the middle

September 14

Brian sets a tray on the nightstand next to my face; I smell the watery flat zing of orange juice from concentrate and reach for the paper cup without opening my eyes. He’s been poking around the motel lobby and reports that outside on the soggy back yard, as well as on the lower stairs and corridor, are a multitude of frogs. So obviously I think I must still be asleep, in my common nightmare of stepping out of bed onto waves of the slimy creatures I hate covering the floor. But I can taste the orange juice. I open one eye and check the carpet: all clear. 

            “Where are we?” I ask.

            “Arkansas,” he says from behind a thin newspaper, “and it’s Friday.” The national Day of Prayer and Mourning. Are people going to work? Are kids excited about a day off school already? Is anybody else high-tailing it across the Midwest with us?

            After a shower I make a plan on the big map. There are many choices within our diagonal passageway home, but I decide to stay with a music theme -- I highlight a blue and red route through Branson to Kansas City. When we step onto the balcony, the frogs have thankfully dispersed. It’s 8am. I put my hand on the railing for a second as I’m struck by that universal early summer morning smell. It’s probably the reason some people like to regularly rise at dawn, but since I rarely do, it’s a smell that still strikes a chord. A bit like something burning, but it’s only the night burning off, the dry salt of the waves of all the beach mornings of my life blowing away; the smell of past and potential waiting together in the last shadow.

            We’re worlds away from the ocean now, weaving up Interstate 65. We have the two lanes all to ourselves and the trees, which grow darker and denser the further north we go. There are not many buildings, but there are billboards, the best of which says:

Booger Hollow
population 7 and one coon dog.

As much fun as such local color is, today turns out to be not so much about looking as about listening. The radio reports that while some planes are flying, commercial air travel is not projected to be totally back on track until next week. The cross-country trek of our dreams has become reality, but the best parts are behind us and the good parts ahead will be sped right by.

            Church services have begun across the Midwest radio dial. We hear soft speaking, sniffling and sermonizing about God’s plan, the grace and will of the mightiest nation on earth, and plenty of Lee Greenwood. Veterans reminisce about terrible sights in shelled-out foreign cities and the strength borne of beloved liberty. Bells ring. Clinton and Carter chime in with somber drawls. Bush’s words from Tuesday night are spliced and looped for effect before a message from our sponsors, though many stations have foregone sponsors on this special day. Regular programming is absent; stories of children abound. Children who are making murals and giving bake sale money to the NYFD, children whose single mothers were lost filing documents under the world trade center, children who send letters and light candles, who wake up at night afraid of what they’ve seen and cannot see.

            Horns honk and I raise my eyes to children on the side of the road wielding a star-spangled banner while their teacher waves quiet encouragement at passers-by. The radio reports that Wal-Mart is running out of American flags. It mentions the early estimate for damage costs in New York and DC, and places to pay respect in Arkansas throughout the day. We locate NPR, giving glimpses of major memorial events around the globe. They also discuss more probable causes and connections of Tuesday’s attacks, and speculate about the outcomes. A few people on the radio don’t feel as proud as Lee Greenwood does, but in this neck of the woods those voices crackle away into static. Around noon, I look up from my lap to find we’ve been reduced to one lane, our elevation has increased dramatically, and all indicators of roadside civilization have vanished into the Ozark National Forest. I can’t remember the last time Brian or I spoke.

            “What do you think are the chances of finding lunch up here?” I croak, as the road zigs and zags through the medieval brush.

            “I just saw a sign actually, food and gas, five miles or something.”

            “Ready to stop?”

            “Yeah,” he says, “let’s take a break.”

            It’s all tucked into the same clearing: the food, the gas, the general store, the four-room lodge where one room must belong to the proprietors of the whole outfit, who are quite fond of bears. This oasis is named after a Grizzly, maybe the stuffed one that stands just inside the café door. Its relatives are represented among dusty oil paintings and carved tchotchke throughout the dining room. Bears remind me of breakfast, which is what our four fellow diners are eating, but it seems later in the day to me than it is, so I’m determined to eat a bear-sized mound of chili fries that bleed through the paper in their red plastic basket. The heavy food anchors me, way up here in the backwoods where I could be frighteningly adrift. Brian’s presence remains a comfort too, across the nicked Formica table, drinking coffee and saying very little about the things we’ve driven past this morning.

            On the way out, I buy a pack of Camels from the cashier and remember with melancholy the three packs purchased in a Memphis gas station. Three packs that we vowed in the electric drizzle would last the whole trip. As we drive further into the hills, I squeeze my eyes for the places those smokes ran out, and where others were bought along the way without thinking. They’re stamps on a steamer trunk, and how do you end up looking backwards at them so suddenly? Brian must also feel misplaced; he reaches under my seat for the CDs and loads one of our friend’s bands. We roll down the windows and sing along loudly to the creatures in the woods beside the road. 

            It is beginning to look like the Pacific Northwest, because we're crossing the grid line that separates my North from South. Only now do I realize that much of what felt so fortifying in the Southeastern geography was also Southern California stuff--the oak and sycamore trees, the musk of jasmine and wisteria vines in the heavy air, the wide lawns and wide concrete instead of asphalt roads, even the vast stucco of the dated strip mall outskirts of towns. I file this somewhere for reference over the coming years, as I grow to accept that I am not really at home anywhere north of 40° N latitude, on any side of the country.

