October 18, 2008
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BEING A RATHER TYPICAL New Yorker I had spent most of my first twenty or thirty years in the U.S. exploring little beyond the East and West Coasts, pretty much ignoring most of what New Yorkers rudely dismiss as “fly-over country”. So when I finally dragged myself away from the Big Apple, the logical way to explore the little towns and communities at the heart of my favorite country seemed obvious: a trip along the U.S.’s first major Highway, Route 66. Once it had been America’s Major Road, “the Mother highway” as John Steinbeck had termed it, but it has been largely forgotten since 1958 when the extensive network of Interstates made it almost obsolete. Of course, most of it was still there, although often buried deep beneath newer roads. But there were small towns and strange sights a-plenty still to be seen, and--mainly because of growing interest from overseas, particularly Germany—it had been undergoing a revival. I was a travel writer, right? So I determined that I would be the latest (of many previous writers) to document Route 66 with the place-to-place milestones that I had used for so many foreign countries. How long would this trip take? Obviously it would depend on how many diversions I took, but some amusing estimates were presented by the highway’s more-or-less official historian, Tom Snyder, in his invaluable Route 66 Traveler’s Guide with such definitions as late starter…get loster…honky tonker…sensitive browser…coffee hound…museum freak…postcard looker. A minimum of eight days would be needed, he suggested. One TRADITIONALLY begins, with a 5:30am breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s restaurant (opened in 1923, three years before the highway) on Jackson Blvd. in Chicago. This is where dedicated enthusiasts excitedly muse on the 2,448 miles ahead of them, a nostalgia trip into America’s past.
Further on, at Springfield, part of the old road is now under the lake and can sometimes be seen when the water level is low. This town was the home of Abraham Lincoln and his memory has been so much exploited that Snyder remarks: “If you can find some place where Lincoln is not advertised to have worked, stayed or stood, you might want to phone the Tourist Police with the tip”. A surprising number of old landmarks still stand, among them the Old Chain of Rocks steel truss bridge (5,353 feet long) which separates Illinois from Missouri. When it was supplanted by I-270 in 1968, it was too expensive to pull down and preserved for pedestrians and cyclists. In 1981, it was repaved to star in John Carpenter’s film Escape from New York. Staying on Route 66 is harder than it looks. Some maps don’t mention it, others fail to show where it joins or leaves the Interstate. Here and there it is an unmarked highway running side by side with the parallel major (and faster) road. But there are continuous stretches that meander through little towns that have known tranquility (but not much business) for almost 50 years since they were bypassed by the interstates. The Ariston restaurant moved to Litchfield in 1935 and has served Route 66 travelers ever since. In recent years some of those have been on motorcycles which initially caused alarm. “Customers immediately thought ‘Hells Angels’ and expected the worst” reminisced Demi Adams, the owner’s wife. But so many of them turned out to be “as nice as anybody could be—European bikers who knew four or five languages fluently”. When it first opened, it celebrated the end of gasoline and food rationing after WW2. In those happy days, a set of Allstate tires cost $43.80, and gas was 17c a gallon. 
National magazines called the first national highway a speed trap, and warned of the small hamlets where cops and judges had their palms out for bribes. In fact Route 66, Snyder reported, was a highway of “flat tires, overheated radiators, motor courts, cars without air conditioning, tourist traps, treacherous curves, narrow lanes, detour signs, Burma Shave signs, ribbons of neon, mom ‘n pop diners, 5c cups of coffee, 25c haircuts, lemonade stands, blue plate specials, homemade pies, waitresses who called everyone ‘honey’, winked at the kids and yelled at the cook”.
