All over the northeast in almost every small town there seems to be at least one beauty shop in a big brick building painted solid pink. A la:
Aside from being a kind of ingeniously simple marketing choice, the pink brick also serves as a homemade beacon of female energy. Don’t you feel it?! There was one shop especially that I saw that was on the smaller side but painted BRIGHT magenta, with a little sign saying “Becky’s Beauty.” If you’re at all interested in beauty shops as safe spaces for women you might like this book, Facing the Mirror by Frida Kerner Furman.
This innovative ethnographic study of a neighborhood beauty salon investigates how customers constitute a lively, affirming community of peers during their weekly visits…. These older, mostly Jewish women articulate their experiences of bodily self-presentation, femininity, aging, and caring pertaining to their lives within and outside Julie’s International Salon. This book explores the socio-moral significant of these experiences, which reveals as much about society as about older women themselves.
Before hitting New York state, I drove through the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts on Route 2, called the Mohawk Trail. Gorgeous! I included some photos after the jump, but I wanted first to talk about Shelburne Falls, a little town along the way where I stopped for some pizza and rest. Shelburne Falls is really kind of two towns: Shelburne and Buckland, separated by the Deerfield River, over which there are two really cool, really different bridges.
The Shelburne Falls Truss Bridge (above) is the main traffic bridge, built in 1890.
The other bridge is called the Bridge of Flowers, a now-defunct trolley bridge that a local group turned into a footpath and garden. Awesome idea!
I walked back and forth between Buckland and Shelburne a couple times trying to choose a favorite but I had some trouble. Buckland had two pizza places, but Shelburne had two bookstores.
Both of Shelburne’s bookstores were having sweet sidewalk sales, but while one of the stores was selling Tom Robbins and Michael Chabon on the cheap, the other had these to offer:
I kind of love it. Enjoy the photos of the Berkshires!
Driving North on Rte 302, I was missing Portland and feeling sad when all of a sudden I turned a corner onto Rte 112 and wandered into this:
The White Mountains of New Hampshire. I can’t think of a better rebound! New Hampshire Route 112 winds through the Whites on a road called the Kancamagus Highway. Kancamagus (a name meaning “The Fearless One”) was the third and final leader (called “Sagamon”) of the Panacook (or Pennacook) Confederacy of 17 Native American tribes.
My last post was a complete lie, I didn’t leave Portland until Saturday. My parents called excitedly to ask where I was, and I said, “…still Portland.” Tommy’s friends would run into me on the street and say, “You’re still here…!” Yes.
Granted, I had amazing weather and a great host, but until further notice, I think Portland is my perfect city, my signature city, whatever. Those that know me well will agree that there’s really nothing I’d be happier to do than sip a therapeutic tea called the Herban Cowboy while standing on a hill looking at this:
A lot of the most famous road trip stories/American travelogues - Travels with Charley, Blue Highways, Easy Rider- share a pretty common theme: they all feature protagonists on a “search for America,” which seems really to be more of a quest to contextualize their own identities. The stories are a little more subtle and complicated than that, but… I’m going to stick with my generalization for now. Thanks!
Amnesia Moon, by Jonathan Lethem, follows a young man named Chaos and is set in a kind of post-apocalyptic America… kind of. The whole thing seems sort of post-nuclear-disaster style at first (mutations, canned food), but in fact there are several shades of weirdness going on.
Everyone seems to be under some creepy mind/dream control helmed by a fat man named Kellogg, who runs a nearby town. Perhaps even more creepily, no one has any memory of what happened to make the world this way or what lies outside their desolate town.
After a run-in with Kellogg, Chaos takes off across the country on a quest to literally find out who he is, where he is and what America is.
Kind of an interesting take on the whole road trip/personal journey/America as a supporting character genre, right?? Without going into details, reality turns out to be pretty gooey in this book, and in the end the question is, “Can you have an identity without a context?” If you have no history and you can’t trust your present experience, memory or even your relationships with other people, how do you define yourself? Terrifying.
And AWESOME because that’s totally what travel and life is supposed to give you, right? Experiences that you can use to calibrate your own identity?
I like it.
I also like this:
If you like Jonathan Lethem, you might also want to check out a pretty cool interview he gave to Ron Hogan on Beatrice right after Amnesia Moon came out.
I walked back and forth between Buckland and Shelburne a couple times trying to choose a favorite but I had some trouble. Buckland had two pizza places, but Shelburne had two bookstores.
My last post was a complete lie, I didn’t leave Portland until Saturday. My parents called excitedly to ask where I was, and I said, “…still Portland.” Tommy’s friends would run into me on the street and say, “You’re still here…!” Yes.
