The Argonath
This evening, I found myself trudging deliberately through the snow-covered streets of my old neighborhood in a rented Buick, hail disrupting the beams of my headlights and drumming angrily against my windshield. I was risking life and limb for three men I’ve never met, John McPhee, Ian Frazier, and Joseph Mitchell, and it was all Susan Orlean’s fault.
I received an e-mail from her this afternoon, in which she recommended, at my request, several writers I might find interesting. I was on my way to the local bookstore to check out some of their work.
Susan Orlean is a writer for the New Yorker, whose book, The Orchid Thief, is the basis for Spike Jonze’s new movie Adaptation. Meryl Streep’s character in the film is called Susan Orlean, but she bears about as much resemblance to the real Susan Orlean as I do to Pamela Anderson. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman dressed her up a bit, so to speak, shackling her with some rather unattractive character flaws in the name of Art. Hooray for Art!
The real Susan Orlean, if I may judge by her stories, is a talented writer with a fascinating life, but, and I say this will all due respect, she could’ve killed me. The roads were that bad.
The risk of bodily harm aside, the ride was quite nostalgic for me. It was not the first time I’d driven through a hailstorm in a rented car. I was once trapped in what I can only call a hail holocaust in the mountains outside Cortez, Colorado. It was the summer of 2001, and I was on my way to Mesa Verde National Park, one of 20 national parks I visited that July and August.
For some people, the Road never calls. For me, she rose up with a siren song in the summer between my first and second years of medical school. When the Road comes for you, it’s best to buckle up and let her take you where she pleases. She took me out West, to California and Joshua Tree, to Arizona and the Painted Desert, to Capitol Reef, to Cortez. I traveled alone. I was Jack freaking Kerouac, minus the sanctimonious beatnik gibberish.
I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed since then relative to my life. Upon my return, I was swept almost immediately back into the daily routine of medical school, its ebbs and flows as regular as a metronome. But in the midst of the familiar, I discovered a delicious secret: the road never stops her hypnotic song, and her gifts are sewn into the fabric of each day.
I listened almost exclusively to Rufus Wainwright’s Poses on my journey, along with what would turn out to be Aaliyah’s last album. Any time I hear that music, I am transported back to the Pacific Coast Highway with its shifting shoulders and gut-wrenching drops to the sea, to the quilted farmlands on the fringes of Los Angeles. The very mention of Curt Schilling returns me to Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, where I watched him pitch against the Pirates the year the Diamondbacks won the World Series. At least once a day, I revisit that magical summer through some arbitrary sensory signal, like the metallic dance of hail on the roof of my car.
Toward the end of August, I took a flight out of Las Vegas to Newark Airport. As the plane taxied to the gate, I traced the skyline of Manhattan south to the Twin Towers and smiled. They had so often presided over the end of a journey for me, and finding them always helped settle my bones. I did not regard them as fleeting. They would persevere to keep watch over my grandchildren, to mark the ends of journeys not yet imagined.
Of course, they were gone less than a month later, consumed by the darkest and weakest aspects of human nature, and I feel now like a boat set adrift against the tide. My homecomings will now be punctuated by the absence of giants, not the stately glimmer of old friends.
My memories of that summer are forever linked to that horrible day in September when the world caught up with us. The images are no less therapeutic in my mind’s eye, but each snapshot is haunted by a shadow of the future. The Road, once so pure and enchanting, is littered with ghosts.
Meryl Streep plays Susan Orlean as Courtney Love. Hail baptizes a white Toyota in the western mountains. Skyscrapers vanish and reappear in photographs taken months and miles away.
Life is a whimsical architect.
Mount Sinai Mosaic: Jan/Feb 2003
I received an e-mail from her this afternoon, in which she recommended, at my request, several writers I might find interesting. I was on my way to the local bookstore to check out some of their work.
Susan Orlean is a writer for the New Yorker, whose book, The Orchid Thief, is the basis for Spike Jonze’s new movie Adaptation. Meryl Streep’s character in the film is called Susan Orlean, but she bears about as much resemblance to the real Susan Orlean as I do to Pamela Anderson. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman dressed her up a bit, so to speak, shackling her with some rather unattractive character flaws in the name of Art. Hooray for Art!
The real Susan Orlean, if I may judge by her stories, is a talented writer with a fascinating life, but, and I say this will all due respect, she could’ve killed me. The roads were that bad.
The risk of bodily harm aside, the ride was quite nostalgic for me. It was not the first time I’d driven through a hailstorm in a rented car. I was once trapped in what I can only call a hail holocaust in the mountains outside Cortez, Colorado. It was the summer of 2001, and I was on my way to Mesa Verde National Park, one of 20 national parks I visited that July and August.
For some people, the Road never calls. For me, she rose up with a siren song in the summer between my first and second years of medical school. When the Road comes for you, it’s best to buckle up and let her take you where she pleases. She took me out West, to California and Joshua Tree, to Arizona and the Painted Desert, to Capitol Reef, to Cortez. I traveled alone. I was Jack freaking Kerouac, minus the sanctimonious beatnik gibberish.
I’m amazed at how much I’ve changed since then relative to my life. Upon my return, I was swept almost immediately back into the daily routine of medical school, its ebbs and flows as regular as a metronome. But in the midst of the familiar, I discovered a delicious secret: the road never stops her hypnotic song, and her gifts are sewn into the fabric of each day.
I listened almost exclusively to Rufus Wainwright’s Poses on my journey, along with what would turn out to be Aaliyah’s last album. Any time I hear that music, I am transported back to the Pacific Coast Highway with its shifting shoulders and gut-wrenching drops to the sea, to the quilted farmlands on the fringes of Los Angeles. The very mention of Curt Schilling returns me to Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, where I watched him pitch against the Pirates the year the Diamondbacks won the World Series. At least once a day, I revisit that magical summer through some arbitrary sensory signal, like the metallic dance of hail on the roof of my car.
Toward the end of August, I took a flight out of Las Vegas to Newark Airport. As the plane taxied to the gate, I traced the skyline of Manhattan south to the Twin Towers and smiled. They had so often presided over the end of a journey for me, and finding them always helped settle my bones. I did not regard them as fleeting. They would persevere to keep watch over my grandchildren, to mark the ends of journeys not yet imagined.
Of course, they were gone less than a month later, consumed by the darkest and weakest aspects of human nature, and I feel now like a boat set adrift against the tide. My homecomings will now be punctuated by the absence of giants, not the stately glimmer of old friends.
My memories of that summer are forever linked to that horrible day in September when the world caught up with us. The images are no less therapeutic in my mind’s eye, but each snapshot is haunted by a shadow of the future. The Road, once so pure and enchanting, is littered with ghosts.
Meryl Streep plays Susan Orlean as Courtney Love. Hail baptizes a white Toyota in the western mountains. Skyscrapers vanish and reappear in photographs taken months and miles away.
Life is a whimsical architect.
Mount Sinai Mosaic: Jan/Feb 2003
posted by Michael Novick at 11:36 PM
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