I’m a little surprised, whenever I think about it, that human beings were able to successfully treat, much less cure, any disease whatsoever prior to…oh, I don’t know, about 1977 or so.

Seriously, whenever one picks up a history book or (God forbid) a book on medical technology, it seems that before the advent of Star Wars all we had were superstition, stone knives, and dried tiger penises. In fact, even to this day, many people’s sum total understanding of basic biology scarcely extends beyond stone knives and dried tiger penises–but I didn’t come here to talk about the alt-medicine crowd.

Instead, I came here to talk about Boston. Err, not Boston itself, you understand, but our journey toward that fabled (and by now near-mythical) Xanadu, where my friend Claire had been accepted to a university or a Thunderdome or something. By this point, it was all getting a bit blurry, what with the heat and the prairie dogs and the Jesus of Wheat and all.

When we next set out, with Erica driving and me trying with only modest success to deal with a client’s crisis of some sort about something or other, the temperature was already nudging toward the triple digits. Frankly, I’m sometimes a bit surprised that any human being successfully survived summer in the Midwest prior to the invention of air conditioning. We had determined days before to make a stop at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. We had a book which called it one of the 50 “most unusual museums in the United States.” I’m not quite sure who made that list or on what criteria it was based, but the Museum of Spam (the quasi-meat product, not the email full of Nigerian princes and penis pills) is on the list, and that’s good enough for me.

The Glore Psychiatric Museum is housed in what’s left of Missouri State Lunatic Asylum No. 2–yep, that was its official name. Now, I’ve seen a number of Hollywood films involving a small number of friends who happen to be traveling alone across the country. All of them recommend stopping for a time in the ruins of an old lunatic asylum, so stop we did.

The first thing one sees upon entering the museum is this old newspaper illustration, apparently dating back to the time of the asylum’s founding, which depicts life in an insane asylum as a rather proper Victorian affair replete with formal tea and, I don’t know, Badminton games or something. “I say, old chap, after our noonday repast, would you fancy a stroll through the park, followed by a rousing cricket match?” “That sounds delightful, dear fellow, but I rather think we should postpone the afternoon meal until after our sport.” “After our sport? I say, are you mad?” “Quite so, old sport!”

We ventured farther in, where we were met by a cheerful gentleman who assured us that no psychotic, supernatural offspring of crazed serial killers bent on bloody vengeance had been seen ’round the grounds in almost a fortnight, so we were confident that our stay would be pleasant and free of the bother one normally can expect from such things.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that anyone unwise enough to be crazy prior to the age of Pac-Man was in for rather sorry treatment at the hands of his fellow man. The museum has a floor full of devices which had previously been used to “treat” mental illness, and to my (admittedly untrained) eye, rather a lot of them looked indistinguishable from the sorts of devices the Inquisitors might use. Take these gadgets, for example:

The chair on the left was used to calm patients by restricting their mobility. Sometimes, apparently, for weeks. The gizmo on the left was designed to confine a person in a very small box which would then be spun ’round at high speed until the unfortunate occupant passed out or threw up, or both–presumably on the premise that a vomiting mental patient is better than a mental patient who…um, isn’t vomiting, or, err, something. The precise details of the therapeutic modality are beyond my grasp of the art.

And the definitions of “mentally ill” were as all over the map as the treatments. In ages past, an unmarried woman who wanted children might be confined to an asylum, as might a married woman who didn’t. (True fact: the dude who invented the diagnoses of “nymphomania” included diagnostic criteria such as a fondness for chocolate and a penchant for reading works of fiction, I swear I am not making this up.)

It rather seems, all in all, that the considered opinion of the entire medical establishment over a very long span of time was that the mentally ill were just being stubborn, and merely needed a few nasty knocks about the head to get them to cut it out. This seems to your humble scribe rather like saying a legless man is simply being lazy, and all he needs is a good swift kick in the pants to get him on his feet again…though I didn’t come here to talk about the Republican party, either.

The general theme of “knock them about a bit ’til they learn to cut it out” as a treatment modality for cognitive and emotional impairment continues through quite a lot of the medical equipment on display:

Some of the items in their collection would look, I have to say, right at home here in my dungeon, and I wouldn’t mind building something like that long cage on the left…but only for people who are of sound and willing mind. I may be a mad scientist, but I’m not, well, crazy, you know? At least not like the folks who actually thought these things would do some good.

A number of other displays commemorated the sometimes colorful and occasionally fatal eccentricities of a few of the hospital’s more outstanding patients. Take this one, for example, which is just kind of weird until you know what it is, at which point it becomes weird and gross.

This bizarre work of art was made by hospital staff, not by a patient, out of the materials found in a patient’s…err, stomach. The patient in question, you see, had what would today be called obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the particular manifestation of her obsession lay in eating any little bits of sharp pointy metal things that she could get her hands on. Which, as you might expect, eventually killed her.

