New Haven to Boston, Part 6

EAST GREENWICH. Established 1677. Exhausted, I conjure: If this was an indie movie, a silver deer would lead me somewhere, and I would wake up there, with police around me, and the deer scene would turn out to have been a dream sequence dramatizing my exhaustion. This is the sort of dreamlike fugue I often pass into after twenty-four hours on foot.

LIFE, it seems, has to be sustained by idle chit-chat and BUOYING narratives of success, struggle, valor, deserving, repentance and condemnation, disgrace and triumph. An ADVERSE world (men like “sports” gossip for this purpose; women prefer “relationship” gossip).

A middle-aged woman in black jogging gear picks up a flattened plastic bottle from the roadside and jogs away with it.

High up: I see to the ocean, below and to the east.

1791: Construction of the Methodist Meeting Hall on Main Street where the Rhode Island Constitution was adopted in 1852.

(Days—Views—Unforgiven Apotheosis) We go through our history and in each epoch everyone prospers and obeys and no one ever has any CLEARER idea of what the LAST MAN should look like. What is the termination point of human history. Why are we doing this. We make all this fuss over the lives of kids we haven’t conceived yet. Aren’t we forgetting to answer one simple question before we crank out more human beings? What is the endgame of this supposed to look like? Are we closer?

2pm, 43 degrees. Planes climbing steeply westward from the airport, through clear skies. A blue plane with a red tail jogs my memory back to the fond stirring colors of my Octopus Battlebeast, that first Christmas I can really remember.

Stuck in a puddle fully reflecting the sky, a shard from the rim of a plastic garbage can gives the appearance of a whole can submerged, out of view. (Sort of a haiku sentiment)

The ONLY NOTE… I can stop now, I think, this is the note I was looking for:

Damn it, Grab what you can get. Take what there is of life’s feeble schematics. Grab tight, claw, uproot; the blood-scream of greed to get it. –I imagine myself petting the blonde lady’s boxer and then weeping. “My dog died,” I tell the blonde lady, and perhaps she weeps as well. What’s as kind as the heart of a dog, and as useless?

Apponaug Village, founded 1696. The sun just blazing an outline around the top line of a great massy cloud in the west. Cemeteries: How can they put SOMEBODY in to the earth, you wonder: a human being, how can they put them down in the dirt like that!

[Illo: HOPE anchor]

I see the big red WARWICK water tower in the distance down the hills. Hideous new condo units facing the cemetery, in hideous green-grass flattened clearing.

The first European to set foot on Rhode Island: Giovanni Verrazano, 1524. He was exploring for the French crown. In the library I’m reading stories about how the English colonists would loose their mastiffs on the Naragansett Indians.

1636- Roger Williams founds Providence on land bought from Naragansetts. 1644, Williams is granted a charter to the colony by the English crown.

It is the 100^th anniversary of the “LEVITON” Company, housed in a long stately brick building. In the same district, the “RHODE ISLAND MALLEABLE IRON WORKS”, founded 1912. A sign on this shuttered building reads “Ironworks Tavern Coming Soon”.

A Hebrew cemetery: Chased Schel Amess Association, organized 1908. A hair salon across the street has opened a mini-business on its premises: “Bonnie’s Tatoos”. From the radio in a deli I learn that oil costs $55.64 a barrel today.

Route 1A: Across the Pawtuxet River. I follow Main Street across the river into the heart of Providence. (The first indoor mall in the US, built 1828 in the Greek Revival style, known simply as “The Arcades”. 3 stories, covers an entire block on Weybosset Street.

8:39, 36 degrees. The State Capitol is majestic, situated on an inspiring overlook, but it happens to look directly across at a gigantic ugly shopping mall. I try to sleep in the bus station for a while, but it’s not designed for sleep, and there are people checking for tickets. When I’m among the last ones on the benches, I go out into the night again, walking along the quiet highway toward the Massachusetts border. North Attleboro, to Plainville, to Foxborough—suburbs of Boston.

Across the state line stop for a coffee and donut and the guy from Kings of Convenience is on tv, performing on one of the late night interview shows following a professional athlete. The music is soft and melancholy and beautiful, it gets me. There are only a few night patrons here, reading the newspapers and chuckling with the woman behind the counter who might be Middle Eastern.

After another two hours or so, the police flag me down.

“What did you, lose a bet?” the cop asks in a thick Massachussetts accent. (Whoever pukes first has to walk Route 1 from New York to Boston.) The talkative younger cop confers with the older, silent cop, who was pulled up in a separate cruiser. These are iconic cops. Every day is another wacky civilian to sort out.

“Stay off the road!” says the other. They point out the white sign that marks the end of their jurisdiction as town officers, and they tell me to get out beyond it and continue to do whatever crazy thing I want. They think I’m the guy who was vandalizing storefronts around here, but I suspect it was probably a local job. They read my passport into their radio: “Sierra, Alpha…”

Why are so many roadside motels in this region owned by Hindus? I can see the lit prayerwheels and devotional posters from the road. I’m half-heartedly looking for a place to stay, I’ve been up for basically two days.

5:41 am, 29 degrees. Past the “7 MILE” marker on Route 1.

Got to get up over the black hill that stretches across the horizon. (This will turn out to be a long journey, up and down the wooded hills leading into the port of Boston.) I think of the swamps and wild little mountains in northwestern Massachussetts; this land is not so different.

Near the bottom of the hill now. Sitting in Dunkin Donuts. Hoping the old guy with the leather jacket and blue track pants will get up and leave me his Times. I realize I’m staring at it too hungrily. I’m just sitting here with my coffee, a little shell-shocked. “Do you want the paper?” the guy finally says. It turns out to be the Boston Herald, of course, not the Times.

Why have I been on this peak of horniness? Especially considering I’ve been exhausted enough to get diarrhea. Why is my libido so cranked up?

Up and down hills along side mirrored lakes, a Scrap Fortress of car junkyard, with huge sheet-metal doors that slide on chains. It seems like in my exhuastion, all sorts of weird left-over emotions are popping up, from various dimly-remembered narratives: different places I was, different things I was waiting for or was about to accomplish; any kind of thing, happy, sad, indifferent but full of strong emotional detail. Emotional memories out of the blue.

[Sketch of hill in Norfolk]