Blue Highways: Orient (Point), New York

Unfolding the Map

The demise of the full service filling station is the subject of this post.  We have just sailed in to Orient, New York on the ferry with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and are back in New York for a quick trip through before beginning the trip west and back to the beginning.  Do you remember full service filling stations?  I miss them.  To find Orient Point, click here to see the map.

Book Quote

"If you want to hear distortions and misconceptions laced with plenty of dogmatic opinion, you have a choice of three places...bars, sport arenas, and gas stations....As filling stations cease to be garages and community centers, as they become nothing but expensive nozzles, they too are losing ground.  But, in the past, an American traveler depended on the local grease pit boys to tell him (a) the best route to wherever; (b) the best place to eat...; and (c) what the townfolk thought about whatsoever....

"Orient Point, Long Island, was a few houses and a collapsed four-story inn built in 1810..."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 7

Orient Point Lighthouse in Orient, New York. Photo by hatchski and hosted at Flickr. Click on photo to go to host page.Orient Point, New York

While visiting my hometown recently, I had an experience that was so unique in this day and age that I took note of it.  I had to stop for some gas, and pulled into a station on the main street to fill up.  As I got out of my rental car to open up the gas tank, a guy came out of the office and said "What do you need?"  Puzzled, I told him I was going to gas up.  He grabbed the nozzle and asked what type of gas I needed.  Then, he gassed up the car.  After he was done, I handed him my credit card, and he took it back into the garage, and then brought the credit card and slip out for me to sign on a clipboard.

He didn't check the dipstick under the hood, but I bet if I had asked him, he would have.

I remember when, and it seems like a long time ago, gas stations regularly provided that type of service.  When I was growing up, someone employed at a gas station always came out and filled the tank as well as looking under the hood and adding oil or water or wiper fluid as needed.  They also washed the windows, put air in the tires if needed, and sometimes gave your car a wash or a detailing.  This was the kind of service provided in 1963, the year of my birth, when gas cost 30 cents a gallon.

Now, as I write this, gas currently averages $3.51 in New Mexico where I live, and the most expensive state to buy gas is California, where I grew up, at an average $4.12.  And yet, when I pull into the pumps, I have to get out and fill up my own tank.  I have to check my own oil, and if I need some, I have to buy it and put it in myself.  If my tire is low, I have to pull the car over to the air compressor, if the station has one, and pay 50 to 75 cents to get the compressor started.  If my windshield is dirty, I have to hope that there is fluid in the containers provided near the pumps, or that there is a squeegee to use. 

I'm told that self-service gas stations are convenient, but it seems to me that it was more convenient to sit in my car and listen to the radio while someone else did the work.  I'm also told that self-service gas stations keep the price of auto fuel down, but then again, gas prices have risen anywhere from 1056-1323% since I was born.  Thirty cents in 1963, according to an inflation calculator which calculates at the average inflation rate of 4.18%, would have the same buying power as $2.23 today.  So gasoline has become more expensive yet less convenient over time, and I'm not sure what the savings has actually been.

But convenience and pricing isn't the only reason I'm writing about this.  LHM also points out that these businesses were an integral part of the community fabric.  People met at the gas station, not only to fill up but to exchange news, gossip and opinions.  Station attendants saw everyone in town and were often the source of important information.  Not only that, but they knew your car personally.  Did your car have a funny knock?  They knew which gas would minimize or eliminate it.  Did your car have a leaky hose but you didn't have enough money to replace it right away?  They could help you nurse it along until the last minute or until you could the money together to fix it.

When I go to fill up my car now, it's such an impersonal experience.  Gas stations have become pumps that sit outside small convenience stores.  It is rare to find a garage attached to a station anymore.  The convenience stores are usually staffed by clerks who seem to rarely smile (and would you for the paltry pay?) and who rarely even look at you.

I've written about this before in my posts, as have others who have bemoaned the loss of community in our country.  Today, people rely on their smart phones to get directions, on the internet for restaurant reviews, on Google to find anything and everything and on Facebook to share what they've found.  People socialize over the Web, buried in a wall of sound on their headphones in the middle of a crowded coffee shop, oblivious to each other and only aware of what is on their screen and in their ears.  We don't socialize with each other, but with a virtual community that can always throw information at us from behind its electronic walls, but can never provide us with real face-to-face contact and authentic human interaction.

