September 11, 2001

New York City

We were busily cleaning out our storage unit, somewhat convinced that we would never want the headaches and anchor of another stick home. Hidden among all our stuff was a small box Mrs. Phred's sister gave us to store in early 2005. This presented a problem, we couldn't just toss it. So I tventoried the contents and sent SIL a list of what the box contained.

The most interesting things in the box were several hundred 9/11 pictures. My SIL and BIL had a large "loft" on the seventh floor of a building immediately across from the south side of the South Tower. They moved in in the early 1970s and lived though the noise and bustle of the construction of the Towers. We visited them often for nearly 30 years. The workers in the tower would sometimes wave when Mrs. Phred and her sister wore pretty nightgowns in the morning.

Many of the pictures appear to have been taken for insurance purposes. The FBI took over the apartment because it was on the same level as the top of the rubble of the tower. They were blocked in their attempts to do anything with the "loft" because of government concerns about the toxicity of the rubble and dust that filled the place when all the huge old double hung windows blew out.

The kitchen was back away from the street. Here you can see what appears to be a "UPS" receipt that blew in on an ill wind from the tower.

After trying to cope with the disaster for about a year, they made a bold decision and bought an RV and began to tour America. After a few years of that, they moved to Venice for two years and learned Italian. Now they're back on the road.

SIL has given me permission to scan and use a few of her 9/11 pictures. I'm not sure I blame her for putting these away in a box. It must have been immensely trying and sad to see everything destroyed.

The subway terminated under the World Trade Center, so you could look out the windows and see thousands streaming to work at Wall Street, a block further South and East. That day many workers and residents were directed over the Brooklyn Bridge to find their ways home.

Trying to sleep in the apartment took some getting used to inhuman screams, sirens and car alarms. I suspect a real New Yorker would have the same problem with the crickets and frogs that sing at night on the Withlacootchee River.

Going up to the top of the Tower always made me uneasy. It wasn't a premonition. I'm just afraid of heights and distrustful of engineers.

This appears to be a message left in dust on the front door of the loft.

Looking down from the west side of the loft.

Are those refrigerator pictures?

I really envied BIL's Wurlitzer juke box. It was a beauty, filled with 45 RPM classics. What a drag.

The Conch Republic

 Grassy Key, Florida 

The Conch Republic celebrates Independence Day every April 23 as part of a week-long festival of activities involving numerous businesses in Key West. The organization — a "Sovereign State of Mind", seeks only to bring more "Humor, Warmth and Respect" to a world in sore need of all three.

You can usually find conch in grassy sea beds in warm tropical waters. A Cayman Islander taught me to cook them chemically by soaking them overnight in lemon juice. Conch fritters and conch chowder are widely available in Key West as is Key lime pie. In case you wondered "what's a conch fritter?" please see my blog.

In 1982, the US Border Patrol set up a checkpoint at the choke point on the north end of the Keys and began to randomly search motorists’ cars for drugs and illegal aliens. This is not an unusual tactic for the border patrol. If you drive in Texas, New Mexico or Arizona today you will be stopped and interrogated somewhere on a road north of the Mexican border and subjected to similar scrutiny.

Once, coming out of Laredo, Texas at night, I was directed off the interstate and stopped in front of a blinding searchlight. The uniformed officers questioned me about smuggling parrots and waved me on. As I pulled past the searchlight, I saw several officers with assault rifles pointed at me and I was very glad that for once I had no parrots.

When the Border Patrol tried the same tactic in the Keys in 1982, the citizens resented both the inconvenience to themselves and the impact on tourism. After their protests went unheeded, the mayor of Key West decided that if Key West was to be treated as a foreign country, then it might as well be one.

The city announced its independence from the United States of America on April 23, 1982 and declared itself to be the Conch Republic. The Mayor visited the Admiral in charge of the Key West Naval Air Station and broke a loaf of stale Cuban bread over his head. After that, Key West immediately ceased hostilities and applied for a billion dollars in foreign aid from its giant neighbor to the north.

The Conch Republic still sells passports to tourists. The 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, bought a set of these online in early 2001, demonstrating both an abysmal lack of understanding of the American culture and a missing sense of humor.

 The Republic later annexed the old abandoned “seven-mile bridge” after a boatload of Cubans landed on it a few years later. The Coast Guard sent them back to Cuba after stating that since the bridge was severed on both ends, the refugees had to be returned under the "wet feet/dry feet" policy. Under that policy, refugees who make it to dry land can stay. Those intercepted at sea are returned to their country of origin. The courts overturned that theory but the Cubans were already back in Cuba.

In a place where invasive species like iguanas abound, the most common of all, the chicken, draws a lot of ire. They crow at all hours of the day and night and they strut the streets like they own it. While they don’t get any special protections in the Keys, residents cannot shoot them, and cruelty laws are enforced. In case anyone is wondering—these are wild, feral chickens and don’t make a good dinner. The chickens don’t have many natural predators..they do eat anything you drop on the restaurant floor.