In Missouri, I-44 has replaced Route 66, but at exit 261 a lovely old stretch of the old highway houses the Red Cedar Inn (1934) and the section along Manchester Road that follows once crossed farms where drivers were reminded to close the gates behind them. At Stanton, Meremac Caverns where Jesse James and his gang hung out, was opened as a tourist attraction 75 years ago this year (2008) by roadside entrepreneur Lester Dill who’s credited with inventing the bumper sticker. Cuba (pop: 3,200) is definitely Republican country. It used to have a sign reading “Cuba, No Castro, Missouri” but Cuba Free Press editor Rob Viehman describes it as “a friendly place” and says it’s no surprise that the community is known as the unofficial epicenter of the social networking movement. Brad Greenspan (MySpace founder) and Jonathon Abrams (Friendster founder) both vacationed at Indian Hills Lake while they were developing their respective social networking sites. There’s a vintage eatery at Lebanon, the Munger Moss Motel (1946) whose manager, Ramona Lehman, was interviewed by a radio station in Tokyo about hosting some of the early Route 66 meetings. Springfield, birthplace of Belle Starr, the Stetson-wearing, pistol-wielding outlaw who hung out with the James’ gang, calls itself “Queen city of the Ozarks”. It was here that the notorious Wild Bill Hickock killed a fellow poker player on Central Square (the verdict was ‘self defense’).
Once a rowdy mining town Galena, whose main street was lined with saloons and bawdy houses open around the clock, achieved new fame as the Rainbow Springs of the Pixar movie Cars. The “Springs” may be derived from Baxter Springs, ten miles to the west, a town where Murphey’s Restaurant was once a bank from which Jesse James extorted $3,000 at pistol point. In the Roaring Twenties, Route 66 --Steinbeck’s “the “Mother Road” who wrote about the westward trek along it of the jobless Okies in his Grapes of Wrath-- also served as a fast escape route for such hoodlums and bootleggers as John Dillinger, Al Capone, Bugs Moran, Bonnie and Clyde. In 1925, Pretty Boy Floyd began a nine-year crime spree in which he robbed 30 banks and killed ten people. Floyd, was a popular young outlaw. Often, he tore up whatever farm mortgages he could find in the banks that he robbed, and tended to seek out poor farms for a meal for which he’d pay with a $1,000 bill. After the FBI gunned him down, 20,000 mourners turned up for his funeral. This memorable year, one year before Route 66 was christened, and when President Calvin Coolidge declared: ”The chief business of the American people is business”, saw the founding of the 15c weekly New Yorker magazine, the Scopes trial, also Hitler’s publication of Mein Kampf.
In tiny Riverton (pop: 600), a former mining town, Eisler Brothers General Store opened in 1925 and was originally a gas station. The quaint store still sells groceries and “home-made sandwiches” to hungry travelers. The ‘20s were a time, Tom Snyder recalled, when people still drank Grape Nehi and summer lasted because of drive-in movies and miniature golf. There was always something to stop and admire: snake pits, caged wild animals, mysterious caverns. “By the mid-1930s, the highway had begun to create its own myth; it grew larger than life”.
Magazine writer Stephen Goode traveled Route 66 extensively a year or two ago and found that, despite the current climate, most people he met had a strong sense of community and were confident about the future. “In an agricultural society like we have here in Oklahoma”, he was told by radio talk show host Lanny Ross, “you have droughts, you have boll weevils, you have energy booms and busts. People are used to that. They know there are going to be good times and bad times. But when people work hard to raise the quality of life in their communities the camaraderie that develops when people work closely together, that makes the future better”. At Clinton, the museum has a replica of a ‘50s diner complete with old-fashioned jukebox and walls covered with old album covers. There’s also a cluttered garage from the 1930s with a glass-topped Red Crown gasoline pump, as well as pictures of migrants, most in trucks bearing signs bearing California or Bust signs, and crammed with furniture, bedding, pots and pans, crated chickens. “We heard many years ago in New Zealand, Nat King Cole singing Get Your Kicks on Route 66” says one entry in the visitors book. “So we came to see it”. It was a major regret to me, as I coasted along, that the days of the Burma Shave sign were in the past, but every museum along the route, as well as innumerable gas stations, souvenir shops and cafes had replicas for sale of these serial, six-part quips. SLOW DOWN, PA/SNAKES ALIVE/MA MISSED SIGNS/FOUR/AND FIVE./Burma Shave. Rents rarely topped $25 a year and most farmers were proud to display the signs on their property, often making repairs when necessary. Horses found some of them great for back-scratching until the company got wise and raised the height of the signs By 1963 the thousands of signs were costing the company almost a quarter of million dollars a year with diminishing returns. Our fortune/is/Your Shaven Face/It’s our BEST/ Advertising Space/ the company had once boasted and its initial cost of $65,000 a year was mostly responsible for $3 million in annual sales.