And yes, some of these advances are convenient, and I use them.  But I don't think it's hypocritical to say, even in the midst of human advancement, that I miss some things about the past.  And one thing I miss, even as I bemoan that we rely so much on fossil fuel today, is sitting in my car like I did as a little boy and being fascinated as attendants so quickly and efficiently provided service to my parents' car and with a friendly wave sent us on our way.

Musical Interlude

I found a fun and funky song called Service Station Song (Let Me Pump Your Gas) by Mean Gene Kelton and the Die Hards.  I wonder what the song is getting at?  Unfortunately, Mean Gene is no longer with us.

If you want to know more about Orient Point

Cross Sound Ferry Services
LighthouseFriends.com: Orient Point
LongIslandLighthouses.com: Orient Point
Wikipedia: Orient

Next up:  Greenport, New York

Blue Highways: West of the Pecos, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe're driving along with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  The dusk is starting to get deeper.  There, against the paling light of the horizon, we see an almost perfect cone, rising like a temple out of the landscape.  We'll stop, climb it's height with LHM, and do some reflection.  See where I think this geographical feature that so caught LHM's attention is located by clicking on the map thumbnail at right.

Book quote

"West of the Pecos, a strangely truncated cone rose from the valley. In the oblique evening light, its silhouette looked like a Mayan temple, so perfect was its symmetry. I stopped again, started climbing, stirring a panic of lizards on the way up. From the top, the rubbled land below - veined with the highway and arroyos, topographical relief absorbed in the dusk - looked like a roadmap.

"....The night, taking up the shadows and details, wiped the face of the desert into a simple, uncluttered blackness until there were only three things: land, wind, stars. I was there too, but my presence I felt more than I saw. It was as if I had been reduced to mind, to an edge of consciousness. Men, ascetics, in all eras have gone into deserts to lose themselves - Jesus, Saint Anthony, Saint Basil, and numberless medicine men - maybe because such a losing happens almost as a matter of course here if you avail yourself. The Sioux once chanted, 'All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.'"

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Is this where William Least Heat-Moon climbed his "Mayan temple" in the desert west of the Pecos? Image from Google Earth's street view at 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°West of the Pecos, Texas

One of the coolest things invented, I think, is the programming code that first started out as Keyhole, and is now Google Earth.  LHM didn't give exact directions about where he found things along the side of the road, and there are some landmarks - a stream, a tree - that are going to be absolutely impossible to find.  But with the help of Google Earth, and especially it's street view feature, I think I was able to find exactly this very spot that LHM writes about west of the Pecos River.  If anyone is traveling along what once was Texas 29, now U.S. 190, toward Fort Stockton after passing through Iraan, Texas and then over the Pecos, you'll find this particular landmark at  latitude 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°.  The picture above was captured from Google Earth, and is what makes me think it's the right place, though of course there is no way of really knowing.  However, it appears to be the only place along that road that matches the description.

LHM seems to exhibit a lot of patterns on this trip.  He likes to stop at interesting places that are off the road.  He likes to climb to the top of things - he did so at the Caddo Mounds, and now here.  He also frequently evokes references to losing oneself.  He does a lengthy exploration of people voluntarily removing themselves from society at a trappist monastery in Georgia.  He refers to Jesus, saints and others in the quote above who have availed themselves of the desert to explore their deeper humanity and spirituality in a search for answers.

I think we can make our own deserts or we can find the physical desert, but the manifestation of the desert is different depending on which one we are in.  Since I've been living in a desert, the differences and the connections are more intermingled for me than they have been in the past.  Before, when I lived in other non-desert places, the actual desert was so far removed from my ordinary experience that seeing one or being in one was really a clash of sensibilities.  I wondered how anyone could possibly live there.

But often, regardless of where I was located, I was in a desert of my own making.  When I felt lonely, when if I withdrew from people because I was emotionally hurt or angry, or when I sought solace in meditation or prayer or some other type of reflective activity, I was inhabiting a desert of my own creation.  It is written that Jesus went into the desert and was tempted by Satan.  Every time I partook of activities in attempts to forestall something that I needed to do or take care of something that I should address, I was succumbing to those temptations and trapping myself in my desert.

The physical desert brings everything into stark relief.  In the desert you really are alone, and you feel very physically separated from other people.  You have withdrawn and it is difficult not to meditate or pray or reflect.  You are putting life aside for a moment to be there, because even though time doesn't really stop, it feels like it has.  The desert invites you to look at your life and put it in perspective.  The desert can tempt you with visions of what your life is and ought to be.  Medicine men go to the desert and some take narcotics like peyote in a ritual meant to draw the spirits and release those visions in stark detail, but the ordinary person need not go to such extremes to have similar desert revelations.

