Jimmy Carter spent two nights here in 1994. Steinhatchee, Florida.
May 112012
May 112012
Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida
A year ago, I first visited Rosewood, Florida, the site of a horrific racist massacre in 1923. Someone imagined a black man raped a white girl, and it exploded from there. I found the paltry memorialization of this American tragedy to be disquieting. I wrote about my first visit to Rosewood on this blog (click here to read that post, see the pictures, and read the depressingly politicized plaque).
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to return. Rosewood is in Levy County, where Florida State Road 24 meets County Road 324, a few miles east of Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. This place once buzzed as a miller of cedar for Faber pencils. Now it’s quiet.
My first trip there was too unsatisfying, bereft of the vibration that turmoil usually leaves. I left without a sense of the gravity of what had happened there. If I hadn’t known beforehand, I never would have realized that this dusty, overgrown, fire-prone patch of coastal Florida land had hosted any event of note, let alone one charged with such fury, terror, and bloodlust.
This time, I battled the seasonal swarm of lovebugs to shoot a little video of Rosewood so people can see it for themselves. It appears, on the face of it, to be a dreary, sun-baked little outpost of pickup trucks and scrubby trees. It seems like nothing special as long as you remain ignorant.
But of course, the woods most people zoom past once were once the setting for unimaginable savagery.
The location of Rosewood, Florida on a map
There is no way to stop in Rosewood inconspicuously. There is no street life. The sole business, the Clam Shack restaurant, is shuttered. The sole church comes out of hibernation, one presumes, once a week. The Florida Forest Service’s Waccasassa Forestry Center keeps a sleepy eye out for flare-ups. If you get out of your car to shoot video, as I did, it’s impossible to go unnoticed. It’s the kind of place where I expect the sheriff to drive over and ask you where you’re from, and to call me “boy” when he does it.
The brutality that started on New Year’s Day, 1923, persisted for a long time — there had just been a KKK rally in nearby Gainesville — and Rosewood was burned down by a mob a full week after the mayhem began. Gone are the Florida Railroad train station, Masonic hall, and school. The few remaining ashes and bricks are overgrown with vines and trees, and modern-day residents live on land long ago commandeered or repurposed from the black community. The lumber mill where its residents worked was in the white town of Sumner, next door just west — you could walk between them, and everyone did — and that mill burned down four years after the massacre, sending the joint settlement into the anonymous oblivion they occupy today.
Some white locals bragged that as many as 17 people were killed and buried like animals in plow trenches, but only eight deaths can be documented (two of them white men), so that’s the number officials usually go with, which minimizes the scope and viciousness of that week. The historical plaque is also quick to praise the brave whites who tried to quell the massacre and praise the politicians who ordered the plaque — facts that may be true but still make me uncomfortable given how much detail about the victims and the climate of insanity that was left off.
As many commenters on my previous Rosewood post have pointed out, there are many Rosewoods hiding in the trees of America, unremarked and unremembered. We pass desultory intersections like Rosewood’s every day. And we will never know how many of them were once the settings for brutal events, in which Americans, believing they were right and on the side of God, were in fact the instruments of something sinister and evil.
When unspeakable things happen, it’s human nature to simply want to get past them. We move on. In this way, they get forgotten.
No sheriff appeared to call me “boy.” That lived only in my imagination, just like the rest of Rosewood. Imagination is what fanned the furnace of mob action in Rosewood in 1923, too. Things like Rosewood depend on the imagination to exist at all.
Read about the historical plaque and my first visit to the site of Rosewood, Florida.
Mar 252012
So I shot this video early this morning in downtown Orlando from the VIP viewing area as the not-so-old Amway Arena (once the TD Waterhouse Centre, opened 1989) was demolished by explosion. Ka-boom! Instant 9/11 flashbacks for me, and lots of dust. The proof of fast-cycle urban planning:
Mar 222012
Taking "baby consciousness" with us (Photo by Julien Haler)
The longer the childhood, the smarter the creature. That’s one of science’s core findings about the development of the baby brain as reported by psychologist Alison Gopnik in her recent TED talk, “What Do Babies Think?“. Humans, who take years to mature, construct cities, which chickens, which take months, wind up in soup.
