Back to School: David Letterman Country, Indianapolis  I remember Dave. I especially remember Dave sprawled on the living room floor of my parents house on North Delaware Street in Indianapolis in 1962 with blood oozing from a gash in his head, after it hit the antique wheelbarrow my mom had turned into a glass top coffee table. Now the last thing you want when you’re a high school freshman having a wild party while your parents are away for the weekend’and you’re supposed to be babysitting’is to leave evidence. The beer cans and cigarette butts were easy to get rid of. But Dave Letterman’s blood did not want to come out of that rug.

The Atmospheric Lead 

Gotham, My Ex-beloved  Oh New York! Fueled to a frenzy by rivers of caffeine! You’re as filthy rich and filthy poor, picaresque and prurient, rude, chaotic, glamorous and grimy, lunatic and lovable as ever. After all these years away from you, Big Rotten Apple, you, I’m hungry to pound your teeming streets, gawk at your characters, din my ears with your cacophony, smell your skin, and dig through the layers of my personal archaeology, from Harlem, where it started in a dorm room at Columbia, to Coney, where I nearly lost it on the beach. 

The Gospel According to East Tennessee  November is balmy in Tennessee. Tobacco leaves are curling to a toasty brown in old red barns. I’m heading back to East Tennessee, driving over a lonely stretch on Clinch Mountain where the only beacon in the blackness is a roadside tavern where biboveralled men are cussin’ and sippin’ and wishin’ they were rich. 

The Cliffhanger Lead 

Wine for Soap 

…and every time it comes to choosing between laundry soap or wine, we buy the wine!  “ ——Peg’s busking journal, June, 1981. Paris 1:00 a.m. 

I’m curled up to sleep next to a waterfall, with my head on my harp case and camera bags tied to my legs. The cleaning staff has mopped around me and gone. Orly Airport is closed for the night. I’m the only soul left in the third floor Observation Area, the classy area of the airport that costs three francs to get into. It has an art museum and a cinema, so it attracts a higher class of people than the main area downstairs, which is free, but at this time of night is filled with homeless clochards and gangs of boys with bottles of cheap vin ordinaire. Here I have a comfortable bench near a soothing waterfall which reminds me of the Canadian North woods, where I will be safe for the night.  I’m sleeping at Orly rather than in the $10 hotel room I reserved today because my mother’s flight arrives at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. She'd better be on it, that's all I can say. This afternoon I rang her in Poughkeepsie from a phone booth on the Champs Elysée to say bon voyage, since it only costs one franc to call America for 8.6 seconds. She shouted, "Nan, I'm not coming! I have a prob— and I cut her off. '“Peggy Lyon! If you’re not on that plane I'll never speak to you again!” I shouted back as the franc ran out. I didn’t call her back to see what the problem was. I was too upset. Was she losing her nerve? 

The Summary or Sneak Preview Lead 

Death Valley Daze  Did God make this land? Warped, slashed, torn, squeezed, pounded, twisted, scoured, then set afire? Or was it, as some say, conjured by the Devil himself? 

A Jaunt Around The Lakes  Oh you should see it! When the tourist tide washes into Ireland’s tourist capital, the whole town scrambles for the jetsam. Jaunting car jarveys quit the pubs, shave their faces, rouse their horses. Lakes of Killarney boatmen dredge up leprechaun tales. And merchants chanting Cead Mille Failtes a Hundred Thousand Welcomes tout their plastic leprechauns and tee-shirts beaming I HAVE IRISH ROOTS! Hustle, bustle, charm, inveigle, for the flood of tourists will ebb in a few hours, rolling away to the Blarney Stone and Bunratty Castle and back to the shores of Amerikay. 