See? Weird and gross. I did try to warn you.

This guy, on the other hand, was straight out of the X-Files:

The story, as near as I can remember it, is that there was this dude who was completely convinced he was sane, while all the people around him thought that he was stark raving mad. He was utterly convinced that there were railroad box cars containing evidence of his sanity being kept at an undisclosed location, and he wrote about them obsessively. Somewhere along the way, he also became convinced that the television set in his room contained a secret mechanism by which he could send messages to the vague and sinister forces hiding the box cars from him, or perhaps to agents opposing those sinister forces (it’s not entirely clear to your humble scribe) so he wrote long, rambling, incoherent letters about box car numbers and train routes and railway schedules and stuff, or something, and tucked them inside the television set, until it eventually quit working.

Which, I reckon, wasn’t actually the outcome he had hoped for. It’s bad enough when a secret conspiracy has plotted to conceal evidence vital to your sanity in railway cars; it’s even worse when you can’t watch next week’s Gunsmoke on television.

This next bit is a tiny section of a huuuuuge piece of embroidery, created by hand by a patient on what I believe to be a hospital bedsheet.

We puzzled over it for quite a while. Reading it is rather like trying to track a coherent thought through a untrodden jungle the way a traditional Chinese doctor might track a tiger across the savannah, following its telltale traces in the slightest disturbance of underbrush, before shooting it in the head and drying out its penis to make phony aphrodisiacs that are sold in small glass vials from musty shops whose owners don’t really give a toss about the extinction of a noble species for the sake of superstition…but I digress.

This display one was one of my favorites.

One should not court another man’s wife if one wishes to avoid a sticky fate. You heard it here first.

The basement of the old hospital, where we ended up after we decided to separate and explore the ancient lunatic asylum separately just as Hollywood has taught us to do, bore a large steel door with these markings:

It is unclear to your humble scribe exactly what sort of disaster supplies one keeps in the morgue, or indeed what eventuality those supplies are intended to ward against. I can only imagine it’s not a zombie-related disaster, as keeping one’s zombie-related disaster supplies in the same location as the corpses of the newly dead is likely to result in a certain inconvenience.

We fled the museum through the gift shop, where many commemorative items were available for sale (“Relive the experience again and again!”), and then were once again on our way to Shangri-La. There were by now only a couple of adventures left before our encounter with the Guatemalans and our renewed appreciation to the full fury of Nature’s watery wrath, but those tales will need to wait for another telling.

Late in the evening, we arrived in Salt Lake City at Claire’s friend’s house. I was a bit afraid that I’d have difficulty sleeping, as my ear was…

Okay, I need to back up a bit, to the day before we left, and explain something about my relationship life.

I live with zaiah. She and I share a very kinky relationship, in which various forms of consent play and consensual non-consent play a large role. Large enough, in fact, that I think we sometimes frighten some of our friends…and nearly all our friends are kinky, too. You might think this has little to do with traveling to Boston, and you’d be right, except for the thing with the ear.

It started while I was on my computer chatting with a friend of mine, who like Claire is also whip-smart and knowledgeable and courageous and generally sexy as hell. (This is, as some of my readers might recognize, a common feature in my life. I really dig smart, strong women who aren’t afraid to make unconventional choices. But I digress.)

Anyway, while I was occupied with my chat window, zaiah walked up to me, set a bottle of alcohol on the corner of my computer desk, and walked away. A minute later, she walked back, set a pair of latex gloves on the desk, and walked away. A minute after that, she walked back holding a needle. She put on the gloves, opened the needle, put her knee in my chest, pushed me back in my chair, and stuck the needle through my ear. That done (and howling subsided), she cleaned my ear with alcohol (more howling), and stuck an earring through the newly-minted hole and walked away again.

I had to explain to the friend I’d been chatting with why I’d stopped responding for a time, which led to some interesting conversation. The real point here is that I would be sleeping in strange places with a brand-new, and still sore, piercing. I normally sleep on my left side, and zaiah had (naturally) added the new hole to my left ear, so…yeah. I was expecting a difficult night of sleeping on the wrong side.

Claire’s friend lives, as I previously mentioned, in a former Mormon polygamous compound that’s been converted into apartments. Each apartment is basically a series of bedrooms arranged around the outside of a central living room, connected to a huge kitchen–a quite serviceable floor plan if one has a number of wives who may not necessarily be too fond of one another, but all of whom are expected to spend their time in the kitchen when they aren’t raising children or on their backs making more.

I managed to survive a harrowing night of sleeping on the wrong side (the wrong side!), mostly by telling myself that when one is traveling the breadth of a continent, there are certain privations one is expected to endure. In the morning we were off adventuring again.

