No Man's Land

Today was a lovely, lovely day on the road. It was also longer than my average run, with more tourist-related stops and more swerving-onto-the-shoulder-I-have-to-take-a-picture stops. I am now both exhausted and exhilarated and absolutely in love with the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Oklahoma's panhandle is rightly called No Man's Land, and it is a dark, desolate, and lonely place (the bottom right picture and top left were taken there). I expected the Texas panhandle to be much of the same, but as I came around a bend between two hills, a canyon opened before me that was so huge and so unexpected and so utterly, utterly stunning that my heart felt like it was ripped from my chest and flung into the rolling, plateaued vastness stretched below me. I hope hope hope that there's more of the same on my way to Roswell, New Mexico, tomorrow morning, although I don't know that my heart could take much more.

I have formal shots of the day, ones related to my actual activities (a tour of Boot Hill, a visit to Dorothy's house and the yellow brick road, Beaver Dunes State Park and Shaman's Portal in Oklahoma, and an early dinner at Ned & Darlene's Cafe--the best roadfood experience I've had yet), but for now I need to lie my head down and sleep...so in their place, I just want to share with you a couple of the aforementioned roadside snapshots. I hope you like them.

I didn't know personal growth could taste so good.

Well, folks, the moment we've all been waiting for has arrived:

I have officially outgrown my jeans.

I know what you're thinking: 'Really? In only a month on the road?' To which I reply, 'YES. Because I am THAT AWESOME.'

It turns out the road food of America is pretty kick-*ss. (That asterisk is for you, Grampa.) And I like to eat it. ALL of it. And then I like to get in my car after eating it, and drive for hours, and maybe at the other side, I like to sit on  my friends' couches and discuss what's for dinner. Because this is my life now. Just me, and the road, and our food. And this triumvirate of power is warming this cold winter in much the same way as my extra stores of fat. I feel like a survivor in the wilderness, stocking for winter. I feel like a grizzly bear. I feel like I can roar powerful roars into the world as soon as I lift my face from this bloody carcass demanding my attention.

Despite an increase in my body fat and a decrease in my cardiovascular fitness, I feel strong. Almost as strong as the elastic holding up my leggings, which are the only things I can fit into right now. I love you, leggings. You don't judge me. You accept me and envelope me and don't pinch my stomach in half when I sit down. I can't thank you enough for this. I think I want to marry you and bear your children.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must go back to my journey...my journey of soul and self. And today this spiritual path is leading me right down to the cheese aisle of the Wisconsin grocery store. Dairy State, let us two be one.

a crazed out black cat of a city

New Orleans is a city of drunken dreamers. A night out means a host of new friends, new adventures, and hundreds of dreams and promises made to be broken. As you go out on the town with these new companions on an evening--them excitedly pointing the way at every step--you remain discreetly sober, because this is the only way to remember it all. They don't notice--they're getting more and more generous and distracted as the evening goes on--but you're making mental notes and pictures and praying you don't forget a thing. You spend all night loving them as they put on their technicolor dreamcoats and twirl madly through the broken streets, and while you end the evening with plans plans plans to see each other again, you know it was for one night only, a vaporous and fleeting thing.

My five days in New Orleans was a whirlwind. It was melting sun and sagging porches, weeping willows and oyster po'boys, cracked sidewalks and cascading flowers, wrought iron courtyards and mosquitos mosquitos, boudin patties and alligator sausage, turtle soup and biscuits and grits, jazz and funk and rhythm and blues, and hey darlin' hey baby and you havin' a nice day, and chintzy wallpaper and tassled lamps and crawfish etouffee.

I have photos for you. In the hundreds. In the eights and nines and tens of hundreds. I'll be spending my day going through them all, attemping to process and sort and develop. I'm slightly overwhelmed: I've got so many I don't know where to begin. There are photos of the 9th Ward and the French Quarter and the food and the jazz musicians and the food and the Garden District and the food and then a dusty used bookstore in the middle of a lost nowhere that makes one want to read read read again and a roadside market on a tiny riverside highway with oh more food and then there's the bayou--OH THE BAYOU.  It's vast emptiness, it's nothingness as far as the eye can see. It's a barren, alien landscape. It's different from the swamp, which is where people usually go, on airboat tours with guides who drop marshmallows into the water to draw the alligators near for viewing and oooohs and ahhhs and faux shrieks of terror. The bayou is--for the lack of a better word--a community. People live in houses on the water and get around by boat, and back Before Katrina all the kids got picked up every morning by a school bus-boat, and there was a store out there, too, and a cemetery with white white gravestones, glowing in a landscape of browns and greens and rust reds. And for a living they harvest shrimp with giant nets, and sit on their docks with poles and lines catching red fish and speckle trout, and the boys slip in and out of the water like bronzed fish, and this is them. And the bayou stretches and stretches and stretches into nothingness all the way to the horizon.