 

            Crossing the state line into Missouri, we approach another pulse point of the American interior. Welcome to Branson! I spy, in purple paint stenciled across the side of a barn. I remember that I meant for us to eat lunch here, in an actual destination, and then I think of the way we drove right past Nashville two weeks ago without flinching. 

            “Where is it?” I ask, squinting into the expanse of sky at barns outfitted like theaters, with ropes of light bulbs and rickety marquees.

            “This is it,” Brian says flatly.  “Pat Boone is here this weekend.”

            “Hmm.”

            “I don’t think I’ll stop,” he says.

            “No. I thought it would be more like— ”

            “Pigeon Forge?”

            “Something like that; I don’t know...” So Branson disappears behind us. We’re eventually in Springfield (is this the capital, or just the signature city of every Midwest state?), and then move further north to I70, where I direct us west with the sun in front of us. We’ve been moving for more than eight hours.

            Brian turns down the radio, still rendering memorial services, and announces, “I can get another free Friday night at a hotel, if we can make it to Kansas City.” He’s already done some planning of his own; I’m impressed and appreciative.

            “That sounds awesome, Honey, but you’re the one who has to make it.” And with that, I once and for all relinquish every aspect of the navigation to his more resilient hands. A Kansas City Westin does sound awesome. It’s just one more Mecca of music history, but the word “City” attached to this one, and an image of Dylan and Dean Moriarity, is really promising. I get on the phone and call information for the hotel number. Yes, they’ve got rooms available, and easy directions from the highway that I scribble onto the back of the Grizzly’s gas receipt. As soon as the downtown skyline is within view, I sit tall in my seat and find myself smiling in the side mirror. Kansas City announces that it is alive in a cosmopolitan way: acres of skyscrapers, light-catching glass, sharp lines, a clean grid of numbered streets. Our Westin room is more plush and contemporary than the Sheraton in Myrtle Beach; it's on the 20th floor, with tall windows to reveal the tight gleaming city. I look down onto Union Station. No balcony, nor any cockroaches on the balcony or fireworks bursting over the palms.

            We get settled and then attempt a brief adventure downstairs, Brian asks the valet about barbeque. He directs us to the famous Gates restaurant north of downtown, and against his recommendation, we choose to walk there. It’s a couple miles up hills and behind the chain link of housing projects, but the temperature is only in the 70s and the exercise feels great. The restaurant shares its interior design with the Sizzler chain—we order at a counter and load trays with fountain drinks and sides like grits, greens and beans from a salad bar. The hostess delivers heaping main courses to our table: beef flaking off the rib and crimson sauce.

            "KC vs. Memphis barbeque?" I ask Brian, wiping the sauce from my cheeks.

            "I'm just going to say that this is very tasty."

            “Kansas City rocks,” I say.

            On our way back to the Westin we wander through the courtyards of Crown Center. Hallmark is the corporate crux of this city, its office moniker reminiscent of the crown of our own Starbucks headquarters. Along the sidewalk we find fiberglass sculptures of costumed cows: in front of the hospital dressed like nurses, in front of the police station dressed like cops, a quartet at the edge of a park dressed like Dorothy and her crew from The Wizard of Oz. It’s a cow parade, part of an international public exhibit, after which the statues will be auctioned off for charity. The concept was conceived three years ago by an artist in Zurich and adopted by an entrepreneur in Chicago, and actually reproduced by knock-off parades in places like Seattle, where the streets have been full of pigs all year. I had to come to Kansas City to find out why.

            In the hotel room, I pop open the champagne split from the mini bar and write a last set of postcards that gush about a place I’ve only been for three hours, and will probably leave before most people get dressed in the morning. Brian returns from checking email and whatever else in the business center, and nods at the champagne. “Good call.” I pour him some and say again how awesome it is to be here.

            “I’m surprised you’re so into Kansas City,” he replies. “You know you’re pretty much in the dead center of the country right now. How’s that fun for a girl who loves the ocean?”

            “I guess if I can’t be on the water, I like cities a lot too. It feels familiar in here.” As I say it, taking my bubbles to the bed and lying in the clouds under the murmur of air conditioning, I feel how true it is. Even in the aftermath of 9/11 it will never occur to me to be afraid in a skyscraper. On the contrary, if not in an empty low enough place to hear the surf through the window, aloft in the heart of a metropolis is where I feel most safe--provided the room is immaculate and outfitted with elegant comforts like champagne and Heavenly® linens. Nothing but the beach or nothing but the best and I'm in a happy place; what makes me uncomfortable is middles. Suburbs, motels, meadows, gray areas. Although Memphis and New Orleans had tall buildings at their core, the city features were so out of sync with my expectations that I ignored them. I wanted the South to be purely antiquated and exotic, so that being there would exoticize me. I meant to go beyond the novelty, except I was not willing to cross the threshold of my comfort zone, to make peace with mediocrity. And now I'm afraid that knock-off novelty is all I’ve got to show for it.

            That's why I'm so soothed in this Kansas City refuge: the venerable plan is erased, there was no search for America, no goal, no sincerity, no devastation, no doubt. It's just another splurgy Friday night in the imprudent cosmopolitan adventure that is my Brian life. I finish my champagne and close my eye against the cool side of the heavenly pillow case.