Roads From the Ashes Page 10

  The basic theory to which most of America subscribes is that unless you’re Charles Kuralt, making money on the road means picking oranges or cleaning restrooms or selling rocks or singing country songs in rundown road houses. Variations on those themes are pretty much the price you have to pay for getting to be Easy Rider. If you want the big bucks, you have to settle down, wear panty hose and be happy with two free weeks a year.

  That’s the view from a high-rise, anyway. To make the dough, you gotta pay the price. But wait! You say you’re out there all the time? Always on the road? By George, you could be selling something! I never cease to be amazed how many times this thought strikes a member of corporate America like a lightning bolt. He’s always positive he’s the first one to come up with such a brilliant notion.

  Because this particular flash hits so often, the number of sales opportunities which have been presented to us is correspondingly large. With proper motivation, we could be raking in cash right this second hawking cosmetics, vitamins, hand-made baskets, motorhomes, tires, bee pollen supplements, memberships to campground clubs, emergency road service plans, magazines, RV equipment, and pre-paid legal insurance plans, to name just a few. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a one of them, except maybe the baskets, which had the sad look of a sweatshop about them. For a while we did carry brochures and videos about Revcon Trailblazers, but the company was mysteriously lackadaisical about following up on leads.

  But no “business opportunity,” no selling scheme, no money-making program outdoes that constant of the get-rich movement, pyramid marketing. Before we left town, a man we hardly know made an appointment to see us. “Just want to run something by you,” he said. I already had my suspicions, and they were instantly confirmed when he arrived with tapes, books, brochures and videos.

  “I was thinking that if you’re going to be on the road, you might be interested in selling something,” he said with the smug assurance of someone who knows he’s had an original thought. “Let me tell you about my company.”

  His company had a catalogue full of jewelry and china and wooden boxes and “collectable” statuettes. “It’s so perfect for you,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about inventory.” Unfortunately, there was nothing in the whole scheme we did want to worry about.

  Later, when e-mail was becoming more universal, and the explosion of interest in the World Wide Web had begun, we received an e-mail message from a man in Dallas. He’d discovered RoadTrip America. “What a neat idea!” he wrote. “Have you ever thought about the fact that you’re in a perfect position to be selling something?”

  Resisting the urge to write back something like, “No, we specialize in original thoughts,” Mark replied politely. As we neared Texas, Bill’s messages arrived with increasing frequency, and included tempting remarks like, “I’d love to meet you, and I’d love to have the chance to introduce you to some business associates of mine. We’re all fascinated by what you do.”

  Flattery has always been a wonderful sales technique, and we fell for the bait. When we arrived in Dallas, we arranged to meet Bill at the high-tech hub known as the Crystal Palace. It’s the home of Sony and Microsoft and AT&T Wireless, but we were headed for the offices of something I shall hereafter refer to as E-Z- Bux.

  The owners of E-Z-Bux had invested in a lavish spread. We were met at the door by Bill and a sidekick wearing tight jeans and high-heeled cowboy boots. “Welcome y’all,” they said. We exchanged hearty handshakes, and stepped into a plushly carpeted receiving area full of unopened boxes and new desks.

  E-Z-Bux had just opened, they said. It was a ground floor opportunity in the exciting new world of electronic communication. “We offer a product that can double, triple, and even quadruple, a person’s efficiency and productivity. Every man, woman, and child in the country is going to be screaming for it, and our marketing plan makes it an exciting opportunity for anyone who joins us now.”

  Bill paused and turned to the sidekick, as if to say, “Take it away, Hopalong!” The cowboy rose to the occasion, and for fifteen minutes attempted to describe just what this remarkable device was. By ignoring his lavish use of phrases like “high-tech platform” and “bleeding edge,” we soon divined that the product they were pushing was gussied-up voice mail. But the cowboy, whose penchant for hyperbole was equaled only by the size of his belt buckle, wasn’t nearly as excited about the voice mail as he was about the “real opportunity,” the chance to “share his discovery” with the clambering masses.