When one is traveling across Utah, a certain sameness begins to set in. Most of the scenery looks like this:

Most of the roads look like this:

After a certain number of bare-knuckle close calls with enormous tractor-trailer rigs being driven at lightning speed along narrow roads by people who are either five-eights asleep or hopped up on a combination of crystal meth, cocaine, and Monster energy drinks, the experience ceases to enthrall, and one soon finds one’s self thinking “Wake me when something interesting happens.”

So it was that we made our way through Utah and into Colorado, which is just as dry but a lot less wrinkly.

Claire had been waxing enthusiastically about the hot springs in Glenwood for some time prior to the trip. Now, ordinarily, water is something I’m pretty much against. I mean, I recognize its utility and all; it is, after all, the primary ingredient in Mountain Dew. But immersion in it is something I don’t much fancy, especially when it’s hot.

However, life in Oregon has been a period of transition for me. I have, since moving here, found myself in a hot tub on no fewer than two occasions, largely at rekre8‘s urging. “Give it a try!” she told me. “It’s not as bad as all that!”

So when we arrived in Glenwood in the evening, I was game to give this “hot springs” thing a go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I heard the phrase “hot springs,” as in “we’re going to stop at the hot springs and immerse ourselves in them,” the image that was conjured up in my mind looked something like this:

though to be perfectly fair, this picture is lacking in the human skeletons my imagination had thoughtfully arranged to provide scattered all around the edge of the springs as a warning to those luckless enough to linger in them too long.

What I actually saw was this:

The principle behind a hot spring is quite simple. Millions of tons of molten rock, heated to fantastic temperatures by intense radioactive decay deep within the earth, forces itself under tremendous pressure through miles and miles of solid rock, until finally it comes near enough to the surface to contact water percolating down through porous substrate. When they meet, the water flashes instantaneously into superheated steam, which blasts up with ferocious energy to the surface, where it…

…manages to feel quite pleasant, really.

The hot springs were surprisingly enjoyable. And I don’t mean that in the “it was surprising any part of the experience was enjoyable at all” sense, but rather in the “I had quite a wonderful time” sense. In fact, all too soon was it time to be off on our way to Denver, where we stayed with another friend of Claire’s.

Or so it is alleged.

We didn’t see hide nor hair of this friend. We arrived at a lovely house in a charming suburb of Denver quite late at night. Claire claimed to have been in contact with her friends, who had, or so the story went, elected to go to bed after leaving a key for us on the porch. We let ourselves in and set ourselves up in the supposedly “spare” bedrooms. The next morning, Claire announced that her fiends had left for work early that morning, so we would not be meeting them.

To this day, I have no way to prove that what actually happened wasn’t that she had scoped out a house whose owners were away on vacation or something, and confabulated an entire yarn about friends of hers who live in Denver as part of a ruse to make us agree to a little breaking and entering.

At this point in our adventure, Louisville, Kentucky, and our encounter there with the Guatemalans, was growing ever nearer..but that tale will have to wait for another time.

It has been, as regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware, some time since I’ve posted a meaningful update.

This is not because nothing has been going on in my life. Far from it; there’s been so much going on lately, for good and ill (much of the last involving Eastern European organized crime, though that’s a post for another day) that I have scarcely had time to talk about it.

I have, for example, been spending quite a lot of time camping lately. My sweetie zaiah, her husband, her daughter, a number of friends, and I all went camping for her birthday; then shortly afterward she, her husband, her daughter and I did it again, only this time with kittens. Yes, I took pictures. Yes, you will get to see them. (Kitten in a tent! Kitten in a sleeping bag! Woohoo!)

And then there was the Boston trip.

We didn’t know, when we set out for Boston, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. It– Wait, hang on, maybe I should back up a bit.

This is Claire.

Claire is a friend of mine. She’s smart and geeky, she’s spent time in Israel doing archaeology and in a metal workshop learning how to weld, she has a background in immunology, she does computer graphics, she’s whip-smart and charming and generally all-around interesting. Sexy, too.

This is Claire’s friend Ero, who I met mere days before the trip to Boston.

I don’t know that much about her, to be quite honest, other than she’s fluent in Chinese.

This is me.

The bunny ears belong to my sweetie emanix. On a trip such as this, they are mandatory, not optional.

And this is Boston.

Okay, so now that the major players have been identified, let me start over.

Claire recently decided to go to grad school in Boston. She wanted to have her car available, which meant driving cross-country…not quite the longest possible drive from one place in the US to another, but pretty close. And for obvious reasons, she didn’t want to make the drive herself.

She put out a call for folks willing to help her drive. Both Ero and I volunteered. Operating under the notion that when given a choice between two people, the best thing to do is choose both-a notion I heartily endorse, by the way–she opted to select both of us as her traveling companions for a week-long journey through America’s heartland. Adventure! Excitement! Really wild things!

