JUST A TYPICAL SUMMER IN A COLLEGE TOWN: Of Urban Hiking, Coppertone Patrons, & Why Your Campus Creeper's Really Scared of Librarians

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'll go ahead and call them the Sunshine Sisters.

All summer long, on my "walks" (seven mile, average, urban hikes - a habit I picked up from the Italian Backpacker Fling), I pass by these two young women, a pair of undergrads who seem to spend every sunny, summer day bikini-clad out on their front lawn, drinking Natty Light and reading fashion magazines through overpriced sunglasses.

Three or four times a week, I pass by. And they're out there, always.

I could hike up their street blind, in fact, and still identify their house - the scent of tanning oil and baked skin whips down the tree-lined street, drifts in between the decaying Victorian homes and student apartment tenements. They've become a benchmark along my hikes, a point at which I'm able to estimate my time and distance, as familiar a landmark as any house or street sign.

They watch me like hawks as I approach, their gaze following me as I passed by. At first, I'd do the polite wave thing. That evolved into an 'D Afternoon, ladies or a stray weekend Mornin', girls.

And they'd just stare through their shades, no movement or acknowledgment whatsoever aside from above the neck, bearing witness to my half-naked, sweat-soaked sidewalk sojourn at the fringes of their lawnchair kingdom.

* * * *

I didn't recognize her at first.

I'd happened upon this wayward patron while searching for a monograph myself in the second-floor stacks. She looked lost, the scrap paper crumpled up in her hand covered in scribbled partial Library of Congress call numbers, so being a, well, librarian, I asked if she needed some help.

And I didn't recognize her, actually, because I'd never seen her in anything but a bikini. She looked naked without a copy of Vogue on her knees. And, well, I think she figured out who I was, sorta, about ten seconds after I did - I'm the half-naked hiker.

You'd be surprised how fucking awkward it can be when two strangers, accustomed to seeing each other in swimwear, meet fully-clothed in a library. Took a good and painfully graceless five minutes to find the books she needed for her essay, simply because, well... what does one say, really?

Finally, the ice broke, the inelegance gone when the books were found, and the discussion evolved from course-related, needles-to-the-brain reading to pleasure reading to, well, just enjoying the Great Outdoors.

"Uh, this is gonna sound weird, but what's with the walking thing?"

"Oh. Bad knee. Can't jog. Kinda a hiker anyway..."

"Nuh-uh! Shut up! You're hiking? In Oxford?"

The patron's eyes light up. She lifts her leg and plops her foot down on one of the library's step stools. Pointing towards a zipper-shaped scar just below her patella, she explains that she's been having problems with pain since her surgery a few years back - high school sports injury.

I'm really glad, sometimes, that the library's been unusually dead this summer. Not sure how I'd explain to the ol' Boss of Bosses how, exactly, I'm helping a patron when the patron's pushing my fingers into her scar tissue in between rows of European history.

Yep, probably not the most professional of patron interactions. But it's a really cool scar.

* * * *

So let's fast forward, oh, five hours or so.

An unusually cool afternoon, partly cloudy skies, intermittent rays of good ol' summer sunshine tormenting my poor red back.

I hit the usual turn. No smell of tanning oil.

At first, I think I've somehow forgotten the street, the house. But, well, the landmarks are all the same - same rundown Victorian homes, same rotten student duplexes and triplexes, same slummy undergraduate upperclassman ghetto.

As I approach I notice there's no furniture in the lawn, the Who Dey! curtains gone from the windows, the inside of the house black as a starless midnight.

The Sunshine Sisters... moved? Without even saying goodbye? How the hell am I gonna gauge my time and distance now?

And I wonder if that chick got her paper turned in before five o'clock?

* * * *

So let's fast forward again, say, oh, another 36 hours.

Two in the morning, ten to twenty minutes until Last Call! for almost all of Oxford's Uptown bars. And I'm outside on the sidewalk on High Street, slightly inebriated and enjoying an unusually cool June night, walking past the main strip of bars when the ol' cell phone starts vibrating in my back pocket.

A text message from a strange number. The message read: Hey still awake? Are U Out or home??? I delete the text, figuring its just a drunk dial. Thirty seconds, later, same message. Not being too good at the whole text message thing, I simply dial the number back...

"Hiiiiii JAYY-sinnn. What's up, Mr. Librarian?"

"Um, not much. Who's this?"

"Izzahizz... I'm...hold on... SHHH! Shut up! I'm asking HIM... are, ah, you like somewhere near [my library]. 'Cuz I'm outside and its closed an' there's this CREEPY guy, like hanging out..."

Researcher Sunshine. Took me a moment to recognize the voice. Don't even remember giving her my phone number, actually.

But obviously drunk enough to have staggered to an expectedly closed library at two in the fucking morning. Normally, during the school year, we're a 24-7 facility. But during the dog days of summer, when the Local U. kids are mostly out of town, we operate like, well, a normal library with normal library hours.

"...Okay chica, tell ya what. 'Bout a block away. Stay right there..."

Another hike. Great. At two in the fucking morning.

