Friday, August 7, 2009

Here I Go Again

Day One:

By the time we had reached Vantage, I felt I had already experienced --and felt a profound appreciation for--the vastness of our country.

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There's nothing in Montana but tree after perfect tree and fascinating little curio shops like 50,000 Silver Dollars. I think this is America. That and the overweight woman riding a large ATV on a state highway. In a tank top.

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Aside from my year abroad, I have never been further east than I am at this moment.

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America has wide open skies and houses made of wood and mile after mile to separate everyone from each other.

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I think my cat almost died in the mountainous region between Montana and Idaho today. Ian and I pried her mouth open to upturn capfuls of water into her throat.

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It's strange to have the sun setting at our backs--stranger still to think how long it will be before I see the sunset over water--though Montana at sunset is as golden as Kili said it would be.


I'm reading Fitzgerald and consequently the thoughts I'm forming for this blog are uncharacteristically grand--elevated diction and complex syntax I usually reserve for my role in academia--too formal for an internet post. I'm feeling melancholy, not sad. Never have I read more beautiful prose.

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It's strange to me that most of the rest of America has large stretches of nothing--farmland, forests, prairie--in between cities. Even along the interstate, we travel for miles and miles without seeing a house, a fence, a light. I'm accustomed to the I-5 corridor of city after city, suburb after suburb. I'm not sure which America I prefer. I have guilt about loving urban sprawl, but all this emptiness makes me feel tiny in comparison.

Day 2:

I don't particularly know where people in middle America, in these tiny homes dotting the landscape, buy their groceries.

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After checking out of the Sky Motel in Drummond, Montana (home of the Trojans) we went into the gas station. Everyone knew each other by first name. I know this is normal, and I must seem snobbishly city to point it out, but I haven't been around small town culture since I was 7 years old.

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Montana by Rocky Votolato came on the ipod shuffle around mile marker 195 on I-90 in Montana. I felt like posting the occurrence on www.mlia.com

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I think the Decembrists provide a perfect soundtrack for driving across America.

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Today there are clouds in the sky, and God rays have constantly been shining down on Montana all morning. For some reason, the God Bless America signage seems quaintly appropriate here, in a way that I can only pretend to understand in a more than ironic fashion.

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I'm trying really hard to understand America. I wonder if I'm doing a great job.

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I feel inadequate and idealistic trying to force meaning on this drive, though it's still true that I am on the road in some vague Kerouacian way, sans drugs and alcohol. I've always disdained the young twenty-somethings that travel abroad, or at home, and do a lot of thinking and philosophizing and soul-searching. But I don't know when I'll ever understand America or be able to explain its essence and appeal to foreigners if I don't try now. I can't imagine I'll have much opportunity to drive across the whole country this way again.

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I liked the gas station clerk in Billings, Montana who seemed puzzled when I told him I didn't need a bag and started shoving snacks and bottles into my reusable-stuffs-in-my-purse pig bag.

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Everyone is nice in Montana, except to us. I'm not entirely sure what it is about us that screams "not-from-around-here" or why that allows for shortness. I guess everyone just already knows everyone.

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Knowing that the Great Wide Ocean isn't at my back, and is in fact many, many hours away gives me claustrophobia. Perhaps it isn't claustrophobia, because we are pointed at a giant, expansive stretch of land, but the Great Plains have got nothing on the Pacific. I've spent nearly all my years that I can remember hemmed in by towering mountains, facing stretches of water with no end. I don't know how everyone in middle America manages not to choke on all this land on all sides.

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We stopped to gas up at a little town just inside Wyoming, where two Washingtonian hippies (also filling their Nalgenes up at the soda fountain) asked us if we were heading home, and where I laughed before answering the clerk when he asked where we were headed.

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Wyoming is further west than Washington State, by far.

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I am in the American West, yet I still insist on calling this "middle America". Is it ignorance or pretension that causes me to think that any part of America that isn't coastline, any part in the middle of America, is middle America?

Day 3:

South Dakota is flat and has absolutely nothing to block out the sun.