We didn’t know, when we set out, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. In those lazy, carefree, naive days before our adventure started, we thought that things would be simple. We would take turns driving, we thought; we would stop and see the sights along the way; and then, once we arrived, we’d chill for a few days, after which Ero and I would fly back home to Portland.

Ah, the naivety of youth.

The original plan was to depart from Hood River, Oregon at about six AM. I should have known just from that plan that hurricanes and Guatemalans lurked in our future. Nothing good can ever come of anything that starts so early in the morning, the way I see it.

This plan was amended so that we’d be leaving closer to 9 on account of OMG six AM WTFbiscuits, so when the day arrived, I found myself, somewhat blearily, meeting up with my fellow travelers at the home of mutual friends, bleary of eye but still (mostly) functional. We set out toward Utah, where we had planned to spend the night with a friend of Claire’s in a former fundamentalist Mormon polygamous compound.

The drive out through the Columbia Gorge was gorgeous, because the drive through the Columbia Gorge is always gorgeous. Oregon manufactures nearly 60% of the world’s total yearly output of natural scenic beauty, so it’s pretty much all over the place here. One can scarcely swing a cat without it sinking claw and fang into stunning natural beauty round these parts. We stopped on the climb up out of the Gorge to take pictures:

Yeah, I know, right? They just leave it lying around!

The first part of the trip went seamlessly. We listened to music, we talked about Chinese culture and archaeology and anal sex¹ and social stratification and geekery, the whole while snapping pictures out the window of the car. We passed through the mountain range dividing the wet half of Oregon from the dry half, without any particular incidents; I had halfway hoped to see some of Oregon’s famed giantic pterodactyls that ride the thermals over the mountains and occasionally eat an unwary hiker, but there were none in the skies. Wrong time of year, I guess.

And then we hit Utah.

When we reached the border, the culture shock was so great it rattled the car. There ought to be signs warning motorists, really; I don’t know how many people get killed every year just from the sudden icy plunge into an alien culture alone. It damn near knocked us clean off the road.

Utah has nearly as much scenic splendor as Oregon, owing no doubt to its proximity to Oregon’s massive natural beauty factories.

They put their own spin on some of it, though, Utah takes stunning natural beauty and adds a certain lovely, stark barrenness to it that’s quite beautiful.

I don’t know what it is with Utah. We made two pit stops on the way to Salt Lake City, City of Perverts². At the first, when I went to make use of the facilities, I was confronted with this…rather ominous sign:

Now I personally have to wonder, with more than a fair amount of horror, about the kind of folks who need to be reminded to close the bathroom door in a gas station.

I mean, not closing the bathroom door in the sanctity of one’s home is one thing. I mean, really, who among us hasn’t occasionally left the bathroom door open while peeing, just in case an Italian supermodel or the entire Brazilian women’s volleyball team should happen to wander into the house by mistake and be stunned into silence by the merest glimpse of the awe-inspiring throobing manhood on display? Guys, I’m sure you all know exactly what I’m talking about. But in a gas station? Really?

Our next stop was even higher on the creepy-meter. We paused at a rest stop along the side of the Interstate, and a woman walked up to me, pointed to the bunny ears, and said “What’s with them rabbit ears? You think you’re some kind of funny bunny or something?”

Which, I will admit, was a new one.

Now, I’m accustomed to getting odd looks when I wear bunny ears out and about. Usually, the odd looks I get fall into two camps: hostility and amusement. And the reactions tend to be neatly separated across gender lines; most of the hostile looks I get are from men, whereas women tend to be amused by them. That probably says something about the social construct of gender roles and gender normalization in Western society, and I’m sure there’s a master’s thesis or two luring in there somewhere, though at the moment I can’t be arsed to tease it out.

But I’m not generally confronted about it in such a hostile way.

There were a lot of things I could have said that I seriously thought about saying. Like, “It’s part of the gay agenda!Once gay marriage is passed, next comes making everyone wear bunny ears!” There were even more things I considered later, like “What’s with them manners? You think you’re some kind of rude douchenozzle or something?” However, I took the high road³ and just smiled politely at the nice lady.

Encounter with the locals over, we piled back into the car and headed on toward Salt lake City, where we would spend the night before traveling on. At this point, the hurricane was only days away, lurking in our future like a gigantic swiriing monster of spirally doom, but we were as yet unaware of the surprises Mother Nature had laid away in store for us. More on that, and things that delight the eight-year-old me, later.

¹ I have been told by reliable sources that whenever two or more women spend more than a certain critical threshold of time talking, the subject of anal sex inevitably comes up. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it was true during the trip. The vote in the car was two to one in favor.

² Supposedly, Utah has the highest per-capita rate of porn Web site subscriptions in the United States. The most popular of these? The various kink-related properties owned by Kink.com. Mormons apparently might be against pervy sex when they’re in church, but when it comes time to watch Internet pr0n, they know how to get their kink on!

³ Or the lazy road, depending on how you look at it.