LHM says that he felt his presence and that he had been reduced to mind.  It is an amazing feeling to be at once so small and so big.  It puts us in our rightful place.  Yes, we are small in the cosmic sense, but yes, we are big because we can see, hear, experience so much and even our smallest actions can have large effects on our world.  Go to the desert to see, and you just may See.

Musical interlude

This is not a musician from Texas, but the topic made me think of this song anyhow.  Blind Willie McTell was a very influential blues artist in the 20s and 30s.  Searching the Desert for the Blues is a testament that no matter what our situation, we create our own deserts even in the midst of plenty.

If you want to know more about this area

I don't have anything for you.  It's a lonely stretch of land between Iraan and Fort Stockton.  It's all well, however.  Like LHM, you can take this space and time to do some reflection if you wish.

Next up: Fort Stockton, Texas

Blue Highways: Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIn this post, I get reflective, very reflective.  It's William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) fault because he stops at a Trappist monastery to learn why monks remove themselves from the world.  That leads me to reflect on my own inability to do so when I need to, and to examine the journey of a friend who seems to be able, through running, to find the best of both worlds.  I hope you find your healthy solace and solitude through reading this post.  Click on the map at right to see where LHM did his own little retreat, and feel free to let me know how you occasionally step away from the world.

Book Quote(s)

William Least Heat-Moon:  "Why would a sane man sequester himself?  Renounce the world?  How could he serve a religion that makes so much of love among peoples and then keep to himself?"

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 17

Brother Patrick, Trappist:  "I begin with this broken truth that I am.  I start from the entire broken man - entire but not whole.  Then I work to become empty.  And whole.  In looking for ways to God, I find parts of myself coming together.  In that union, I find a regeneration....

"....Coming here is following a call to be quiet.  When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside me.  Then I hear something very great."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 18

Inside church at Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers, Georgia. Click on photo to go to its host site.

Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Georgia

As I get older, I am a man who is beginning to understand himself.  Two years ago, after I finished my dissertation, I began to emerge from the self-imposed home exile into which I had put myself.  When one writes a dissertation, one immerses him or herself into the writing.  Days are spent trying to get something, anything on the paper.  The time for socializing is limited.  I had moved to a new city, Albuquerque, in 2004 and unlike in other cities where I lived, I didn't really go out seeking friendship and companionship.  I had work to finish.  It took four years.  While my wife was working and meeting people, I spent most of my days at home in front of the computer.

I was growing unsatisfied with life.  It seemed that my wife was ramping up her life with her career, her professional activities, and her friendships, and I wasn't ready to go along.  I was not willing to, as I saw it, careen from one event to the next.  I wanted something more sedate and controllable.  But conversely, I was also lonely.  I hadn't developed many friends in Albuquerque.  I was alone a lot, and I didn't like the aloneness.  In fact, I feared it and always had.  Wounding, hurtful views that I had about myself, created in the cauldron of family dysfunction of my youth, always came flooding to the surface when I was alone.  My doubts and fears, my self loathing and hatred, they always were lurking under the surface of my active life.  To be alone was to face them, and I didn't want to face them.

When I finished my dissertation, I ended up taking a one-year position as a visiting professor in Lubbock, Texas.  My wife stayed in Albuquerque.  I spent my weekdays in Lubbock, and drove five hours to Albuquerque on Friday and five hours back to Lubbock on Sunday.  In Lubbock, I was both alone and lonely.  I was lonely for my wife, lonely for friends.  And I was alone.  I feared greatly being alone five days a week.  But it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  I reveled in it.  I watched movies and I wrote.  I found the Zen of doing dishes and laundry.

When my assignment in Lubbock was over, I came back to my life.  But for some reason, I had trouble bringing with me that ability to find solace in aloneness as I got back into my Albuquerque life.  It was like having a retreat, but once the retreat is over, everything reverts to normal.  But I take as inspiration a friend who, I think, has found how to put a desire for silence and aloneness in balance with his duties and activities in the world.

When I was in my twenties, I joined a Catholic volunteer organization and lived with another man and three women in Milwaukee.  All of us did some kind of social work in the community.  The other guy, TJ, and I became close.  We initially bonded when the women in our house were in an argument over something, and both of us separately left the house and ended up together at a bowling alley where we drank some beer and played video games.

