thedrifter
07-29-07, 07:44 AM
Jul 29, 2007
A story at every turn of the road
Biker logging stories, miles across nation
By Mark Melady TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
mmelady@telegram.com
WORCESTER— Woodrow Landfair ran out of gas in Death Valley, lived in a New Orleans shelter with Katrina refugees, sold charity door-to-door in New Rochelle, N.Y., told stories in Teaneck, N.J., and ate more peanut-butter sandwiches in the last year than the average 3-year-old — all in service to the writer’s muse.
Mr. Landfair, a 2006 University of Texas creative writing graduate, has logged 23,000 miles on his Suzuki Intruder since selling off everything he owned that did not fit into two backpacks and leaving Austin with $3,000 in search of Experience, Truth, Authenticity and Life’s Lessons — not generally available in creative writing class.
“I can still hear the coyotes,” said the 24-year-old wanderer, who recently stopped for a respite at the Java Hut coffeehouse in Webster Square.
While his travels have been compared in the media to the cross-country treks of Beat writer Jack Kerouac in “On The Road,” Mr. Landfair said he drew his inspiration to drift from Louis L’Amour’s “Education of a Wandering Man,” an unfinished memoir by the prolific writer of Westerns, in which he chronicled his life on the road in the 1920s and 1930s. Referring to Mr. L’Amour, Mr. Landfair said, “He said he dropped out of school at 15 because he thought high school was holding back his education.”
Last summer, Mr. Landfair stuffed clothes, a sleeping bag, notebooks and a laptop computer into two backpacks and set out to travel to all 48 contiguous states, a goal he will soon achieve.
He generally carried two to three days’ worth of food on his back — most often a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and maybe a bag of spinach to make his mother happy. He skipped breakfast and ate the other meals whenever he got hungry. He worked his experiences and observations into stories that he told in coffeehouses and at poetry slams.
Last fall, out of money and with winter approaching, Mr. Landfair decided to hole up in New York City while he replenished his wallet and stayed warm.
He worked three weeks raising funds for children’s charities. “That was a painful three weeks,” he said. “We were bused out from the city to New Rochelle and sent into neighborhoods.” Life lesson learned? “Selling door-to-door is about as bad as it gets.”
In the post 9-11 world, he also learned that the free life of shelter living comes with red tape and identity checks. To stay in a New York shelter, Mr. Landfair first had to check in at Bellevue Hospital to be interviewed, photographed and thumbprinted.
“Just walking into the place is scary,” he said. “It smells like old soup and BO, and they used to do lobotomies there. It’s a frightening place.” But his one-night stay at Bellevue was pleasurable. The rooms were clean and spacious (four to five to a room) with fresh sheets on the beds, windows with a view and showers that worked. “It was like summer camp for adults,” he said.
Mr. Landfair quickly landed a job delivering room service at an upscale midtown hotel.
“The manager did cocaine and the kitchen staff were mostly illegals from Central America,” he said, “but the tips were great. I was the only white guy in room service. The others were pretty skeptical, but we became close. I earned their respect as a worker — an honor because they were the hardest-working people I’d ever seen.”
By the end of the winter, Mr. Landfair had saved $5,000.
He hit the road again and, in post-Katrina New Orleans, lived in a shelter for five weeks, where he learned that what he learned before did not necessarily hold.
“I was pretty naive, growing up in the middle class,” he said. “When we were told in school that everything is fair and equal and that this was the land of opportunity, I’d look around my class that was 90 percent white and that seemed right. Then I came to New Orleans.”
While the tourist areas have been rebuilt and are up and running, he said, the poorest Crescent City neighborhoods remain largely uninhabitable. “I don’t consider myself political, but the discrepancies between how whites and blacks, the well-off and poor fare are so obvious, you cannot deny it,” he said.
Out West, he ran out of gas in Death Valley one night and was eventually rescued by German tourists, ironic because he had been told that among the ghosts who wander Death Valley are the spirits of World War II German POWs imprisoned there during the war.
He writes in notebooks every day, sending the full ones to his mother or father for safekeeping. Every few days, he works in his laptop.
Mr. Landfair has started a novel, not surprisingly a road book. “Two buddies go on a big road trip before joining the Marines,” he said. He also has a collection of short stories. “I’ve sent work to an agent in New York and she thinks we’ve got something we can sell.”
He will visit his 46th, 47th and 48th states in the coming days, when he bikes through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. He will sell his motorcycle in Maine and use part of the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to an as-yet-undetermined American city.
“It could be in Montana,” he said, “or it could be somewhere else. I have nowhere to go back to and no one is waiting for me to come back. It doesn’t matter where I go or what I do, though I tend to like the manual stuff. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I’m just going to keep writing.”
Mr. Landfair can be reached at swlandfair@gmail.com.
