Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 1

BREAKFAST AT THE EXIT CAFE.

Wayne Grady / Merilyn Simonds.

PREFACE.

WE didn't set out to write a book. We were in Vancouver, intending to drive back to Ontario in our green Toyota Echo, and we decided to take the long way home, down along the Pacific coast, across the southern states, then up the Atlantic seaboard. It was to be a holiday, an excursion. It was just before Christmas 2006, and we were keen to avoid driving across the Prairies in winter. We were naive. We were curious. We wanted to see the mountains of Was.h.i.+ngton and the forests of Oregon, the deserts of California and Arizona and New Mexico, the canyonlands of Utah, the arid farmlands of Texas, the troubled cities of Mississippi and Alabama, the exhausted plantations of Georgia and Virginia, the great, wind-beaten banks of the Carolinas. We thought this would be relaxing, a break from our writing lives.

We should have known better. Put two writers together in a car and keep them there for a couple of months, and it's more than likely you'll get a book. But what kind of book would it be? Both of us grew up, for the most part, in southern Ontario, close to the American border, although neither of us had travelled much in the United States. What we knew of America had come from America, not from our own experience of that country. We knew what Americans looked like and sounded like; we knew how they acted and sang and wrote. What we didn't know was what they were like at home.

We had no itinerary, no agenda. We didn't stick to the interstates, as Larry McMurtry did when he wrote Roads; we didn't drive only on smaller highways, as William Least Heat-Moon did in Blue Highways. The routes we travelled were blue and red and white and yellow on the maps, solid lines and dotted lines and sometimes no lines at all. We didn't tell anyone we were coming: we were neighbours who were dropping in unexpectedly, wanting only a cup of coffee and some conversation.

By the time we got home, we had driven more than fifteen thousand kilometres; travelled through twenty-two states; put on twenty pounds each; replaced half the car; slept in mom-and-pop motels, boutique hotels, dreary motor inns, the car; eaten in diners, cafes, bistros, five-star restaurants, chain eateries, food courts, the car. Our favourite meal of the day was breakfast, because eating breakfast every day in a restaurant is one kind of proof that you're on the road. And everyone else in there is travelling, too. Part of the reason we chose the t.i.tle of our book is that the places we had breakfast took on for us a kind of iconic status. Like America itself, they became, for a time, our home.

John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, his book about driving the rim of America, wrote that "people don't take trips, trips take people." He was right. This trip not only took us into America, into the heart of the neighbour we thought we knew, but also took us into ourselves. Throughout the book, Wayne speaks in his voice-his sections begin with W-and Merilyn speaks in hers-M. The result is a conversation and a twinned meditation, too, as we each engage with the landscape we're travelling through as well as our own interior geography.

We discovered that a marriage between two people is not unlike the sometimes uneasy truce that exists between two countries that have lain beside each other for a long time. We each came to that in our own way, and that, too, was part of the journey.

1 / MEGALOPOLIS, USA.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON looms across the border from British Columbia at the end of a long line of cars and buses. As we await our turn at customs, we watch a man playing with his young son on the wide stretch of gra.s.s between two parallel roads, the one we are on leading into the United States and the other disappearing behind us into Canada. The man is tossing his son into the air and catching him on the way down, and the child is laughing hysterically, obviously frightened out of his wits. The man keeps throwing him higher into the air and catching him at the last minute, the boy's head swinging closer and closer to the ground each time. We watch with resigned fascination until we arrive at a stop sign a few metres from the border, beside a placard that reads Canada This Way, with an arrow pointing behind us.

We are driving into America.

Border crossings always unnerve me, which, as Merilyn says, is an odd and tiresome thing, because I have crossed this and many other borders in my life and ought to know what to expect. I have no particular reason to expect to be unnerved. But to me, crossing a border is a harrowing experience, perhaps because I grew up in a border city-Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, Michigan. The saying in Windsor was that the light at the end of the tunnel was downtown Detroit, and it was meant as a positive thing.

