‘Young Woman’s Guide’ Lesson 4: How to Fight Loneliness
Call it “Chekhov’s Journalist.” That scene, you know the one, seemingly inevitable in any movie or TV series with a plotline that concerns a journalist, wherein the reporter bangs their interview subject.
But while there’s probably more of a market for a “Young Woman’s Guide to Banging Your Way Across America” book or TV series, I’ll relinquish that idea to some enterprising young person for a nominal fee and/or an executive producer credit.
I was looking to chronicle American life at this moment in time, and though I wasn’t being bankrolled by a major publication — I made my money via Patreon — I knew that journalistic ethics of at least the most basic order must be obeyed. I didn’t anticipate ending up in too many situations wherein I would even be faced with the possibility of romance with someone I was talking to for my project. All the same, before I began my journey, I set myself a rule: No behavior that even hinted at more than a friendly-at-most interaction.
***
Picture a bar in your mind. You’re probably thinking of the set of Cheers, if you’re honest with yourself, warm and wood-paneled and full of characters. The reality isn’t so different, no matter where in America you go.
Maybe there’s carpet, some dyspeptic shade of green or red. Maybe the lighting is more “dim” than “warm.” Maybe there are signs proclaiming the sanctity of the Second Amendment (Pierre, South Dakota) or the supremacy of a particular college (The University of South Carolina, South Carolina).
Maybe the only character present is that of the bartender. Maybe they’re the taciturn type, and you sip a beer in silence before slinking out (Indianapolis). Maybe they’re a font of stories and tips, and you gladly accept their Facebook friend request (Hays, Kansas; Ridgeland, Mississippi).
It’s unwise to base one’s impression of a town solely on conversations had at a bar, but the local watering hole is a good place to start your research. You’ll find your boosters there, of course, the locals who threaten to hunt you down if you paint their home in anything but bright, hopeful colors. And you’ll find knots of young people unburdened by troubles more serious than now-strange interpersonal squabbles, as well as the middle-aged and middle-class meeting up for happy hour.
Most often, though, I would walk into an establishment and find it rife with beaten-down sitcom ex-husbands. This was the habitat of so many of the Hollow Men, the ones who found themselves wondering why she’d died, or why she’d left, hungry for any kind of connection with another human being.
And therein lay the potential for trouble. Because I was there to talk to people, to listen to them and their stories, to solicit their hopes and dreams and fears, for some of these Hollow Men, I became a human life preserver.
Some clung in desperate hugs. Others left me drunk voicemails, two or three in a night. Still others wondered when I’d be coming back, offered to fly me back, begged to keep in touch.
Part of me wondered if I was inadvertently giving these men the impression that I was interested in them romantically. Another part of me said their immediate attachment was just a natural consequence of living in a society that tells straight men that any attention paid to them by a woman is a signal of sexual desire. Whatever the reason, I knew that my gender, combined with their sexuality, resulted in the reveal of vulnerabilities that other chroniclers may not have unearthed.
The guilt began to eat away at me well before I hit even the halfway mark of this project. Here I was, dangling a connection in front of these people — the presence, however temporary, of someone who gave a shit — and then leaving them behind, just as everyone else had: the government, their wives, girlfriends, children, friends. I would drive away in silence, hoping the miles to my next destination would leach away the guilt.
Too, I began to imagine that I was the source of these men’s unhappiness, that I carried this isolation with me like a virus, Typhoid Mary but for loneliness.
The pressure of being a guest compounded the effect of this delusion. Staying with a local host as often as possible was crucial for getting an unvarnished perspective, and most of my hosts were lovely people with whom I enjoyed long talks. All the same, the need to perform, tell stories, be helpful and polite at all times, took an increasing mental toll as the miles piled up.
I wrote to a friend in July:
“I was a distance swimmer in my youth. 500, 1000, mile, these were my events. During each, but particularly the mile, there would come a point before halfway where the rest of the race would seem impossible. Genuine impossibility, a zero percent chance that I would ever finish, that my body wouldn’t just give out right this stroke. Okay, maybe this one. Or this one.
