Our mission in the Land of Enchantment has been
accomplished! The Flag of Greenland flies high and proud right in the middle of
the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR). It’s time to move forward. Now we will be looking for
New Greenland in the land of mirages and tobacco, of confederate flags and fat
Texas Tea, oil that is! To the Bible Belt are we going! Damma!
Apparently it is the same world – the same Indians and cowboys, the same rattlesnakes, scorpions, and black widow spiders sheltered in hidden spots – yet it is nothing like before. Oil!!! Big Fat Oil is everywhere, both visible and invisible, with a kaleidoscope of oil-related structures looking like monstrous spaceships in a lunar landscape.
And these portable homes are not just any homes: each of them is no lesser than Hoover Dum! As I am watching them passing us by, I am thinking to myself: “Texans are tough! That must be a difficult life! And a difficult job!”
Texas homes, both permanent and portable, are the galaxies of their own. They keep more items inside than there are stones in Uummannaq Mountain. All the pleasures of the world are available handy!
All worldly pleasures are accessible in the temperature controlled environments. Regardless of the season, it’s not cold and not hot; it’s just pleasant and comfortable inside. Damma!
For a while, it seemed to us that our search for New
Greenland in Texas was leading us nowhere. And then everything changed in a
blink of an eye. We discovered that here, in the middle of the Lonely Star State,
lives a boy who knows everything about Greenland and who can spell the word Uu-mm-a-nn-aq
and quote its exact geographical coordinates. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet
Ricky!
You need to know something about Ricky. His ancestor, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a Spanish hidalgo and the explorer of the New World, a proto-anthropologist who gave one of the first detailed accounts of Native American tribes living in American Southwest. He was an explorer, but also a healer, a shaman, a bridge-builder and a peace-maker. No wonder, little Ricky lives on Explorer’s Street, just outside of Austin. No wonder, he wants to become an Explorer when he grows up. And I can assure you that he is absolutely fit to take this path in life: American, Spanish, Ecuadorian, Irish, Tadjik, Russian, Jewish and even Cossack bloods run in his veins, and his room is full of polar bears.
Our journey through Texas gave us a lot to think about, a lot to compare and to contrast. At times it was hard to survive in Texas, but we did! By the way, Austin - a town where we discovered Ricky Cabeza de Vaca - was a perfect place to stop. Austin is by far the greatest Texas' anomality. It has all one can wish for: live music, night life and Three Little Pigs at Rosewood Avenue where we ate while waiting for our car to be repaired. Now we are on the road again, and this time we will be searching for New Greenland in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi! Time to look for some Spicy French Food!
This is the place where the revolutionary war against the British was fought! This is the land of Huckleberry Finn and of Guy Davis, the Bluesman, a Big Friend of Uummannaq and Greenland: his blues come from here - a place where his grand and great-grandparents, track linemen, used to live, work and interact with KKK.
Mark Twain said about Mississippi: "It is a remarkable river in
this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows
narrower and deeper."
On a steep shore of Mississippi River, Little Jaaku is practicing Southern American English: "Wha cha doin today y’all? I’m gonna have some chittlins and gravy!" Here they eat grits, and they eat Cajun food. They eat cat fish ... Cajun style.
Should we take a raft down the Mississippi River? Should we dedicate the next month to stealing watermelons and chickens and borrowing boats and cigars? Will we find Freedom on our way? Will we find New Greenland? Or only more sufferings?
Instead, we are moving east to the humid subtropics of the Yellowhammer State. Now we are deep in the heart of Alabama! Here we will be collecting medicinal plants and practicing double modals: “It feels as we I been livin’ here darn near our whole life! Darn! Darn! Darn! I might could climbed to the top. I used to could do it! And I knowed you for a fool soon as I seen you!”
Alabama is a land of hurricanes, tornadoes and tropical thunderstorms. It reports more tornado fatalities than any other state in the US and ranks seventh in the number of deaths from lightning per capita!
No surprise we get right into the middle of one as soon as we cross the state's border. It comes with furious hail and as many lightnings as we have seen in our entire life!
This is how it looked and felt:
And the Aftermath: flat tire in the absence of a spare one! Whom to blame? and What to do? Little Jaaku in his own defense: " I only done what you done told me!”
It takes only hours till we are driving fast through the heart of the Hillbilly Country, through the lands of big mountain feuds, all the way to Virginia and both Carolinas.