Every year before school started, my parents would whisk my younger brother and me through the tunnel to the United States because everything was so much cheaper on the other side. They'd drag us up and down Woodward Avenue, into all the really cheap department stores, with their dark, uneven hardwood floors and sticky, gla.s.s-fronted cases, buying us cheap s.h.i.+rts and sweaters and pants and socks and windbreakers. At a designated spot between Woodward Avenue and the Detroit Tunnel, my father would pull the car over and my mother would frantically cut the price tags off all the pants with a pair of nail scissors, pull all the cardboard stiffeners out of the s.h.i.+rts, stuff all the bags and tags and cardboard and tissue paper and s...o...b..xes into one of the shopping bags, and toss the whole thing into a garbage pail practically within hearing distance of the customs shed. Then she would make us put on all the clothes we'd just bought, to hide them from the customs official, who, if he spied an overlooked price tag or caught the whiff of new denim, would yank us from the car and make us take off all our clothes and then arrest my parents. In my family, "duty" was something one paid if one were caught wearing two pairs of pants.

Now I watch nervously as the guard comes out of his tiny kiosk, pistol jutting from a little holster that looks like a miniature leather jockstrap, and leans over to ask what the h.e.l.l I think I'm doing, trying to get into the United States. What business do I have going into his country? Because things are cheaper there, is that it? Well, buddy, things aren't cheap in America so that foreigners like me can come in and buy everything up. Do I imagine that Americans work as hard as they do at keeping prices down for the benefit of non-Americans? I can think of no answer to such a question. In fact, it seems like sound economic theory to me. All of us in this line-they should turn us back, close the border. We'll ruin America. Besides, the mouthy literalist in me wants to add, I don't like your country. I think your country is too big and plays too rough, like a sulking adolescent with divorcing parents, and I am certain my thoughts are written all over my face, like price tags sticking out from the collar of a brand-new flannelette s.h.i.+rt.

"Where are you coming from?" the guard asks politely, taking our pa.s.sports.

"Ontario," I say.

"Vancouver," Merilyn says, simultaneously.

"Oh," I say, "you mean today? Yes, Vancouver."

"And where are you going?"

"Ontario," I say, stupidly.

"Seattle," says Merilyn.

The guard looks at me. "I mean we're taking the long way home. Down the coast, and"-I feel Merilyn's elbow jabbing me in the ribs; she has warned me about saying too much at borders, it's the first thing they look for-"through Seattle," I add lamely.

The guard smiles and hands me our pa.s.sports. "Welcome to America," he says.

IT'S THE twentieth of December. Merilyn has spent the past three months as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia while I stayed home in Ontario looking after, in reverse order, the gardens, the house, the cat, and myself. We've both had time to get used to being alone, a rarity for a couple who usually eat, sleep, and write in the same house. We've probably become rugged individualists, more American than Canadian. I flew to British Columbia so that we could drive home together, thinking the trip home would give us time to rediscover our communal selves before settling in for the winter.

We could head back straight across Canada, but the weather is making us cautious. High winds have been buffeting Vancouver, with heavy snow causing power outages and trees falling like drunks in Stanley Park and across the city's streets. Climate change is making Vancouverites freeze in the dark. No snow on the Prairies yet, but Saskatchewan and Alberta are known for sudden changes in weather. And everyone expects a white Christmas in Ontario. Even if it doesn't snow, the Trans-Canada will be cold, icy, and treacherous. Driving home through the southern reaches of America seems to us a better bet.

The terrors of the border are balanced, too, by the appealing thought that we'll be able to just get lost for a few weeks. Not lost in the literal sense of not knowing where we are, for we are travellers in an age of cellular phones and wireless Internet access. No, I mean lost in a more ancient sense, the way Th.o.r.eau meant lost when he advised packing a few vittles in a sack and disappearing into the woods for a few weeks, "absolutely free from all worldly engagements." Or in Paul Theroux's sense: after a trip to Africa, he wrote, "The word 'safari' in Swahili means journey-it has nothing to do with animals. Someone 'on safari' is just away and un.o.btainable and out of touch." For the next month or two, we would be on safari.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit asks an important question: "Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration-how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"

Well, one way is to take the old self into unknown territory and see what happens. To lose ourselves in America.

MADLY, without forethought or direction, we are speeding into America. It's the week before Christmas, the day before the winter solstice. Any other year, the children, and their children, would be getting ready to come home. I would be baking shortbread and unpacking ornaments. Instead, I'm sitting in this little green Toyota, feeling restless. Restless for stasis.