THE LITTLE TOWN of Quapaw (pop: 984) boasts a strange phenomenon which regrettably I didn’t see, known as Spooklight. A yellow or orange-colored ball that has been seen many times since the Civil War era apparently travels eastward down the road, sometimes at great speed, emitting sparks and “hopping, swaying, spinning, or moving in arcs”. `Folklore attributes the light to the spirit(s) of Indians from various local tribes such as the Quapaw, or as an ethereal miner searching for his wife and children who were kidnapped by Indians. Scientific explanations have included swamp gas and car lights, fiery minerals in the air, electrical or sub-atomic disturbances and heat rising from the ground at the end of each day. In 1946 the Army Corps of Engineers studied the Hornet Light phenomenon and could not find a cause for it. The western most stretch of this state notes a few star-sightings, the most notable of which—the Will Rogers Museum at Claremore—is a tribute to the biggest celebrity of his day, the cowboy radio celebrity turned columnist whose quips (The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected) filled 3,600 columns that were syndicated in 500 papers. Rogers was born at Oologah a few miles north. Between Miami and Vinita, Route 66 totally disappears but the stretch of I-44 which replaces it is also called the Will Rogers Turnpike and was the subject of a song by Woody Guthrie which you can download on your cell phone. Mickey Mantle Boulevard in Commerce marks the hometown of the new York Yankees star. Approaching El Reno a sign for Big 8 Motel is a legacy from the movie Rain Man part of which was shot here and Erick (pop: 1,023) was once notorious for its speed-trap which busted Bob Hope. Near Oklahoma City is Lake Overholser, a seaplane base for early Pan American Clippers. EVERYWHERE ON THE HIGHWAY were the ubiquitous sounds of the eponymous 1946 song, written by Bobby Troup and recorded by Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones and scores of others. In a 1964 TV series, George Maharis and Martin Milner traveled the route in a Chevy Corvette, a conventional enough trip compared with some earlier exploits. As early as 1928 International Transcontinental Foot Marathon (“the Bunion Derby”) was staged, Los Angeles to Chicago then on to Madison Square Garden in NYC, a distance of 3,448 miles. (The winner, Andy Payne, part Cherokee from Oklahoma, won the $25,000 prize). Happy Lou Phillips and his friend Lucky Jimmy Parker made most of the route on skates but “they walked a great deal” reported one newspaper, “since at that time (1929), Route 66 was only paved through towns”. Dick Zimmerman, 78, pushed a wheelbarrow from California to Michigan to visit his 101-year-old mother. Undocumented but legendary is a certain Mr. Doughtery, with white beard and turban, who traveled up to 16 miles each day pushing all his worldly possessions in a shopping cart.
The flat Panhandle stretches seemingly forever, but occasional vintage gas stations come into view, an art deco one at Shamrock dating from 1936 and another at McLean where the former Sears brassiere factory—now a barbed wire museum—has a Route 66 display. Ruth Trew, a member of the local historical society here, meets lots of foreign visitors who tour the highway and she says it’s the wide-open spaces that attract them. “The Germans tell me, ‘Germany is full of cities, crowded with people. There’s no place to go except the next town’. On Route 66 you can drive and feel free and not feel crowded or penned in. They find it liberating”.
At Amarillo the oddly-named Natatorium began as a swimming pool but reopened as a dance hall in 1926, featuring such jazz age stars as Paul Whiteman, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Harry James. Tom Snyder claims that on nearby W. 6th Street a local grocer used to toss live chickens off the roof as a marketing strategy. West of town at the famous Cadillac Ranch, ten 1949-63 models are buried nose-first in the ground and constantly graffit’ed by visitors. This eye-catching artwork was built in 1974 by helium tycoon Stanley Marsh with the cooperation of a San Francisco art collective. After Vega a slight diversion brings you to the Vega Motel with its 1940s furnishings and Adrian (pop:159) which is the exact center of the old Route 66. A onetime greasy spoon, Zelda’s dating back to the highway’s early days, is now the MidPoint Café—the oldest on the route—and displays a collection of memorabilia.