It's +43C this afternoon and we are in the “Old Dominion”! Eight US presidents were born here! Virginia! Here they have great rocking chairs in their balconies. Sitting in these chairs, local residents watch life slowly going by with a distinct sense of total coolness.
In Virginia, we follow Little Jaaku's instincts and at first end underwater and then underground. In Saltville we plant the Flag of Greenland at Virginia Cobia Farms and enjoy the finest flavor of cobia, which in our humble view overpasses the one of mahi-mahi, of Chilean sea bass, and even of our beloved Greenlandic halibut. Bill Harris, a genius biologist, recently taught the salt water cobia to survive and even propagate in fresh waters of self-sustaining "spaceship looking aquarium" hidden deep in the Blue Ridge mountains.
From Saltville, we head to the yellow Luray Caverns where the new stalactites are
growing from the old ones and seem to be stalagmites since we see their reflections in the waters of the underground ponds that are shallow but seem to be bottomless. In this world of illusions, you never know where is up and where is down anymore!
We are here mainly to listen to the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a lithophone that in some tricky way makes stalactites to produce the most enigmatic music in the world similar to the one that we daily make in Uummannaq Music.
We return on the surface safely, but after that, we stand for five and a half hours in the traffic jam leading to Washington DC. It's Friday afternoon and every single off-road we are trying to take leads us even to a bigger jam.
What can you do when stuck in the traffic? Maybe watch President Obama flying above our heads. Marine One flies in groups of identical helicopters constantly shifting in formation; we don't know in which one the President is, but we know that had he been driving instead of flying, our terrible auto jam would have been many times worse! Dear God, please save the President!
Five and a half hours later we hit I-95 North and now we know that finally we are on a short approach to our destination. Six more hours and we will enter the Heathens of New York where a man may lie with a man and woman may lay with a woman according to the recently approved same sex marriage as the Six State to do so.
New York! The greatest of America's cities, and it puts dear in God into us with its everyday signs!
Here we will meet real New Yorkers! They are awesome and humble! They are collectively responsible for only 1% of the America's greenhouse gas emissions!
Now you can see why the gasoline consumption in this great city is the same rate as the national average in the 1920s....
... and why an average NewYorker consumes only one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas! Toilets and Fluid Station Ahead! Here despite all gruesome circumstances people believe in the bright future.
Matthew 7:7 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." True in NYC!
And all who have sinned...
... MUST come to Matsu Japanese Restaurant on Upper East Side in NYC which is an incredible oasis of dignity and freshness. Sea food here it is much better than in Nobu or in EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street, and better than anything else except for the fresh catch we eat on the sea ice of Uummannaq Bay. Please, before anything else, try Sex-on-the-Beach signature hand roll! Amma!
Sex on the beach MUST be followed by a coal- brick-oven Grimaldi's pizza in Brooklyn! To obtain this treasure you need to get into yellow cab, drive to Brooklyn and .....
... then spend (at least) an hour in the line on the street, but to plant the Greenland's Flag in melted home made mozzarella cheese and fresh basil takes only seconds!
From here, the road takes us to Nathan's on Coney Island, a home to the world's best hot-dog! Al Capone ate here, Jimmy Durante, Cary Grant, and in 1939 FDR served Nathan’s hot dogs to the King and Queen of England and later to Joseph Stalin ( in Yalta). The line for famous hot-dogs is endless this morning, and it is +39C in the shade, and there is no shade in sight.
Nathan's Famous is only steps away from the ocean. Atlantic Ocean! Now we can finally say: "We made it!" Our trip started on the Pacific, in LA, and now, 3 weeks and 10 000 km of ZIGZAG travelling later we are about to touch the waters of the Atlantic. If we jump high enough, would we see Greenland from here?
Native Americans used to call Coney Island "Narrioch" - "land without shadows". And indeed, nothing - even the Wonder Wheel - casts a shade. Sun is overwhelming. So, let's sit down and think about everything that happened to us in the last three weeks, let's revisit our great adventure and let's think about the future - about all the important things in life we normally do not think about. It's not the end of our journey, it is just a final stop for today. Takuss!
As soon as we crossed the Texan border we felt we’d fallen down the rabbit hole.
