Dispatches from the Road, Pt. 7
Visions of America: Eastward 'n Southward
Our last Dispatch left off somewhere among the buttes and plains of South Dakota, heading east, just as you feel the big country giving way to, well, smaller country…
Eastward, cont.
The Midwest
I-90 goes straight outta Wyoming into South Dakota, and in Badlands you get the first hint of a smaller scale to things. A wind comes across the plains and it’s fresh and moist and you know it comes from the East. The highways are suddenly two-lanes, the speed limit stays at 70, and you have to brake sometimes. Familiar fast food chains throw their heraldry up to the sky.
Across lush Minnesota, over the Mississippi River, and into Wisconsin with the promise of legion lakes to the north, but skirt Milwaukee instead (congrats) and head south to Chicago deep dish za, which is, in fact, everything it’s cracked up to be (Lou Malnati’s = 8.7/10; Pequod’s = 8.1). The scene outside Wrigley Field on gameday is a shock after the vast emptiness of the Basin, the Rockies, and the Plains.
At 135,000, the 2021 Indy 500 is the largest gathering of people since the start of Covid. Anywhere in the world. There’s a crazy military flyover to remind you, everyone sings Back Home Again in Indiana, and you need earplugs if you’re close to the track. There’s a strange cessation of activity, a collective release, when the cars jet by — then it’s back to normal, people pick up conversations where they left off.
According to one deep background source, the fun never stopped in Columbus, OH during the pandemic, and it’s not hard to imagine why. OSU is nearby, young people flock to the bars and comedy clubs of High Street, and the Columbus Crew have a new stadium. On a Zoom book talk, Columbus’ de facto poet laureate, Hanif Abdurraqib, talks with SF’s de jure laureate, Tongo Eisen-Martin, about A Tribe Called Quest. A new renaissance?
Along 80 East a small town somewhere in western Pennsylvania and a billboard that draws your eyes: “Brookville Citizens for Community Values: Pornography Pollutes Mind, Body, and Soul.” The billboard looms above a shuttered, one-building store front with a fading sign out front: “Adult Store: Mags, Vids, Toys.” The revaluation of values?
Pass a sign for a Route 66 Dinor [sic], a Christian Lives Matter sign, a Super 8, water towers, overpasses, more fast food, stop lights, telephone poles and wires, and towns with names like Marienville, Rose Township, and Snydersburg. Places you imagine Rabbit still running around. Then Allegheny National Forest, canned tomato soup over a campfire, and a denser, closer kind of nature.
Southward
95 South
All the way up in New England, along the curving contours of I-95, down onramps, through tunnels, past skyscrapers, until: white sand rock beaches, tidal marsh grasses, and seaworthy Boston Whalers chilling with crustaceans, salt-mollusks, and greenhead flies from the depths of hell.
Southbound through old, waspy college towns where everyone you read lives down the street. Summers don’t miss the college crowd, but stark class divides are still in evidence. Very different in the East (but also the same). People are slow to get used to the whole no mask thing — but too soon?
New York, New York… what can you say? Still perhaps the only American city that can tempt a Dharma bum. But you gotta be on your game, and never so many people. A trilling excitement thrumming down streets and avenues until you’re there for 24 hours and it’s either stay or leave.
Down the Jersey Turnpike into rest stops with Burger Kings, Starbucks’, and convenience stores next to many-urinaled, many-mopped bathrooms — with America ebbing and flowing, in and out, all the while.
Rumson, NJ with Bon Jovi nearby, and rumors of Bruce Springsteen getting a DUI on a motorcycle around the bend, while down in Asbury Park, Johnny Mac’s gives out coupons for free pizzas with every drink.
In Lincoln Park in Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, a reminder of history. Two statues face each other across a central plaza. At one end: a benevolent Lincoln stands contrapposto, looking down his nose, one hand extended over an emancipated Black man who (kneels? cowers?) at his feet (1876). At the other end: Mary McLeod Bethune opens up and out. Two schoolchildren, a girl and a boy, stand agile beside her (1974). There have been protests for the removal of the Lincoln statue.
Then full circle 95 South and hot sparkly tarmac asphalt on the double two-lane gash that runs up and down the east, pine and oak dark green, limiting views, everywhere thick with life, thick grass thick trees thick heat, the sky smaller because the trees are closer (it’s a brilliant clear blue but more human). Cars don’t know how to use the left lane, tire parts litter the side of the highway, and unmowed grass grows up around abandoned cars off the shoulder. Down home into the “Christ-haunted”1, “death-haunted”2 belly of the land…
*An earlier version of this Dispatch mistook Bruce Springsteen for Bon Jovi (understandably?). Bruce got the DUI.
Flannery O’Connor: “Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
Sally Mann: “Flannery O'Connor said the South is Christ-haunted, but I say it's death-haunted. The pictures I took on those awestruck, heartbreaking trips down south were pegged to the familiar corner posts of my conscious being: memory, loss, time, and love. The repertoire of the Southern artist has long included place, the past, family, death, and dosages of romance that would be fatal to most contemporary artists. But the stage on which these are played out is always the Southern landscape, terrible in its beauty, in its indifference.”
Good stuff! One thing: SD impression may depend on which way one is driving? On my recent car trip westward, South Dakota appeared vast and spacious, speed limit high;) Love the encroaching greenery of return to SE!