Hagar Writes

Mass. Migration: a long road trip & a leap into the unknown

  • Near the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis

    I’m feeling very lucky at the moment, sitting in a deep bath after a night out seeing three incredibly talented singer-songwriters share the stage at the Listening Room in Nashville: Twinnie, Tenille Townes, and Bonner Black. Stream their music—I certainly will be doing so. They sang songs about love and heartbreak and birds and goldfish and Nashville’s neon lights obscuring the stars. Hailing from the UK, Alberta, Canada, and Hot Rock, TN respectively, these three smart, charming, and velvet-voiced women fulfilled my Nashville dream.

    Meanwhile, the walk to the venue down Broadway was all cowboy hats and Bon Jovi covers and testosterone and excess. Loud music poured out of every building and food truck. It was A LOT.

    Speaking of testosterone, we hung out in a Memphis dive bar last night listening to five local musicians perform soul and blues covers and banter with each other and the audience. The singer, A.B., had an astounding voice and an ease with people. Other young musicians in jeans and baseball caps clustered by the bar, one of them jumping up on stage to cover from the bass player when he lumbered off to pee at the beginning of a number. The original bass player, an older guy who wore his baseball cap tilted to the side, much to the amusement of the young crew by the bar, worked the room carrying a silver tip bucket. The show was unpolished and soulful and very entertaining. We left smiling ear to ear.

    It’s a joy to watch people being really good at their craft. Humans are wonderful. And awful.

    I was reminded of that fact wandering around the Civil Rights Museum, which is located in the Lorraine Motel where MLK Jr. was murdered. Owen and I spent over three hours inside, reading about all these brave souls who fought for justice, paying a steep price but also embodying goodness and righteousness and love and hope in the face of hate and violence and evil. The museum really drives home the fact that everyday people have the capacity to change society,and that we all have a moral obligation to do so. It’s a powerful place that I hope Diego and Pele can experience someday.

    Today, we had our first mapping snafu. Instead of the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, I somehow managed to route us to a neighborhood called Hermitage which, incidentally is not far from where that asshole Andrew Jackson lived. We drove almost twenty miles out of the way in rush hour traffic, ending up in an unpaved parking lot amidst various strip malls. It was frustrating, especially since it lengthened our drive by about an hour and a half, but we also laughed. Humans (me) are sometimes dumbasses. Machines are dumbasses too.

    In Memphis, we saw piles of dirty snow on the ground, remnants of last week’s ferocious storm, and on our drive to Nashville, we saw tons of broken trees, their branches snapped by the icy cold and strong winds. Nature is not to be trifled with. I wish we were better at heeding that message and giving our natural environment the respect it deserves.

    A friend in North Adam called to inform us that the Massachusetts weather has turned the sidewalk in front of our house into a treacherous block of ice covered in snow. She suggested we hire her neighbor to help us out. He sounded very friendly on the phone (and his little baby was very chatty), and when he gets back to town in a couple of days, he’s going to help us out.

    Humans are cool and kind. I hope we can figure out how to be better to each other and the world. As Tenille Townes, my new Alberta crush, sang tonight: we could all use a little more of the kind of love that envelops everyone inside of it. (I’m paraphrasing.)

    Take a warm bath and listen to some beautiful music and know that there are many people across the country caring about and looking out for each other, even if that’s not what we’re told and shown.

    Good night, y’all.

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  • Yesterday, we drove 628 miles, which I don’t really recommend. We traversed a large swath of Texas, all of Arkansas, crossing the Mississippi into Tennessee just before 9 p.m.

    When you travel by car, you are not really “in” the places you pass through. You’re a detached observer, an astronaut hurtling through space, adrift. We only stopped twice the entire drive (if you don’t count our hour-plus detour to turn around and retrieve the laundry we left in Nick and Alison’s dryer!) We had our first-ever Buc-ee’s experience and, y’all, it was CRAZY. For those who don’t know, Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas station/convenience stops that originated near Lake Jackson in Texas and has since spread throughout the South. Buc-ee’s prides itself on its clean bathrooms, which were impressive for a busy way station, to be sure. But what floored me was the sheer scale of the place. The size of several football fields smooshed together, the Buc-ee’s we stopped at, East of Dallas, offered a dizzying smorgasbord: BBQ brisket and pulled pork sandwiches prepared in an open kitchen in the middle of the room; hot chicken nuggets and fries in a box; cut fruit and key lime pie in cups; freshly roasted pecans and cashews; oodles of old-fashioned fudge in every flavor; slushies; and tons and tons of merch bearing the company mascot, a wide-eyed beaver wearing a goofy red cap. Anyways, I was totally overwhelmed but somehow all in, sort of like how I’m now a Costco person. I don’t know what to tell you: I contain multitudes.