Apparently it is the same world – the same Indians and cowboys, the same rattlesnakes, scorpions, and black widow spiders sheltered in hidden spots – yet it is nothing like before. Oil!!! Big Fat Oil is everywhere, both visible and invisible, with a kaleidoscope of oil-related structures looking like monstrous spaceships in a lunar landscape.
As we are driving through Texas I am thinking of Hivshu who carries his home on his back. Hivshu – a son of a Fly and of
Admiral Robert Peary – is a wanderer who travels the world lite. All his
belongings fit in a little seal-skin bag which he carries on his back. Whether
in Greenland, or in Africa, or on the Pole of Cold in Siberia, he needs no
more. He can build an Illuaraq (little house) out of ice and snow using his
working knife alone: it will fit 10 people and the construction will take no longer than an hour.
Texas it is a different story. Owning a home is the
most important of all American religions. People bury their entire lives in the ground to raise a home made out of wood, concrete, plastic and precious stones.
And when
they travel, they pull their additional homes behind their back.
Texas homes, both permanent and portable, are the galaxies of their own. They keep more items inside than there are stones in Uummannaq Mountain. All the pleasures of the world are available handy!
All worldly pleasures are accessible in the temperature controlled environments. Regardless of the season, it’s not cold and not hot; it’s just pleasant and comfortable inside. Damma!
After visiting some of the best homes of Texas we noticed: so much is happenning inside while there is literally no one – not a single person - outside. Texans reminded us of
astronauts – they live in the capsules. If you step outside, you will end up in
a pool whose sapphire chlorinated
waters are populated by high fidelity gadgets relentlessly searching for all kind of undesirable
elements. And where is Sila? There is no place for Sila here. Too much
chlorine!
You need to know something about Ricky. His ancestor, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a Spanish hidalgo and the explorer of the New World, a proto-anthropologist who gave one of the first detailed accounts of Native American tribes living in American Southwest. He was an explorer, but also a healer, a shaman, a bridge-builder and a peace-maker. No wonder, little Ricky lives on Explorer’s Street, just outside of Austin. No wonder, he wants to become an Explorer when he grows up. And I can assure you that he is absolutely fit to take this path in life: American, Spanish, Ecuadorian, Irish, Tadjik, Russian, Jewish and even Cossack bloods run in his veins, and his room is full of polar bears.
Our journey through Texas gave us a lot to think about, a lot to compare and to contrast. At times it was hard to survive in Texas, but we did! By the way, Austin - a town where we discovered Ricky Cabeza de Vaca - was a perfect place to stop. Austin is by far the greatest Texas' anomality. It has all one can wish for: live music, night life and Three Little Pigs at Rosewood Avenue where we ate while waiting for our car to be repaired. Now we are on the road again, and this time we will be searching for New Greenland in the swamps of Louisiana and Mississippi! Time to look for some Spicy French Food!
This is the place where the revolutionary war against the British was fought! This is the land of Huckleberry Finn and of Guy Davis, the Bluesman, a Big Friend of Uummannaq and Greenland: his blues come from here - a place where his grand and great-grandparents, track linemen, used to live, work and interact with KKK.
On a steep shore of Mississippi River, Little Jaaku is practicing Southern American English: "Wha cha doin today y’all? I’m gonna have some chittlins and gravy!" Here they eat grits, and they eat Cajun food. They eat cat fish ... Cajun style.
Instead, we are moving east to the humid subtropics of the Yellowhammer State. Now we are deep in the heart of Alabama! Here we will be collecting medicinal plants and practicing double modals: “It feels as we I been livin’ here darn near our whole life! Darn! Darn! Darn! I might could climbed to the top. I used to could do it! And I knowed you for a fool soon as I seen you!”
Alabama is a land of hurricanes, tornadoes and tropical thunderstorms. It reports more tornado fatalities than any other state in the US and ranks seventh in the number of deaths from lightning per capita!
No surprise we get right into the middle of one as soon as we cross the state's border. It comes with furious hail and as many lightnings as we have seen in our entire life!
This is how it looked and felt:
And the Aftermath: flat tire in the absence of a spare one! Whom to blame? and What to do? Little Jaaku in his own defense: " I only done what you done told me!”
Aside from the pouring rain, hail, lightnings, flat tire and ZERO visibility, we greatly enjoyed the Cotton State of Alabama. Now the nightmare is over, and the Sun is up again! We are ready to drive North - this time to the Appalachian Mountains, to the great state of Tennessee!
