Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Away In A Meth Den
As I lie here sweating in a manger of a motel room, listening to my roommate struggle to breathe, I am silently glad that the junkies in the parking lot stopped breaking windows before they got to ours, and I wonder if things might have turned out differently if we’d never followed that Star of Bethlehem, or if we’d followed it to its final destination, the banana factory.
This evening, a friend from college is getting married at his home in Gettysburg, PA, where he teaches anthropology at the local college. Despite, or perhaps due to, my imminent departure Brooklyn in five weeks, and the consequent acceleration of time’s passing that always precedes such phenomena, I decided to make a real road trip out of the holiday weekend. My roommate McGregor had been eager to take a road trip before I left, and so it was a done deal. Of course, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to find lodging in the vicinity of our nation’s second most famous National Cemetery for Memorial Day weekend. As it turns out, the real culprits weren’t the suspect seniors, clogging the hotel lobbies with their Civil War re-enactment garb and oxygen masks (one of which I wish I had on hand to clap over my roommate’s snoring muzzle), but hordes of prepubescent girls that proved the proverbial flies in our figurative ointment. You’d think that working in a middle school for four years, I’d have seen that coming.
The local women working the desks at the various hotel chains seemed amused at our attempt to locate a room without a reservation. “Dontcha know? There’s not a vacancy anywhere in Gettysburg this weekend… Girl’s soccer tournament.” While the rest of the country flocks to the beaches, grills meat over lumps of coal, and drunkenly watches the Boy Scouts and VFW parade through town, here in south-central PA the traditional kickoff to summer is the commercial frenzy to service a mass congregation of tween soccerettes and their ever-supportive family units. Somehow, amidst the girls’ squealing and the thunderous clamor of their bare feet running to and from the pool area, Amanda, the greatest employee of the world’s greatest Days Inn (in 2006, by the company’s own estimation) not only managed to make us a reservation at an inexpensive motor inn in Hanover, about a half-hour away, but printed us up door-to-door MapQuest directions. Gettysburg is good people.
We pulled up into the parking lot of the Clearview Motor Inn into what appeared to be a scene from “Cops.” Two young white guys in wife beaters eyed us from the concrete porch in front of a room with an open door, which abruptly closed. A strung out looking dude with a tattooed skull got up from his plastic lawnchair and scurried into the shadows. One of the beefy looking kids asked us if we wanted "to party". The funny thing is, I rarely think twice about these things in Thailand – it’s simply, “Okay, those guys are drug dealers, and that guy’s a junkie, and there are the prostitutes… What should we do for dinner?” But, for whatever reason, here in my homeland, even though I have a cell phone and know how to communicate with the police, it all seems so much sketchier.
Needless to say, we made sure the room had a deadbolt, and we keep our possessions with us at all times -- I’ve certainly stayed in worse accomodation -– however, I think we’re going to be moving on. Why? We were awakened at about five A.M. by the sound of glass breaking and a voice yelling, “F@%k you, Jamie! Come get some!” From what Jamie told the police, I guess her boyfriend found out where she had been sleeping (and if he'd been able to see in, with whom).
But if we’d only spent a little longer enjoying the sights of eastern Pennsylvania – from Easton’s Weyerbacher Brewing Company, where we were feted with samples of their various tasty brews (relax, mom – eight samples at ½ oz. each works out to a quarter of a pint, which is well below the legal limit, even for "Blithering Idiot", Weyerbacher's barleywine), to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, from whence McGregor’s family left for down South (apparently there wasn’t a lot going on there back in the day either). But we knew we’d found a good place when, searching for the Lost River Caverns, we saw the star. Mystified at first by the signs in heavenly blue (“Follow the star to Bethlehem attractions” and “Let Bethlehem glitter, please don’t litter!”), we became entranced by the obvious scheming of a hyperactive Chamber of Commerce. It drew us right into town, which had a certain charm, something a lot of former industrial towns cannot claim, but we soon shook off the trance of the star and reprioritized. Did we really want to see Bethlehem’s Banana Factory? The Pennsylvania Dutch Miniature Village? Or the wonders of the earth, parceled out in $9.50 portions?
I’m glad we ended up making it to the caverns, but perhaps, if only we’d dallied a little longer in Bethlehem, we might have pulled over for the night during the frightful storm yesterday evening. As it is, unable to find lodging in any of the area’s inns due to an annual pilgrimage, we’ve slept within these unsavory walls, albeit, in two queen-sized beds. Who knows what light morning brings? Are we the wise men from the East? We number but two... In any case, the decision to stay here, perhaps not the wisest.
