Lesson 5: When Abandoned Nursing Homes and Paradise Feel the Same
The reactions of people in my life when I told them about the Centerville project were largely expected: enthusiasm, or that slight delay where the listener put together that yes, I meant all 50 states, or “Wow, I’m jealous.” What were less understandable were the ones who took this to be some kind of grand vacation, some indulgent Hunter S. Thompson-esque road trip to Find Myself.
Forget for a moment the framing of this project — an effort to put together a word-mosaic of America at this moment in time — and focus only on the physical scope: every single state in America.
Routes need to be planned. Flights to Alaska and Hawai’i booked. Housing for, generally, three nights in each place needs to be secured. And when you’re not an independently wealthy dilettante or backed by a team of TV producers, you need to do it all yourself, on a budget of about $1000 a month. Total.
That’s how I ended up on couches and air mattresses, in murder motels with suspicious red stains in the corner and cigarette burns in the duvet, in a yurt in someone’s backyard. In an abandoned nursing home.
***
I looked at my phone before I got out of the car, willing it to tell me something different from what I knew it’d say. No Service. (Thanks, T-Mobile.) The single-story building in front of me lay about 100 feet across the street from a small bar called the Black Nugget, the City Hall of Underwood, North Dakota, and a farming supply operation.
I thought I felt a vibe even in the car, parked in what I hoped was the correct place, not that it was likely to matter. Something a little off. But I told myself that was just because I had read the reviews of this place, the place where I’d be spending my only night in central North Dakota.
Here is a sampling of the Airbnb reviews for the UFS Lodge in Underwood, North Dakota:
“Staying here was a profoundly disturbing and depressing experience: the property is creepy, broken down, and entirely unrenovated,” read one.
“The neighborhood seemed sketchy. As a woman traveling by myself, I did not feel safe in this lodge,” read another.
***
After a night being hosted by a lovely young couple in Bismarck, I had headed north, to the geographic center in McClusky, where I passed a pleasant afternoon at a watering hole with some farmers and a radio host who commuted down to Bismarck.
North Dakota was the stop just after the Minnesota Mishegas, and I had braced myself for “You’re not from around here, are you” and “What are you, Mexican?” comments that, thankfully, never came. Instead, my companions talked in near-Canadian accents about NASCAR and their kids and the sugar beet crop and the town’s Peeping Tom problem — “There are some weird people here,” said Gina, the DJ. “Sometimes I think they’re attracted to places like this” — and the challenges of country and city life.
There wasn’t anywhere to stay in McClusky, though, and so I had to make do with the aforementioned lodge in Underwood, about 40 minutes west. It had been, the reviews pointed out, a nursing home, once upon a time.
There was still plenty of daylight when I arrived, but even so, I couldn’t quite tell what was wrong with the glass double doors at the building’s entrance until I felt a crunch beneath my sneaker. The glass of the right door had shattered somehow. That crunching was the only sound I could hear.
I shoved down my fear and walked in, looking for some kind of reception area. It wasn’t hard to find, but it was as abandoned as the rest of the building seemed to be. A phone number for some kind of manager was printed on a piece of paper and taped to a door. I looked again at my phone. No service.
Faint noise emanated from the hallway to my left. I followed them, hesitant, and found a common room-type area with a TV blaring one of the Sports Centers and a large snoring man in a dingy recliner, a couple beer bottles standing sentry on the floor to his left. Waking him felt rude, so I wandered back out to the reception area.
Loath to accept that I might just have to hunker down in my car for the night, I fiddled with my phone again, and — what was that? Wifi? Here? And not password protected? I offered thanks to whatever deity there might be who gives a shit about small lone women traveling.
Finally, the woman who owned the place was able to roust the guy who had the keys for the rooms, and who is now, in my mind, a dead ringer for Danny Trejo (memory having its own casting director). His appearance was your stereotypical biker-scary, black denim and leather and poorly inked tattoos; unlike other stereotypes I had encountered, though, he was a kind, empathetic guy. “You know what, I’m gonna put you in the room that’s got its own toilet,” he said, a small, genuinely touching gesture.