Gopnik calls it “baby consciousness,” a phrase so giddily Zen it makes me giggle. It’s a development-specific mindset we lose as we grow and our heads are no longer stuffed full of tapioca. People peg toddlers as daft and scatterbrained, and it’s hard not to agree with that assessment when you observe a two-year-old do things like throw dried dog poo at the wall or try to fit a sandwich in the DVD player drawer.
But Gopnik, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the co-author of The Scientist in the Crib, says the truth about baby brains is just the opposite: “Babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing, but they are very good at taking in lots of information at lots of different sources at once… When we say babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we’re really saying is they’re bad at not paying attention.”
They’re starstruck with all the things there are to see and process. They’re high on learning. They’re in that deliciously primordial state that travelers know well, when everything is fresh and even meaningless details are noticed and interpreted.
There’s something to be said for this. When we go to a new place, our frame of reference is reset to zero. We bring with us our animal instincts for survival, of course. Even toddlers are self-protective. But everything we experience becomes a teachable moment.
Wide open, soaking it in: Fort Sumter Ferry, Charleston, 2011
Our gullible states are never higher than when we’re traveling. I remember dining once with some fellow writers at The Cricketers, a country pub owned by Jamie Oliver’s family, and after the meal, the waitress had a quirky way of serving tea. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but for the story’s sake, let’s say it involved wiping every exposed surface of the teapot with a moist rag after every single pour. Well, one of my companions was a first-time visitor to England, and when the waitress left the room, she leaned over and piped up conspiratorially: “They sure do pour tea funny here in England,” she protested, and took a sip. It took some minutes for me to politely persuade her that, no, what she had just witnessed was the peculiarity of one near-freak server at one country inn and was not representative of an entire nationality. The realization of her broad-stroke misinterpretation slowly lit her face like the dawn.
When we travel, our mind state tricks us into thinking everything we see is somehow typical of the new place we’re exploring. The stereotype of tourists as gullible morons, as infants with credit cards, is by no means particular to Americans because it’s well-earned by the borderlessness of human behavior. It’s what potentially makes travelers so annoying — and easy to swindle.
Try it the next time a visitor comes to your town. Invent some myth about your home that would make a fabulist blush: that there’s an Italian Heritage parade down your Main Street every Sunday afternoon or there’s a law making it illegal to serve steak with A-1 sauce — whatever Mike Daisey-ism you dare. Because everything about the destination is new to a tourist, just as the entire world is fresh to a baby, they will most likely trust you, their host and surrogate parent.
Travel regresses us to childhood. Is it any wonder that so many of us travel in our 20s, when we’ve just left that larval childhood stage but have not yet grown into the ill-fitting uniform of full adulthood? Is it any wonder so many travelers put a high priority on intensely sensory experiences such as drinking, sex, panoramic views, and extreme sports — pursuits that please our primal natures?
Gopnik knocks her point home in a way that make me think of a backpack as the next logical accessory after diapers:
If we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think cases where we’re put into a new situation that we’ve never been in before. When we fall in love with someone new, or when we’re in a new city for the first time. What happens then is not that our consciousness contracts — it expands. So that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home…. So what’s it like to be a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos.
Personally, I’m for it. Peace and wisdom flower in an open mind. We travel to grow.
Hold onto that wonder, travelers. Always see the world with your baby brains.
Vacation as never-ending childhood: I rest my case
Mar 062012
Out of character? The State Department sends this passport mascot to trade shows to encourage applications
Last weekend at the New York Times Travel Show, a well-dressed young woman spotted my press credentials and introduced herself. She was from the State Department, she said, and she’d like to bring me over to Deputy Assistant Secretary Brenda Sprague.
I admit I was taken aback. Usually, when someone from the government taps you for a little chat, it’s not a good thing. But it’s precisely that mistrust of bureaucracy that the State Department appears eager to correct as soon as possible. In a surprising turn, the Obama administration’s State Department is making a true effort to reach out to travelers.
On the road, I’m always jealous of the travelers from Australia and New Zealand. When they need something from their government, it’s often a breeze. Their taxes are repaid with international support. Someone answers their calls at their diplomatic outposts. It seems like wherever they venture, they can all but pop into the nearest embassy for a beer and a back rub whenever they’re bored. Here in New York, I’ve even attended boozy Friday afternoon wine mixers at the Australian consulate.
