setting the record straight

Countless times after I'd moved to Alaska, and in earlier years whenever I traveled, people have asked me where I am from. When I replied "New York" people have always assumed that I mean the city. They often following by telling me either that they love New York City or that they've never been to New York City but that they suspect they'd love it. Historically I have not loved New York City. In all of my visits the primary impressions that the city had made on me were: this place smells like garbage; people in NYC are a bunch of grumps; NYC feels like a huge shopping mall, which is bad. Other than the navigational ease provided by the City's grid structure I'd never been too impressed with NYC. Often when confronted with a conversation about New York I would say in a derisive tone "New York is alright, but I much prefer Boston, or Toronto, or even Montreal. They smell better, and the people aren't as arrogant". Probably I was also a little resentful of all of the attention that the City gets while Upstate seems not to exist for most people. I can recall times when I've explained that I wasn't from the City, that I was from Upstate, and to the questioner this meant I was from Poughkeepsie.

Now though, after just over a week in the City, I'm willing to ignore those complaints and to apologize for my earlier scorn. New York City is beautiful, both as a collection of huge buildings and as a huge collection of people. I'm leaving the City tomorrow for a brief visit to Upstate, but I'm looking forward to coming back.

The New York Public Library is incredible. It's big and old and beautiful. Just being inside it made me feel proud to be participating in such a valuable, important social institution, even if my participation these days is solely on the borrowing end.

it's not the heat, it's the spiders

Since Friday we've been in Benton, Louisianna. It's hot here, and humid. Whoever you are, it definitely is hot enough for you. I'll go to sleep hot and a few hours later wake completely soaked with sweat and stuck to the floor of the tent. Also, there are bugs. Our natural pests in Alaska are mosquitos, bears, and an occasional upset moose. Here there are also mosquitos, but they're not the only chitinous nuisance. There are terrifying spiders with big, black, almond shaped bodies covered with neon markings and with legs several inches long. One of these monsters had spun its web over the front-passenger wheelwell on the bus we've been camping at and sleeping in. On Sunday I watched as it wrapped a big, hapless beetle in web and then sat there beside it's cocoon-ed meal. From here, with the relative safety of electric lights and doors that latch shut, I imagine that it was waiting for the web covered beetle to become usable food, but then, as I crouched a few feet away and watched the now unmoving spider, I felt like it I was being stared down. The spider, I imagined, had sized me up and recognized that I was too big for him to really make us of, it would have taken her days to cover me in enough web to fully immobilize me, but she knew also that she had the upper hand. I was definitely more afraid of her, though she was roughly 1/2240th my weight, than she was of me. As of today she's gone. At first I was happy to be able to enter the bus without having to pass by her many watchful eyes, but I quickly realized that I was safer knowing where she was, and that now she could be anywhere. It's been a long day of slowly, timidly handling any object large enough to hide a spider.

Spiders aren't all though, there are also ants. They're not like those friendly ants of the north who want only to help you clean up those crumbs that seem always to litter the floor in whichever room you've last eaten. These ants are much smaller, and much less benign. They'll fearlessly crawl over you, which is annoying and itchy in and of itself - it feels like they're wearing tiny, ant-sized golf shoes, and when allowed to crawl long enough they begin to bite. Their bites sting me like a fresh mosquito bite but leave no marks on my skin. Ben, however, has red marks all over his legs that look like sombody has been pinching little bits of flesh off of his legs using razor sharp tweezers. These, he says, are from the ants. I think he's contracted something. He looks leperous.

We also saw moths the size of hummingbirds.

Hold on, here's some background on the aforementioned bus: it belongs to Ben and is full of old junk from when he and four other Anchoragians spent 6 months in 2002 driving it around the continent. For the last 5 years it's been parked in a field behind a house on land owned by the family of one of the other 4 traveling Alaskans.

We've been camping at the bus while Ben sorts through the piles of old magazines, instruments, underpants, and 16-lb cans of beans. Well, I've been camping, Ben's been sleeping inside the bus and getting torn apart by insects. Mike, Nola, and Gabriel, the folks that live in the house behind which the bus has been hidden, have been wonderful to us. They've been helpful and generous to us, sharing meals with us and taking us into Shreveport multiple times to run our big-city errands. I'm typing this at their computer, while my laundry drys in their dryer. They've really gone out of there way to treat us like family. Dang. I've been lucky.