Google maps are great, but how do you contradict the GPS assistant who wants you to take the shortest route when you want to take the longer, less trafficked, and MUCH greener route through the Hudson River valley and across the Tappan Zee (“Tappan” after the Native American sub-tribe of the Delaware/ Lenape people, and “Zee,” Dutch for sea) Bridge?  I fight the objecting Google bongo drums directing me south when I want to go west, and lunch at a rest stop near Washington’s headquarters outside Fishkill NY, contemplating the temporal distance between General Washington and me, texting photos of my roadside still life back to photographer friend Julie in NH.

Crossing the Hudson reminds me of flying with David in the Warrior 500 feet above the river, self-announcing our way first down the starboard side and then up the port, well below the top of the World Trade Center en route to a friend’s first gallery show in the City:  one of several incentives that prompted David to earn his wings.  Revolutionary and personal history fade in and out, like radio waves of Boston Public Radio’s Jim Braude and Margery Egan giving way to Christian Rock, then Afro-Cuban, then Fauré before I exit to NJ 252 and take a one-way bridge and a long ride along the Delaware & Raritan Canal to reach Princeton, my first night destination.  One small, panic-inducing hiccup:  the first gas station I stopped at declined my VISA card, but accepted another.  Later, in the hotel, both a text and an email from Chase explained why:  Chase didn’t know it was me.  I allayed Chase’s misgivings, paired my cell phone with the Marriott tv (!!!), and searched out a very nice Italian place, Mezzaluna, for a fine dinner in town.

A stroll through the Princeton campus afterward first invited admiration of the vernacular campus gothic, a glow that gave way to dispiriting thoughts of how this new world version of Oxford and Cambridge was ersatz, something of a theme park:  America has no medieval universities.  Scholarship and learning were held in such high esteem when first universities were founded, borrowing administrative structure and elitism from the Church—the reason Princeton’s library looks like a cathedral.  And yet, UCLA and other colleges now expect adjunct professors to work for free:  doctorate, five years of teaching experience, and letters of recommendation all for a salary of $0.  As a colleague recently observed:  being a professor used to be a good job.  Not to mention student debt, curricular slippage, and 43% of Americans getting their news—their “truth”—from Fox.  Contempt for expertise, facts, data, scientific method has blighted the ivy on those lovely pseudo-gothic walls, and our democracy is imperiled.  What would the Princeton founders have made of digital capitalism?  Whither the Princeton graduates of 2022?  Beautiful campus.  Confounding times.