We left Vancouver in a rush, anxious to be on the road, deciding at the last minute to head south, away from the snow, instead of east. The back seat is piled with coats and bags of shoes and what I could salvage of my office. "How will we convince customs that we didn't buy all that stuff in the States?" Wayne moaned, already antic.i.p.ating crossing back into Canada. So I packed up most of my things and s.h.i.+pped them home, but I refused to be parted with the ma.n.u.script I've been working on for months. "Come on, who's going to think I bought that?"

I reach back and jostle the bags and the box that holds the novel. Establis.h.i.+ng a little order, is what I tell Wayne, but really, I just want to touch my things. I set a small jar of hand cream, a handkerchief, and my asthma puffer in the handhold of the pa.s.senger door. I open the glove compartment, which Wayne oddly insists on calling a glove box, and straighten the emergency manual, the car registration, our pa.s.sports. I add the mileage book, the small pad I bought to keep track of our expenses, a new Sudoku, my Palm. The novel I'm reading and my notebook go into the door pocket.

I gather the various state maps and brochures that arrived just as we were leaving, and arrange them under my seat. I dig a highlighter and a Sharpie out of my purse and clip them to the MapArt book that condenses the continent of North America to a series of neat, brightly coloured squares. Across the first few pages, a yellow line rises up out of Ontario to flatten across the Prairies, the Rockies, and British Columbia, coming to a stop at Vancouver-a record of our drive west in September, 5,001 kilometres, door to door.

I rest my hand flat on the open map and look out the window, suffering a moment of horizontal vertigo, the kind of dislocation that comes in a moving vehicle when you take your eyes from the landscape, then look up, miles later, uncertain where you are. The last thing I saw was the low grey obelisk jutting out of the gra.s.s beside the car as we inched toward customs. It looked like one of the posts that surround the old prison quarry back home where convicts once did hard time. In the gra.s.sy stretch between the twin roads moving into and out of the two countries stood an oddly Grecian monument, Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity carved on the side facing us as we headed to the United States. I turned and craned my neck to see what drivers heading into Canada would see: Children of a Common Mother. How strange, I thought. Canadians were brethren as they entered the United States, kids when they returned. What kind of Faustian bargain were we making, crossing this border?

"There's a plaque, too. I'm going to go read it," I said, jumping out of the car as Wayne looked on, aghast. "Don't worry, I'll be back before we move another inch."

The bra.s.s plate was framed by two women, each extending her country's coat of arms to meet in the middle. An eagle and a rampant lion: a scavenger and a predator. The scavenger I understood, but Canada, predatory? Not exactly how I think of my country. Where was the beaver, that amiable, trepidatious rodent that warns his fellows, then dives for cover at the faintest threat?

The words flanked by the women were optimistic: More than a century old friends.h.i.+p between these countries, a lesson of peace to all nations.

I peered at the two women. They were hardly more than girls. The American was fine-boned and pretty. In one hand, she cradled a cornucopia overflowing with vegetables and fruit. The Canadian girl was muscled, as if the sculptor intended to carve a man, then thought better of it and added b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She was lugging a huge sheaf of wheat, her arm clearly broken in some agricultural mishap and poorly set.

None of it fit. Our two countries were brethren, or children, or women: which was it? And what kind of friends are we? Squabbling kids who trade loyalties like baseball cards? Men who, like Wayne, play hockey together for years without ever knowing the names of each other's wives?

No, I thought, as I headed back to the car. The plaque had it right. It's a women's friends.h.i.+p. Never an easy thing, especially if one of them is outgoing and pretty.

We've left the monuments behind and are zipping over the tidal flats where the United States and Britain drew their final line in the sand. Here, the distinction between one country and another seems arbitrary, inconsequential. The landscape refuses nationality. The same sandy loam sifts on either side of the border; the same clouds scuttle overhead. The birds, looking down, recognize no boundaries. Even I, staring out at the low bungalows along the roadside, at the cars that pa.s.s by-the usual mix of American cars and imports, as many BC plates as Was.h.i.+ngton State-have trouble discerning any difference.

Yet there is a difference. Not out there, beyond the winds.h.i.+eld, where a steady drizzle is fingering horizontal lines across the gla.s.s, but in here, inside me.

"What do you love about the States?" I ask Wayne.

"The New Yorker, baseball, Star Trek, bourbon, L.L. Bean, John McPhee, Amazon."