Coronado National Memorial

Benson, Arizona

We're staying in Benson for a little over a week to visit with Mrs. Phred's sister and our brother-in-law, Tom. The quiet desert is a sharp contrast to their New York City loft where they lived for many years next to the World Trade Center before it was trashed by 9/11 debris. When we visited there the sounds of the City (car alarms, sirens, screams of sidewalk vagrants) made it hard to sleep.

We decide on dinner in Brisbee about 60 miles south. It's a copper mining town with some similarity to Butte, Montana. Lot's of old brick storefronts. Mrs. Phred buys some new clothes in the Pantera Gallery before our dinner in the Roka cafe.

It's a four course menu. I have the lamb meat balls with cous-cous and Mrs. Phred and her sister both have quail. Tom explains that the proper way to eat quail is to cover your head with a napkin like a tent, put your hands behind your back and mash your face in it. I begin to suspect he is joking me when they don't bring out the tent-sized napkins with the meals.

However, Tom assures me he is reporting the truth about a French custom and so I Google "cover your head  with a napkin and eat birds" only to find that at least one restaurant in France offers a $4,000 meal in this fashion made from illegally obtained small birds called Ortolans that migrate up from Africa. The species is in serious decline in France as the result of unenforced hunting laws. Apparently it is eaten whole (bones and all) with a napkin over ones head and hands behind the back. A culinary experience for two priced at $4,000.

On the way to dinner we stop at the Coronado National Memorial. It's not that much. Just five or six paintings in a visitor center explaining his expedition from Mexico City to Kansas in search of cities made of gold. It's on the Mexican border. About every other vehicle we pass is a Border Patrol truck. They could have put the memorial almost anywhere based on his travels, which, by the way, preceded the Lewis and Clark expedition by nearly 300 years.

Francisco Vásquez de Coronado was searching for the golden cities based on a report from one of the four survivors of the 600 members of the Navarez expedition. Cabeza De Vaca (Head of a Cow) was treasurer of the ill-fated expedition and one of four men that escaped Indian captivity, hurricanes, disease and near starvation to emerge from the wilderness in Mexico City after wandering for eight years. Cabeza's family name was awarded by the King of Spain. Cabeza started his overland journey in Tampa Bay only two blocks from our old Florida house and wandered and floated on rafts in an epic journey to Mexico city. Along the the way he was captured by indigenous tribes and gained great celebrity among them as a medicine man. He was often traded between tribes and earned a very steep purchase price after apparently bringing one patient back from the dead.

Those old Spaniards were tough as nails and they were all hoping to duplicate the earlier feats of Hernando Cortez who conquered a nation of 5,000,000 with 1,500 soldiers. He brought back a lot of loot to Spain and left some of it in the sands of Florida after his galleons sank in fierce storms. Anyway...it was pleasing to see a small peace group hoping for a change in Bisbee.

Aside from the rather fantastic exploits and intrigues of Cortez,  I might want to consider making a movie called "The Nine Burials of Hernando Cortez". You can read about this uber weirdness in the Cortez Wiki link above. It includes the 1981 attempt to destroy his bones. Destroying 500 year old bones is a strange political quest. In fact, it makes my own creation off the quasi-terrorist organization  SLAMM seem relatively rational. You probably remember the headlines when my Society for Liberation of All Marine Mammals donned SCUBA gear and black wetsuits and dynamited the locks at midnight holding in the dolphins at Florida's Marine Land. Imagine our chagrin when they all returned at feeding time the next day for fresh fish. They never caught me for dynamiting the dolphin pens or for freeing "Willy" the Orca whale at 4 AM one quiet Sunday morning in 1981. Willy never came back.

Arkansas State Hillbilly Chili Cook-Off

Bull Shoals State Park, Arkansas

Bull Shoals lake was created to tame the White River. The lake is even bigger than Lake Norfork. We drive up on 9/11 to sample the chili in the annual Arkansas Chili Cook-Off.



The admission is $3 a head. You get a ticket for the admission price that you can use to vote for the "peoples choice" best chili. We also buy 20 tickets for 50 cents each that can be used for chili samples, funnel cakes. water, hot dogs or whatever.

The band playing is a lot better than I expected. They play some things that sound a lot like Mississippi Delta blues, some Eric Clapton and other things that are not very hillbilly..

One ticket gets you a tasting cup of the competitors chili...six tickets buy a big bowl of standard chili...four for a hot dog. There is no entry fee to compete in the cook-off, but you have to agree to produce at least four gallons of chili for the little tasting cups...

Someone mistakes me for a local celebrity named Gaston who is a big sponsor for the event. Eventually I straighten this out and promise to look for someone who looks like me and convey regards.

