My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (32 page)

My discomfort in the air reached its peak—or was it its nadir?—on a flight between Cleveland and New York some time ago. In addition to pawing through Skymall, I often tried to calm myself by jabbering to my seatmates, and on this particular flight I was next to an older gentleman who told me that he was a magazine publisher. Pay dirt! I was just starting my writing career, so I considered the chance to schmooze a real live publisher a major opportunity—major enough for me to put aside my Skymall completely and focus on cultivating my bit of good fortune. Things were, in fact, going very nicely. The gentleman told me that his magazine was distributed all over the United States and was published in scores of languages as well. He even suggested that I come by the office and meet the staff. I was so excited and so afraid of looking too eager that I didn’t dare ask him the name of the magazine. Then, somewhere over Altoona, we hit what felt like an air trampoline. I say this not as the sissy I was then but as the flying strongman I am now: It was really wild turbulence, with service carts clattering down the aisle, overhead compartments flapping open, flight attendants tumbling like tenpins. In the midst of the commotion, my seatmate/future editor/publisher swiveled to face me. “Susan, are you ready to meet your Maker?” he gasped. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” Well, I wasn’t, and I hadn’t, and I twisted away from him, fumbling in the seat pocket to find my lucky Skymall and silently repeating nonsense verse to drown out the sound of his prayers. At last, the plane stopped bucking, and we wafted uneventfully down toward New York and onto the runway. At this point my neck was practically dislocated from craning it away from my seatmate, but he still managed to push his business card into my very sweaty hand before we got off the plane. “I do hope you’ll come visit,” he said sweetly. “I think you’ll find that the
Watchtower
is a wonderful magazine.”

Right after that ride, I signed up with a hypnotist and got myself bedazzled into thinking airplane rides were fun—or, at the very least, nonlethal. It worked, and I soon abandoned most of my flying anxiety behavior, but my attachment to Skymall endured. What had started as a palliative had become a passion. Mostly I found myself a little obsessed with the idea of the Skymall customer—the person the catalog evoked. Even when catalogs don’t include pictures of people with the products, they do bring to mind a particular individual; they really need to, since there is no salesperson at your elbow giving you the narrative that all retail experiences imply—the story of who you are and who you will be by acquiring a particular item. I can decode a lot of other catalog personas, such as, say, the horny trust funders of Abercrombie & Fitch; the nerd-ball pipe-smoking Levenger guy; the swingers who live and die by Design Within Reach. But Skymall? Who was this person that Skymall described?

Well, there’s the hairiness, as I mentioned previously. In fact, despite those bikini-area shavers, I would say that there is, overall, a distinctly masculine aura in the catalog. Skymall man is a businessperson—maybe a middle-level database administrator or regional field sales trainer. He lives in a house and has a backyard. He is an intrepid traveler but is afraid of fire (for which Skymall provides smoke hoods and fire escape ladders), insects (no problem: he can use the Bug Cap to protect his face and neck or, better still, the Keep Your Distance Insect Vacuum), and germs (besides the Daisy-Lift toilet-seat lifter, Skymall offers vibrating tongue cleaners, ultraminiature personal air purifiers, and bacteria-resistant utensils—“Your old wooden cooking spoon may be teeming with bacteria—replace it with the new-tech ExoGlass Spoon!”). The Skymall man also worries about his privacy (for which Skymall offers wide-screen Caller ID displays, driveway alert systems, and a listening device detector—“Find Out Who’s Eavesdropping on You!”) and mean dogs, who, thank goodness, can be stopped in their tracks up to fifty feet away using Dog Off, “a great gift for joggers, walkers, repairmen, and postal delivery people.” (Just one question: Are we supposed to be giving gifts to repairmen these days? Maybe Skymall men are raising the generosity bar.)

