I skipped over Nevada on this trip, staying south of it until I reached California and then heading north, and only north, for months. Two of the books I’ve read that tell tales of journeys spent time in Nevada, though, so I’ve gotten to know it, to some degree, from a third-hand perspective.
I’m nearing the end of my journey. I’ve decided not to try and make it out of the Pacific Northwest for the next month, instead spending that time bouncing around between Seattle and Portland and Eugene. I can think of worse ways to spend my time. Then, just over a month from now, I’ll pile into a car with four other women and I’ll complete the circle of North America that I started last August, before I knew that my route would resemble a circle. (It seems appropriate that it did, especially as I started reading Blue Highways—the book after which this blog was named in part—again the other day. William Least Heat Moon traveled in a circle, and he writes this of his route: “Following a circle would give a purpose—to come round again—where taking a straight line would not.”)
It’s hard to believe I’ve been at this so long. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve been drifting forever. I’ve had a great time, and will continue to do so for the next month–with a number of posts still to write, I’m not closing down the blog just yet–but despite the fact that I specifically set out without any goals so that I couldn’t fail, I feel like some hopes that I wasn’t admitting I had haven’t come to pass.
I started reading the two most quintessentially American travel narratives on my list in Canada. I don’t quite know how this happened. Travels with Charley was just sitting on the book shelf of the woman I was staying with in Toronto, waiting for me when I finished all the appendixes of The Lord of the Rings. Roughing It, by Mark Twain, was recommended to me in Phoenix, bought in San Diego, and sat in my duffel bag through LA, and Oakland, and Portland, waiting patiently to be the book I read next.
Sometimes it feels like I’m traveling just so I can learn the context for more stories, my own–I want to collect as many things to weave into the stories I’m going to tell as possible–and other people’s as well.
I remember what a difference studying abroad in Ireland had on my understanding of The Dead and how the second time I read it–after having been there–felt like reading it for the first time because there were so many new layers that had been hidden to me before. I remember reading the line “The gentle rain was trying not to fall” in Murphy and being blown away by how exactly it described something I’d experienced there many times. If I’d read that turn of phrase before I went to Ireland it might have pleased me but I wouldn’t have understood it nearly as completely.
It’s for that very reason that I waited to read Michael Chabon’s latest book, Telegraph Avenue, until I was in Oakland.
Another thing about New Mexico, perhaps another reason its license plates proclaim it a Land of Enchantment, is that mysticism is very close to the surface of reality. I think I saw more churches in 24 hours than I had in the months of the trip before hand. Catholicism is ever present, lurking at the corners of your awareness. Catholicism has always seemed to be the most mystical branch of Christianity to me; the most pagan, if you will, since it’s been warped so many times to appeal to those it’s trying to convert. From the Saints taking the role of deities to the cross being altered to absorb pre-existing beliefs, incorporating sun god symbolism, or standing in for the Tree of Life. Somehow crosses looming on hilltops seemed more fantastical here than they did in Houston.
When I first decided that I’d read travel narratives while I was traveling, I assumed they’d mainly be quest narratives, where the main characters set out to achieve something specific. This was probably because I couldn’t think of many beyond The Lord of the Rings and the journals from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
This held true for the first two books I read. There’s never been a quest with a more obvious goal than the one undertaken by Frodo and Sam and in Travels with Charley Steinbeck has a very specific plan laid out for his journey. He’s going to be in this city for these days, and this national park by this date, etc. But then I moved onto the stories of Don Quixote’s adventures and, as I’ve already pointed out, he didn’t try and reach any particular destination. He had a goal definitely, but it wasn’t a physical one. He was searching for things that were more qualitative than quantitative. He happily wandered in circles seeking adventures and glory, because there wasn’t a specific location where adventures and glory would be found. They could be stumbled across anywhere.
I started reading Don Quixote—I took the fact that Steinbeck had named his truck Rocinante in Travels with Charley as an omen of which travel narrative I should tackle next—and within a few pages came to an uncomfortable realization. I am Don Quixote. (Apart from the fact that Don Quixote is a mad man this realization was also distressing because I’ve always aimed to be more of a Sancho Panza.)
Having finished The Lord of the Rings on the bus ride in to Canada I was trying to decide which of the absurd number of books I was carrying around with me I would read next. Don Quixote because it was one of the largest and finishing it would lighten my load the most? Heart of Darkness because it’s a slim volume and I could probably finish it quickly, sending it safely home so it wouldn’t continue to get dogeared in the duffel? Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because it has recently been brought to the fore front of my attention once again? But before I could make this decision, life intervened.
I hung out with a friend from college yesterday and she showed me around some of the scenic bits of Northern Kentucky. We drove up and down curvy roads and sat and stared at the Ohio river, and the smoking refinery across it. The last stop on this meandering tour of Northern Kentucky was Devou Park and the gorgeous overlook of Cincinnati that I almost managed to capture in the photo above.
Today, and yesterday, were good days. My calves are burning slightly, as my experience from the first day has turned into a pattern in the two that followed it. Chicago is my “walk too far in the wrong direction eventually turn around but find something interesting along the way” city apparently. Interesting things like used bookstores. If you can judge a city on the number of neat used bookstores it contains, and I think that’s a pretty valid way of going about it, Chicago is pretty great. There will soon be little room in my duffel if I don’t finish some and mail them home.
I got a copy of Heart of Darkness at one of the used bookstores. I picked it up because I decided awhile ago, when I was coming up with ways to make this trip (and hopefully this blog) coherent, that it would be interesting to read travel/journey narratives while involved in one of my own. Heart of Darkness was a friend’s suggestion (along with Don Quixote, but I haven’t found a copy of that yet) when I mentioned my plan to read journey stories. Before I get to Heart of Darkness however, I am rereading Lord of the Rings, because it is a, if not the, quintessential travel narrative to me.
It’s amazing how easy it is to slip back into seeing the characters as I imagined them eleven years ago, before the movies had entered my consciousness. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get back to book’s reality. I’ve lain about Chicago reading it: in Millenium Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan, on the “L,” (I was tempted to just ride the train all day reading and writing, especially after I noticed the aching in my calves). I’ve watched Aragorn change from Viggo Mortenson into the stern and stony-faced man with the hooked nose I remember. I’ve thought about the hobbits’ adventure: how Frodo experienced wanderlust until a journey was forced on to him and then all he wanted was to be safe at home, how even the homebody Sam is excited to go off and see new things like Elves. I wonder when, and if, I’ll start to long for home, and who I’ll meet that will excite me the way the elves do Sam.
I came across a passage that felt like it validated the unplanned way I am undertaking this trip.
“[Bilbo] used to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary…Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further?”
So when people ask why I’m probably going east again after coming west a jog, or wouldn’t it make more sense to to maybe visit those places in that order, I might start pointing them at this quote. It’s all one road. It’s the road that I make of it. This journey will be one smooth, continuous one, whether or not it goes in zig-zags and circles.
Tomorrow there will be an actual post about the actual physical place I am in. And maybe pictures. Really.
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