THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Wednesday July 14,1999
Entertainment
Section:
B
Movie soundtracks fall short, but punk band album offers sounds from the West Coast.
Summer tunes
SEE PAGE 3B
Page 1
Planning the trip
Web Wanderings offers helpful tips for those planning a weekend excursion.
WWW.KANSAN.COM
SEE PAGE 5B
Contact the Kansan
Kansan newsroom: (785) 864-4810
Kansan Fax: (785) 864-0391
Kansan e-mail: editor@kansan.com
Commentary
Weekend of beer, traffic fun for editor
Don't mess with Texas. Specifically, don't mess with traffic on highways surrounding Dallas, Houston and Beaumont. Texas.
That's what I learned from four days of vacation, from more than 24 hours of driving and from too much food, drink and lots of reminiscing with college friends.
Last week, when Michael Weishaar — my best friend from my undergraduate years — and Left Kansas City, Mo., we had a destina
Here's a synopsis of our road trip, a drive to Bemont to attend a friend's wedding.
meandering journey to parts yet unknown
— is to alternate driving (behind the wheel) and sleeping (passenger seat) until we reach Houston. We're meeting Beth, Mike's wife, at her parents' home.
By 4:30 a.m., I-35 is a blur to our sleep-
heavy eyes, and we stop at a rest stop south of Wichita to sleep.
Friday, July 9
George Benson, Beth's dad, grills some steaks for dinner, and we meet four of our friends who are already in Houston at a local bar.
I wake up at 6 a.m. and we take turns driving hour-and-a-half stints. The traffic increases as we near Dallas, and by early afternoon, Mike and I agree that some drivers don't understand the signs that say "Slower traffic keep right."
In Beaumont we witness our first accident while trying to get to our motel.
We leave for Beaumont, about 50 miles east of Houston, at about 3 p.m., but we have to pick up two guys who are flying into Houston for the wedding.
Mike and I grab some chilidogs at James Coney Island — never pass on the opportunity to grab a hotdog at a local landmark Beth safely navigates downtown traffic on the way to the airport.
On the drive to the rehearsal dinner, our jaws drop looking at a car wrapped around our exit sign.
The rehearsal dinner is a great chance to swap stories with our friends — 11 roommates from 1991 to 1995 at the University of Kansas.
We adjourn to the Handlebar, a local bar, and pay $3 to have our ears assaulted by one of the worst bands ever assembled.
Todd, the groom, and four other guys end the evening with syrup, greasy bacon and funny paper hats at the Waffle House.
Saturday, July 10
The guys meet in the morning to play basketball. I score on my only shot despite being short, out-of-shape and recovering from a broken hand.
14 p.m. the wedding goes off as scheduled.
We eat and drink some more at the reception, held at an art museum downtown.
For the third night in a row — this is much harder because I'm not in prime undergraduate social shape — we stop at a bar. The icehouse is a corrugated tin building with a concrete floor, a huge bar, a shuffleboard, several dartboards, foosball, peanut shells on the floor, loud music and best of all, cheap drinks.
The night ends with breakfast —although no paper hats this time —at IHOP.
Sunday, July 11
Friedrichs is a Bremen graduate student in journalism.
We leave Beaumont at 8:10 a.m. and avoid most of the annoying traffic we battled on the way to Texas by following non-interstate highways until we get on U.S. 69 in Oklahoma.
Beth makes fun of Mike for locking the doors of the car an hour after he started driving. I miss the sign for U.S. 69 in Miami, Okla., and take us on a 15-minute detour. Mike comments on the prolific road-side junk dealers.
Sunday evening we arrive in Kansas City, needing another day of vacation to recover. Final cost of trip: $35 for motel room, $50 for gas and $115 for food and beer, $35,000 for the heart by-pass surgery.
Authors put pen to the road
8y Katie Burford
Kansan campus editor
The road's power to make travelers look at life from a different perspective has inspired numerous authors to capture these experiences on paper. The following are road lit classics:
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
While this book may be credited with defining the Beat generation, it's longer-lasting influence will be on the generations of youngsters it sets to wandering.
In a recent issue of *Rolling Stone*, Johnny Dewp wrote of the book's impact on him: "I was not going to be doing other people's taxes and going home as 5:37 pm, to pat my dog's head and sit down to my one-meat and two vegetable table, wailing for Jeopardy to pop on the glass tix, the Pat Salak of my own private game show, in the bellybutton of the universe, Miramar, Florida. A beautiful life to be sure, but one I knew I was destined not to have, thanks to my big brother Jim and
the French-Canadian with the
"Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe" by Bill Bryson Bryson repeats a trek of Europe that he made in his early 20s, making riotously funny observations along the way. Take, for example, his observation that Dutch sounds like a peculiar version of English.
"It was disconcerting. I found this again when I presented myself at a small hotel on the Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. 'Oh, I don't believe so,' he said, 'but let me check with my wife.' He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called: 'Marta, what stirs in you leggings? Are you most moist?' From the book's pages hallowed:
From the back a voice bellowed:
'No, but I tingle when I squirt.'
'Are you of assorted odors?'
Hail them!
'Yes, of beans and sputum.'
'And what of your pits—do they exude sweetness?'
'Truly.'
'Shell I suckle them at eventide?'
'Most beattly!'
'A small of petroleum prevails throughout,' I said by way of thanks, and departed."
He returned to me wearing a sad look. 'I'm sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately no.'
"Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
McCandless' story begins when the recent graduate of Emery University in Atlanta and former editor of his school's paper sends his parents a copy of his transcript (he received mostly A's) and a cursory note. This was the last his parents ever heard from him. Using McCandless' journal and the recollections of people he encountered, Krakuer planned together the young
"Into the Wife" by Jon Krakauer, of "Into Thin Air" fame, wrote an article about the mysterious death of Chris McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness for *Outside* magazine in January 1993. The story so intrigued him that he decided to retrace McCandless' steps and write a book about it.
man's two-year journey that took him zigzagging across the United States and ended with
his tragic death.