Mean dogs aside, the Skymall man is a pet lover, forking over a fortune for automatic pet dishes, deluxe dog beds, ramps to help older dogs into cars, wheelie bags for pet transportation, and, most touchingly, pet headstones made of Vermont slate. (Skymall also features a garden stone of composite granite, cement, and resin with a prewritten “sentiment” of either “My Beloved Pet” or a four-line farewell that is generic enough to use for either a pet or a human buried in the backyard.) The Skymall man likes a drink. He appreciates the value of having a martini atomizer and a Barmaster Electronic Mixing Assistant (“It’s the PDA of the Cocktail Circuit”) close at hand, as well as, appropriately enough, two different digital Breathalyzers. He likes to barbecue (see the array of tools and grills and even the personal steak branding iron with up to three initials, “to show your guests the pride you take in a great barbecue!”). But, as much as he likes to be the boss of the backyard grill, he likes to relax while doing it, which he can do once he orders the Remote Cooking Thermometer, which allows him to sit inside and, say, practice his golf game on the amazing DivotMat until the remote alarm beeps to let him know that his personally branded steaks are ready.

Commitment to utter laziness is another signature Skymall attribute. The Skymall man may make gestures of activity by purchasing the appurtenances of the sporting life (digital golf scopes, electronic fish finders, and a luxuriously padded, synthetic leather, motorcycle-seat bar stool, which is particularly desirable, since it is both a sport-related item and a drinking accessory), but the quintessential Skymall sport product may be the ExerCHIzer. “If regular aerobic exercise is too strenuous, try the ExerCHIzer for health, fitness and stress reduction!” the catalog suggests, explaining that the device “helps you perform vital aerobic exercises with minimal effort.”

Skymall does celebrate items that perform more than one task at a time—for example, the binoculars that are also a camera, or the Fire & Ice Grill, which is both a barbecue and a cooler, or the world’s first digital camera/recorder/PDA stylus pen—but it really exalts in the single-function product, the thing that does one thing and one thing only and is wholly useless otherwise. It’s a bold move to tout products like battery-operated automatic eyeglass cleaners and five-foot-tall popcorn poppers when doctrines like voluntary simplicity, arguing that we could live very well with one blanket, one frying pan, and a knife, are in vogue. What kind of house could accommodate not only a five-foot-tall popcorn popper, but also a carnival-style snow cone maker and a soft-serve ice-cream maker, and the Old Fashioned Carnival Cotton Candy Maker, and the Nachos & Cheese Maker, and the plastic salad-bar set (“The Mother of All Salad Bars!”)? Is it the biggest house in the known universe? Does it have a storage room just for makers of specific foods? Does Skymall represent the ultimate in human ingenuity—the ability to devise a machine that makes cotton candy—or is it addressing our lack of ingenuity in not being able to figure out a way to make cotton candy ourselves?

I am not totally immune to Skymall’s beckonings. I once bought a little handheld scanner after seeing it in the catalog, and fell for not one but two sets of vacuum-sealed storage bags that were going to banish forever—or at least compress—the clutter in my closets. And this Christmas, at last, my husband got me a Pop-Up Hot-Dog Cooker. I used the scanner approximately once; the vacuum bags just added to my closet clutter. The hot-dog cooker will probably get a brief workout and then be retired, first to my even more cluttered closet and then to my neighborhood Goodwill collection center. This is perhaps proof that the ultimate, best product of Skymall is Skymall itself—this document of the misbegotten inventiveness of humankind; the magical thinking that leads us to believe that some material item, however nutty it is, will improve our existence; and the heartwarming, affirming fact that we humans are the only life force that would—or could—conceive of, market, and purchase goods such as French Maid toilet paper holders, talking Christmas ornaments, dryer vent brushes, Tan Thru bathing suits, CD shredders, World’s Largest Write-on Map Murals, and personal neck-mounted cooling systems. In the words of another Skymall product—those framed instructional thought inducers, known in Skymallese as Inspirational Artwork That Shares Your Values—this takes
CHARACTER
(aluminum or wood framed),
EXCELLENCE
(double matted), and the
ESSENCE OF LEADERSHIP
. Or you can just—wood framed and double matted—
DREAM
.

