I was 24 and the bright blue horizon seemed infinite; life diverging into a myriad of worn dirt roads which tied together the uneven edges of the Midwest. I had always possessed a keen apprehension of the Midwest, no, an outright phobia really. I imagined nothing more than a 2-dimensional ocean of stale American dreams and cornfields, curving easterward over the green horizon until Appalachia finally brought relief. To ameliorate this uncertainty, I suppose I left Los Angeles with a bare minimum of plans or preparation. I didn't have to leave, I didn't have to do anything really; that was the apathetic beauty of upper-class, post-college existence in LA. The choice to simply exist and and be defined by the rhythms of time, which occluded greater consequence.
What the Midwest lacked in grandness or austerity it made up for in glorious sincerity, a sort of niceness almost alarming to someone so hardened by the cold pretension of LA. The shallow, vapid smog of the city faded over the vast western deserts, and as the highway crested each successive mountain range, it was like a new dawn, a buckle in the tinfoil of the earth. I guess I was afraid to trust people who didn't immediately judge you in cold logic, to open up to people who lived through the simple yearly cycles of the earth. The farmers I met were hard-faced, unafraid people with broad, flat foreheads and faded flannel shirts; their smiles fresh and warm. The anthropology of America was absurd and tangible, something to be grasped at with outsider wisdom, and I wished I felt a stronger connection to by birth country of Norway, where I had lived until I was ten. I must have looked like some strange Eurotrash tourist, I thought ironically, wild blonde tangles almost bleached white in the sun, a redneck tan working it's way down my bare back, almost Diasy Duke-like Corduroy cutoff's perched over stern-toed brown cowboy boots. I was a cocky bastard, caught in the infinite possibility of youth when adulthood has been realized, intellect developed, yet childish indecision and spontaneity are still actor in life.
Somewhere to the north, the narrow, trim roads and sunlit cornfields have way to a rougher, sinuous landscape of hills and lakes, clad in festive green, a million pine trees bright. Up here in the northern tip of middle America, people smiles with disarming brightness, and even the young people had deep creases round their lips it seemed, nervous hands can't lie. This wasn't the drive-by country of the vast western deserts, the sagebrush oceans, bur rather something to be studied and understood in fine detail, if one had the time, of course. To me, it was a passing thought, beautiful, yet still a highway pitstop on the road from where I'd been to where I was going. The weather was changing, the clouds swirled into grayish pudding cake tangles, and instead of dispersing on the red horizon, as they did in the West, they stayed, and coalesced into rain that lasted for days. The rain washed away all the stale, dusty dreams I'd gathered over the desert, and turned them into something stoic and resolute; no longer was I merely a wandered in an old truck, I had a purpose, a plan to head east and find my youth, my family, and my future. I had been sent to the great cultural identity blender of Los Angeles, swirled into the gigantic melee of ideas and personalities for 5 years, and, emerging battered and wise, I would return that that whence had come.
In the West, a sense of place was paramount, and seemed to mold the various identities I saw across sagebrush and cholla, pinon pines and junipers, small and featureless on the vast elevated plane of the continent. The weather was rugged and temperamental, prone to spontaneous spring blizzard's and August cloudburst's that reminded us of our minor place in the scheme of things. The old cities of thew northeast were universally gray and dreary, thick smog and methodical, repetitive ambition clogging the sun. This was not to say they weren't full of smart, forward people, much the contrary, I thought. The energy, the creative force of New York was not equalled elsewhere on this continent, and I missed the tenacious pragmatism of Manhattanites, the sharp resolve to produce meaning for the world. I was never satisfied though, and this restlessness is what drove me westward, stale donut crumbs and coffee stains littering the inside of my mind like a million Monday mornings.
I wanted to be a 21st-Century Huck Finn, but instead of muddy overall's snaring on thickets in some far off hollow, I spilled coffee and hand-rolled tobacco on slick, rounded pieces of denim and polyester. I was an urban refugee; assimilating to an aesthetic my people tried so comically hard to appropriate. I suppose the narcissist in me expected even out here in square, geometric rural America, I'd grt the same sort of stares and recognition I got in the city; the self-loathing puncuated by smug awareness of being watched. I guess I was handsome in a way both conventional and absurd; different from the legions of all-American farm boys who streamed into LA looking for their "big break" and ended up an extra on Elimidate, yet I was also distinct from the androgenously beautiful A-list hipsters and models. Style to me was something I wasted too much time, and what should have been fluid and easy became overly analytical in my head. This trip was a chance to live and dress spontaneously and without pretense, and I laughed at my current outfit; cowboy boots and cutoff cord's, a ragged western shirt and brown Ray-Bans.