Eighteen of the 300 miles of Route 66 which cross and re-cross this state comprise the longest continuous stretch of the original Route 66. After Amarillo, whose 924 population is 98% American Indian, comes Tucumcari, its name associated with that of an ancient Indian chief. The town—“two miles long and two blocks wide” say locals—sits under the shadow of a mountain of the same name. It used to advertise widely in the region as “Tucumcari Tonight” because it has plenty of overnight rooms, most of them in old neon-lit motels such as the Blue Swallow. The Tee Pee Curio Store dates from 1944 and its souvenirs include playing cards, sheriff’s badges, mugs, glasses, paperweights, ashtrays, belt buckles, money clips.
Roy Cline called Cline’s Corner,“the coldest, the meanest, the windiest place on Highway 66” when he opened his trading post and gas station further down the highway in 1934. This speck on the map features in Howard Subtle’s Behind the Wheel on Route 66 after his 28 years as a Greyhound bus driver in which he recalls: mislaid children, garrulous passengers, the occasional stowaway hiding behind the rear seats and, on one noteworthy trip, an elephant tied to a tree and left with food and water by a man whose truck had broken down and gone for help. In July 2001, Albuqerque staged a big celebration of the road’s 75th anniversary with art exhibits, car shows, old neon signs, walls covered with vintage postcards and photographs, and a demonstration by the Hardly Angels (a synchronized women’s motor cycle team). Authors and photographers were on hand to sign their works, and visitors were entertained by mariachis, solar-powered “futuristic” vehicles, posters and movies, jazz, country and western music, a crafts fair, and an ice cream and apple pie social. The post office issued a special stamp. Some party! Wish I’d been there.
Cubero achieved some measure of fame when Ernest Hemingway settled in a house nearby and wrote part of his The Old Man and the Sea. At Grants (pop: 8,806) which once boasted of being the nation’s “Carrot Capital”, you can make a diversion south to some genuine Ice Caves, but the town itself doesn’t have too much to offer. Mike Garcia, who used to sing in a local band called Bad Habits, saw the future while still in his 20s and chose to study computer science at the local branch of the University of New Mexico. But he couldn’t wait to leave town. “There’s nothing here but flipping hamburgers and a few teaching jobs” he complained.
Even movie stars drove across the country in Hollywood’s golden era, and in Gallup among those who signed the register at the historic El Rancho Hotel were John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Kirk Douglas. The hotel’s architect was said to have been former silent star Raymond E. Griffith who successfully planted the legend that he was D.W. Griffiths’ brother.
“This is harsh but beautiful country”, says the indispensable Tom Snyder, “the air clear and sharp, unspoiled for the most part”. Don’t even think of traveling Route 66 without Tom’s documented record. I certainly couldn’t have written this without his chronicle as my constant companion. Holbrook is proud of its Wigwam Motel whose 15 cozy rooms, inside tall, stone teepees were built by owner John Lewis’ father in the 1940s. Architect Frank Redford built seven similar motels around the country. Outside is Lewis’ collection of ‘50s Fords and Buicks, and the main building houses a small museum with Indian artifacts and frontier days rifles and powder horns. Holbrook’s a quiet town, to which former space engineer Ted Julian retired to open his Roadrunner Shop back in the Sixties. “Probably our most serious problem here” he says, “is the young people taking laps from end of town to the other, and sometimes mooning each other”. Winslow is where you can get out of the car at Kinsley & 2nd Streets and celebrate “Standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona”, the song Jackson Browne gave to the Eagles. Snyder explains the background: “Roadies often improved their prospects locally by getting duded up a bit at the Store for Men before standing on a corner to wait for a girl (my lord) in a flatbed Ford”. In 1984 when the last part of Route 66 was replaced by I-40 (thus becoming decertified as a Federal Highway) Bobby Troup, attended the ceremony, it’s said. with tears in his eyes. This was at Williams, where a tan-colored 1953 Cadillac together with life-size cutouts of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe sit outside a self-proclaimed “Back to the ‘50s Diner”. Drawn indoors past the old glass-topped Sky Chef gasoline pump by the overpowering scent of chile, you can study hundreds of photos of families who have preceded you along this fabled highway and choose from malts, shakes, floats, cherry phosphates.
