hit the road, jack
Spokane
I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.
Somewhere near Sprague
The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.
George
I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.
Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass
As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.
Snoqualmie to Seattle
Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.
Seattle to the river
As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Happy Fourth of July.
I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.
Somewhere near Sprague
The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.
George
I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.
Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass
As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.
Snoqualmie to Seattle
Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.
Seattle to the river
As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Happy Fourth of July.
Labels: americana, feminism, portraits, religion, travelogues
posted by little light | 3:17 AM
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