this is the end

September 17

When I open my eyes I could be in Arkansas again, with tart juice in a urine sample cup and noxious light in the bathroom. Except now I don’t even have Kansas City and Colorado ahead of me. Only ten hours of Columbia Plateau. When I get home everything I left there will be waiting, withered; everybody’s life will be plodding forward, while I'm pulled back through a geography strewn with new views of a collapsing world. 

            We pack up our bags for the last time. I arrange my contents in ways that will be easiest to unpack, since I am kind of compulsive about unpacking the minute I get home. Before a trip, I have no problem slowly adding to an open suitcase on the floor of the bedroom over the course of several days, but I don’t want to be visually reminded that a trip is over instead of ahead. Brian (like a lot of people probably) is the opposite—he won’t need these summer casual clothes once we get back to reality, so they’ll sit in salty wads in the duffel bag indefinitely. 

          We leave this last motel parking lot while everyone else waits for their waffles to ding in the lobby. The sun climbs into a clear sky. We get generic donuts and coffee at a Safeway and take them to the end of the road where we can look down into the gorge. At the bottom is a thin rocky green river and what looks like a desert golf course, but I can't make out any pair of waterfalls.

            It’s a dull road up to Boise, which somewhere has a capital building, but all we stop to do is fill the gas tank. Then we cut into the northeast corner of Oregon, and travel up the Columbia River. Lewis and Clark’s river, which crowned the undaunted exploration we have just retraced, giving us all this extra American land to drive home through. Our river, where we’ve camped so many Memorial and Labor Days at a natural amphitheater called the Gorge; where we’ve watched sailboarders fly over the waves in the windy channel that bisects our Pacific Northwest region. The Columbia is among this country’s longest main stems, and the only one whose mouth is the Pacific, the last one reaching for the edge of the West.

            “We’ve had a lot of rivers,” Brian declares.

            “Yeah, I like all that water. And they all connect somehow?”

            “They all connect to a sea, gulf or ocean.” He muses back to past vacations for awhile—the opposite of our conversation on the way to the Atlantic when we plotted the future, when flying across an ocean seemed possible. I’m certain I’ll be so afraid on a trans-Atlantic flight that I’ll need an injection to knock me out, but it can't stop me from seeing the world. Despite my fear, I wish now that we had waited in Memphis and flown home instead of undertaking this much redundant driving. It would surely boost my outlook to be welcomed home with an airport scene fit for how far we’ve traveled, a celebration of moms awaiting us as the gate, stepping right off the plane into arms full of warmth and welcome. I’ll wish for it even more in the coming months, when everything changes such that I’ll never be met by the open arms of greeters at an airport terminal gate again.

            But hindsight has been my sharpest view all the way down this road. I resign myself to the car, and to scenery that continues to feel more like endings than beginnings. With only each other to mark our homecoming, we talk more than we have the whole trip. Though the precise dialogue will be hard to recall, we must talk that much, because a whole day is going by. It must be one of those re-fill days that fill with nothing much in order to make room for the other days that overflow with fabulous stuff. Even though I guess they’re necessary for balance, the nothing-much days leave a blanket of regret on me when they're over, a what-if-that-day-was-the-last-one guilt. If the last day was overflowing, I wouldn't have time to worry about it, so those are infinitely better. Of course I always imagine the last day proceeding until the night, assuming I’ll get the whole thing. But what if the last day happens in the morning, on a regular Tuesday, before there is anything to think about, before you've had a chance to waste time or to be grateful that you didn’t?

            And what if you set aside sixteen overflowing days to do everything, foolishly thinking that’s enough time to see everything necessary to compile the perfect picture album, the definitive travelogue. Foolishly thinking there are such absolute things. You determine to use every moment correctly, to check every point of interest off all the right lists, and move from one to the other on the most remarkable routes, inventing tours that only the cleverest tourists would take advantage of. But then you end up driving by lots of them, and can't reason why. You end up stuck in traffic, seeing movies, settling for franchise food. When you tell people you skipped Fort Sumter and William Faulkner’s house will they shake their heads, thinking: What a waste. And how could you sleep through a night in the French Quarter, not ride a Gatlinburg rollercoaster, not gamble on a riverboat? Why didn't you walk with the ghosts or swim in the ocean? Or stay? You’ll have to figure out how the journey, of a person or a whole population, can be a great big mess but still worthwhile.

            So maybe the truth is that Brian and I don't talk to each other a lot during this last day, maybe it’s just inner dialogue on both sides of the cockpit. I don’t know where he ends up or if it’s even philosophical, but because I care about him, I hope he at least has no regrets. We didn't take The Trip, we took a trip. We didn’t take Our Trip, we took his and mine and met each other on a few stops. We struggled when we tried to control things according to an image outside ourselves, and passed responsibility to the other person without fair warning. And we learned a lesson about wasting time that I do not even fully understand yet.

