America, a Musing

Greetings from New York! I’m not one to leave off unpacking for a week, so I’m already feeling pretty settled. (But it is driving me crazy that I don’t have hangers for dresses and coats yet. My clutter induced anxiety is something I’m trying to tame.) I had my first day at Pointe yesterday, and I can’t wait to continue working there for the rest of the summer. I’ll post the link to my first blog blurb when it’s published!

Now that I’m not dancing full time, it feels like I have to relearn how to be a person: when to shower if it’s not when I get home from a day of sweaty rehearsals, how long it takes me to get ready in the morning without having to put my hair up in a twist or warm up my feet and limbs, how to deal with the stiff pain that comes with sitting at a desk all day rather than the acute pain of dancing on blisters. All in due time.

Before I continue on in writing about my New York life, I feel the need to reflect on and attempt to synthesize my experiences for the past two weeks. The Road Trip! It was an awesome experience and something I will remember forever. And I do not mean awesome in the hackneyed sense of the word. I saw truly awe inspiring sights. The Grand Canyon comes to my mind’s eye most readily. The Carlsbad Caverns a little less so, perhaps because the underground world was so bizarre and splendid that it seemed unreal. The Guadalupe mountains, the sierras, the desert sun setting over giant saguaro cacti.

And there were the human sights. A haunting building right off the highway in New Orleans that had clearly been ripped into by Hurricane Katrina and never rebuilt. The above ground tombs in St. Louis Cemetery that held scores of bodies as well as the dust of their predecessors. Rows of stately tombstones in the Texas State Cemetery. Quaint little graves on a ranch in which the bones of one of our nation’s presidents rested mere feet from my newly purchased cowboy boots. (When in Texas…)

I saw parts of American that I have never seen, and I have realized how little I have in common with most of my country’s inhabitants. I was fully conscious of the looks my New York license plates, patent leather backpack, and (though I don’t like saying this) slim figure drew in the south. We didn’t even venture into the depths of Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, but right away I grasped the depths to which the lives of people in those states differ from my own. I grew up in a world of expansive coastlines, of theater, of quinoa, of liberal and cultural arts. A fried catfish po’ boy sandwich in Louisiana and a plate of barbeque made with extra heavy mayonnaise in Texas were gastric adventures for me, not norms. A southern drawl is not just a quaint element of a country music star’s persona.

Of course, I KNEW all of this. What surprised me, almost, was how well the south fit into the pigeon hole I placed it in. Or rather, how well I fit into the role of “outsider” as I drove through. The places that I have lived in — New York, San Francisco, Boston — are centers of art, technology, education, culture…but those values are not central to the people in the interiors of the United States. I’m generalizing, of course, and placing a whole bunch of states into the category of where not to live when I “grow up.” Because I don’t think it would feel like living if I just went to school, got a job in whatever store or industry was biggest in a certain small town, got married, bought a modest house, babies, etc. For this is what I assume people do in places like Biloxi, Mississippi and Pecos, Texas. And I assumed that the people of Biloxi and Pecos shook their heads at the skinny little ballerina on her way from east to west — the girl who got a kick out of eating “Louisiana” brand hot sauce in Louisiana and who treated the southern states like the fake country attractions in Epcot.

Again, just going off biased and cursory impressions: it seems like the ancestors of people in these small towns just plopped down when they ran out of supplies on their way westward and posted up on random plots of land. The cities grew only as much as they needed to support the population, and the population never greatly exceeded the needs of the town. Carlsbad, New Mexico (the caves were located about 15 miles southwest of the town) seems self-subsisting. People work at the large Walmart so that they have money to buy food for their families from the large Walmart.

But plenty of these places contribute to the wealth of our country, too. There’s oil mining in Texas, rice crops in the swampy south: industries that have contributed to my own family’s prosperity in the world super power of the States. But why is the wealth magnified on the coasts and sifted out in the heart of our big country? The wealthiest, the richest in what I see as riches in our country are benefited, but they have the least in common with the common people. Compared to the man who works at the Subway sandwich shop in Carlsbad or the nice lady who brought me free pie at a gas station in Orla, Texas, I feel more like a Parisian than an American.

And, sadly, I’m implying that — because I grew up in big metropolises on the coasts — I am somehow better. But I also feel like a fraud for saying so, because I get the sense that the people of small-town America are real Americans: the majority, the ninety-nine percent, the ones most affected by laws created in D.C. but also the ones furthest from the epicenters of creation. Compared to them, I feel frivolous, irrelevant (i.e ankle bracelets, patent leather backpacks, twenty dollar bottles of curly hair-specific shampoo). It’s a conundrum to feel both superior and inferior, but it seems that my superiority complex wins out, because I do think that America should look more like the one that I grew up in. Ballet companies and Montessori schools and Japanese star sushi chefs and craft beer and hybrid art gallery/coffee shops.

I don’t think people should get out of small towns. I think we should commit to making them places to go to rather than pass through. Not places to get out of or subsist in, but places to grown in. Maybe I should have plunked down my patent leather back pack and made my case. However, maybe the small-town south wanted nothing to do with my liberal effrontery and was happy to watch me pass through on my way from coast to coast.