But U.S. consulates and embassies are never welcome a weary traveler, not even if they were born with the privilege of carrying a passport with a bald eagle stamped on the cover. Indeed, the diplomatic fortresses we build abroad, such as the bunker on London’s Grosvenor Square and the $750 million citadel in Baghdad, are resolutely intent on keeping us out. They are designed out of an imperialistic marriage between pessimism and industry, and they’re geared to making inroads for business but halting independent Americans at the machine gun-guarded door. People around the world are confronted by those impassive slabs and wonder what sort of dastardly machinations are being hatched within.
A degree of detachment makes often makes sense, of course, either for security reasons or simply because they’re routinely swarmed with visa-seekers. In Krakow, I remember having to pick my way through a mob of what appeared to be boisterous protesters, only to realize when I got to its head that they were actually jostling for a spot in the queue for a paperwork blessing by my country’s invisible bureaucrats.
At the Travel Show, the State Department representative proudly told me that they were attending the show to get the word out about STEP, or the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program. This long-overdue program is designed to supply citizens with a level of hospitable consular support that other nations take for granted. If a traveler can surmount their malaise at registering their whereabouts with the federal government, they can receive email updates about local security warnings, and if the worst happens, as during the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, American seekers will actually come knocking on doors to make sure you’re all right.
The public relations push hasn’t stopped there. Today, the State Department held a live chat about keeping safe over Spring Break. This is a topic that travel journalists are often asked to hit this time of year. (Here I am on CBS last year talking about the same subject, spending much energy to gently assure viewers that Mexico is hardly a nefarious underworld of malfeasance.) So it’s gratifying to see the government trying to anticipate our questions for a change.
Mind you, I still don’t take my government’s word as the only word that matters. I have found that Australia’s list of travel warnings is often less politicized (or at least, politicized in different ways) than our State Department’s travel warnings. But the outreach is important to me. It’s encouraging to have an administration that values international travel or at the very least acknowledges that some of us are doing it.
You might have noticed that the White House has also been much more attentive to communicating with citizens on the same level that we communicate with ourselves. It’s tweeting now, it’s pumping out annotated live streams of important speeches, and it’s beavering away on Facebook.
Uncle Sam may not be ready to invite the masses inside for free Big Macs and Cokes, and behind the scenes he’s still an imperialistic fellow who’s more interested in fostering business deals than helping backpackers, but at least he’s working harder to repaint his impenetrable bunkers in a cheerier shade.
Feb 292012
The logo for one of the original travel blogs
“One day, not very long ago, I noticed I’d never been to the Pyramids. So I quit my job, left my apartment, and made a list of places I’d always wanted to go. And here’s the proof.”
That was how I kicked off the webpage documenting the round-the-world trip I took years ago. It was 1998. People were still paying for Netscape. Few of us used the Web regularly, and all of us had dialup, but I was determined to try it: I documented my journey online as I went. I’m ashamed to admit I began by using Courier.
Everyone logs their trips online now, but no one was doing it then. I was a pioneer. It took real effort. Flashpacking didn’t exist. I had to seek out Internet cafés and without WordPress or Blogspot to rely upon, I had to hand-code everything in basic HTML, and I was forced to seek out crude FTP programs (Fetch!) to get my writing online.
I didn’t put my travels online for Web fame or to garner a following, the way so many backpackers do now. There were no affiliates or appeals for free lodging, and I was years away from collecting my first paycheck for travel writing. Then, it was simply so my family and friends could follow along and know I wasn’t lying dead in some South African ditch. It also saved money at the STD ISD in India if I could simply upload some writing and pictures for everyone to follow. (I also tacked on a first-person account of 9/11 two years later because I didn’t know where else to post it at the time. That’s republished here.)
Technology and I have progressed somewhat, to say the least, but for all these years I have left my online diary online, quietly stashed in a corner of the Internet as a sort of museum of myself and of travel blogging.
I invite you to peer into the past to see how I did my online Web journal. There is some stuff that could really get me in trouble here, but just remember how young I was. Read about hippo attacks, angry mobs in Jordan, and false positives for syphilis. Learn about the traumatic event that made me call my RTW journey Stap Vinnig Oor.