            At the Washington state line we eat something. 100 miles later we're on I90 at last. I see a sign for the Spokane KOA and remember the very first road trip we took. Camping in the old SUV all the way down the tenderly fogged-in Pacific Coast Highway, then across the blistering desert through Palm Springs to Phoenix. Images of the lightening storm that night and the warm swimming pool I had all to myself the next morning splash across my eyes. Four Corners fry bread and the Grand Canyon—sleeping fitfully in fear of rattlesnakes and cruising the canyon rim at dawn, splitting a joint as we stared down into the breathtakingly bruised and striated earth. In Jackson Hole we hiked, took dozens of Teton photographs, got drunk at a cowboy bar and stumbled around in the square under a harvest moon. With 4000 miles in 12 days we were superstars, but on the last night in Spokane, I was sitting in the front seat of the Forerunner crying and wanting to drive away into the night alone. Exactly what pricked the bubble that time is as obscure now as the it was in the memory of the Universal City Sheraton fight, and as irrelevant. This man did not understand me, or I him. I wonder now if we did not fight through that whole first trip.

            How will I spin the battle percentage on this one in the coming years? How well will our helplessness at the almost-end-of-the-world persuade me that he understands better than most could, that it’s my burden for not even understanding myself? There’s a trap in these questions, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about unity now. Across the windows of a Seattle suburb office complex we can see from the freeway, blocks of printer paper--with perforated sprocket holes still attached and a single 600pt font letter per page--have been taped into a banner that sends PEACE AND BLESSINGS TO ALL. Both the horror and the Hallmark responses, and the sediment of so many places we’ve engaged them, have crossed a continent with us.   

            They’re in the dusky driveway of the house, where on both sides our unassuming neighbors have proudly hung the stars and stripes from horizontal rods. In the clear plastic film canisters and miniature video tape cases Brian lines up across the living room window sill, in the brine on clothes I unpack into the laundry basket and in the clay coating the soles of flip flops I push to the back of the closet. They’re on the news that still dominates most channels on our giant TV as I sort two weeks of mail into piles on the kitchen counter. 

            The cat is alive and well so we roll him around on the carpet for a few purring minutes. We peek into our empty cupboards and fridge and then forget about dinner. Brian builds us the first fire of the season, though it’s hardly cold outside, and we cover the coffee table with all kinds of treasures that prove what is now part of us. Six pint glasses are the centerpiece: Jack Daniels Distillery, Top of the Hill, Brew-Thru, Moon River, Anheiser-Bush, Crescent City. No one stole them at four o’clock in the morning; nothing shattered them over the bumps in the road. The firelight flickers off their rims. We sleep in a pile of blankets on the living room floor.

 

 

And I may be obliged to defend
            Every love, every ending
            Or maybe there's no obligations now
            Maybe I've a reason to believe
            We all will be received
            In Graceland

                                    Paul Simon

 

            That Friday night we had a half dozen friends over in attempt to re-acclimate. Instead of watching George Clooney’s All-Star 9/11 Tribute, we plugged our video camera into the TV and streamed our travelogue of bumpy Southern roads, trees and water. Our poor friends. I fried them catfish dipped in Charleston breadcrumbs and whirred Bacardi into Patty O’s Hurricane mix. The usual Northwest Indian Summer had turned early; the wind shook the windows and we huddled against hard spikes of rain as we smoked on the small front stoop.

            I was only half there, half drifting in the news I’d heard that morning—that the brother of a high school friend was lost in his investment office on the 103rd floor of Trade Center Tower One. I hadn’t talked to the friend in ages, and had never really talked to his brother, but it was a face I recognized in the terrorized smear, and it altered the whole picture again. September 11th stretched into every corner and was lots of people’s whole life now, not just a scene in how I spent my summer vacation.

            Americans of Generation X finally bear the same witness as our Pearl Harbor grandparents. There can only be one superlatively greatest generation, though. Our own reprisal, our more recent war in the middle east, has been compared to Vietnam; but Vietnam remains elusive to those of us who know it only second-hand, from fathers unwilling to talk and film directors determined to find a moral. It’s just our video for All Along the Watchtower, and at the same time it's more tangible than this Iraq war, known by half a dozen different names and never shown on network Television at dinner time. Why don't we demand to see more, like the Greatest Generation's children did? The strategy of insisting that we do not recognize our stratifications is not erasing them.