  In case you’re one of the lucky minority who has yet to enjoy the pleasure of being on the receiving end of this kind of sales pitch, let me help you out in advance. If someone says they have “an opportunity to share,” you can forget about laundry detergent or vitamins or voice mail. What they’re really after is giving you the privilege of memorizing their routine and spouting it off to any poor soul you can hogtie for an hour. The product is only an excuse to mine human avarice, to promote the tempting possibility that there really is a trick to earning buckets of money without lifting a finger.

  “And you’re in the perfect position to achieve success,” Bill was saying. “You’re out there, on the road, meeting new people every day. Have you ever thought about what a great opportunity you have?” We fled.

  But don’t get me wrong. Mark and I were avidly interested in pursuing business that would both keep us on the road and dovetail seamlessly with life in motion. We just had our standards, and we were not willing to clip our dreams to fit the prevailing notion that nomads are bottom feeders, and that the price of being Odysseus is professional groveling.

  Flavor Beyond the Cup

  From Crater Lake we headed to Bend, then west to the coast and north through Portland to Washington. Lots of Seattle natives were eager to tell us they don’t like coffee, and that the espresso epidemic was the result of evil spores that blew up from California. California was the whipping child for every ill Seattle was suffering, but in the case of coffee, the blame seemed ill- placed. Washington had more caffeine entrepreneurs than Italy. The carts were everywhere, and for a java lover like me, it was terrific. It was impossible to get more than two steps away from a friendly espresso maker.

  I can’t understand how Seattleites delude themselves into thinking their coffee phenomenon is California’s fault. They can’t avoid claiming Starbucks as their own, and it has become the McDonald’s of the cappuccino crowd, invading rejuvenated downtown shopping enclaves across the land and infecting the vernacular with nearly as many new words as the computer revolution. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear Mark order a “double tall skinny latte.” He can voice the phrase in Memphis or Malibu, and get just what he wants. So can lovers of “grande easy whip percent mochas.” Every time I go inside a coffee establishment of the new order, I hear another idiom. The old argot of diners may have perished, but hello, java joint jargon.

  I soon came full circle with the coffee explosion. When we first got to Seattle, I reveled in the ubiquity of espresso. When we left, I noticed that the farther we separated ourselves from the caffeine capital, the harder it was to find what I considered good coffee. “It’s like New York bagels,” I said to Mark. The farther you get from Manhattan, the less likely you are to find a real one.” This line of thinking led me to the sad image of a small town in Kansas. I imagined its welcome sign: “Welcome to Dead Center, where the coffee is awful, and the bagels are frozen.”

  It was true in 1994 that good coffee was pretty much a phenomenon of the Far West, and a fresh bagel could only be found in the shadow of the Empire State Building. By 1998, things were different. Bagels were the new jelly donut, and Starbucks had swept the land. Two more regional wonders had hit prime time, and were enjoying the heady status of mass marketing and mob consumption. ]ust like pizza in the seventies, java and bagels were set to usher in the new millennium.

  “It’s one more example of the loss of regionalism in
America,” we might lament. “Bad coffee has gone the way of local dialect. The good old days are dead.” I am sometimes surprised by my own nostalgia for a cup of boiled brown branch water served in a thick mug on a chipped Formica counter. But I have nothing to fear. Real American coffee is alive and well. I find it waiting patiently on back burners everywhere, right next to the glass cases full of Danishes. More than once, Mark and I have chosen to slip into a familiar tuck-and-roll Naugahyde booth, even when there was a Starbucks right next door. Flavor goes beyond the cup.

  But I digress. And coffee wasn’t the first thing we noticed when we drove into Seattle. The Space Needle was. There it stood, rising above Puget Sound, reigning over the city that airplanes built. It’s hard to think of a prettier urban landscape than the view that greeted us when we drove into Seattle from the south. Mount Rainier hung like a mirage in the distance.