* * * *

Turns out both Sunshine Sisters - former roommates - had staggered down to my library after one too many whiskey-diets.

Having just moved out of their summer digs, well, they'd sorta drank enough to sorta forget where they were temporarily staying until they could move into their new place. Still having the keys to their old house, and a few days left on that lease, they figured they'd just go back, crash on the floor...

And the other Sunshine Sister? Well, turns out she'd interviewed me for a class assignment a few years back, about my library's $6 million face lift and the distractions caused to our users by the construction. From what I made out in the Drunk Girl / English translations, that's how the idea to give me a call came up, for some odd reason...

Creepy guys following you, walks down dark alleys, and too much booze rarely mix well in small college towns. Wasn't hard to figure out who the creeper was - the guy was skulking beneath a street lamp on the corner, doing the drunken zombie shadowdance with lager-fortified urine running down the front of his pants. Kid couldn't have been any older than twenty, twenty-one...

You know, I've been blackout, fall down blitzed before, but I've never been so completely bombed as to wander around in public, covered in piss, hollering at female passersby about my prowess in the sack. And I've slept with enough women to know that, yeah, anything that would find such behavior, er, lubricating, is probably marginally able to identify itself as a woman.

Anywho...

All I had to do was to walk two intoxicated super seniors past a barely standing kid who was creepy, sure, but in no condition to pose any threat to three people without so much as a weapon, much less a quickly debuzzified 30-year-old male.

I mean, c'mon - it's only a quarter-mile walk, right? Easy enough, right? I told the two women to just keep quiet, walk past the guy, and let me deal with it if the guy decided to start following us.

Well, if you've ever had to deal with drunk women, you can probably guess that the best laid security plans of mice and men...

"HEY YA FUCKIN' STALKER!" Interviewer Sunshine hollered as we passed the obliviously wasted kid. "This IZZZAGENTLEMAN! BRINGIT ya bishassfuckin CREEPER!"

"Yeah, my librarian'll kick your fucking azz ya fucking azzhole!" chimed in Researcher Sunshine, before turning to the street and other late night passersby, hollering, "MY LIBRARIAN WILL KICK ALL YOUR ASSES!"

The creepy guy just stood there, staring for a moment as he swayed in some nonexistent breeze, then, well, just staggered off into the night with a Fuck you, bishes! of his own.

He even growled at me, flexed imaginary biceps. Growled. Not like a scary, rabid dog growl, either. We're talking yapping poodle growl here.

But what kinda guy bails when he hears someone threaten to have a friggin' librarian kick some ass? Seriously. Why not just get a tattoo that reads IMA PUSSY scrawled across your forehead?

By three in the morning, I'm heading down dark, familiar streets, being pulled along by two women who smell of familiar tanning oil towards a familiar house. Literally walking intoxicated Super Seniors like a pair of hyperactive cocker spaniels, with one woman tugging at one hand and another dragging me along by the other.

Oh yeah. I'm glad most of my colleagues aren't usually up that late.

Don't even want to know what they'd think.

Most definitely not the most professional of patron interactions. But I'm not exactly the most professional of librarians at times, either.

- # # # -

DISPATCHES FROM THE ROAD: Of Navajo Girls and the Great White Wannabes, Sixty Acres in Paradise, I-40's Culinary Treasures, and Other Things

PINE HILL, RAMAH NAVAJO RESERVATION, NM (ZP) -- It took me a few seconds to figure out who, exactly, was yelling at me, a few seconds longer to figure out why they were yelling in the first place.

A young Navajo woman, a Ramah Band local, wanted to know if I had an extra cigarette. As I sat on the hood of my mother's jeep, waiting for my father to return from the inside of the reservation market (yes, a regular ol' quickie market, smack dab in the middle of one of the most independent states in the Navajo Nation), the woman waved me over to what was apparently her older brother's pickup.

At the window, she said that Big Brother didn't mind her smoking, but, well, he didn't like her talking to Anglo boys.

And she didn't want just a cigarette - she wanted information. I was a strange, white face in a land reserved, in theory, for her people - she just wanted to know if I was new to the area, if I was looking for things to do...

Besides, she added, I somehow looked cool, in cowboy boots, Levi's, and my white tee shirt, almost like a character from Grease - Grease, as in the John Travolta film, her favorite movie...

...And she wanted to know what the hell I was doing in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, on a tiny little reservation, far from anything remotely cool.

I bummed her a fresh Marlboro, lit the tobacco for her, and asked her what she did for fun, what local folks her age (we're talking high school kid here) did during the summer, while school was out and the New Mexico sun burned holes into the asphalt.

Just hang out, She said. We, ya know, watch movies, play video games, go to parties, drive to Gallup (70 miles away, the closest town of more than 20,000 people)...

Before she could finish, the sound of Brad Paisley's hit song, "Ticks," bellowed from inside her shirt. She politely excused herself, reached down the front of her white tank top, and pulled a mobile phone from between her breasts.

The sucker was held in place by the tautness of cotton stretched across boobs - an ancient Navajo trick.

God. It's _____. I don't want to talk to him right now. He's, oh my God, such a hick...