Bull Shoals is really small town in Arkansas, maybe 2,000 on the lake. The Bull Shoals police have also sponsored a 5K race today to honor all the New York firefighters and New York police killed nine years ago...It's a small town in mid-America...They're not burning Korans here...

First prize for the best chili is $500. You also get bragging rights for a year until the next contest. The People also pick a winner and that prize is $100.

The High Thin Edge

Grand Canyon, Arizona

The overnight temperature predicted is minus four degrees Celsius. We planned to walk the whole length of the Rim trail today. It's 15 or 20 miles. I don't have the courage to ride a mule down the narrow trail to the bottom of the canyon or the stamina to make the ten mile walk down Bright Angel trail to the canyon floor and back.

I prepare a knapsack:

• Water
• Turkey sandwiches
• Mixed nuts
• Power bars
• Paperback books
• Knife
• Digital camera
• Maps

There is a system of propane shuttle buses that run every 15 minutes. We take the bus fifteen miles to the westernmost edge of the park, on a road that bans private vehicles.

The terminus on The Rim is called 'Hermits Rest'. This place has another building designed by architect Mary Coulter. The road we traveled was built by the Union Pacific railroad from their railhead ten miles back. From here wealthy travelers took mules down into the canyon a mile below for an overnight stay. The whole two day package cost $18.25. The 'hermit', Louis Bouchard, lived in the canyon below and was hired to tend the mules by Union Pacific. The railroad built this route to avoid paying the toll on the Bright Angel trail.

We've seen a picture of Mary Coulter preparing to descend into The Canyon by cable in the early part of the last century. During our hike we find the concrete and steel stubs of the top of the cable system that was used to transfer supplies and Mary to the Union Pacific resort a mile below. A student from Bulgaria asks me to take his picture and I ask him about his travels. He's also been to California and Niagara Falls in New York.

We head east along an unpaved trail on The Rim. The trail is built on the very edge of the rim, often becoming a two-foot wide ledge with an abyss on one side and a rock ledge on the other. The trail is full of large rocks and loose gravel. This trail is much more than I expected. It's fairly pointless to try to describe the beauty, grandeur and vastness of The Grand Canyon. Eventually we find a flat rock outcrop and stop eat our lunch. I ask the Commandant for a full hour lunch break and we read our books and try to decide what colours we are seeing. We decide that greens, browns, oranges, blues and purples in combinations predominate. The stillness and quiet is strange to us. A black Raven flies past our rock. We hear the wings beat.

We walk for five hours, counting lunch. The whole trail is an overlook, but we also pass many abandoned developed overlooks from back in the days that private vehicles could travel on this road. The only ones who use these overlooks now are on foot like us. We only meet two other hikers during the day who pass by as we eat lunch. I struggle with my vertigo, approaching the edge but unable to look down, then stepping back again. I remember looking down from the World Trade Center roof and visualize five very small World Trade Centers stacked one on top of the other in the center of the Canyon five miles distant. An old Quicksilver Messenger tune called The Works of Man replays in my head and I think about all the people who decided on the same day to step out of the building and hit the street below. This is a place that lends itself to meditation and daydreams, but I need a daydream-catcher to filter out bad daydreams.

Onn the 11th of September Tom and Jil lived on the south side of the south tower of the World Trade Center. They built their flat on the seventh floor of an abandoned office building in 1972 and moved from Brooklyn. The office workers, in the tower across the street, would sometimes wave at us when we went to visit them.

You could only see the first 30 floors of the tower from the flat's windows due to its proximity. I never missed a chance to go to the South tower roof on our visits.
They were in New Mexico, on vacation, on The Day. Their flat was used by the FBI as an observation post since it was on the same level as the rubble. Someone drank all her wine and left graffiti on the walls. This was no great additional loss since all their windows were blown out and the flat was full of dust, asbestos, pieces of the tower facade, computer pieces and possibly body parts.

Their dog-sitters took their old dog over the Brooklyn Bridge. She was traumatized and never really recovered. Eventually they had to put her down since she howled continually when left alone.

Tom is an artist and photographer. Some of his photos are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jil collected and sold African ancient tapestries to decorate Corporate offices. She studied at the Sorborne in Paris and Julliard in New York.

Tom had never driven very much or owned an automobile. They decided that owning things was not all that important. They purchased a diesel pickup truck and a trailer. This is their third year of full-time travel. They work in places like the Indianapolis 500 and Mount Rushmore for a month or two and move on to Alaska, Mexico or Florida.

We spent two days with them this year and brought two bags of freshly picked citrus. Tom likes red grapefruit a lot so I load him up with those. I cook them salmon and a salad of spinach leaves, cherry tomatoes, raisins, mandarin orange slices, pine nuts and goat cheese with a raspberry vinaigrette dressing.