  We’d heard that Boeing gave factory tours. We’d just finished watching cheese production on a grand scale in Tillamook, Oregon, and I was hot to see a 747 roll off the assembly line. By great good fortune, the whole city had gone airplane mad the week we arrived, because Boeing was unveiling the first jet ever to be completely designed on a computer before it was built. The first test flight of the new 777 was only days away.

  Boeing and the O.J. Effect

  Having heard that the world shows up for the Boeing factory tours, we rose early and drove to Everett, home of the biggest building in the world, if you measured by volume. Inside, the biggest commercial aircraft in the world were being assembled, dozens at a time. Even though the sun was barely above the horizon, we were not the first. A Canadian couple was already waiting by the door. A sign said that tour groups would be limited to forty people. The line soon grew to twice that, but nobody left.

  Eventually, a man in a suit and a clip-on name tag unlocked the door from the inside. “We can accommodate everybody,” he said cheerfully, and he led the way to an auditorium where, thanks to the wonders of time-lapse photography, we watched a 747 get assembled in seven minutes.

  At last it was time for the real thing, and we rode a bus to the giant building. Inside, nearly a dozen 747s were in various stages of assembly. We watched from a high platform, and the guide yelled explanations over the reverberation of ten thousand power tools.

  Later we went outside to see new planes getting their final touches before delivery. Each one is fitted on the inside according to the buyer’s desires, and the exterior decoration is custom- tailored, too. “The buyers have to choose between an all-over paint job, or leaving a lot of silver showing,” said the guide. “The paint adds a lot of weight, but the naked metal takes more maintenance. They pretty much have to decide whether they want to spend money on extra fuel or extra labor.”

  Before we left, we caught a glimpse of the new 777, which had yet to take to the sky. It was smaller and sleeker than the 747, and sported only two engines. “But look at those engines,” said Mark. “Each one is bigger around than a DC 10.” It was true. The 777 was powered by a couple of monsters.

  Boeing was like the redwoods. When we saw the whole operation, everything was huge, so everything looked reasonably sized. But then I started thinking about how a 747 would look parked in front of a house. You’d have to install a giant sequoia in the front yard to balance it out.

  We retired to Bothell, a suburb north of downtown Seattle. It was late spring, and the largest flock of Canada geese in the universe had touched down in the campground, which had a pond. They were so large and so aggressive that Marvin wouldn’t go outside. Geese are high output birds, and this meant we didn’t want to go outside either. We were hostages in the Phoenix.

  It didn’t matter much, because it was an afternoon when most of America was being held hostage to breaking news in Southern California. A white Bronco was leading the Los Angeles Police Department on a slow tour of the freeway system.

  That slow chase knit the backdrop of our travels for the next fifteen months. We watched the opening ceremonies in Seattle, and thousands of miles and millions of tabloid headlines later, we watched the Fryeburg Fair, Maine’s oldest and most popular county fair, shut down for the finale. The vendors stopped hawking, the lumberjacks stopped chopping, and even the office put out a sign that read “Closed Until The Verdict Comes In.”

  The three-ring coverage of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial permeated every state and oozed into Canada. There was no escape. It blanketed the continent better than a flock of super geese, and the newscasters served it up as daily manna across the land.

  Flying Penguins

  It was time to call Charlie. We’d never met him before, but we were pretty sure we’d like someone who spends all his time making juggling toys shaped like penguins and cows and tomatoes and killer whales. Back when Wizards of Wonder was a going concern, we’d sold Charlie’s products. A number of crates of them had gone up in smoke.

  Mark had managed to grab a file that contained a list of our suppliers as he fled the fire, and he’d written letters to each one explaining what had happened and asking what we owed. The response was heartening. Companies wrote, saying things like “Take as much time as you want to pay.” Some even telephoned. Charlie Brister sent a letter on Flying Penguini stationery. “Come see us if you’re ever in Seattle,” he wrote.

  We’d warned Charlie we were on our way, and his response was still warm. “You can come by our factory,” he said. “We’ll give you a tour.”