The Ramah Navajo teenager hit the End button on her mobile, sending the caller, poor Hick Boy, plummeting towards Voicemail Oblivion.

Another ancient Navajo trick.

The woman thanked me for the tobacco, wished me well on the rest of my trip, and politely excused herself once again, this time to call some female friend and to tell her that, yes, the Hick Boy had just called her and left a voicemail...

And, yes, some Navajo teenagers have cell phones, just like their non-Navajo counterparts.

* * * *

I returned to my perch on the jeep, watching as others, mostly tourists like myself, entered and exited the mini-mart.

An older white woman, clad in a monstrosity of a Easter-style hat, climbed out of an SUV with a Kokopelli bumper sticker in the back glass. A sandal-clad, bearded gentleman strolled the parking lot on WASPish white legs, truckstop turquoise dangling from his neck, along with one of those "Made in China" medicine bags, the kind more likely to be found in a Head Shop than around the neck of an actual shaman.

I even spotted one of those notorious Fake Indians, a regular Ward Churchill type, sunburned lobster pink, obviously dyed black hair, reading some guide to Navajo spirituality.

The bumper sticker on the back of his sedan? Yep. Another Kokopelli, this one blowing its flute next to a marijuana leaf and "tribal" artwork, inscribed with the phrase Rocking Primitive. And beside it? An Ivy League window decal.

Fascinating, this Native American magic.

A whole group of white people, through some sort of sorcery, turned into Indians - just like the ones they'd seen in the movies, the ones played by all of those Italian and Greek actors in all of those John Ford westerns, like ol' Sicilian-American Iron Eyes Cody, the famed "Crying Indian" anti-litter pitchman.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that I was the only Anglo tourist to talk to an honest-to-God, bona fide American Indian at that mini-mart that day, to ask about things more substantial than Do you have any organic cornmeal? or Do you know where I can get buy real Navajo blankets? or Do you sell magic crystals like they do out in Sedona?, to simply have a conversation with a actual Ramah Navajo teenager about nothing in particular.

The mysticism just doesn't seem to work on me. I was just glad to see a Navajo-owned business thriving, to see a rural teen with access to mobile technology and being, well, a teenager and not some Hollywood stereotype.

I dunno. Maybe I've just known too many Indians, good people from all sorts of tribal backgrounds.

Nothing in the United States screams Culture War quite like a trip to an Indian Reservation.

- MORE -

NEAR EL MALPAIS NATIONAL MONUMENT, NM (ZP) -- I flew into Albuquerque on the Fourth of July, at my parents' request, to visit their piece of paradise.

My father picked me up that afternoon, and we traveled long and hard across New Mexico, drove for three hours, down Interstate 40, down winding state highways, down red dust county roads, across cattle guards and over ancient, tire-shredding lava flows.

All so I could see sixty acres of land, sixty acres of paradise that my parents recently purchased, sixty acres that I may one day inherit.

Sixty below endless Western sky, land enveloped by fire ants and high desert fauna, bright red dust everywhere, nothing but the pines and afternoon thunderstorms to keep you entertained in the evening. Sixty below the stars and loaded with antelope and elk, home to a reclusive badger and a pair of wild horses.

And that sixty acres is, indeed, paradise.

- MORE -

SELIGMAN, Ariz. (ZP) -- Westside Lilo's Cafe is one of those hidden treasures of the Not-So-Old West, a throwback to the days when getting from almost anywhere in America to Los Angeles meant a trip down old U.S. Route 66.

A German-American diner in the middle of goddamn nowhere Arizona, in a town of less than 500 people, a place where even the BLT sandwiches surpass most urban five-star restaurants in terms of excellence.

I've stopped in every time I've passed through Seligman - I've sucked down gallons of coffee there, put down at least a farm's worth of bacon-and-egg breakfasts, and savored every bite of their authentic, homemade German potato salad. The roadside diner has probably taken years off of my life, simply by offering delicious, artery-clogging fare.

For some reason, Lilo's makes just about any trip down I-40 bearable, more homey and hospitable.

And it's strange, too, the number of folks I've met in my life, from all parts of the country, who've savored the pancakes, who've chowed down on the biscuits and gravy or the bratwurst.

There's a secret society of us out there, the Lilo's Faithful, folks who'd rather drop a few extra dollars in a tiny, rural town than wait for the whizzbang discounts offered by the fast-food chains in cities like Kingman or Flagstaff. And there's a rival group out there, somewhere, tourist regulars of the cross-the-road competition - the original, almost infamous Roadkill Cafe.

One day, we'll have to rumble, old school, right in the middle of o' Route 66, getting our kicks in below the belt and above the knees, once-a-year road trippers and senior citizen RVers, truckers and bus passengers and occasional celebrities. It'll be a ferocious battle, I'm sure, a western Arizona version of West Side Story...

There's a reason folks are willing to pull off a desolate stretch of interstate and wait, at times, as long as 20 minutes for a table.

And I think it has something to do with what the folks at Lilo's (and, yes, the Roadkill folks, too) put into the food, their secret, addictive preservative -

Love.

- MORE... LATER... -