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I have seen probably a thousand motorcycles between yesterday and today, as our time in South Dakota coincides with Sturgis, the annual Harley Davidson festival/rally/conference. Attendance at the events in 2000 was estimated at 3/4 of a million people. This morning, two Harley guys helped us get the car & trailer out of a tight spot in the Days Inn parking lot. I'm not entirely sure if it's because they were afraid we'd harm their bikes, because I'm a cutie with curls like a cherubim, or because they're just genuinely nice people. I myself believe that are gnarly Harley riders are secretly softies at heart.



About a quarter of the way through South Dakota is a little town called Wall, where a mysticism and legend to rival that of King Arthur has grown up around Wall Drug--a tourist shop/restaurant/pharmacy/museum/miracle that provides the one interesting feature in South Dakota's otherwise bland, flat landscape. Wall Drug deserves a good hour or two of research on the interweb to fully understand it. The doughnuts were divine (ta, Brandi), the 5 cent coffee bearable, and the ice water as free as it ever was. I've never felt more American, I think. Although Ian's purchase of the 2009 Sturgis Rally American Lager does rival the feeling.

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The problem with this state, as Ian put it, is that it has far too much sky.

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Somewhere in South Dakota I realized why there were so many taxidermy shops littering the countryside. I was under the impression originally that everyone in the area stuffed their pets after death. And then I saw the amazing amount of deer and buffalo and other game stuffed and mounted on the walls at Wall Drug. It's for hunting. Oh America.

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There's so much corn in Minnesota that I wonder how Americans eat anything but corn, how grocery store shelves aren't just stocked floor to ceiling with ear after ear of sweet, homegrown corn.

Day 4:

The God rays in Minnesota shining over America's bread basket over its fruited plains, put Montana's to shame. The people here are so heartbreakingly nice, so friendly and welcoming, that I'd be tempted to stay awhile, if it weren't for the billboards asking what is at the Center of my education (with a cross standing in as the 't' in center) and reminding me that my aborted fetus, where I to have one, had fingernails seven months before it would have been born.

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My prose is lacking. I need to start another Fitzgerald novel. Stat. Fitzgerald never would have said stat.

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There was a documentary made a few years ago about primary schools in China--I can't remember the title . Every year in primary schools, the teacher selects a class leader of sorts. But this particular year, in this particular class, the teacher introduced a little thing called democracy. But as I snapped a photo of Minnesotan God rays shining down on a cornfield with an American flag in the foreground, I wasn't thinking of the class' democracy experiment. I was thinking of the footage of the Chinese children standing, reciting songs and national anthems together, stepping in time. It was eerie, just the kind of anti-communist propaganda that HUAC needed to terrify the American public in the 50s. And then I made the connection. We do that. We stand together as elementary students and chant words in unison about our country and our love for it. In expecting our children to commit the Pledge of Allegiance to memory, our schools are producing a nation of factory-stamped patriots, just as China is. No wonder the English I met this year found it hilarious and weird when they had me recite the Pledge of Allegiance. What a funny country I live in.

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The Mississippi lies between the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin (MN forms MIMAL's hat, in case anyone learned that mnemonic device). There was a trail leading down to the eastern river bank, and I stuck my pointer finger into the water. It's not as large and impressive up here as it is down south, where Huck Finn used to float, but I find it amazing that someday the water I touched will travel all the way south through America, out the Mississippi Delta, and into the Gulf of Mexico. In the middle of this country, it feels like it never ends.

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We're driving towards Madison, Wisconsin, and I can't get that Kimya Dawson song from the Juno soundtrack out of my head. It's beautiful here: there's so much water and large trees,and cheese, and I'd love to spend some time here on a giant tire swing.

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After paying the toll to enter Illinois, we put on Sufjan Stevens' album for the state, and I wished it were night time. The album felt fitting immediately, and I saw a fully-grown sunflower that had pushed out of the rocks by the side of I-90.

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Passing through Chicago was not the first time I wished that I was born near the turn of the 20th century, and turned up my coat collar to the wind in Chicago in December, at a time of gangsters & bank robberies, good music and insert-nationality-here-Americans. The brick buildings make me nostalgic for a time period I never witnessed.

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Five minutes in Indiana were enough for me to decide I hate it here. It may have something to do with the factory smell and the haze in the air or the fact that I have had to pee since before we started Chicago's traffic and the next exit with services isn't for 15 miles, or that I-90 is a toll road all the way through, but this is a state the Union could do without.

