This year, I've driven across more than 2/3rds of the continental United States, from from Glendo, Wyoming to Bonita Springs, Florida; across the great state of Iowa; and around the bottom third of Lake Michigan; a bit around parts of Nebraska, Texas, New York and New Jersey.
It's been a strange and sad year for our country, and it's not over yet, but on our recent arrival home from SouthWest Florida, I think that I won't be forging any new roads these last five weeks, so I offer my driving retrospective on 2017.
I love to travel, but a road trip is a special form of tourism. Driving to or through a place helps you see it in a new way. Interacting with local drivers (FIBs, the Pittsburgh Left, Georgians who don't like to be passed and speed up each time you move to the left lane to overtake them but then slow down once you're back behind them again, LA Wazers...) provides insight into the local culture. (The only better way to get in tune with a locality is to take public transit - to get around and see how people really live).
Brooke said to me (after we had just driven 21 hours to Florida for Rex Grossman's "Make-a-Wish" trip to swim and play ball in the ocean) that she loves the magic of an airplane ride... waking up one morning with your feet in an ocean, and returning home to sleep in your cozy bed during a blizzard that night (or vice versa). I agree with this, but even when I do fly somewhere, I like to rent a car and traverse the local streets (see my video from my driving tour of Haiti in 2013 here!).
It seems un-related, but as i drove across this vast and disparate country of ours this year, I was gratified and alarmed to be reminded that we are both the nation of President Trump and the nation of President Obama. We are such a complicated amalgam of a citizenry, it's kind of amazing that we can function (and have functioned) so well as to accomplish as much as we have. It's not to say that there aren't massive wrongs that need righting, and injustices and indecencies and indignities that we can and should solve for - there are. But it's not a small thing that we have created from this nation of mass diversity a grand, awesome, and terrifying power.
In my travels this year, i crossed the Mason-Dixon line, which is not a border (borderlands are thin, desperate places - see Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub for some ideas about this), but is another cultural continental divide of sorts for us. We once fought a Civil War over this divide, and i've heard it suggested that we are approaching a new kind of civil war in our country. This one would not be fought along geographical or tribal lines, but a kind of neo-tribalism. Artificial tribalism. Managed and created tribalism.
But i didn't see that in my trips. We are a disparate lot, and i encountered a lot of folks in my travels who were different from me - who were my Other. But we were also united in common cause of friendliness and decency and civility. It's not the people peppered across this land who are divided, it is the artificial divisions that are being thrust upon us by richer (not higher!) powers that are divisive.
(i expect there is more to come...)
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| Source: googleMaps w/ Paint! |
I love to travel, but a road trip is a special form of tourism. Driving to or through a place helps you see it in a new way. Interacting with local drivers (FIBs, the Pittsburgh Left, Georgians who don't like to be passed and speed up each time you move to the left lane to overtake them but then slow down once you're back behind them again, LA Wazers...) provides insight into the local culture. (The only better way to get in tune with a locality is to take public transit - to get around and see how people really live).
Brooke said to me (after we had just driven 21 hours to Florida for Rex Grossman's "Make-a-Wish" trip to swim and play ball in the ocean) that she loves the magic of an airplane ride... waking up one morning with your feet in an ocean, and returning home to sleep in your cozy bed during a blizzard that night (or vice versa). I agree with this, but even when I do fly somewhere, I like to rent a car and traverse the local streets (see my video from my driving tour of Haiti in 2013 here!).
It seems un-related, but as i drove across this vast and disparate country of ours this year, I was gratified and alarmed to be reminded that we are both the nation of President Trump and the nation of President Obama. We are such a complicated amalgam of a citizenry, it's kind of amazing that we can function (and have functioned) so well as to accomplish as much as we have. It's not to say that there aren't massive wrongs that need righting, and injustices and indecencies and indignities that we can and should solve for - there are. But it's not a small thing that we have created from this nation of mass diversity a grand, awesome, and terrifying power.
In my travels this year, i crossed the Mason-Dixon line, which is not a border (borderlands are thin, desperate places - see Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub for some ideas about this), but is another cultural continental divide of sorts for us. We once fought a Civil War over this divide, and i've heard it suggested that we are approaching a new kind of civil war in our country. This one would not be fought along geographical or tribal lines, but a kind of neo-tribalism. Artificial tribalism. Managed and created tribalism.
But i didn't see that in my trips. We are a disparate lot, and i encountered a lot of folks in my travels who were different from me - who were my Other. But we were also united in common cause of friendliness and decency and civility. It's not the people peppered across this land who are divided, it is the artificial divisions that are being thrust upon us by richer (not higher!) powers that are divisive.
(i expect there is more to come...)