After Kingman, the highway climbs between jagged peaks via endless switchbacks and blind curves, to the 3,500ft summit at Sitgreaves Pass before beginning an equally twisting and turning segment down into Oatman, which looks exactly like you’d expect an ancient western town would look, sagging wooden shacks lining the unpaved street. Burros wander around, unfazed by the mock gunfights conducted daily. The doddering 1902 Oatman Hotel makes no concessions to such modern comforts as television—or even water—in the rooms. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon night here after being married in Kingman and room 15 is preserved as a sort of shrine (it costs fifteen bucks extra).
In this state much of the old route—apart from parched stretches thru the Mojave Desert where summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees—has been submerged beneath a welter of freeways, re-emerging in short stretches or as main streets through towns such as Barstow, Victorville and Rancho Cucamonga. Patricia Solis, who runs an antique store in Barstow, says the town finds it impossible to keep the Historic Route 66 signs that mark the streets. ”They get ripped off every time we put them up” she says. “we can’t seem to put them high enough”. Anyway, after three time zones, we’re finally in the eighth and last state where at Victorville, among the ephemera of the Mother Road at the California Route 66 Museum is the 1923 Dodge in which cowboy star Roy Rogers arrived in the state in 1930. Space for the museum and a vintage soda fountain was cleared by local Route 66 Society. “It was $30,000 worth of work” recalls one of its members, freelance writer Jon Robinson, who himself drives a 1950 DeSoto. South of Victorville, the I-15 heads over the 4,300ft Cajon Summit. Apart from a brief stretch, I-15 has subsumed most of the old route, but you’re on it if you follow Cajon Blvd into San Bernardino, a Mormon town in the 1850s when it was once a major citrus-growing center. Every September, Stater Brothers stage a huge vintage car rally. At Pasadena, Route 66 becomes The Pasadena Freeway, in 1940 as the Arroyo Seco Parkway, it was California’s first freeway. The first freeway in a bold, new experiment that was to cover California with a series of similar fast motorways. Take the Sunset Blvd exit and drive along Sunset until it reaches Santa Monica Blvd which runs all the way to the coast.
My lengthy relationship (platonic) with Betty Pepper, which began in Greenwich Village, continued until she died a few years ago. In the mid- Sixties she left the city to live upstate in the woods around Pine Bush. Amber and I used to rent a place nearby for a week or two every year, helping to assemble the next year’s Witches Almanac. But when she and Martin, her husband, moved to Newport, R.I. most of our communication was by mail and telephone. Barely a week or two went by when we weren’t in touch. “I found the piece about Eleusis you had done which I’d like to use. I’ll send it off to you for additions or corrections” and “You definitely improved the intros and I agreed with the changes—one exception, I used ‘tender’ as a verb. But if you misunderstood so will others. Clarity above all” were typical of her annotations. “Please tell me your reactions to the new almanac. Any thoughts, ideas, improvements” Do say something!" My job as co-editor for 30 years was also to produce at least one 1,000-word piece for every issue (Lafcadio Hearn, the Venus de Milo mystery, Sasquatch legends, Chichen Itza) often from some foreign land that I had visited in connection with my travel writing chores. I also produced , under my pseudonym Oliver Johnson, the book’s opening column Today & Tomorrow—about a dozen items related to magic or paganism in one way or another. Together Betty and I co-authored two books, Magical & Mystical Sites for which I visited the ‘magical’ places in nine European countries (see chapters 17 & 18) and Seasons of Being, a compendium of hundreds of quotations (boiled down from 200,000 we assessed) which were presented in the form of a complete life—with appropriate quotes for its spring, summer, autumn and winter—or a year in one’s life. For both Betty assembled all the artwork. As early as 1991 Betty wrote to reassure me about her health: “The cancer was caught in its early stage and although the fact that it happened indicates I have a predisposition and it may well turn up again; at this moment I’m feeling altogether splendid, strong full of energy. Yes, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we knew how much time we had left—the only alternative is to just keep forging ahead. That’s what we’re both doing and you’ll admit the prospects are rosier now than before”. At about this time, the almanac now about 20 years old, Betty offered me $2,500 a year for my services, requesting that the money be paid near the end of the year when the distributor paid up for the almanac which had appeared the previous spring. Many years, her hard-luck stories persuaded me to waive payment and one year I suggested she devote my remuneration to sending out a press release with the new almanac to 100 publications, optimistically expecting that at least a few would review it. Nobody did. Then early in 2005, Betty’s cancer resurfaced and by summer she was dead, the sudden departure of somebody I had regarded as a colleague, a friend and a spiritual adviser for half of my life.