The caretaker invited me to use whatever soaps and shampoos I could find in the shower down the hall. Without using the word “ghost,” I asked him if he’d ever seen any weird shit happen, anything kinda spooky. “Nah,” he said. “I tend to conk out, though.” I asked if anyone would hassle me if I went across the street to the Black Nugget. He paused for a moment. “Probably not. Not a whole lot of people around right now, you just missed the big rush, mostly truckers and some bikers.”
I decided I’d had enough to eat in McClusky and settled into my room. The beds were indeed the hospital kind, dressed up with linens from one of your lower-tier Big Boxes. Support rails in the bathroom. If we’re being honest, though, it wasn’t much different from a dorm. Cinderblocks and easy-to-clean linoleum, particle board furnishings.
Despite the Minnesota pyramid schemers’ insistence, I do not consider myself exceptionally sensitive to the spirit world. I have never seen a ghost, and I attribute premonition to a combination of luck and keen observation. And yet there was, throughout this building, that unmistakable miasma of death. People had died here, probably by the dozen, and yet not enough to keep the place in business. That knowledge, far more than the idea of waking up to an angry granny, was what set my neck hairs upright and kept me from a blissful slumber.
There was some quality lavender shampoo in the shower, though.
***
No, this was not a seven-month break from reality. “Oh come on,” you say. “You went to fuckin’ Hawai’i.” But even Hawai’i provided no respite for someone like me. I wrote a dispatch from Maui to supporters:
I was not meant for Paradise.
I am too nasty, brutish, short. I lack the openness to blessings, the ability to let things go, to allow myself to be taken by the flow.
I am not the kind of person who will think, “I need to go buy probiotics” and then find a jar of probiotics in the back of another person’s fridge and think they are a gift from the universe, particularly if I cannot see their expiration date.
Because I am not this kind of person, I am out of place here in this land of mountains ever the green of spring, of oceans and skies that bring new meaning to the word “blue.”
Maui is where the haole go to escape their hellscape lives, the white people from the mainland who, no matter how hard they try, are never more than haole. They can talk all they like about the shaka and going with the flow and communing with the island spirits, but they are, at their hearts, pedestrian people playing spiritual dress-up.
You see this in the conversations they have with me. A 30something woman who grew up in Maryland and has a master’s in counseling and worked at a domestic violence shelter burned out and, after steadily working her way west across America, bought a one-way ticket to Hawai’i. When she talks with a slightly younger French-Canadian woman, the word “blessings” features prominently, as does “openness,” “manifestations,” and other assorted New Age jargon. But when your correspondent is around, she talks about growing up in Maryland, the difficulties of grad school, how hard it was to be so close to domestic violence at all times.
A 65-year-old man — who looks, remarkably, no older than 50 — does the same thing. He refers to young women as “goddesses” with no self-awareness; his conversations with other hippies focus on topics like “healing” and “beauty” and finding connections with other human beings. But with me he talks about the Trump supporter at volleyball who’s started punching him in the head and calling him a pedophile — hey, he’s 65 and looks 50, who’s going to blame him for dating 35-year-olds? — and the woman in Turkey he was engaged to before things got too complicated. He talks about growing up in the Midwest, living in Philly, the first marriage he tried to make work for 21 years, the second marriage to the woman he cheated on his first wife with. He talks about the real estate market, how the housing bubble took a little longer to burst on Maui, but how his habit of flipping homes is one he’ll have to quit, now that we have two generations of people who will never be able to afford them.
It’s when these people come together that they begin speaking that second language, incomprehensible to cynical assholes like me.
I am not willing to submit to the alternate reality here, where everything would be just fine if people would be more open and accepting and manifest the things they need. This is no strategy for dealing with the world at large. And perhaps that is part of the point: In the face of overwhelmingly powerful systems that mulch up human lives by the millions, it’s easier to pretend that you can at least manifest a new pair of flip-flops to replace your old ones.