It was the time between strokes, I guess, that was so paralyzing in its enormity. You can get way too into your own head in that kind of race, constantly having to check your stroke pace and keep tabs on your energy levels and the other seven girls in the pool with you. Your coach usually paces the deck as close to you as he can, and you’ll see him every other breath, giving you signals — kick more, turn on the gas, chill the fuck out. Those signals don’t generally come until after the halfway mark, or 35 short course laps. For the long course mile, it’s 20. The long course mile is the most soul-sapping race you could do, worse even than the 400 IM, because at least in IM you get to switch strokes.
But so during the long course mile there would be these 35-second stretches between flipturns and you’d generally find yourself disappearing into numbers. Number of strokes, breaths, laps. And the time between these would expand, stretch into a void that could only filled by you going, ‘Oh god, why did I let coach sign me up for this?’
Tonight is the conclusion of State 14 out of 50, and I cannot fathom doing this for another five months.”
Perhaps sensing the approach of a mental break, my friend suggested I allow myself an indulgence. I was turning 30 during the next stop, in Montana. Why not mark the occasion with a pit stop?
***
Staring at a Magic Eye puzzle while driving is probably not in the Hall of Fame of Great Ideas. But that’s what happens naturally about 40 miles northwest of Great Falls, Montana, heading north on I-15 on the way from Lewistown, in the center of the state, to Whitefish, on the western side of Glacier National Park.
Something catches your eye on the left, a flash of white that looks wrong for a cloud. And there, there are a few others. But at first, in your furtive glances, all you see is more of the blue-brown of the endless horizon. And then, almost when you stop looking for it, there it is: the outline of a mass of peaks, all along that horizon, just a slightly darker blue-brown. They recede just as suddenly, yet you can’t stop yourself from looking again, and again, each new glimpse a small rush from the adrenals.
Because you know, logically, that there is an end to all this flatness. The oceans of blighted grass, the land swelling now in a manner uncannily like waves, cannot continue forever. But while the impossible teeth are hiding in the haze, you doubt your eyes, your mind. It transforms their inevitable appearance into something like Christmas morning: You bounce a little in your seat, nervously sing along with the radio, check the mileage. How much closer? The presents not yet present; still, a metaphysical presence.
When they finally did appear, rearing in peaks that became ever more improbable, I could neither think nor say anything other than, “This is stupid.”
“This is fucking ridiculous” was the response to two particularly primeval peaks rising over a swift-flowing river. The conifers marched everywhere, sometimes obscuring skeletons, their comrades fallen to disease or fire. “Oh, just shut the fuck up” came as a lake in a valley popped into view. A stop by a glacier-fed river, glass-clear, evinced a “Jesus.”
Photos are useless. They can’t capture the temperature of the water — a cold that genuinely reaches the marrow of your tarsals — or the taste, which is what you imagine would happen if someone were to liquefy air. They can’t capture every crevice of the absurd rock faces, or the needles on the pines as well as the larger vastness of their wholes. They can’t convey the smallness you feel in the face of such physical enormity, continually bearing down upon you for 68 miles on US Route 2, over the Marias Pass and the Continental Divide.
“What the fuck,” I mumbled through a mouthful of a hastily assembled sandwich on the bank of that river. I ate almost in defiance of the peaks before me, whose very existence seemed a cosmic nudge to not even fucking bother. But I did bother, because the sandwich — cracked pepper turkey and cheddar on sourdough— was delicious, and I was here too, even if only for a little while.
Whitefish is a cute little town currently being overrun by rich dillweeds from the coasts who are driving up real estate prices so that many of the natives are fleeing down the road to Kalispell. (There’s also a bit of a white supremacist problem at times, thanks to “Nazi Next Door” Richard Spencer’s visits home.)
My host in Whitefish, a gregarious guy named Brian, lightly berated me for not telling him it was my birthday. After I spent the next day inside Glacier proper, he took me out on his boat with some friends to a mountain lake at sunset. We spent the night at a bar that served huckleberry hot wings and happened to be featuring a delightfully twangy bluegrass band. I bought a local bride-to-be a screwdriver (Malibu Passion Fruit, her choice) and listened to her talk about how much she loved her fiancé and her friends and everyone in the bar. I danced (poorly) with a cute guy.
I was able to forget the miles, the guilt, the perils that lay behind and ahead, blood thrumming with the banjo strings.
The cure for this kind of loneliness isn’t much of a cure, it turns out, but rather a few well-timed moments that aid in the eternal fight.
