what he said? isn't it too much?). Eh! Pas mal! He’s a charming guy, has a nice conversation, and a delicious sense of home-made design. Makes us feel comfortable and at home in about two minutes. So easy-going and friendly. Why does Couchsurfing gather the nicest people on earth? Or, better say, how comes all the nicest people on earth decided to gather on Couchsurfing?
We cook together a vegetarian lasagna, a colombian salad with fresh cilantro plus a delicious guacamole he prepares adding sprouted lentils and soy beans to the genuine recipe : excellent! I also tried some arepas with a non-conventional corn-flour. It's been a complete disaster although we survived eating them... Hem... We then spend a while talking around local beers before showering and falling dead in bed. Next morning, supposed to go rock climbing, the rain starts falling right after breakfast so we spend the morning crashing on the couches in the living room, watching the rain on the bright green of the garden, talking about life and everything and nothing in particular and finishing the lasagna and the beers and doing some laundry. Then we say goodbye and he goes to work and we drive south through Tennessee, on our way to Alabama. We cross Birmingham: an abandoned, desert, ghost, depressing as much as depressed zombie town and found no place to have dinner on a cold grey monday evening. We make it to Tuscaloosa and have the best hamburgers one can possibly dream of. Huge. Heavy. Fat. Juicy. Tasty. Way too big. So totally unhealthy it's a pleasure to just imagine the triglycerides filling my arteries. Plus, the french fries are battered in beer before being soaked in the boiling oil. Jesus! It's so fucking good it has to be a sin! Spend 2 hours looking for a national forest or something around Tuscaloosa to set the tent and finally hide both the car and the tent behind some trees and bushes, hoping nobody will come by. Quiet night. The next morning, as usually in these circumstances, seeing the place you chose the night before, when it was dark, with the bright light of the day is a funny experience. The main highway is way closer than it seemed and all the trucks would probably see the tent if the trucks' drivers were looking at the road while they drove. We're lucky enough they all watch TV and read the newspapers while driving on cruise mode... We cross Greensboro, a small town severely hit by the crisis, and enter a pies’ café called PieLab. Check for www.pielab.org, it's worth it. In the middle of the deepest crisis, a bunch of cook and graphic designers built this unique cosy space to both cook and sell pies and create sustainable design and ads and stuff. Nice people, creative and positive, they create jobs and life and activity and workshops for children and adults in a deeply sinistered neighborhood. No need to say the pies are fantabulous and the coffee, organic, fair trade and… watery. ;)
The rest of the day is not especially exciting, driving south through Alabama. We listen listening to Janis Joplin, Taj Mahal and a bluegrass band whose name i cannot remember. They’re good and their tunes take us until we enter, and while we go all the way through Mississippi, down to Louisiana. After meeting a scary hostess at the Alabama welcoming center, who asked for our passport numbers and phone numbers and address and blood type and about how long and where we planned to stay in Alabama, just "so as to help us have the best possible stay there", we stopped at a lovely Trucks' kitchen by the hughway. Fuck, this creepy old fat women looking exactly like the one in Stephen King's Misery. And the trucks' kitchen was exactly like in my dreams (from the american road movies of my childhood): sitting at the bar, eating eggs and sausage and grits with the TV news. And this middle-aged fat woman, named Shirley, with a white and red shirt and curly hair, refilling for free your mug of watery cafe and calling you Babe. Well, she was a Tracy but everything else was pretty similar to the cliché of the Shirley waitress... I then spent several hours sighing, nose against the window, as miles went by, couting the road kills along the highway 59. Interestingly enough, the raccoons disappeared progressively as an important quantity of armadillos began to settle at the top of my charts. Maybe twenty to thirty dead armadillos just on the right side of the 59 South. They look so cute! I wanted to stop and take one and stuff it. And shivered each time I imagined them alive... We reached Louisiana in the evening and entered New Orleans with the sunset to meet Rachel, our Couchsurfing host for the first night. But that's another story.
As a conclusion? Well, an amazing week, full of beautiful spaces and people. A very impacting, very inspiring week. Dense and full of great ideas, causes and fights. And an interesting contrast, all along this 1000 miles long moutainous range. A contrast between the most preserved and protected natural spaces and the most devastated ones ; between acute environmental awareness and aberrant industrial development ; between sustainable alternative consciouness and crazy blind straight-in-the-wall capitalist behaviour and consuming ; between creative, positive solutions and huge, massive problems ; between indians in cages and hippies at war ; between coal and trees ; between shopping malls with KFCs and virgin nature ; between crisis and wealth ; between yesterdays' mistakes and today's consequences... and tomorrow's solutions?
Love to all. Take care of what's important for you!
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