  Charlie reiterated his invitation over the telephone, and the next morning we headed for Chasley, the name of the company begun ten years before by Charlie’s wife Barb, a world-class juggler and the creative force behind the company’s products. “Two factory tours in two days!” exclaimed Mark. “This is terrific!”

  When we arrived, Charlie was juggling lobsters outside the front door. We followed him inside, where a poster announcing our visit was pinned to a bulletin board, and the entire staff was expecting us. It was clear from their faces that they didn’t quite know why. “Who are these people?” they seemed to be dying to ask. “And why in the world are we caring about their arrival?”

  Charlie didn’t care what they thought. He gave us a tour worthy of royalty, showing us every step in the evolution of a small cow destined to be part of a threesome that was packaged in a milk carton and labeled Milkshake, “because that’s what you get when you juggle a trio of Holsteins,” said Charlie. We saw how white fabric was cut and screened with a pattern of black spots. After it was sewn together, each cow was stuffed with crushed walnut shells. “We tried lots of stuffing materials,” explained Charlie, “Sand, beans, millet— but they were all the wrong size or the wrong weight. Juggling toys have to feel right, and walnut shells have turned out to be the best filler we’ve found.” After we saw how the cows were packed into their cartons and readied for shipping, Charlie took us out to lunch at a nearby sandwich shop, where, no surprise, espresso coffee was available, too. While we ate, Charlie regaled us with Bill Gates legends, which were already rampant in Seattle in 1995.

  Before we left, we’d discovered that Charlie and his family lived in Bothell, which was the same neighborhood where our goose-infested campground was. We explained the hazards and invited them over for dinner. “Don’t wear your party shoes,” we said.

  We gained four new friends that day, and I learned something that at the time seemed profound. If you discounted magnitude, there wasn’t a whole lot of contrast between Boeing and Chasley. They both had tidy assembly lines and interchangeable parts. They both made flying things that required skill to use. They both gave terrific factory tours. Well, actually there was one difference. Boeing didn’t give out samples.

  Cruising

  One of the reasons we’d headed for Seattle in the first place was that we had reservations on a Princess Cruise to Alaska. Yes, a Princess Cruise, a lavish one that featured enormous ice sculptures and great pallets of food and giant shakers of piña co
ladas and classes in how to fold napkins. If motorhomes had seemed foreign to me, cruises like this one were as alien as flying saucers.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t traveled by ship before. As a child, I’d voyaged from New York to Panama on the USS Gibbon when my father was tapped to become military attaché to Costa Rica. Three years later, we’d returned on the USS Geiger, with stops at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before we climbed to the highest deck to watch for the Statue of Liberty through the fog. Because my father was the highest ranking non-crew officer on both ships, we were handled with kid gloves. It was on the first of those journeys that I learned what VIP meant. “You are one,” said my father. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”

  I’ve since traveled by ship in Europe, on beautifully appointed crafts that plied the waves between Venice and Alexandria. Even the ferries that called at the ports on the Dalmatian Coast were quite lovely, especially the VIP lounges and dining rooms that first-class tickets afforded.

  But the Love Boat was something else entirely. A trip on a ship like this was cruising for cruising’s sake, with a “because you’ve earned it” attitude and a battalion of full-time masseuses. We’d made a leap to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we were now members of the Winnebago crowd we’d held in disdain, but a chasm separated us from Princess Cruisers. Heretofore, we’d considered cruises to be something for soft wimps who wanted to travel but didn’t want to leave home, who wanted to see the world, but not smell it, touch it, or taste it.

  So why were we packing our bags and abandoning Marvin at a kennel in Seattle for a float through the Inland Passage? The main reason was that some friends were celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary by taking this cruise, and they’d decided it would be more fun if they brought a party along. The second reason was that we were still fire crazy, which meant that we still peppered our conversations with questions like “What have we got to lose?” One thing we had to lose was money, of course, but we had some at the moment, and “What the heck?” won out. We would soon be winging our way to Anchorage and catching a big white boat in Seward.