            Though life now is a million miles of highway, rail, and cabling away from the days when this country seemed most drastically divided, our humanity is the same. We are so ambitious in proportion to our size, which for a country is enormous. Consider the fact of our two coasts—the land between them appearing to hold off a skirmish between two divine brothers, the two biggest oceans in the world. If Mexico and Canada weren’t attached to the US, would we call it a continent instead of a country? Africa is a continent. Asia is often called a continent (and certainly never just a country) even though it is attached to Europe. So the definition which points merely to how things look from space does not suffice. Europe has a lot of different countries, not states, in it; even the United Kingdom is not just one country with multiple states or provinces. So why are we?

I know, the United States is a country because it appeared to agree on one set of principles that would undergird all the land it could amass, my land and your land. And I know what a life and land-altering war it waged with itself to prove it. But by some definitions the United States actually still has a few different worlds inside of it, where very different viewpoints are compelled to coexist. In the Southeast I learned that youth is the essential bond of the Western states, the thing that classifies them as a cohesive region, and makes another region so different. Like most adolescents, we can be naïve and spoiled on the West side. The immortal monuments I grew up with in Southern California were not soldiers and political savants, not the builders of this country, but rather the decorators—the hand and footprints on Hollywood Boulevard, the rides at Disneyland. I was trained to value scripts, archetypes, and no loose ends. After 28 years, on the other side of the country it sunk in that endings are not always happy, or even endings.
            I have never taken a haunted walk or hearse ride. Never toured the Citadel or Fort Sumter. The only thing I’ve ever seen in Nashville is White Castle, and I haven’t eaten another White Castle burger since the ones I ate there. I shrank my Jack Daniels t-shirt in its first wash and never wore it again. I have not made it back to see the post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans, so I know the reality of neither its before nor after. But despite everything I missed, the breathtaking contradictions of the Delta have set a deep hook in me.
            I will get back to The Outer Banks and find that Irene did not wash away Cape Hatteras or the greatest campground I ever saw, though it will be worse for the wear when I drive through the second time: the main building on the other side of the pool, the empty waterslide on the ground. I will go north of Kitty Hawk far enough to find wild horses and to understand that North Carolina is only considered the South if you live in the West.
            I will be re-captivated by coastal Georgia, learning that the traffic at Hilton Head was no anomaly and that Tybee Island—“where the elite eat in their bare feet” according to the Crab Shack's menu—is indeed more like Hilton Head than like its Georgian sister islands. I will visit those raw islands for nothing but history...on Ossabaw I will eat a ham sandwich in the yard of crumbling slave cabins and ride a wagon through forests of live oak and wire grass to a Spanish colonial mansion...on Sapelo I will drink the sweetest of tea made by a storyteller descended from the first slave to set foot on the island, whose dwindling family has tended the place ever since.
            In downtown Savannah a motel clerk will respond with concerned surprise to my traveling alone. I will dine at The Pirate House, pour the rest of my rum punch into a go cup and sip it under the moss in Washington Square. Flannery O’Connor's place will still be closed on Monday, but I will roam cathedrals and ride a SCAD student’s pedicab to Forsyth Park. I will find Frederick Douglas letters and Br’er Rabbit essays at the Georgia Historical Society, and poke into every painter’s workshop in the City Market, every gallery on Factor’s Walk. I will tour museum homes that illuminate the upstairs-downstairs divisions of domestic slavery, and learn the details of how many southeastern walls and roofs were hammered together by un-credited black Americans. Pretty much all of them.
            I will return to Jackson, Mississippi in July. My taxi driver, with liver-spotted hands and white stubble on his sun-burned head, will truly be missing multiple front teeth. Almost immediately he will say, “Now don’t judge Miss'ippi by ever'thing you hear.”

            “No, no,” I will say back, thinking this guy must be a plant, “I’m here with a group of teachers, with an open mind.”

            “Yeah. Thank goodness all that’s over. I was born and raised here and my daddy was a Clansman.”

            You’ve got to be kidding me.

            “Yeah, I know all about it, ugly. Me, my best friend is a black fella. I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one, of course…”

            He will drop me on the completely wrong side of Jackson State University. Dragging my suitcase across the blistering campus parking lot and drenched in sweat, I'll tell the first friendly face I see -- my JSU program director -- about the cabby, and then wonder what kind of first impression I myself have just made.

“Honesty;” the cab driver will have said, “at least ‘round here we’re honest.”

            One fifth of Mississippi’s population will live below the poverty line, and ¼ of the impoverished families will live in the capital. Across neighborhoods the evidence of this circumstance will be other-wordly to my eyes: mile after mile after mile of dusty refuse-filled ditches and shotgun shacks, utterly neglected. I will learn of more Jim Crow atrocities than I can stomach and feel the way fear permeated the state from Emmett Till to Medgar Evers; I will visit the landmarks where each of those figures was indicted for the most ludicrous of supposed crimes. That's a haunted tour.