Ellie
A story at every turn of the road
Biker logging stories, miles across nation
By Mark Melady TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
mmelady@telegram.com
WORCESTER— Woodrow Landfair ran out of gas in Death Valley, lived in a New Orleans shelter with Katrina refugees, sold charity door-to-door in New Rochelle, N.Y., told stories in Teaneck, N.J., and ate more peanut-butter sandwiches in the last year than the average 3-year-old — all in service to the writer’s muse.
Mr. Landfair, a 2006 University of Texas creative writing graduate, has logged 23,000 miles on his Suzuki Intruder since selling off everything he owned that did not fit into two backpacks and leaving Austin with $3,000 in search of Experience, Truth, Authenticity and Life’s Lessons — not generally available in creative writing class.
“I can still hear the coyotes,” said the 24-year-old wanderer, who recently stopped for a respite at the Java Hut coffeehouse in Webster Square.
While his travels have been compared in the media to the cross-country treks of Beat writer Jack Kerouac in “On The Road,” Mr. Landfair said he drew his inspiration to drift from Louis L’Amour’s “Education of a Wandering Man,” an unfinished memoir by the prolific writer of Westerns, in which he chronicled his life on the road in the 1920s and 1930s. Referring to Mr. L’Amour, Mr. Landfair said, “He said he dropped out of school at 15 because he thought high school was holding back his education.”
Last summer, Mr. Landfair stuffed clothes, a sleeping bag, notebooks and a laptop computer into two backpacks and set out to travel to all 48 contiguous states, a goal he will soon achieve.
He generally carried two to three days’ worth of food on his back — most often a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and maybe a bag of spinach to make his mother happy. He skipped breakfast and ate the other meals whenever he got hungry. He worked his experiences and observations into stories that he told in coffeehouses and at poetry slams.
Last fall, out of money and with winter approaching, Mr. Landfair decided to hole up in New York City while he replenished his wallet and stayed warm.
He worked three weeks raising funds for children’s charities. “That was a painful three weeks,” he said. “We were bused out from the city to New Rochelle and sent into neighborhoods.” Life lesson learned? “Selling door-to-door is about as bad as it gets.”
In the post 9-11 world, he also learned that the free life of shelter living comes with red tape and identity checks. To stay in a New York shelter, Mr. Landfair first had to check in at Bellevue Hospital to be interviewed, photographed and thumbprinted.
“Just walking into the place is scary,” he said. “It smells like old soup and BO, and they used to do lobotomies there. It’s a frightening place.” But his one-night stay at Bellevue was pleasurable. The rooms were clean and spacious (four to five to a room) with fresh sheets on the beds, windows with a view and showers that worked. “It was like summer camp for adults,” he said.
Mr. Landfair quickly landed a job delivering room service at an upscale midtown hotel.
“The manager did cocaine and the kitchen staff were mostly illegals from Central America,” he said, “but the tips were great. I was the only white guy in room service. The others were pretty skeptical, but we became close. I earned their respect as a worker — an honor because they were the hardest-working people I’d ever seen.”
By the end of the winter, Mr. Landfair had saved $5,000.
He hit the road again and, in post-Katrina New Orleans, lived in a shelter for five weeks, where he learned that what he learned before did not necessarily hold.
“I was pretty naive, growing up in the middle class,” he said. “When we were told in school that everything is fair and equal and that this was the land of opportunity, I’d look around my class that was 90 percent white and that seemed right. Then I came to New Orleans.”
While the tourist areas have been rebuilt and are up and running, he said, the poorest Crescent City neighborhoods remain largely uninhabitable. “I don’t consider myself political, but the discrepancies between how whites and blacks, the well-off and poor fare are so obvious, you cannot deny it,” he said.
Out West, he ran out of gas in Death Valley one night and was eventually rescued by German tourists, ironic because he had been told that among the ghosts who wander Death Valley are the spirits of World War II German POWs imprisoned there during the war.
He writes in notebooks every day, sending the full ones to his mother or father for safekeeping. Every few days, he works in his laptop.
Mr. Landfair has started a novel, not surprisingly a road book. “Two buddies go on a big road trip before joining the Marines,” he said. He also has a collection of short stories. “I’ve sent work to an agent in New York and she thinks we’ve got something we can sell.”
He will visit his 46th, 47th and 48th states in the coming days, when he bikes through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. He will sell his motorcycle in Maine and use part of the money to buy a Greyhound bus ticket to an as-yet-undetermined American city.
“It could be in Montana,” he said, “or it could be somewhere else. I have nowhere to go back to and no one is waiting for me to come back. It doesn’t matter where I go or what I do, though I tend to like the manual stuff. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I’m just going to keep writing.”
Mr. Landfair can be reached at swlandfair@gmail.com.
Ellie