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There was a Confederate flag hanging in a gas station off I-90 in Indiana today. I was loathe to give them my money, but the needle on the gas gauge was pointing dangerously close to E.

Day 5:

The midwest makes me profoundly sad, I think because it betrays that so much of America is not the prosperous country it claims to be. We stayed in a seedy Motel 6 just outside of Toledo, Ohio, and at each turn we were confronted with something more and more depressingly American: the surly clerk at the Motel 6, who only brightened into some form of customer service once she made a mistake, the tired and bland "Big Boy" restaurant staffed entirely by 40-60 year olds, the overweight and overloud families that ate there, the two mini-golf places less than a minute's drive away from each other. But with poverty and destitution everywhere in this world--the very least degree of which can be found in the U.S.--I feel guilty bemoaning the plight of America's once-prosperous breakbasket. Perhaps it's because in the gradual shift from America as a country rich in production to America as a country rich in...fact?...it isn't the factory owners who have suffered--it's the 50 year old man whose only employment option is a Big Boy restaurant in Maumee, Ohio. In any case, as we drive along this piece of shite tollway in Northern Ohio, I can't get the image of a homely and matronly housewife gone slightly to seed out of my head.

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Cleveland was just as nice as Liz Lemon made it out to be.

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At the subway in Pennsylvania, if you buy the double meat, you get a free cookie. This is America.

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We crossed into New York just after midday. I-90 traverses the Northern half of the state, bisecting upstate forests and wineries. It's beautiful here, and I can't quite believe that less than 500 miles away from these vineyards lies a giant, bustling city. America, like Libya, is a land of contrast.

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Somewhere in upstate New York we stopped at a Travel Plaza--a sort of 'get everything' stop off the toll highway that leads to nothing else--just the shops, bathrooms, and gas station (similar to an aire in France). Walking into the building, I felt immediately, and perhaps unnecessarily, out of place. Actually, 'out of place' is not how I formed the thought. I believe I said I felt 'West Coast'. What am I doing here, in the east, so far away from home? I don't know how to integrate myself into East Coast culture, that clashes so immediately with that of the West Coast. And what about me could possibly be so different from these people that I feel at odds in upstate New York--an area that, admittedly, is still quite 'country' (I am smelling manure and staring at corn as I write this)? How will I feel in an East Coast city? I'm reminded of that bit of graffiti I found in my lycee in Perpignan, scrawled in cursive on the hallway wall: "I'm Westside anyway, nigga!" I feel as incongruous here as that graffiti was in France. I might as well twist my two middle fingers together and throw 'westside' where ever I go.


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Through the few thousand miles we have driven, in each of the dozen-odd states we've driven through, there has been something in it that I have identified as intensely American--something I could identify objectively as American because I was a newcomer to the state, but I could identify with, in a very subjective manner, because it exemplified America, and as much as I love French wine and wearing heels to the grocery store, I am, unavoidable, so American. What surprises me--the further we get into New York and the more I think about it--is how foreign I feel in New York, this most American of all states. To many foreigners, New York is America. But this doesn't feel like America to me. And it isn't just when I come into contact with the people here. Driving through New York feels, inexplicably (or perhaps quite explicably, as this is New England, and is some of the earliest settled land when America was colonized) like Europe. It's something in the juxtaposition of trees and civilization, something in the layout of the farms. We aren't anywhere near the West anymore.

Day 6:

The forests here are deciduous. Deciduous!

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We're shipping up to Boston today, and then on past that to Dover. We've spent most of our time in Massachusetts in the dark, looking for a hotel room that took over two hours to find in the sparsely populated wooded western half of the state. We did see two spectres in a parking lot last night--tall waif-like blond women pouring over a Blackberry: the East Coast wealthy stereotype. Throughout this trip I've been taking snapshots of scenes and images that I find capture America. I don't think I've taken a photo since Ohio. To me this seems more New England and less America. The custodial staff at the hotel were low-paid white people, the customer service here is more of the French persuasion, and post-vocalic R's are being dropped right and left. But I'll find America here--it may just take longer, the Americanness may be a little less obvious. Take the highway signs; in Washington State they portray a silhouette of George Washington's head. In Massachusetts? A pilgrim's hat.

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