Jamaica Blue  I’ll start with rich coffee and wild sex, two commodities for which Jamaica is famous. Of course there’s also sun and rum and Ganja and Reggae and wild Rastafarian hair and Rent-a-Dred lover boys (beach Gigolos with bleached dredlocks). And charming hucksters begging to braid your hair, show you the real Bob Marley house, push you drugs and eye-bulging erotic wood-carvings. But two of the most startling takes of my week on this ribald English-speaking Caribbean isle happened on a tour of the Mavis Bank Central Coffee Factory in the spectacular Blue Mountains, and in the disco of Hedonism II in Negril. 

The Shock / Provocative Lead 

In the Valley of the Kong Longs ( Drumheller, Alberta Dinosaur Country)  Godzilla was here. In the flesh. I’ve got his teeth marks on a 75-million year-old souvenir to prove it... Well actually it was an Albertosaurus, the grandaddy of the T-rex, the inspiration for the Japanese movie monster that once stalked the streets of Drumheller. He was the monster who attacked the poor vegetarian Hadrosaur whose chunk of fossilized tibia I was holding in my grasp. 

Lost in Angeles (Mountain Biking in Los Angeles)  It was my dirty little secret. And even more scandalous because I knew how. I’d done it in hot-blooded Latin Montreal, after 15 years of not doing it at all. And I’d even done it in England, on the left, and in Manhattan at mid-day. But I was not going to do it in Los Angeles, not even when people said I’d have to or be laughed out of town. I would not drive... 

Character / dialogue lead 

Fried Green Tomatoes: Juliette, Georgia “I don’t think it floats, but you can wash yer skin and yer hair with it. And yer dishes and yer overalls. And well heck yer tractor and yer floors,” the old man said. ”We used it fer durn near everythin’ when I was growin up. It ain’t yer fancy-smancy Mar-say French milled, but a bar of Octagon All Purpose’ll keep everybody and everything on the farm spankin’ for a month.””   The wonders of Octagon soap...the music of whistling trains... swappin’ gossip at Bowdoin’s...goin’ fishin’ in Lake Juliette or the meandering brown Ocmulgee River...and eating Fried Green Tomatoes. These are the simple charms of Juliette, Georgia, an old cotton and gristmill town 15 miles north of Macon that time and the railroad line forgot, but Hollywood didn’t. 

Conjuring Blackbeard’s Ghost, on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina’s Outer Banks  “So what’d ya wanna know? After they hacked off my head, they threw my body to the sharks, black cape, boots and all. Twenty sword wounds and five pistol ball holes and no head and it still circled the sloop seven bloody times before it would sink! Ha! ... And then Maynard sailed from Ocracoke, this devil of an island where you’re sittin’’right now’down the North Carolina coast to deliver the blood trophy to the Governor of Virginia, who the people of this state begged to capture me. That was back in 1718.””

The Question Lead 

Boomeranging Around Sydney  Would it whiz back around and hit me in the face? Or maybe even break my arm, like it did to that friend of a friend in New York State who was taught by the Aborigines? Or would it fly off at 100 mph and sink into the Sydney Harbor? That’s was what I was wondering as I stared at the wall of boomerangs in the renovated warehouse resounding with the eerie tones of the didgeridoo. 

The Statement Lead 

Going Overboard in the Whitsundays, Great Barrier Reef  It’s the eighth wonder of the world, the largest living thing on the planet, visible by astronauts even from the moon. And here I am upside down in the land Down Under, paddling around in it as carefree as a duck.

Excavating Arthur  It is historically inevitable that there should appear, in the town of Tintagel on the stormy coast of Cornwall, a car park named King Arthur, a launderette named Lancelot, and a lottery draw machine named Merlin. After all, Celtic mythology and Tintagel tourism have it that the heroic chieftain who saved Britain from barbarians in 12 great battles was brought forth into the world from Merlin the Enchanter’s sea cave at the base of Tintagel Castle. 

Odd Juxtaposition Lead 

Cockpit Follies  I’d never landed in a blizzard before. But two hours after leaving my apartment in Montreal on a hot morning in August, I was bumping through Tokyo airspace with blobs of snow whizzing at the windscreen of the Japan TransOcean Air #737-400 I was flying.