I Can Click from Sea to Shining Sea and So Can You | Post 36 | Washington
Really?
Is this really what greets the virtual traveler who drops into Google Street View at America’s easternmost point…
…clicks all the way across the country…
…and then exits Washington State Route 112 onto the final stretch of road down towards Cape Alava and the westernmost point of the United States mainland?
Really?
Incredibly, just a couple of miles separates this barrier from the Pacific Ocean and the ultimate western reach of continental America. In great Street View irony, the grand framework of this project — all the way across the country — appears stymied. At least from this screenshot.
I wrote on day 1 that Across the USA on 1 Gigabyte a Day was inspired by my desire — while living abroad — to see America outside of mainstream and social media streams. It was an experiment: “What can we find out about — and in — America when we use our digital tools in the ‘long form’?” The project drew from three traditions: (i) The great American road trip, a long-established literary genre; (ii) the megatransect concept of studying a region by crossing it in a straight line; and (iii) Street View imagery as art, like the work of Doug Rickard, Jon Rafman, and Agoraphobic Traveler Jacqui Kenny. So, how did it go?
Takeaway #1: My experiment worked! You indeed learn much about America through Street View.
Proof is no click further away than my final segment from eastern Washington to that cruel road barrier near Cape Alava. For example, very soon after I departed the old Hanford nuclear site — and after a pause at the Silver Dollar Café — I dropped into the Yakima River valley and encountered acres and truckloads of Street View confirmation that Washington is the country’s top producer of, among other things, hops and apples.
Between the Cascade Range and the Pacific, that other Washington staple, lumber, is on view, from the felled product, to the Forks museum, to the politics.
“JOBS GROW WITH TREES” says the bottom rung of that wooden sign.
I have found that Street View also reveals America via repetition. Way back in Pennsylvania I remarked on the omnipresent self-storage unit. They remain aplenty in Washington, and I noticed some linear similarities in how we store other stuff:
In another echo of Street View America discoveries past, I stumbled across not one, but two chapters of the Grange, a.k.a. The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a “social and educational fraternity for farmers and their families,” per one historian.
Dating to the Civil War and boasting a lobbying record that influenced the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act and rural mail delivery, the Grange represents one of Street View America’s key teachings: Significant stories are everywhere, and their clues are right there for the taking in Street View.
It does not take Mount Rainier to prove another discovery, but it helps: Street View travel can generate sensations of immersion as palpable as “brick-and-mortar” travel. Take for example a hike from the parking lot at Sunrise in Mount Rainier National Park. As I clicked, gazed, and panned, clicked, gazed, and panned, I felt that same nagging of real nature and real photography — maybe, just maybe, just a bit higher and further along the trail, I could find the winning landscape.
Would it be here with the wildflower foreground?
At the tree-line’s fringes?
Or maybe the mountainside path itself?
High up and wide, encompassing the ranger station and all?
Leaving Sunrise, I was swooped up in a similarly visceral real-time moment, a cyclist tearing past me on the descent.
Should Street View Travel somehow ever be confused with the genres Street View Humor or Street View Incredible, I would point out that in the well over 3500 miles of Google imagery I traversed, I never saw anything particularly bizarre or lewd. That said, while scrolling through Olympia, my trip took a brief turn to the odd. Spotting the state house dome from afar, I made a bee-line for the Capitol Campus and en route nearly hit a large bird, got a leaf stuck to my face, and then skimmed by a family of deer.
For all the local insights, historical anecdotes, and high-res vistas, I found something else in Street View America: My own biases. Writing in The Boston Globe about my virtual trip, I remarked on the Rust Belt:
Coastal, global, and utterly educated, I frequently encounter an America I do not know well — the America that has sent people like me to read Hillbilly Elegy, White Trash, and Strangers in Their Own Land in search of understanding.
In Washington, I saw more of the same, and by that I mean more of what I do not regularly experience. The Main Streets I have lived near do not feature Elma’s sequence of restaurant-hair salon-gun dealer-thrift shop. Where I am intimately familiar with certain big metropolises, faded New England mill cities, and college towns, I came across a young girl who knows Satsop (pop. 675) like the back of her hand.
And so, from the comfort of my own home, for free, and at my own pace, Street View enabled me to acknowledge and interact with the unfamiliar — and do so on my own terms. I circled blocks. I paced back and forth on sidewalks. I looked at cars in driveways. I did layman’s anthropology to front yards:
I did these things unencumbered. Plenty of times on this cross-country trip I felt this is not my home, these are not my people, but I did not feel a consequential pressure to leave, to judge, or defend against judgement. I could remain and observe. Sure, virtual travel could be construed as anti-social. Travel sans social pressure is travel sans social interaction. But it is also travel sans social media — or any media whatsoever. As I discovered, it is possible to see America without The New York Times, Fox News, Facebook friends, or Twitter feeds telling you what’s up. Thus I wrote in the Globe:
I would never argue Street View travel is “just like being there” or as eye-opening as engaging real humans of opposite political and geo-economic circumstance. But I have never read or streamed anything online that did a better job of showing me America with nuance and perspective.
And therefore, Takeaway #2: My experiment worked in another way too! I said I wanted to see America using “digital tools in the ‘long form’,” and I discovered that meant more than just using common internet platforms with a pace and level of attention at odds with iPhone push notifications and sub-24-hour news cycles.
In Street View, I was never dished social media feeds or algorithm-determined search results. Rather, I drove the story, actively conducting the (re)search myself. And in an era where tech celebrates automation (self-driving cars), artificial intelligence (machine beats man at Go), and digitizing every last bit of real life (e-mail, e-books, online-dating), my Street View project did the opposite: It applied an “analog” or “humanities” or “human” interpretive layer to an internet platform.
Still, as I approached the Pacific and the end of my cross-country trip, it occurred to me that perhaps I had virtual travel all wrong.
Maybe virtual travel is just like any other now-now-now internet fire hose. After all, Street View is the ultimate in instant information, ready to pin, orient, and navigate you at any moment, anywhere in the world. And maybe virtual travel is totally complicit in the digitization and automation of everything. After all, Street View is the ultimate in converting real into virtual, comprehensively moving our physical world to gigabyte clouds. And, heck, in the end, I could not actually reach the westernmost point of the U.S. mainland, could I?
But then I thought a few clicks back. I had in fact viewed the Pacific, from quite close. It was where U.S. Route 101 briefly skirts up against the coastline and before I turned off it to run the backroads towards the westward-jutting Cape Alava tip.
There, along that stretch of Route 101, I scrolled into a public beach parking lot, and I did something I had not done before. I stopped. I pulled out a thick black bag. I wrapped it completely over my virtual vision.
I clicked to the edge of the parking lot, and I looked out at the Pacific. I strolled down a path for a better view.
And then I walked into the ocean for real.
Ground covered since last post:
- Start: Mattawa, Wash.
- Moxee, Wash.
- Mount Rainier National Park, Wash.
- Elbe, Wash.
- Ohop, Wash.
- Olympia, Wash.
- Elma, Wash.
- Aberdeen, Wash.
- Humptulips, Wash.
- Forks, Wash.
- End: Ozette, Wash.
Trip to date:
Blog post sources:
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