Here’s the link, for as long as it lasts. Go:
Stap Vinnig Oor: Jason Cochran’s World Tour
It’s as much a journey into the Web’s past as it is a trip around our planet.
Me at the Monsoon Palace in Udaipur, India
Feb 092012
Jason Cochran: The Ward of Cheap in London
My recent post on San Francisco touring pitfalls was such a success that it’s not too early for another winning budget travel video. This one is about London, and how to see it without spending more than $15 a day. I have passed more time in London than in any city other than my home, and I have written about it quite a lot, too.
Between you and me (don’t tell anyone), my guidebook to London, is probably the best one I’ve written. I was in the zone. That’s the same book that was award best guide of the year by the Society of American Travel Writers’ Lowell Thomas Awards. I took some of the ripest fruit from that guide and turned it into a video.
You should have seen me racing around London in a single day to shoot all this footage with my little camera (for a site that’s now defunct). It’s easier said than done since there I was on my own and there was a lot of running around to be done. And I shot this on the same day as a video about what the U.K. Post Office can teach America’s and one about the successful Barclays free bike loaner system, also known as Boris’s Bikes. I was mildly moist, enjoyed nothing of the sights, and I might have chosen my wardrobe better. Then I hustled off to Southampton to do another video about the naming of the new Cunard Queen Elizabeth ship.
Let no one say travel writing is like a vacation. You have to get the goods, and the goods have got to be good.
Yeah. I know. Uptown complaints.
But this is good. There are actually some incredibly useful tips in here for saving cash there once you arrive — without missing out on what makes London London. I’m proud of this, as I am my book:
Once you’ve laid out a million dollars for airfare and hotel (although my book has some terrific secret hotels), these tips will save you save you dosh.
Fun fact: The opening and closing shots were lip-synched because the original audio was too messy. You probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you, but I now know what Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds go through in their ADR sessions.
Feb 072012
While I’m working on other projects, I’m presenting some great trunk songs. Today, I present a segment (with some really handsome shots by Matt Crum) about all the ways to make San Francisco, which is already a good-value city for vacations, into an even better value.
One of my books is a guide to San Francisco, which is still for sale. It may be the most plainspoken guide to San Francisco ever written. I actually tell people all the things that are not as exciting as they’re cracked up to be. On The Haight: “You’re more likely to meet slumming rich kids from the suburbs who have discreetly parked their Beemers a few blocks away than you are to meet any actual hippies.” And I proclaim the vagrant-plagued Tenderloin “a national shame.” Oops.
I think it’s true. But as it turns out, people don’t always want the unvarnished truth in their guide books. They want more cheerleading.
Framed this way, though, in a helpful how-to video, navigating the mistakes of San Francisco becomes much more appealing. Another reason I have branched into camera work.
This was made for a website that is now defunct, where it ran in a much shorter version.
Feb 032012
Just a happy, pleasing video designed to bring you the feeling of being somewhere, without quick cuts or commentary: Like I did for my drive through South Dakota’s Badlands, I shot a ride on the Angels Flight railway in downtown Los Angeles.
Most people don’t know that downtown Los Angeles is steep in places, and this funicular was constructed in 1901 to haul locals up Bunker Hill, which is now the heart of the city but then had some pretty mansions. It’s only 298 feet long (although its historic plaque, installed before the railway was moved slightly south, gives the old length of 315 feet—and adds an apostrophe for “Angel’s”). That it managed to survive at all is a miracle, but the ride has been bumpy. It started as transportation in a residential district, as did Pittsburgh’s Monongahela and Duquesne inclines, which are also still in operation.
It was later engulfed in stone skyscrapers, followed by dismantling, storage, a move slightly south, and a period of benign neglect that climaxed when one of the trolley cars disregarded its brakes, hurtled downhill, and crushed someone. This video was shot 15 days after it re-opened following a nine-year closure and refit. The locals were curious and not a little bit nervous.