I considered myself artistic and literary, an English major.  I wrote poetry.  I was shy around and about women.  TJ had been a business major, a member of a college fraternity, and he'd had a lot of girlfriends.  But he was searching.  We talked and he began writing poetry and stories.  We both were competitive, and played games to win.  He taught me euchre, and one night when I couldn't lose he got so angry that he picked up a book, the Trappist Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, and threw it across the room.

In time, over that year, I came to consider him possibly the best friend I ever had.  He became important to me in a way that many others never had up to that point.  We were close, but we had difficult moments.  We both fell in love with one of our roommates.  It could have torn things up between us.  But that experience taught me just how emotionally fragile and immature I was, and set me on a path to some eventual inner healing.  I could have seen the situation as another competition between us, but for once TJ didn't make it that way.  In fact, both of them were generous enough to patiently put up with me until I could make peace with the situation.  That generosity made a huge impression on me.  Some years later, I was honored to be asked to be best man at their wedding.

A short time before the wedding, TJ decided to do a silent retreat at a Trappist monastery in Iowa.  How ironic since he had once thrown Thomas Merton's book forcefully into a wall.  He had flirted with the idea of becoming a priest, and I think that the retreat was a way for him to decide, once and for all, whether he really wanted marriage or to look into life as an ecclesiastic.  He was also drawn to silence.  He often spent time alone doing prayerful reflection, and certainly a Trappist monastery would offer a lot of time for silence.  His fiancee was, as you can imagine, worried about where this exploration would lead.  He did the retreat, and came home and made a decision.  He left any possibility of a path toward priesthood behind, and embarked into married life.

They had two children, both girls.  I was lucky enough to go on business trips to the East Coast where they moved and stayed with them three or four times a year.  Their youngest daughter became my godchild.  TJ became a high school teacher.  But he was troubled.  He started drinking more, and there were some signs of depression.  He sometimes spent evenings with a glass of whiskey in a darkened room, thinking and ruminating.  His wife was worried, and called me.  I offered what I could in phone talks.  He recognized what was happening, and made a decision to start counseling.  Things got better.  But it seemed that he was searching for something - that he felt in need of something that he still hadn't found.

I suggested once, when I was in a running phase, that he and I should train for a half-marathon.  I would train where I was living, and come out and run a race with him in his city.  We both trained, and we both ran.  Through running, it seemed he suddenly found what he needed.  He began training for marathons, first one, then another, then another - three or so a year.

Today, TJ seems more centered and grounded than I ever knew him to be.  He has nurtured his love of the written word, and teaches English at his high school.  He loves to try to help high schoolers see the joy in reading a great book.  His daughters are beautiful and growing.  He and his wife are busy with the girls but they make time to do things together.  He's lost his competitive edge - he doesn't even really follow his beloved football and baseball teams anymore.  He's given up drinking entirely.  And he runs.  He loves long distances, whether training or racing.  I imagine that he finally found, in running, the way to that silence, that spirituality, that way to set himself apart from the world that I think he needed.  What the Trappist monastery couldn't provide, he made for himself.

If I sound envious, I am.  I still seek a way to embrace aloneness at times and be comfortable with it and with myself.  How I beat myself for the smallest things.  If I sound admiring, I am.  I admire how he found a slice of perfection, a life in good balance.  If I sound like I miss him, I do.  I miss both him and his wife, who regardless of the years and miles apart still make me feel happy and a little more whole when I think of them.  There are few people with whom I share such a friendship.  Every time I talk with TJ now, I find he helps me briefly center myself when my problems seem overwhelming.

Everyone seeks that balance - a mixture of being of the world, and yet able to step apart from it so that it can be seen for what it is and appreciated.  A very few sequester themselves in monasteries.  Many can carve space in in the midst of the myriad activities of their lives.  Many never find that place of solace.  I am still looking for a way to make it a part of my life - to find a time and space where I can put the world aside and be comfortable with my aloneness.  I find it in pieces, but not as an everyday occurrence.  I think TJ found running to be his daily retreat into reflection, spirituality and peace.  He gives me hope that I will find my own balance one day, without having to join a Trappist monastery - instead, I'll find it within myself.  To answer LHM's question, above, I realize that I am often broken, but TJ has taught me that I can mend my brokenness by removing myself from the world for small periods, even as I remain active and engaged in my world.

If you want to know more about the Monastery of the Holy Spirit

Flickr photos of Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Journey America: Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Wikipedia: Monastery of the Holy Spirit

Next up: Alexander City, Alabama