The question is whether it was his idealism or the wilderness that killed him.
The Che Guevara that would one day become a leader in the Cuban revolutionary movement was born on this journey, which began Jan. 4, 1951, in Buenos Aires, Argentina and ended July 26, 1952, in Caracas, Venezuela.
"The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey Around South America" by Ernesto Che Guevara.
Guevara, 23 at the time, and friend Alberto Granado, both trained physicians, decided on a whim to make the journey as Granado was tinkering with his motorcycle, La Pedrosa.
"That's how the trip came about." Guvara wrote, "and it never devised from the general principle laid down then;
improvisation."
The Guvara of "Motorcycle Dairies" was tagged by The Washington Post as "a Latin James Dean or Jack Kerouac." Time observed that "by the end of the journey, a politicized Guvara has emerged to predict his own legendary future."
roadtrippin'
Commentary
It was a defining moment, when Guevara walked away from a life of relative comfort in Argentina and came to commune with the plight of the common man in all of Latin America.
Call of the road leads wanderer in search of self
"Not all who wander are lost."
That saying, which I first saw on bumper sticker, sums up my life.
For me, wandering is an art form. As with art, it has purpose, even if it does not have direction.
Wandering is the
Although there is nothing wrong with having a destination on a road trip, the "when" and "by what route" should never be set. To fix an itinerary is to corrupt the core beauty of a road trip.
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A road trip is not defined by distance, but rather mentality. All one needs do is embrace the unexpected. Some of the best moments—and most keen revelations of my life—have come on the open road.
For me, the trip started when I was 2 years old — I remember it like it was yesterday. We were living on a military base in Montana, where I was born.
My recollection is like a still photograph in my mind. In the foreground, I am sitting on the floor playing with some coins. In the background, people are busting about, carrying boxes and other large items. An air of excitement, edged with apprehension fills the room.
That is all.
My next memory
Katie Burford
Kansam campus editor
is in a different
place with different scenery. Neither frightening nor remarkable, it was just different. There were mountains; I was in Colorado. Furred!
eventually my family landed in Oklahoma, and my teen-age
years were spent in suburban purgatory. But come graduation day, my life became my own, and I was on the road again.
A decade later, the motion has not ceased. Nor will it. Until I choose. The open road, though, is not always the easy road. Tires go flat, the food is bad, hotel rooms are raunchy, your travel companion is annoying and drives like hell, and so on. Leaving home means opening yourself up to all sorts of mishaps.
But it can yield the most divine pleasures.
See DANGER on page 5B
A rambling railroad journey redefines freedom
By Lisa John
Kansan manaina editor
Once a hobo, not always a hobo.
When John Reimringer gets into a car, he fastens his seat belt. Next, he locks all the doors. These are not the habits one would expect from a man who, 15 years ago, spent his KU spring break hopping freight trains.
Today, Reimringer is hesitant to share the details of his journey. For one thing, he is working toward a master's of fine arts degree in creative writing, and this is a story he would like to work up into fiction sometime. For another, he doesn't recommend that anyone hop freights.
That's what his parents told him when he called home and told them his plans in the spring of 1984.
"It's a good way to get killed," he said.
"They weren't too happy about it," he said. "But I figured that if I got killed, they'd want to know. If I had told them I was going to Daytona Beach and then they found out I got killed on a freight train in New Mexico, it would have been a shock."
John Reimringer stands next to a freight train in North Lawrence the closest, he said, he has been to a freight train in 15 years. In 1984, Reimringer and another KU student spent their spring break hauling freight trains from Topeka to Texas.
Photo by Lisa John/KANSAN
But the burning question is, When there was the alternative to spend spring break in a college mecca on the beach, why would anyone choose to hon freights?
"A friend of mine from the dorm had done it before, and I'd read about it, and I was reading Jack Kerouac at the time—so it sounded like a fun thing to do," Reimringer said.
In fact, the 22-year old Reimringer had been reading "The Dharma Bums," a Kerouac story that begins with Ray Smith bumming a ride on a freight train.
"I just wanted to travel and get out of Kansas," he said. But in his own way,
He and a fellow University of Kansas student, Jonathan Lee, who had experience hopping freights in Nebraska, packed old blankets and old clothes in army-surplus packs and, on a cold
spring night, headed for the Topeka railroad yards
"We had set our destination as Alamogordo, New Mexico, where my friend had been born." Reimringer said. "So we spent a long night walking around the yards, asking people who work there where the trains were going."
After finding no luck at the Union Pacific lines, they walked to the Cotton Belt vards, south of the river.
"It was four in the morning; we were cold and tired," he said. "We went up and knocked on the door of the yard office. We'd checked to make sure there weren't any railroad detectives around. These guys in the yard office recognized us at once as college students out for kicks — we were trying to act like we were hardened bums. But they looked at us and said, 'Y'all wouldn't happen to be college boys, now would you?' Reimringer said he and Lee had told them where they wanted to go.
"They checked a computer printout and said, 'We've got a freight coming in that will be in about 20 minutes, and it will slow down when it comes over the Kansas River trestle, and you guys can hop on it there—but be careful.'" he said.
They told Reimringer and Lee that there would be some grain cars near the front of the train that they could get on. The young men checked out the area, looking for obstacles along the track.
"We were also thinking, 'If I fall when climbing on board, I'm going to push myself away from the train,'" he said. The moment arrived.
See TRAIN-HOPPER on page 5B
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