I rhyme off my list: The New Yorker. s.e.x and the City. The Coen brothers. Richard Ford. Martin Luther King, J r. Sweet potato pie. Oprah. "And what do you hate?"

"Reality TV, Coca-Cola, Homeland Security, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Rifle a.s.sociation. And you?"

"The CIA, the bomb, aerial spraying, Tommy Hilfiger, Ugly Americans, the fact that they think they own the world. Oh, and Oprah."

How on earth will we ever see past all that?

"Good travel is like good reading," Wayne says. "It sucks you into a world and holds you there."

"Long enough for us to really see?"

He shrugs. "That's the idea."

I uncap the highlighter and set the point on the map, on the city of Vancouver, then drag it half an inch south, past the border, the first indication that this line might, at some point, become a unifying circle.

WE stop for a late breakfast in Fairhaven, a settlement on the sh.o.r.e of Bellingham Bay that was once a village in its own right but has been swept into the greater urban embrace of the city of Bellingham. It is a quaint little place, its brick buildings recently sandblasted, its pitted woodwork filled and repainted. It has a persistent, nineteenth-century look about it. Rather than allow box-store malls to suck the life out of its core, Bellingham pa.s.sed a munic.i.p.al design bylaw requiring new buildings to be constructed to look old. The instant nostalgia seems to be working; even in late December, in the rain, Fairhaven's quaint streets are swarming with shoppers. The storefronts along the main street are filled with Christmas goodies: gingerbread men, old-fas.h.i.+oned sleds tied in red ribbon. A recipe for mulled wine is posted on the window of the wine shop in front of which we park the car.

We ignore the seasonal frippery and head for Village Books. We've been here before: it's an establishment worth whipping down from Vancouver for, its shelves burdened with books, both new and used. On either side of the door, plaques embedded in the red brick advise: A Room Without Books is Like a Body Without a Soul (Cicero) and Some Books Leave us Free and Some Books Make us Free (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

"What does that mean?" Merilyn says, puzzled before the Emerson quote.

"d.a.m.ned if I know."

Heading for the nature section, I buy Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone and Ann Zwinger's Wind in the Rock, both about the American desert, which I am looking forward to seeing. In the mystery corner, I pick out Michael Collins's Death of a Writer.

"Do you carry Canadian books?" I ask the man behind the order desk on the second floor, a pleasant-looking bookman with short, greying hair and studious gla.s.ses. His card says he is the Consignment Coordinator.

"A few," he says. "Lots of Canadians come through here, and we go up there, too, of course. But fiction, nature, books about Canada-there's not much interest. Not really. A few break though the barrier, the Margaret Atwoods, the Alice Munros, but not many. I don't think Americans are very interested in other countries."

Looking through the shelves, though, I notice several books by Canadian writers: Ron Wright's A Short History of Progress, Bill Deverell's April Fool, Karen Connelly's The Lizard Cage, and Tree, the book I co-wrote with David Suzuki. We are not identified as Canadians; it seems Americans are consuming foreign culture without knowing it. As they say in the ads, Don't tell them it's good for them.

Merilyn and I take our loot next door to the Colophon Cafe, which looks like a 1950s diner. There is a framed citation on the wall above our heads: Best Use of Poultry, 1998.

"I think I'll have the chicken," I say.

"Nineteen ninety-eight was a long time ago," Merilyn warns. "Besides, this is breakfast, remember?"

She's right. And I love diner breakfasts. Merilyn orders the quiche "made nightly by our own bakers." I scan the menu for bacon and eggs and order the closest thing to it: the Truly Decadent California Croissant, which consists of scrambled eggs, Swiss cheese, avocado, and tomato on a flaky French pastry. Merilyn looks at me askance.

"Why not?" I say defensively. "We're headed for California."

At the table across the aisle, a woman and a much younger man are sharing a bottle of wine. Suddenly, I'm a censorious moralist. What's an older woman doing having a bottle of wine with a young man at twelve-thirty in the afternoon? A Wednesday afternoon? Maybe it's her son; the boy has that surly, I-wish-I-were-anywhere-else-on-the-planet look about him, and he clearly isn't used to drinking wine. He holds his gla.s.s with his long fingers curled around the bulb and his thumb hooked over the rim.

"No, no, I don't think that's why she did it," the woman is saying animatedly. "I can't see her thinking that."