    Anyway, I digress. I’ve been thinking about spaces—public and private—and how they shape our reality. In Austin, we went for an afternoon swim at Barton Springs, an outdoor spring-fed pool that is free during the winter months and early in the morning and late at night in the summer. It was refreshing, warmer than the Pacific but still cool, perfect for an 84-degree February day! Public bathing spaces are common all over the world, in all kinds of cultures, but they’re not really an American thing. That’s a shame, because there is something beautiful about providing a space for people to plunge and sauna and unwind together. It breeds an almost familial connection between perfect strangers: look, my body is similar to yours—we’re all human animals.

    In Marfa, our docent for the “Studio Tour” of Donald Judd’s workspaces was a gentle, bearded young man named Aedan with an art history degree from Dartmouth. He and Owen bonded over their love of Mass MOCA and exchanged numbers so they can get coffee when Aedan is next in town. Aedan had been living in Marfa for a few months and was loving his job, but he lamented that even though he was in the middle of all this open space, surrounded by the jagged peaks and scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert, there was nowhere to wander and hike: everything around, as far as the eye could see, was private ranch land.

    It’s a particular kind of hubris: to claim vast expanses of land that were forcibly taken from Indigenous peoples who called the landscape home for centuries as private property. It’s also emblematic of U.S. history and culture. We’re obsessed with ownership and expansion (paging Buc-ee’s).

    Public spaces are precious—parks and libraries and public schools. They represent human’s hunger and capacity for connection and shared experience. In Austin, Alison took us to see the gorgeous troll sculpture that resides in a local park, one of a series of built by Danish artist Thomas Dambo for his work Trail of 1,000 Trolls, and I can’t wait to go searching for more of these gentle giants in the future. I’m also looking forward to exploring all the accessible nature around North Adams, to using the free snowshoes that are provided at the trailheads that originate at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and working at the library that’s just down the street from our new (pink) house.

    Appreciating public spaces is a good reminder to not take the business of “making a home” too, too seriously. Yes, my home environment is very important to me and I am, of course, excited about refurbishing and decorating 194 East Main in the faded-elegance style she deserves. I look forward to welcoming people into our home for dinner parties and overnight visits.

    But it’s the shared spaces that truly create a sense of belonging to a place, and I hope to participate and get involved in, for example, supporting the local library. As we discovered in the Bay Area, making a home is in large part about getting familiar with the surrounding environment, with the hidden corners and magical offerings and soul-expanding pockets of nature and wildness.

    Today, we will go and experience the Civil Rights Museum here in Memphis, maybe thrift, and then go looking for live music. I’m enjoying passing through all these new places and drinking up the newness. But I find I am also looking forward to arriving in Massachusetts. I am excited about discovering and creating a new home.

  • DAY 9 MARFA > AUSTIN

    (photo of a piece by Narsiso Martinez in Marfa Ballroom)

    Some days—most days, to be exact—pass by in a bit of a blur, like seeing the countryside glide by from the car window.

    Today, we passed the 2,000-mile mark, somewhere just outside of Austin, where we are staying with Alison and Nick and their two awesome boys. The day started early, after a sleepless night for both of us. We fell asleep easily last night, but woke up around three and tossed and turned for many hours. We weren’t unhappy, but we knew we’d be wiped out the next day. I thought about the design of the new kitchen and where to hang the pictures I’d taken down from the gallery wall in the Berkeley living room.

    We finished the Beth’s Dead podcast, which I’d definitely recommend, and listened to a playlist inspired by Trinidad Senolia, a DJ duo out of Los Angeles. We witnessed the lonely Chihuahuan Desert give way to Texas Hill Country with its rolling hills and wineries and oaks, reminiscent of Northern California’s own wine region. I marveled at the infinite cloud formations, and lamented not stopping in Fredericksburg, a touristy town with a serious German vibe and intriguing antique stories and boutiques. When you’re trying to cover this much ground, you have to roll through places you’re curious about without stopping. As discussed in an episode of This American Life we listened to, this might actually be a blessing. Oftentimes, the mystery and intrigue of a thing is much more interesting than the answer or the solution.

    It’s been lovely to be with our Austin family. We got the tour of their ’60s ranch house, had a rooftop margarita, and ate A LOT of delicious barbecue. We sat outside after dinner, on a 70-degree February evening, enjoying the enthusiasm of the boys (and Owen) playing a loosey-goosey version of Dungeons & Dragons. We caught up on friends and work and changes and life.

    Remember that ear worm “Life is a Highway”? Life is a highway/ 
    I wanna ride it all night long    . I’m happy to be staying put with people I love for a couple of nights, but I have always loved traveling and being on the move, winding my way through places I’ve never been before. In fact, though, the song gets it all wrong. Life ISN’T a highway. It doesn’t stretch predictably from point A to B, slicing straight through limestone formations, paved and predictable. Life is a country road, like the ones we drove through in Marfa, potholed and undulating. We don’t actually know where we’re headed or what the Dungeon Master has in store for us—the trick is to stay curious and enjoy the ride.

    [*Disclaimer: written on less than five hours of sleep. Go easy on this tired armchair philosopher.]

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