Past the barren eastern flanks of the Rockies, hot and dry and ready to combust into a tinderbox of mountain trophy homes and Ponderosa's, the landscape changed. Slowly and imperceptibly, the old fire-engine red F150 descended down the sloping ramp of the High Plains, and the unkempt sagebrush and prairie dog holes of Colorado turned into neat, geometric rows of Kansas corn. The ethics changed as well, and the yuppie liberalism, the progressive island of Denver faded with the crest of the continental divide; morphing into a no-nonsense, stoic resolve to live by the rules of the sun and the rain. The mountains were beautiful, but too familiar and safe a landscape for me, and the brooding peaks that inspired awe and terror in the flatlanders were a second home for me; a playground I knew and understood. Personally, it was the habitat of these derided "flatlander's" which was alien, bizarre and fascinating, I vowed to move east without stereotypes or preconceptions.
Everything now was obscenely and rakishly green; fraught with the impenetrable American resolve to produce and procreate. The smells changed too, as the air picked up sweet summer humidity, cow manure and diesel fuel; it all felt very swampy and moist. Sometime when I stopped for gas, the muggy, oppressive air hung like a veil over the neat hedgerows and chrome fuel pumps, and I had the distinct urge to crawl out of my skin and back to the hot, dry, judgmental air of Los Angeles. There was something pure amongst the palm tree and neon obscenity of LA, I thought, yet life at the moment precluded any sincere understanding of these subtleties. I thought with an uneven tide of smug contempt and bitter embarrassment of the colorful resume I had amassed over the past 5 years, and imagined life as a recluse, unaware of the teeming mediocrity that undermined existence.
That was the wonderful thing about road trips, they clarified the uncomfortable things, the awkward details of life into something forward and tangible. I had no complaints though; since I was confident I had lived a thousand lives and had an untold number left; the faith in something succinct happening and making everything better. Life, or perhaps just the present, was full of an immediacy that wasn't always comfortable, or even necessary, I thought. The abstractions that passed me by along the highway mostly took the form of greenish-brown blur's, pieces of domesticated nature that were strangely tolerable, given their context. Even in LA, a number plugged into the vast urban gridlock, the feeling that the wild, ragged edges of nature was watching was omnipresent. The steady stream of earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires ensnared the city, and on some mesquite-and-sagebrush ridge overlooking suburbia, a mountain lion watched silently.
As one progressed east though, the lean gritty Westerner in cowboy boots and faded denim gradually faded into plump, content Midwesterner's, their John Deere machines and Sunday clothes bright in the muggy sun. I wanted quite badly to cultivate an air of uselessness, or rather, aloofness from responsibility, such that I might hold a captive audience amongst these straightforward people. The landscape colored by thoughts increasingly on the journey east, and nostalgia for my childhood on the coast of Maine filtered into my subconscious hazy like the Mississippi fog. I was in Iowa now; in what I had always seen as the figurative heart of the between-coast's fabric of America, here sat all the dull contentment of the lower classes, my foul judgement on those I didn't understand.
In fact, Iowa was even more green an mysterious than I had imagined, and the little rural towns in particular retained the surreal ambience of a bygone era. This was a strong, simple land where little blonde children skipped down Maple-lines main streets to buy an old-fashioned Coke bottle for fifty cents, then meet up with Jimmy or Bobby for a gave of pick-up, who had conveniently been at the pop store as well. I couldn't take it anymore, the foul miasma of urban life; sorting out the winners amongst the bigger mess had become too much work. Everyone preened and pranced for attention, without the slightest idea they had already lived a thousand lifetimes in the Midwest.
This latest reincarnation was the best yet; in that awareness of self was secondary to experience. The experience right now was so overwhelmingly sensory that I had to laugh, having dismissed the Midwest as devoid of the hidden agenda's I picked out of West Coast life. During the days, driving mostly, I made minimal conversation with anyone, save the vacuous pleasantries over things like gas and food. The exception to this was what I had begun to refer to as the "blind moments", when, driven by some internal misalignment [or perhaps precision?] of gears, I went careening off the highway down some off-ramp towards god knows where. God-knows-where was usually bleak and left a bitter, stale taste in my mouth, but sometimes, I left with a strangers foreign smile etched into my memory, or the smell or flowers in some marshy river valley.
The latest hitchhiker; I didn't know his name, I don't like names, they are too definitive. Well anyways, I'd let him drive for a while. I leaned back on the hard gray fake leather seatback, my feet up on the dash, freckled legs and coffee stained cutoff shorts bright in the sun. Suddenly, I lit the sunset in the rear view mirror with a smile that reflected all the light right back at it. The horizon blinded me with that last pulse before tomorrow and then, all was dark.