We Just Up and Left

A guy known as the Catman lived in Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park for a while; he had a hundred cats and a mouse-colored trailer, which he parked in Space 19, near a knobby maple tree. This happened to be prior to the animal weight restriction—that is, the rule that residents in the park could not own a pet that weighed more than twenty pounds. None of the Catman’s cats weighed more than around ten, but if you added them together, they would probably have weighed close to a thousand, and if the twenty-pound rule had been in effect, they might have required some sort of waiver. This is all academic, because before the rule was enacted the Catman had hitched his trailer to his pickup and packed up his animals, and in a matter of minutes all hundred and one of them were gone. In Portland Meadows, as in all trailer parks, people come and go. Everyone everywhere comes and goes, but people who live in trailers live in a constant state of possible mobility.

Some people come to Portland Meadows, on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, and then leave after no time; some people stay too long. A man who hated everyone and used a battery-operated bullhorn for normal conversation stayed in the park only a few years, but everyone could hardly wait for him to go; when he finally did, he pulled his trailer out and then sowed broken glass and planted pieces of barbed wire and crisscrossed fishing line all over his parking space. Some people stay for ages and are nearly unseen. They could disappear and no one would look for them, because no one would notice they were gone. Last April, the park newsletter noted one of the hazards of being invisible: “We must request that persons please not be getting inside the Dumpsters. . . . A person could be knocked out trying to get into or out of a Dumpster by a slip of the hand or foot and not be discovered before the Dumpster is emptied.” Some people who live in the park, though, make a big impression. A phony blind priest with a Great Dane Seeing Eye dog lived in the park for just a couple of months, but no one will forget him: He had lots of high-spirited friends who used to visit and who didn’t seem to mind at all that he wasn’t really a priest, that the dog was blind, and that the priest, in fact, was the one with excellent vision.

Victor Nicolaevich Gorbachev, who told me he is Mikhail Gorbachev’s cousin, lives in Portland Meadows, in a crumbly camper with busted pipes. He works as a driver for Space Age Fuel. He has lived in the camper since shortly after he arrived in America, except, he said, for five months he spent in prison. He has moved the camper three times—from Fairbanks to Phoenix to San Francisco to Portland. He says that life in Alaska, Arizona, and California was not particularly pleasant, but he loves Oregon, and for the moment he is planning to stay. Drifting in a house with a license plate is something that Victor Gorbachev considers distinctive about the United States. “In America, the houses are light as wood and you move them around,” he says. “In Russia, our houses were made of bricks.”

Portland Meadows is in a saucer of land rimmed by the Columbia River, the Willamette River, and the stagnant, coffee-colored Columbia Slough. Downtown Portland is a few miles south. To the north and the east lie the snowy tops of Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood. To the west are a race-car track and a horse track and the bundled black strands of the railroad tracks. It is an empty-feeling landscape of big, homely things—big trucks, big truck stops, a big toy warehouse. In 1915, when the park opened, it was called Portland Auto Camp, and on advertising placards its address was given as “Union Avenue and North Edge City Limits.” The park lies low. The land it sits on is two feet below sea level. It may be the lowest point in Portland. It is part of the Columbia River floodplain; several times in this century, it has been underwater. Jim Benson, who manages the park with his wife, Jan, says, “We’re way down. We’re really down in a hole.” Now the address is 9000 Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, but from the road there is no sign of the park, no front gate or portal: There is only a steep-pitched driveway, unmarked and unremarkable, that looks like one of the narrow off-ramps that truck drivers use when their rigs are running away. At the bottom of the driveway are a speed bump and a pothole, and then the asphalt levels off and the park spills out in every direction, like a puddle. Except that it is older and bigger, Portland Meadows is a lot like any other trailer park. It has some two hundred trailer spaces, a beauty parlor, and a dusty box of a building called the Country Store. It has an office and a Laundromat. It has a dozen narrow lanes that even have names—Main Street, A Street, Twelfth Street. At any given moment, several hundred people live here. Some are single, many are divorced, some are old; there are babies and children; there are people living on welfare and people with more money who just like low-maintenance living that they can take on the road. There are Elkhart Travelers and Airstreams and cab-over-campers, bulky Detroiters and Travelezes and double-wide longs. None of this is visible from the road. I lived in Portland for five years and drove up and down this block of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard a million times and never saw anything to suggest that scores of lives were unfolding a few feet below me. People find their way here anyway. One recent afternoon, a boyish-faced man with wheat-colored hair stopped by the trailer park office. “You got any trailers for rent?” he asked.