Downtown L.A. is actually one of my favorite places. It’s bizarre to me that an entire city, one that is about the size of Chicago’s Loop, would be pretty much abandoned, as L.A. was in the 1940s. The whites went west and left it to the incoming Mexicans. What remains is a fascinating mix of the untouched and the decimated. Part of the city is a stately example of incredible American wealth in the years between the San Francisco Quake and World War II. And part of the city is parking lots. Downtown Los Angeles lost the thread of what its personality was. Angelenos are figuring it out.
Citizens of Beverly Hills, perhaps regretting the white flight that abandoned the Angels Flight, installed this plaque in its old location. They wrongly made its name possessive, too.
Jan 262012
Airfares were in disguise before today, but we can spot bad behavior
It’s a welcome development. As of today, travel vendors are required by the Department of Transportation to include taxes and fuel surcharges right up front when the price of the ticket is quoted. No more will shoppers experience that painful price jump when they click through the final purchase screen. All unavoidable expenses are incorporated from the start.
This change finally makes base price the same as cost. It also makes purchasing travel sensible, like purchasing stuff in Europe: The amount on the price tag is what you pay.
It has always been one of the cornerstones of American hucksterism. Businesses love separating the price from the true cost because it makes a sale more appealing. Never mind the fact it’s a lie. Everyone pays the full cost, not only the base price.
So of course some of the big vendors have been responding to the change to “teaser fares” with some weasel-like email messages. Don’t they know that travelers are thrilled? Why apologize?
Air-hotel packager Go-Today.com explains it this way: “Consumers should be aware that fares have not increased; they simply reflect a difference in how pricing is displayed.” That’s the bottom line, and it’s true. But other companies are editorializing, and that’s where they step in it.
Sleazy Spirit Airlines has made a business out of making the cost of airfare seem lower than it truly is. It has had its wrist slapped by the DOT already for deceptive advertising. (I hope the DOT scrubbed thoroughly afterward.) Unsurprisingly, the airline, which builds out the true costs of travel by charging even for carry-ons, tried to spin the new rule as an erosion of American justice, saying it is being forced “to hide” taxes in your ticket quotes now.
Spirit’s fear-mongering email is typical of the false victimhood that hucksters hide behind these days:
New government regulations require us to HIDE taxes in your fares.
This is not consumer-friendly or in your best interest. It’s wrong and you shouldn’t stand for it.
Starting January 24, 2012, fares are distorted.
Why?
Thanks to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s latest fare rules, Spirit must now HIDE the government’s taxes and fees in your fares.If the government can hide taxes in your airfares, then they [sic] can carry out their [sic] hidden agenda and quietly increase their [sic] taxes. (Yes, such talks are already underway.)
“They can carry out their hidden agenda”? I’d put on my tinfoil hat, but Spirit would charge me extra to carry it on. You’d think the Boston Tea Party took place on an Airbus. It’s not fooling customers who know the issue is not about taxation but about advertising deceptive prices, a charge that it paid a fine for.
Spirit alleges a federal conspiracy because it can’t pretend airfares cost $9 anymore. California’s Sen. Barbara Boxer is having the company for lunch, and rightfully so. It’s detestable and disingenuous to manipulate customers into believing that their liberties are eroding when the only thing eroding is Spirit’s ability to deceive them with impunity. Since it has built its business model on the old bait-and-switch, of course it’s mad. It also has to pretend that the way it’s been misleading you all this time has been just.
Booking Buddy sent me this [emphasis mine]:
BookingBuddy Traveler,
Starting today, January 26, 2012, the Department of Transportation is requiring airlines and online travel agencies to include all mandatory taxes and fees when advertising fares. This is a big win for travelers.
We wanted to alert you to this as it will make flights and vacation packages appear more expensive than you may be used to. In reality, you are simply seeing more of the taxes and fees up front. Base prices themselves are not increasing, and the taxes and fees are the same…
The way Booking Buddy breaks the news makes me wonder: Well, if it’s so great for travelers, then why weren’t all the vendors doing it before today?
Is it because up until today, they didn’t care much about what would be great for travelers?
I give credit to the few third-party booking sites that were adding in mandatory fees to begin with, including Kayak and TripAdvisor. Add those guys to the top of your browser bookmarks because they were being frank with you anyway.
They didn’t need partial or incremental disclosure to make sales more attractive — and didn’t require the wrath of the government to quote costs fully.
