American Roads in Retrospect
Part One
America is big, big and diverse, and trying to take it in all at once is like trying to drink from a fire hose. The roads of its East Coast stretch from the pine-covered mountains of northern New York, where the Canadian border suddenly draws a line in the continent, down to the heady intensity and thick air that is New York City, and then further down to DC, and Maryland, and Virginia, and then into the whole world that is the South. This stretch alone — merely tracing the continent down along the Atlantic — encompasses complete cultures and entire ways of life. But this just the start; the continent stretches West, and as the wheels of one’s car eat up the tarmac, one loses the sense of being in just one America. So much changes: the land, the weather, the people, the food, even — at times — the language. And yet the country rolls on, from the thunderstorms and coffee and old trees of the North-East to the warm breezes and burritos and tanned bodies of California.
This past summer, with two friends packed into a beat-up 2001 Chrysler Town and Country sporting Quebéc plates, I spent three months drinking from the fire hose. I tried to take in America, all of America, in all its dizzying glory.
I was unable to write about this trip while I was on it, and it is only now — a solid four months since I returned to my adopted Canadian city — that I have begun to find the words to explain what I saw, and thought, and did. I will begin trying to put these experiences down here, and I will do my best in this, and the posts to come, to explain what it is to see, in 3 months and nearly 9000 miles, some of the many Americas.
What turned into this epic voyage was born modestly enough, in my friend and traveling companion Max’s suburban-Montreal living room. He had recently graduated university and was planning a year of seeing the world, before beginning what would come next in his life (it turned out to be law school). I was in my last year of school, and we agreed to spend the next summer traveling together. I wanted to take an epic bike ride and Max wanted to see the American south and catch some music at Bonnaroo. What we settled on was to bike from Montreal to the small costal Quebéc city of Gaspé (which I’ve written about here), drive down to Bonnaroo in early June, and then see where the roads and our questionably functional car would take us.
Before jumping into just where they did take us, I think I should say a little bit about my relationship to ‘this broad land.’ I am an American, and more specifically a North-Easterner. However, since the age of seventeen I have spent the majority of my time outside the United States. A good chunk of my junior year of high school was spent living in Israel, and I was a university (college) student in Montreal, Quebéc — the city I continue to call home. I am an American, but for some time now, when I’ve been in the USA, it’s been as a visitor who will later return to somewhere else. This has been enough, that relatives who I see on holidays have jokingly told me that I’ve come to be though of as the family’s ex-pat. Time will tell how right they are.
All this is to say that, while America and New Jersey are indelibly stamped on my soul, my living as an American among Canadian, has shaped my perspective on the country. It has not made me an impartial observer of the United States. If anything, it may have embattled me a bit. For while I love, and may choose to stay in, Canada (Québec), the air of moral superiority Canadians often take on when discussing the United States rather irritates me.
It bothers me — not only because it offends my national pride — but because it tends to rely on generalizations about what America is or is not: generalizations, of which I am skeptical. Thus, much of my time in Canada has been spent pushing what I’ve titled my “America isn’t any one thing” thesis. It’s rough thrust is that, parts of the United States are more culturally different from each other than any part of (English) Canada is from the American North-East.
I feel that my trip quite proved this thesis, although not always in a way that would have me holding my head high in the company of foreigners. America is more varied and beautiful, but also, at times, more hideous, than my Canadian friends or I knew.
That is enough about me, and the baggage I carry as an author. With my continental stage well set, I will leave off for now. My next entry will cover from New Jersey to Manchester, TN. It is the beginning of my time giving out lifts, sleeping in fields, sharing beers with strangers, speeding through desserts, stalling on mountains, plastering the back my buddy’s mini-van with bumper stickers, and — in all it’s clichéd Kerouac-esqe glory — living every mile of great American road trip.