What happened next was the most depressing thing that has ever happened to me. Making no mention of me whatsoever, she willed the Almanac to a jewelry salesman named Michael Marra whose grandiloquently described himself as Theitic, “High Priest of the Coven of Minerva”. I was pleased some one was in command, and wrote a congratulatory letter: running the almanac was not a task I would have been willing or able to do. On Theitic’s website he listed “truth” as one of his “likes”, an ironic boast as it happened. A week or two later, I wrote to remind him that the Almanac owed me two payments, the one now-due from this year’s almanac, and the work already in print for the next one. Theitic replied that if I wanted to continue writing for the almanac “it would require negotiation of (my) fee” and in any case his records showed that I had been paid for all my work to date. I had my lawyer send him a note asking for copies of the cancelled checks that would authenticate these mythical payments but, of course, he never replied. To my amazement, Theitic’s lies were endorsed by two people who had known me for a long time—a risible poet named Barbara Stacy and Tom Chisholm, a global warming-denier weatherman—who presumably hoped to remain contributors to the new High Priest, which of course they did. Members of Marra’s coven also rallied around him, calling me a liar because if the holy Theitic said I’d been paid it must be true. I downsized the two payments, and life went on. But what did all this mean? I don’t mean the Theitic part—there are many treacherous ‘friends’, as well as liars and cheats who pass themselves off as high priests--but why on earth did Betty erase me like this? I tossed the conundrum around in my mind for months trying to find an answer. Could my oldest friend, my spiritual adviser, my guiding star, have been trying to impart some final wisdom? Or was this just the logical finale to years of exploitation? I still muse on it today. I am still baffled. There had clearly been a predetermined power grab for the almanac. At any rate, I was toast. Not all the almanac’s longtime readers were enamored of its new form. One wrote; ”I have subscribed to the Witches Almanac since 1980. It was established and edited by Elizabeth Pepper. There was something sweet and obscure about the information Elizabeth put together in each Almanac that made it priceless. It wasn't slick and commercialized. It didn't include popular culture's version of a "witch". It was a soft, all-paper almanac. Unfortunately, Elizabeth passed away and the new editors have changed the Almanac for the worse. It is covered in an icky, high-gloss book cover that takes away from the pen and ink drawings that used to cover the old version”.
Persuaded by my friend Rona, I spent a week or two in the alluring Mexican resort of Zihuatanejo which I’d last visited in 1962 to visit Tim Leary and his short-lived International Foundation for Internal Freedom. This time after settling in at a cheap hotel on expansive La Ropa beach, I quickly made the acquaintance of Catherine Krantz who, after coming here for a vacation, found herself starting a glossy magazine. Titled Another Day in Paradise, it had fared surprisingly well for a start-up, especially so as its young entrepreneur had no previous experience in publishing. An interesting mix of practical advice about dealing with Mexican legal problems, buying property and stories about local handicrafts with pictorials of social events, ADIP soon prompted a spin-off magazine about real estate which clearly indicated Zi’s future. And sadly, like every ‘undiscovered’ paradise, the little seaside town was not destined to remain unspoiled. The tiny resort in which--I had written 30 years before--the streets were traversed by more burros than cars, were now filling up with new hotels, condos and clubs.