So as I settle into my new perch in Memphis--where I arrived late last night--to get started on the hours of work before me processing these photos, let me leave you with some pics I took early last week of a lovely girl in Spring, Texas. I'll see you again tomorrow.

Saturday, Day 8: the Boggy Creek Farm and my arrival in Houston

My last morning in Austin found me at the Boggy Creek Farm, a recommendation I got from Saveur, which has yet to lead my road trip dining astray. It turns out this farm has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal as 'Where Whole Foods Shops' and they were on Rachael Ray last Friday night. And let's also not forget their food blog on The Atlantic Monthly. All this coverage is shocking when you get there and realize: this farmer's market is actually A MARKET AT A FARM. It was tiny--there weren't dozens of tents and food vendors and flowers and fancy coffee stalls. It was so different from my love affair with the San Francisco Farmer's Market. This was the EPITOME of straight-from-the-source shopping and as fresh as fresh could be. And it was so peaceful I never wanted to leave:

This is the ENTIRE MARKET. I KNOW.

The actual, lived-in farmhouse of the Boggy Creek Farm.

And the owners! Don't even get me started on the owners. This is Carol Ann Sayle and that's her husband, Larry Butler, on the tractor in the background.  He was tilling the earth in preparation for their winter cabbage, which is apparently gorgeous and tissue paper thin and so super delish that Carol can't wait. I love her. I also got her cookbook and she signed it for me and she spelled my name right. That was when I decided to erect a tent and never leave. In fact, I'm blogging right now from the bushes.

Okay, so I couldn't justify carrying a bag of organic radishes on a road trip, but I COULD justify a bottle of honey! This is Gause Yaupon, named from the local yaupon flowers that the bees go nuts for. Apparently a host of Austin chefs use it in their recipes because of it's 'signature flavor.' Alison, we'll put this to good use when I arrive in San Francisco. And by 'good use,' I mean, 'we can eat it by the spoonful.'

More stuff I wanted but couldn't get...check out those ancho chiles!

And the japanese radishes!

And the gourds!

And the shopping baskets!

And the craft stall!

This is Buddha Hill, the winner of the Austin Chronicle's best mother-daughter design team award last year. Try as I might, I couldn't find a website or Etsy page or anything for them, but if you're ever planning on being in the Austin area, you should definitely track them down. They made gorgeous, functional things--totes, aprons, wrist-warmers, purses--and with really good, quality materials. These bags were STURDY. And as someone who compulsively buys tote bags, I'm a pretty good judge of what's crap and what's not. Because I own a LOT of crap.

Speaking of compulsively buying bags...I COULDN'T STOP MYSELF. I HAD TO BUY THIS BAG.

Okay, and this--THIS I WILL BE ORDERING AND SHIPPING UNTIL THE DAY I DIE. I will not live a life that does not include Herbs de Tejas from here on out. I got the spicy one (they've also got original and orange), which has organic oregano, thyme, lavender, basil, sage, savory, rosemary, garlic chives, and jalapeño, all of which they grow themselves (with the exception of the basil, which they get from the boggy creek farm). And OMIHEAVEN. I've been making scrambled eggs with it the past three days and there's an explosion of happiness with every single bite. It's supposed to be great on chicken, too, which is next on my list. Along with salmon, and potatoes, and anything I will ever throw on a grill. (Before I forget--they don't have a website, but you can email them at laketravislavender at waynegibson dot com if you'd like to find out more. They ship!)

And then I arrived in Houston on Saturday afternoon! I kid you not, this is where I'm staying. I KNOW. I think they're part of the Kennedies or something. They're currently pretending they don't know what I'm talking about, but luckily I can see right through their protestations, which is why I'm selling  personalized tours of the house everyday while they're gone. * cha-CHING *

No task but to live

You came! You really came! I love you more today than yesterday.

Here's the poem that speaks of the heart of the next few months:

And that's why I have to go back

to so many places in the future,

there to find myself

and constantly examine myself

with no witness but the moon

and then whistle with joy,

ambling over rocks and clods of earth,

with no task but to live

with no family but the road.

--Pablo Neruda, End of the World (Wind)