To the land of Al Gore, of rock-and-roll and of Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment facilities which helped
to build the world's first atomic bomb. Damma!
It takes only hours till we are driving fast through the heart of the Hillbilly Country, through the lands of big mountain feuds, all the way to Virginia and both Carolinas.
Fileds of Glory! So many famous Civil War battlefields were fought
here. Moonshine (White Lightning, Mountain Dew, Hooch) and NASCAR racing
started here too. In the years of Prohibition, the moonshiners were trying to
make their cars (carrying bootlegged whiskey and other illicit products) faster
and faster so that they could evade the police. Moonshiners would modify
(soup up) their cars for speed and cargo capacity and after the repeal of
Prohibition they started to race each other. Today the speed limit on this
particular road is 55. And high-way patrol officers are everywhere. We hear that they fine everyone driving even 5 miles above the speed limit!
It's +43C this afternoon and we are in the “Old Dominion”! Eight US presidents were born here! Virginia! Here they have great rocking chairs in their balconies. Sitting in these chairs, local residents watch life slowly going by with a distinct sense of total coolness.
In Virginia, we follow Little Jaaku's instincts and at first end underwater and then underground. In Saltville we plant the Flag of Greenland at Virginia Cobia Farms and enjoy the finest flavor of cobia, which in our humble view overpasses the one of mahi-mahi, of Chilean sea bass, and even of our beloved Greenlandic halibut. Bill Harris, a genius biologist, recently taught the salt water cobia to survive and even propagate in fresh waters of self-sustaining "spaceship looking aquarium" hidden deep in the Blue Ridge mountains.
We are here mainly to listen to the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a lithophone that in some tricky way makes stalactites to produce the most enigmatic music in the world similar to the one that we daily make in Uummannaq Music.
What can you do when stuck in the traffic? Maybe watch President Obama flying above our heads. Marine One flies in groups of identical helicopters constantly shifting in formation; we don't know in which one the President is, but we know that had he been driving instead of flying, our terrible auto jam would have been many times worse! Dear God, please save the President!
Five and a half hours later we hit I-95 North and now we know that finally we are on a short approach to our destination. Six more hours and we will enter the Heathens of New York where a man may lie with a man and woman may lay with a woman according to the recently approved same sex marriage as the Six State to do so.
New York! The greatest of America's cities, and it puts dear in God into us with its everyday signs!
Here we will meet real New Yorkers! They are awesome and humble! They are collectively responsible for only 1% of the America's greenhouse gas emissions!
Now you can see why the gasoline consumption in this great city is the same rate as the national average in the 1920s....
... and why an average NewYorker consumes only one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas! Toilets and Fluid Station Ahead! Here despite all gruesome circumstances people believe in the bright future.
Matthew 7:7 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." True in NYC!
And all who have sinned...
... MUST come to Matsu Japanese Restaurant on Upper East Side in NYC which is an incredible oasis of dignity and freshness. Sea food here it is much better than in Nobu or in EN Japanese Brasserie on Hudson Street, and better than anything else except for the fresh catch we eat on the sea ice of Uummannaq Bay. Please, before anything else, try Sex-on-the-Beach signature hand roll! Amma!
Sex on the beach MUST be followed by a coal- brick-oven Grimaldi's pizza in Brooklyn! To obtain this treasure you need to get into yellow cab, drive to Brooklyn and .....
From here, the road takes us to Nathan's on Coney Island, a home to the world's best hot-dog! Al Capone ate here, Jimmy Durante, Cary Grant, and in 1939 FDR served Nathan’s hot dogs to the King and Queen of England and later to Joseph Stalin ( in Yalta). The line for famous hot-dogs is endless this morning, and it is +39C in the shade, and there is no shade in sight.
Nathan's Famous is only steps away from the ocean. Atlantic Ocean! Now we can finally say: "We made it!" Our trip started on the Pacific, in LA, and now, 3 weeks and 10 000 km of ZIGZAG travelling later we are about to touch the waters of the Atlantic. If we jump high enough, would we see Greenland from here?
Native Americans used to call Coney Island "Narrioch" - "land without shadows". And indeed, nothing - even the Wonder Wheel - casts a shade. Sun is overwhelming. So, let's sit down and think about everything that happened to us in the last three weeks, let's revisit our great adventure and let's think about the future - about all the important things in life we normally do not think about. It's not the end of our journey, it is just a final stop for today. Takuss!
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