            I will ride from Jackson to Memphis again, but on a bus, with stops in Greenwood, Ruleville, and Clarksdale, where I will see the Delta Blues Museum and the Crossroads. I will get back to Memphis armed to make more sense of its incongruities, and the more I learn the more I will wonder. I will go into the National Civil Rights museum and listen through puffy headphones to a tape of JFK pleading shakily with National Guardsmen about the University of Mississippi integration of James Meredith—1400 federal troops and Marshalls using tear gas and bayonets were required to ensure his enrollment.
            “The civil rights movement saved America from another bloody revolution…but the work isn’t done,” Reverend Billy Kyles will tell our rapt audience in a conference room at the Museum. In 1968 he was waiting in the Lorraine Motel parking lot to drive Martin Luther King Jr. to dinner, when his friend was assassinated on the balcony. Jacqueline Smith will still be on the corner outside the Lorraine while Dr. Kyles is telling us this story. I will spend hours inside the museum but not join a tour of the room across the street from which James Earl Ray fired; instead I will grapple with my dubious conscience on the brick wall outside. The tuition at Rhodes College, where I will be lodged, is $45,000 a year. Blocks away is evidence of Memphis’s staggering infant malnourishment and mortality rates. I will wonder if education, service and tourism are not all working against each other in spite of themselves.

            Back on Beale Street I will see an Elvis billboard claiming: “What happens in Vegas started in Graceland.” I will hear the heartbeat of civil rights reform inside the Mason Temple where, with an angry storm rattling the shutters and drenched sanitation strikers clogging the doors, MLK delivered his seemingly precognitive “Mountaintop” speech. I will stand, shrinking in awe, at his podium, wondering how a man could stand so tall on a principle that had been so brutally opposed for so many centuries. How could he stay in Memphis amidst the sadistic threats of police as well as civilian mobs? He explained on the last night of his life: he had been led by God up to a view point from which he could see The Promised Land, and he knew that we would all get there, though he may not get there with us. He said he was happy that night, not worried about anything and not fearing any man, because, as Union generals had sung a century before, his eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
            Was he really so assured and unafraid? Or was he just trying to keep himself--a human shield--between his congregations (or his enemies) and their own fear?

            Brian and I did take our airline vouchers to Las Vegas in November of 2001. While we were in our room at the Hard Rock Hotel, dressing up for a concert and arguing about where to have dinner, American Airlines flight 587 crashed in Rockaway, Queens, killing all 260 people aboard. I thought of them throughout the concert and cringed at the images. I was as afraid to fly as ever; how could I have gotten back on a plane so soon? Later that night in the ring-a-ding dazzling casino the answer came to me: because I could see a favorite escape on the other side. It was only a weekend though. At home my anxious heartbeat skidded often and my throat lump swelled as winter swept across the Northwest, stripping its best trees. Friends were over one night in December to decorate racks of holiday cookies when I swooned into the bathroom and crumpled to the floor, nearly cracking my head against the tub. I was roused only to faint again on the way to the bed. An emergency room EKG revealed nothing but stress; a psychiatrist confirmed and gave me a bottle of pink happy pills. I was too frightened to take them.
            Instead, the day after Christmas I incredibly boarded yet another plane, to go even further, flying with my parents to a popular island chain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. America's most recent acquisition has its own complicated history and contemporary tangles, its own contradictory landscapes and displays. There is nothing the least bit Vegas on the garden island of Kauai, but for me, the authentic is at last the sublime. The sun can be seen both rising out of and setting into the ocean from the same cliffside perch, and the Malasadas cart outside the Lihue Kmart serves, definitively, the best donuts I ever want to taste.  
            I took Brian to Kauai with me the following year, and that was our last plane ride together. In spite of all the motion, we had kept each other in stasis. Insecure and unaccountable, tourists in our own life, we wanted to buy the package but not unwrap it, thinking that enough expensive wrapping would protect us from growing up and being afraid. From the threat of that real human condition of mediocrity. Because we were stranded together that second Tuesday of September--the only real things we could each hold onto when everything else seemed about to disappear--we tried to make it work awhile longer. But the end of our twenties was the end of the relationship. Brian moved to a place where he didn’t have to spoil or rescue anyone else. I was alone to let go of the vanity the Talouse Street fortune teller had seen, learning to trust the power of not knowing everything that lay ahead.  
            There is no cure for fear, no lasting escape. There is only finding a way to pack the fear, to carry it and move along. I still sometimes wish that Seattle was Savannah, and still prefer packing to unpacking--I am a mortal turning my eyes from the road's end. But Sunday nights no longer feel like doom, even at the end of a vacation. I know that the future is possibility while the past is not. Like the rest of the teeming crowd over here, tumbled against this Western edge, I can always go further toward where the sun sets, so I can keep my eye on it.