Return-Path: bigo@cruzmail.ucsc.edu
From: "Oliver Phillip Nicholas" <bigo@ucsc.edu>
Subject: Oliver's Travelogue, Part 1
To: snip

Friends, Americans, Countrymen, expatriots + foreigners,

I hope that all is well with you. You are a diverse group of individuals, spanning great geographic distances, comprising many of the ethnic groups of the world and all idealogically unique. I bid you all hello. May it be that the Sun shines wherever you are just now as brightly as it does where I am.

And where am I, you might ask? Currently, it's Boba's Cafe in the City Market area of downtown Savannah, GA. Day four here is providing me with some of the first sunshine I've seen since leaving...well, let's see. It wasn't sunny in DC. It was rainy in Santa Cruz. Hell, I'm not sure how long it's been. All the more reason to celebrate. At any rate, I've been keeping some record of my travels, so in installment one of my travelogue I will convey some of my choice stories. Oh, and by the way, although this email is probably going out to every single person I know or have ever met, feel free to distribute it further if I've forgotten anyone. To that end...

----bloop*bloop*bloop---- [time warp]

The first day of my trip brought me successfully and intact through the quagmire that is DC's beltway. It took me three hours to move 60 miles. You get the feeling that we really do live in a black hole once you realize just how difficult it is to get in and out of. I mean, I drove the entire country, 3,000 miles, and didn't hit a lick of traffic till the beltway. Go figure.

I spent the night sleeping in my car in a campsite on North Carolina's Outer Banks, parked directly on the shore of the Sound. Warming a can of soup by the heat of my precious little Primus camping stove, I savored the familiar but long-absent delight of being away from the city, more in the midst of Nature. I wrote cathartic poetry by the light of the appropriately full moon. Well, that and the sickly orange high pressure sodium street light in the middle of the campground. Ah, America!

Heh, anyway I explored the upper Outer Banks and then made my way to Cape Hatteras at the bottom, where I was to take a ferry to the island of Ocracoke. I noticed as I got further south that I was seeing more and more damage left over from Hurricane Isabel -- houses with roofs gone, siding torn off (how the hell does *siding* get torn off?!), etc, and then unfortunately discovered that the highway I was taking to the ferry simply ended in a roadblock and a "road closed" sign. Looking ahead, I could see that one fo the bridges I needed to cross was still gone, having been carried away in the storm (we're talking 10 or 15 feet long here, not like a Golden Gate or anything). I rerouted and stopped at a dockside convienance store, where I asked, "Ocracoke didn't get blown away, did it," immediately realizing that that was perhaps a sensitive subject. The clerk assured me it hadn't, gave me detour directions to the ferry, and I was on my way. Weird place, that Cape Hatteras. Waiting in line for the ferry, at what to the casual observer very much appears to be the ends of the earth, I saw power lines that appeared to ground out into the ocean. The things buzzed loudly, rythmically, in a sort of rising and falling tide of electrons. It was strange, that intensely modern, machine-associated noise here with this weird, almost war-torn landscape under an overcast sky. To those of you who know that track on Tool's AEnima CD (-ions, maybe?), it was just like that.

So I travelled NC-12 south along an island where the sky turns lavendar when the Sun sets -- and we're not talking some watered down pastel, either, but a full-bodied, deep, rich hue which fades towards a midnight, almost ultra-violet purple as the last rays leave your sight. It's an amazing place, and on the road into town if you stand in the right place you can see both sides -- the ocean *and* the sound, since the island's dunes are still being reconstructed and there are spots (a lot of them) where the sand is still flat.

The people around there are proud of their lifestyle -- they know it's atypical and wear that fact like a badge, often literally. Sitting in Howard's Pub, the only bar on the island (and one of a very few restaurants -- and again, the only one really open during the off-season), I'm surrounded by walls decorated with old license plates: OCRACOK, BEACHN, ZEDSDEAD, O-COKE, NC-HWY12, RTO-FISH, ILNDPATH and FREE2BE, to describe a few. My bartended told me that 750 people live their year-round, but I don't believe her. That place is *SMALL*.

My second night on Ocracoke was amusing. I took a nap in the afternoon, woke up and enjoyed a Cohiba (thanks Spencer) on my the deck as the sun set. Then a shower and off down the road. So I'm down at Howard's Pub, enjoying a Guinness and some crab cakes and waiting for the live music to start, and these three guys come in and sit down at the bar. The one sitting next to me is like the perfect image of a biker-type around here. He's got the gruff beard/mustache thing going on, a closely cropped Marine-esque haircut, a Harley shirt with rolled up sleeves exposing a few skulls and spiders inked on his arms -- classic. After a while my first question is, you know..."So, where you guys coming from?" His response began like a 4 hour journey of discovery through some random guy's life. The first thing he tells me is that he's from, or actually it was that he has a physical address, outside of Reston (that's Virginia, for those of you that don't know), but "moves around" or something, like I have some idea of what that means. I have not. So we talk intermittenly throughout the evening, and it goes something like this, in groups of two beers: After two beers, my acquantance has a job doing home stereo installations. This doesn't entirely fit with the image but whatever, I'll roll with it. After four beers, he used to build bikes, beautiful ones, though he doesn't seem to know a terrible lot about engines. After six beers, we're talking about my trip further down the coast and he tells me to avoid this one area or other, cause there's a marine base there and the whole marine thing -- he doesn't seem to think too highly of the majority of those particular foot soldiers, romping around town being young and stupid all the time. Doesn't sound too enticing to me, either. So then, still somewhere around six beers, I find out he "used to be" a marine. A few more Budweisers (or "fancy imports", as he joking refers to them with the bartender, since i'm drinking Red Stripe) and he lets on that he's actually not retired at all -- he is an active marine. And after like 10 beers, I kid you not, it comes that he's a marine sniper, one of a very small number trained in the country, who could get killed for what he's telling me, etc. That's after we're talking about his wife and daughter and him being away from home a lot. A very interesting conversation, after all. My mother, I think it is, has tended to describe bikers as adult-aged little boys, and come to think about it you could see a lot of that in this guy. At any rate, the night ended with someone pulling an oyster shucking knife on some other guy outside the pub, leading to him being pinned on the ground with the Sheriff's and Sheriff's deputy's guns pointed at his head (random people, not my marine sniper friend). I decided it was time to go to bed then.

So I'm seeing that I've been a bit longwinded, and as I'd like to get outside and enjoy the sun a bit while it lasts, I'm going to leave you all here, as I was driving back up Ocracoke to catch the ferry. Next installment, we'll pick up as a make my way into Charleston, SC, where I spent about five days. Do let me know how you all are. Peace.