Hello Everyone! It’s hard to believe another week has passed here in the Great Lakes State. They really seem to be flying by and while I am seeing and doing a lot, the time is really moving. I’ve finally crossed the 45th Parallel (midway between the equator and the North Pole) for the final time here in Michigan and am only heading north from here. I spent a little more time than I would have liked to have in Traverse City this week, but it was a nice town and I was able to catch up on some work. I finished another episode of my podcast (out now – listen to it here or by searching “American Anthology” wherever you get your podcasts), which is always a bit of a chore even if it’s something I really enjoy doing. I also spent a night out on far-flung Beaver Island, Lake Michigan’s largest island and an interesting place to visit. The weather has been holding up pretty well, but we’ve had some hazy days here which hasn’t made for the best photography conditions. All in all, it’s been a pretty good week on the road.
When last I wrote, I had just arrived in Traverse City. Traverse City is a very pleasant town with a good variety of services which allowed me to get some work done. In addition to the library which had good internet access, they also had a gym to shower at and plenty of shops to restock my supplies. On Thursday night, after I finished up last week’s This Week, I headed out to the Traverse City Pit-Spitters baseball game. The Pit-Spitters are a part of the Northwoods League which is a summer league for college players. The game was a lot of fun and it was $2 beer and hotdog night which you really can’t go wrong with. I also have to applaud whatever genius came up with the name “Pit-Spitters” because I absolutely had to buy a t-shirt at the game. And the Pit-Spitters won, so that made it even better.
On Friday morning I toured the old Michigan State Asylum in Traverse City. At $30 for a ticket, it was a bit pricey for a walking tour, but it was really good and I would say definitely worth it. Our guide grew up in the area and had several connections to the hospital when it was still active (which it was until the 1980s). He intertwined his personal stories in with the history of the building and what they accomplished there. The central idea by which they operated was “beauty is therapy”, which meant that the campus was full of ponds and flowers and walking trails and the buildings had big windows to let in plenty of sun and it was well appointed with nice furniture and plenty of art. Patients were expected to work, and the hospital was self-sustaining for much of its early existence, producing enough food that there was a surplus which was sold to the local community. When the hospital officially closed, the community banded together to save it from being demolished. Today the campus is getting a second life as a mixed-use complex with condos, restaurants, studios and low-income housing. The whole place was really cool and definitely worth seeing. After my tour, I enjoyed a nice lunch in one of the restaurants there. When I finished at the hospital, I embarked on an afternoon drive up the Old Mission Peninsula which took me to the Old Mission Lighthouse and past some wonderful farm stands and wineries. They’re coming to the very end of the cherry season here in Michigan, and it’s been great to eat so many cherries and taste different varieties. I’m probably about cherried out though. Heading back in Traverse City, I went to a nice winery just outside of town for some live music and a few glasses of wine and to finish writing the last bits of my podcast.
Happy Halloween from Washington D.C. I’ve been out and about these last few weeks gathering up stories and taking photos of some of Washington’s most haunted locations. It’s been a wonderful jaunt around the city and it’s always great to see things from a different angle. This is by no means an exhaustive list, just some of the places I enjoyed most. Please keep in mind that these are stories and I haven’t gone out of my way to disprove them or check for historical accuracy. Halloween is a day to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy a good ghost story, so enjoy this haunted historical trip around our nation’s Capital and the surrounding area. Happy Halloween!
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this series focuses on a single picture and what it brings into my mind. In this particular post I’ve chosen two photos (and written closer to 2000 words) on the topic of “otherness”. One picture is me at a work party with the other teachers I worked with in Japan and the other is of me and my students when I taught in New Orleans.
There have been a lot of times in my life where I have been the “other”. In fact, most of my adult life has been dominated my some form or other of “otherness”. Some have been more pronounced while others have been more subtle. Since this idea of “otherness” has captured the national attention recently, and for very good reason, I thought I’d offer my own perspective.
After High School, I went to Penn State, a state university in central Pennsylvania. I didn’t realize at the time nor think much about the fact that the vast majority of people there were obviously going to be from Pennsylvania. There were always sports team loyalties and conversations about differences in accents and dialect that mostly went over my head. It wasn’t until much later, having spent a fair amount of time driving through rural parts of the state and recognizing town names from people I went to school with that I realized how different their upbringing was from mine. When I think of my time there though, I think mostly about our school spirit and camaraderie – how our “sameness” around our love of Penn State, our obsession with wearing blue and white clothing and our never-ending conversations about the football team overshadowed, for me at least, that sense of “otherness”.
In my professional career as a tour guide, I have taken hundreds of people from around the globe on cross country tours of the United States. While it is obviously my home country, I have spent much of the last 20 years surrounded by international guests.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a picture of me, Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert at the Warner Theater in D.C. and the story of how I came to meet these guys that night in 2010.
I’ve never been much on celebrity heroes. I’ve always thought it was a little strange that people will idolize a musician or an actor because it always feels to me like they are idolizing a character, not a person. Most rock stars and movie stars are playing a role and are very different when they are off camera, so to me it’s a bit like looking up to a character in a book like Atticus Finch or Tom Joad. On the other hand, there are people you come across at times in your life when you really need a hero and maybe their songs or their movies are the things that keep you going. Anthony Bourdain was that person for me.
After spending my twenties guiding multi-week tours of the U.S. all summer and spending my winters traveling the world, I finally gave in to the pressure to “grow up” and “get a real job”. Coupled with that was my desire to help out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans which is how I found myself wearing a tie and teaching junior high school math. The times were tough as was the job itself, but it was the dramatic lifestyle change that affected me the most. After so many years on the road, I was all of a sudden faced with rent and bills and trying to make the most of my weekends. I’m not going to lie, “the real world” wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I found myself struggling from paycheck to paycheck and from one week to the next. Going from my tour guide salary to a teacher’s salary seemed like a big jump, but after all of my bills it really didn’t leave much and I ended up getting a second job working three nights a week waiting tables. It was all a bit much.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this series I’ve chosen one picture per post which brings out strong memories for me and has a story attached to it. This picture is of the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, California, the place I first watched the sun set into the Pacific.
I was as far from home as I’d ever been.
When I went to college, my goal was to work for the National Park Service. My major was Wildlife and Fishery Science with a minor in American History. I spent five years working on two degrees to prepare myself for my career, but in the days of the infancy of the internet I really didn’t know what that career would entail. While there, I worked in the banquet department at a beautiful resort hotel and golf course and made pretty decent money for a college kid. I was, therefore, pretty disappointed when I started looking for a real job only to find that the only Park Service jobs available to me were 3 month temporary positions in parks I’d never heard of making $8 an hour. I couldn’t believe it – after five years of good grades and two degrees from an excellent institution I was only going to make $8 an hour? That was significantly less than I was making in my current job. And in three months I’d have to start all over again?
I decided to think on it for a while and headed to my summer home of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In my first “real world” lesson, I had to sign to a one-year lease to get a decent place to live, and went back to work at the restaurant I had worked at the previous two summers. Over the next year I worked a lot, drank too much and made some really good friends, some of whom are still my friends today, but didn’t make a lot of progress towards any career goals. I’d like to say it was fun, but looking back it just seemed like it was at the time. There were some great days, but life after college was supposed to be different.
After a year of spinning my wheels I found myself no further ahead than I had been when I arrived. I cut my losses, packed up my bags and headed north. I went back to Pennsylvania for a while, and then headed to Ocean City, Maryland for a few days to see what the work climate was like there. Nothing seemed to be working out, so I finally gave up and heading home to D.C