This evening, a friend from college is getting married at his home in Gettysburg, PA, where he teaches anthropology at the local college. Despite, or perhaps due to, my imminent departure Brooklyn in five weeks, and the consequent acceleration of time’s passing that always precedes such phenomena, I decided to make a real road trip out of the holiday weekend. My roommate McGregor had been eager to take a road trip before I left, and so it was a done deal. Of course, I figured it wouldn’t be a problem to find lodging in the vicinity of our nation’s second most famous National Cemetery for Memorial Day weekend. As it turns out, the real culprits weren’t the suspect seniors, clogging the hotel lobbies with their Civil War re-enactment garb and oxygen masks (one of which I wish I had on hand to clap over my roommate’s snoring muzzle), but hordes of prepubescent girls that proved the proverbial flies in our figurative ointment. You’d think that working in a middle school for four years, I’d have seen that coming.
The local women working the desks at the various hotel chains seemed amused at our attempt to locate a room without a reservation. “Dontcha know? There’s not a vacancy anywhere in Gettysburg this weekend… Girl’s soccer tournament.” While the rest of the country flocks to the beaches, grills meat over lumps of coal, and drunkenly watches the Boy Scouts and VFW parade through town, here in south-central PA the traditional kickoff to summer is the commercial frenzy to service a mass congregation of tween soccerettes and their ever-supportive family units. Somehow, amidst the girls’ squealing and the thunderous clamor of their bare feet running to and from the pool area, Amanda, the greatest employee of the world’s greatest Days Inn (in 2006, by the company’s own estimation) not only managed to make us a reservation at an inexpensive motor inn in Hanover, about a half-hour away, but printed us up door-to-door MapQuest directions. Gettysburg is good people.
We pulled up into the parking lot of the Clearview Motor Inn into what appeared to be a scene from “Cops.” Two young white guys in wife beaters eyed us from the concrete porch in front of a room with an open door, which abruptly closed. A strung out looking dude with a tattooed skull got up from his plastic lawnchair and scurried into the shadows. One of the beefy looking kids asked us if we wanted "to party". The funny thing is, I rarely think twice about these things in Thailand – it’s simply, “Okay, those guys are drug dealers, and that guy’s a junkie, and there are the prostitutes… What should we do for dinner?” But, for whatever reason, here in my homeland, even though I have a cell phone and know how to communicate with the police, it all seems so much sketchier.
Needless to say, we made sure the room had a deadbolt, and we keep our possessions with us at all times -- I’ve certainly stayed in worse accomodation -– however, I think we’re going to be moving on. Why? We were awakened at about five A.M. by the sound of glass breaking and a voice yelling, “F@%k you, Jamie! Come get some!” From what Jamie told the police, I guess her boyfriend found out where she had been sleeping (and if he'd been able to see in, with whom).
But if we’d only spent a little longer enjoying the sights of eastern Pennsylvania – from Easton’s Weyerbacher Brewing Company, where we were feted with samples of their various tasty brews (relax, mom – eight samples at ½ oz. each works out to a quarter of a pint, which is well below the legal limit, even for "Blithering Idiot", Weyerbacher's barleywine), to the Pennsylvania Dutch Country, from whence McGregor’s family left for down South (apparently there wasn’t a lot going on there back in the day either). But we knew we’d found a good place when, searching for the Lost River Caverns, we saw the star. Mystified at first by the signs in heavenly blue (“Follow the star to Bethlehem attractions” and “Let Bethlehem glitter, please don’t litter!”), we became entranced by the obvious scheming of a hyperactive Chamber of Commerce. It drew us right into town, which had a certain charm, something a lot of former industrial towns cannot claim, but we soon shook off the trance of the star and reprioritized. Did we really want to see Bethlehem’s Banana Factory? The Pennsylvania Dutch Miniature Village? Or the wonders of the earth, parceled out in $9.50 portions?
I’m glad we ended up making it to the caverns, but perhaps, if only we’d dallied a little longer in Bethlehem, we might have pulled over for the night during the frightful storm yesterday evening. As it is, unable to find lodging in any of the area’s inns due to an annual pilgrimage, we’ve slept within these unsavory walls, albeit, in two queen-sized beds. Who knows what light morning brings? Are we the wise men from the East? We number but two... In any case, the decision to stay here, perhaps not the wisest.