For a moment I think she must be his literature tutor; they are discussing motivation in Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. Then the boy says, "I need to walk around a bit, stretch my legs," and he gets up and goes into the bookstore, where I can see him pacing back and forth with his hands thrust in his pockets. As soon as he leaves, the woman's jaw sags, her eyes look nervously about her, and she sets down her wine. She seems to have aged in an instant. When the waitress pa.s.ses her table, the woman plucks at her, like a troll from under a bridge, and asks for the check.

By the time our own check comes, I have constructed an entire story around the couple. Several stories, actually. She's his mother and he's depressed, which I call the Canadian version. She's his high school English teacher, trying to seduce him or, having already seduced him, trying to hang on to him (the British version). Or she's his father's new wife, wanting to win him over (the wine) and yet smart enough to know not to say anything against his mother ("She'd never do anything to hurt you"). This spa.r.s.e scenario seems quintessentially American to me, a little mini-drama about the breakdown of the nuclear family. It reminds me of Gary Snyder's remark, in his essay "White Indians," that "the modern American family is the smallest and most barren family that has ever existed." I'd like to see how it turns out, but as with the tossing of the child into the air at the border, the finale remains a mystery as we climb the stairs from the cafe and make our way back to the street.

MEGALOPOLIS. That's what demographers call this part of the Pacific Northwest. After we leave Fairhaven, signs along the I-5 point to a succession of towns-Mt. Vernon, Arlington, Marysville-but the urban sprawl is more or less continuous. A conurbation. A megacity.

Most of the population of the Pacific Northwest is concentrated here, cl.u.s.tered like crystals in a supersaturated solution on this thread of an interstate that dangles south from Vancouver through Seattle to Portland. Nine million Americans, almost a third as many people as live in the entire country of Canada, occupy the thin strip of land between the coastal mountains and the sea, as if those who surged west across the United States during the last century were suddenly stopped in their tracks by the ocean, piling up on one another, nowhere else to go.

A trip never really begins until you put some distance between yourself and home, so we are speeding through the landscape at sixty miles an hour, which is the speed we usually drive at home, though it's legal here. I take note of these subtle differences, trying to feel like an explorer in a strange land.

"Do you suppose there is some international agreement that regulates the colour of highway signs?" I muse, as we whip past blue Adopt-a-Highway signs, green exit signs, exactly what we would see at home.

"Canadians probably order their signs from American companies," Wayne says. "Just like our computers, which keep telling us we're spelling 'colour' wrong." He's still tense from the border crossing, though it was the driver ahead of us who was handed the orange card and directed to the covered bays, where cars and trucks and RVs had their doors flung wide, like prisoners being strip-searched, and men with knee pads crouched, strafing the undercarriages with beams of light.

"Adrenalin can take up to seventy-two hours to dissipate," I say, patting his knee.

We're crossing a long bridge over yet another river. The body of a dead deer is slung over the railing. Wayne looks at it bleakly and mutters, "Compared to him, I'm fine."

On the political map of the United States, this part of the country is painted Democrat blue, which I always find confusing, since we Canadians paint our Liberal ridings red. Abortion, gay marriage, women's rights: all the items on the left-wing agenda have been taken up with enthusiasm here in the Pacific Northwest, even the right to die by your own hand. It's always had a reputation as the home of radicals. At the turn of the last century, this part of the world was a stronghold of the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World. Anarchists set up communes all along this coast. One of the longest-lasting was Home, started by three men who, in the summer of 1895, rowed into Puget Sound in a boat they'd built themselves and bought some land around an isolated bay, and within a few years dozens of anarchists, communists, food faddists, and freethinkers were living there.

These humid, forested slopes tucked up into the far corner of the country seem to attract people of an independent mind, or maybe people are transformed once they get here. It's true that humans have an impact on a landscape, but it works the other way, too. We are like Darwin's finches, whose beaks change shape almost annually depending on the food supply: there's no reason to expect humans to be any less susceptible to the place in which they find themselves.

I think of something Byron wrote in Don Juan: "As the soil is, so the heart of man." It's a Romantic notion, I suppose, that landscape can influence character, but observation makes me think it's true. When driving through Europe one autumn, I noticed how differently farmers in each country cured their hay: in bales, in stooks or stacks like enormous hives, layered on wooden ricks. John Ruskin tried to prove the principle in The Poetry of Architecture, using variations in cottage design to ill.u.s.trate the effect of landscape, which he called a "gigantic instrument of soul culture."