Very few of the new places had the classic style of La Casa Que Canta (“the house that sings”), a longtime fixture above La Ropa. Built by Jacques Baldessari, a former cosmetics executive, who transferred from Paris to Mexico in 1974, it was an eccentric cascade of terracotta walled cubes, suggesting to people in passing yachts, that it might be an earth-red Himalayan Monastery or a pueblo. Adobe bricks separated areas in the decorated open air lobby and gnarled posts of brazil wood held up porches. Baldessari commissioned craftsmen in Oaxaca and Michoacan to produce beautiful and whimsical furniture carved animals, folk art chests and one-of-a-kind painted pieces with stark Frida Kahlo and Rousseau-like primitive motifs. Every day, maids spends 20 minutes with lovingly assembled arrangements of fresh leaves and flower petals—a stylized bird one day, a peacock or a fanciful butterfly another—put together petal by petal and leaf by leaf on the pristinely white bedspread. One visitor wrote that he was so disinclined to disturb the fragile floral display that he thought of sleeping in a hammock. "The structure is more like sculpture really than architecture" said Enrique Muller, the man responsible for its sensuous design. “I had to create a style that would work on such steep slopes to figure a way to integrate them into the construction. We wanted to give the impression that the structure had just risen from the earth". Novelist Clifford Irving was living in an apartment on the beach here at La Ropa, where he’d spent the past few winters. I dropped by with magazines for a chat, and asked him if I could put him on camera for a few minutes, promising that I would refrain from mentioning either Howard Hughes or the fake autobiography which had once earned him a jail sentence. Irving was polite but declined my invitation, was quite adamant about it, clearly viewing it as an intrusion on his beachside tranquility. Understandable, I suppose, but I was a bit taken aback. After all I had been one of his biggest fans when he wrote the imaginative book about the hermit-like Hughes. Of course, Irving couldn’t have known how much I admired his coup, but I felt that an obvious minnow like myself shouldn’t be treated as though I were a big fish from the intrusive network. (But if there’s ever a man who must have been sick of being questioned…) When the news of his phony biography first broke it was one of the best stories of the Sixties and, outlaw that I am, I reveled in the day-to-day developments. All my sympathies were with Irving and if he had to go to jail surely the gullible publishers, too, were guilty. Then, while I was still there, my old friend Bud Green moved to Zi, fleeing from a nerve-racking encounter with enforcers of the pointless drug war. Bud had come out of it rather luckily after getting the final word from New York’s District Attorney that they were not going to prosecute him for the bust at his Madison Avenue apartment a few months before. They would, however, be keeping the dozen kilos of fine Humboldt weed plus the $60,000 they’d confiscated. (I wonder what happened to that?) They had spent the intervening weeks trying to persuade him to snitch and lead them to the mythical wholesaler who was distributing this weed, and had finally accepted his explanation that there was no Mr. Big. Stocking up with enough pot to sell to his New York customers, Bud explained, involved a lengthy train trip across country and back, buying from isolated mom ‘n pop dealers who were as smalltime and interchangeable as the disposable cell phones they used. Of course, in this case as doubtless so many others not prosecuting was a much more profitable deal for the DEA team. That’s why the war on drugs is corrupt from top to bottom. As somebody who smoked marihuana on a pretty regular basis for 20 years (it becomes less rewarding as you get older) I have strong feelings about the cretins who still try to pretend that it’s a dangerous drug. And what really makes me mad are the inhuman, unfeeling jerks who waste time opposing medical marijuana. Before the year was over, I was allowed to join the cliquey Society of American Travel Writers, sponsored by the late Art Harris, a travel writing colleague I had known for many years. During my brief membership, as an editor at Insight Guides I was able to hire half a dozen fellow-members to contribute to books I was assembling. Within a year, my membership crashed to a halt. At the Society’s annual dinner on a boat in San Francisco Bay, I got bored with the after-dinner speeches and invited a lady companion to join me in smoking a joint. A few minutes and a few puffs after retiring to her cabin, there was a hammering on the door from a handful of crew members armed with crowbars and other heavy metal. We were informed that we were putting the captain’s license in jeopardy if the Harbormaster learned about this flagrant example of drug abuse. Failing to ask how the harbormaster could find out unless somebody went and told him, I meekly extinguished the joint and departed for my own cabin. This incident, however, was too much for SATW’s stern arbiters who a week or two later informed me that the Ethics Committee had met. Familiar with the drunken antics that had sometimes enhanced earlier meetings, this Ethical cabal ruled that I would be suspended from membership. The committee had rarely been in session and when I took a look at its composition, I found that one guy headed his own Florida PR firm and the other was head of public affairs for the Canadian railroad. These apparently were the people who decided who was worthy of membership in the club.
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