The people who settled this landscape sit between a metaphorical rock and a hard place-between the turbulent ocean and the Cascades, which are part of the volcanic Pacific Rim of Fire. Easterners who ended up here from their cozy New England villages and sprawling Great Plains farms had a choice: tough it out, or leave. It's a form of natural selection. The stubborn and the single-minded stayed, reproduced, and proliferated.

Wayne and I are birdwatchers, observers of nature. We're inclined to think of humans not as civilized beings but as just another species. When we travel, we look at all the populations-feathered, furred, clothed-with a curious eye.

So, thinking about the kind of people who ended up here, I expect them to be self-reliant and freethinking, something Americans claim as a national birthright. Historically, Americans seem always to be running from home, whether from England or New England, resolutely heading into the setting sun, away from family and tradition, looking for places to survive on their own. But once they arrived here in the Northwest, they became social-minded. Not only did they elect the first woman mayor and erect the first Hispanic college, but this is the home of consumers' co-ops, mutual aid societies, and publicly owned utilities. Internet cafes, emblems of both real and virtual connectivity, were sp.a.w.ned here. They may have the lowest rate of church attendance and the highest percentage of atheism in the country, but social conscience runs high: three of the ten greenest communities in the United States are part of this I-5 megacity. And the two biggest online magazines devoted to environmental sustainability are produced out of Seattle. Maybe that's because they still have an environment to save-over half of the land ma.s.s of Was.h.i.+ngton, the Evergreen State, is still covered with forest.

At least, that's the way it looks on the map. From where I sit, though, gridlocked in traffic in the endless urban sprawl that is Seattle, this could just as easily be Mississauga or Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. Fifty years ago, when John Steinbeck approached Seattle after decades living away from the Pacific, which he called his home ocean, he wrote that he "remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage-a little city of s.p.a.ce and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land."

The highway is twelve lanes wide now, and we can hardly see the earth for houses. We certainly can't see the matchless harborage: skysc.r.a.pers block the view. Wayne counts twelve building cranes rising above the downtown high-rises. The rain pours down. The traffic is going nowhere. Clouds settle like tired Sasquatches onto office tower roofs.

"Let's just drive on," Wayne says. He would rather be moving. Something about sitting behind the wheel of a car sucks the curiosity out of him. He's not venturing through new territory, he's locked in a video game, earning points for every car he pa.s.ses. Sitting still is not sitting well with him.

"How about going into Fremont?"

"What's that?"

"The Artists' Republic of Fremont. It's the old hippie part of Seattle."

"An artists' republic?" he says, lighting up. "I thought Plato kicked artists out of the republic."

We ease off the interstate and down past small, cottage-like houses pressed into the hillsides. I watch for the sign that says Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Back Five Minutes. Or the one that advises Entering the Republic of Fremont, the Center of the Universe, Set Your Watch Forward Five Minutes.

"Maybe somebody stole them," Wayne suggests. He seems to like the idea. "Or maybe they disappeared into the temporal s.h.i.+ft when everyone changed their watches." He likes that idea even better.

We do find a pole stuck with arrows painted in Neapolitan-ice-cream shades. They point every which way: Timbuktu 10,029 mi. Bermuda Triangle 3.75. Xanadu, East of the Sun. Dinosaurs 3 Blocks. Troll 2 Blocks. The pole itself is striped with an arrow that points straight down: Center of the Universe.

We get out to stretch our legs and stroll past a sixteen-foot bronze statue of Lenin; a rocket mounted on the side of a building, blowing smoke as if trying to blast off; a corral of life-size dinosaurs shaped from living hedges. Tucked under the highway overpa.s.s, someone has shaped a giant troll in ferro-cement, a real VW Beetle crushed under the weight of its left hand. A block away, three billy goats gambol across a yard, cut-outs in rusting steel. But these are relics of a quirky past. The stores that line the short main street sell souvenirs made in China, bins of organic vegetables, and vintage clothing arranged by colour on chrome racks.

"Do artists still live here?" I ask a young woman wearing a heavy brown khaki jacket and pants and a Peruvian woollen cap. In one hand she holds a bouquet of brushes and balances a palette; with the other, she dabs at the painting on her easel. It's a reasonable likeness of the troll.