Cross-Country in Six Days

An excerpt from my personal blog:

"I guess in my self-absorbed depression I kind of ignored the whole “getting here” scenario. It was quite an adventure…I finally got to see the Great Plains, and my first tumbleweed (and my second, and my eightieth)...

We skirted the beltway through DC into Maryland and then Pennsylvania, and forged through the Appalachians on the Pennsylvania-Ohio Turnpike. Around 2 am (we got a late start that day and it set us behind), we stopped in Newton Falls, OH at a small Econolodge right off the turnpike.

In the morning, we snatched pastries and watery OJ from the continental breakfast at the hotel, and then continued down the Ohio turnpike. Tolls abounded, however, the rest areas kind of made up for it…they were better than any I’d seen, usually with a major chain restaurant and a Starbucks in each one. We thought we’d gotten lost when we crossed into Indiana, but then *duh*, that would be logical since that was the next state on the map.

Ohio and Indiana are notable only for their rest areas and their vast multitude of hipped barns. Barns, barns, and more barns. We were supposed to stop in Rockford, Illinois for the night.
Hands down, the worst state was Illinois. It was so bad, so industrial and so traffic-ridden that we didn’t stop as scheduled that night and pressed ahead into Wisconsin. Chicago, even on a Saturday, was a parking lot on the expressway, it smelled, and it was just plain ugly. Blah.

We crossed into Wisconsin and stopped at the first decent hotel…I believe it was in La Forest(?), right outside of Madison. We had a pretty decent pizza, covered with Wisconsin cheese, and then literally dropped into our beds.

Wisconsin was a beautiful state—all I could think at the time was that it had to be a hunter’s paradise—and the lay of the land reminded me a lot of the land just south of Charlottesville. It was beautiful, heavily forested land, full of rolling hills where complacent cows grazed on browning grass…which then turned into some mild mountain terrain. At La Crosse, Minnesota (or was that Wisconsin…I know the line is right in there somewhere), we went across the Mississippi River…it was a lot larger than I thought it would be, knowing that it actually originates in Minnesota somewhere.

Minnesota flattened out to rolling hills and then to sweeping plains, and I could only think of “A Prairie Home Companion” as we drove through (and was rewarded after doing a radio scan by finding the Thanksgiving special on an NPR station). We forged through to South Dakota and got to see the sun set on the Dakota plains.

Sunset on the Great Plains is amazing…the sun appears to sink into the Earth itself, and in your rear-view mirror, you can see the night slowly rolling up behind you until you can’t outrun it anymore. We stopped in Mitchell, SD, home of the Corn Palace. I had the most amazing fried chicken I’d ever had from the “Pizza Ranch” (or something like that). There were signs on the hotel—by this time we’d stopped following the itinerary and just started following the map—that warned not to “gut your birds in the hotel rooms, please”. Welcome to the Prairie, I guess. Pheasant season. The hunters drank all the coffee in the morning.

South Dakota was probably my favorite state, and I think it was because I had always been so very fascinated by the Plains Indian tribes—the Sioux nation, the Crow, the Blackfeet Indian tribes. I am very familiar with the history and lore of the Southern plain states—Deadwood, Yankton, and the treaties and trouble that those names invoke. I started seeing tumbleweeds, signs for the Oglala college, the last repository for the native Sioux language available to the tribes, and tons of gimmicky crap like “wild-west town” and “props from Dances with Wolves Ahead”. It made me feel nostalgic and unbearably sad. I could picture how it might have looked…there were spots here and there that reclaimed the prairie, and on those spots, wild horses roamed. The rest was a patchwork quilt of crops and windmill farms.

I’d intended to stop in Deadwood, because…well, because it’s Deadwood, but when we stopped in Sturgis and I saw a sign for “Wild Bill Hickok’s Casino and Bar”. I decided that the Deadwood in my head was probably nothing like the town’s modern incarnation, and that I’d stick with my imagination instead.

Wyoming we crossed completely in the dark, which made me sad. I stopped at an overlook around midnight, and in the blackest night I’d ever stood in, looked up at the sky and felt humbled. I could see thousands of stars across the night sky when usually I would only be able to see the brightest.

That night, we exceeded 650 miles, mostly because we didn’t realize that the first 50 miles into Montana was Crow Reservation land. Reservation land, generally, does not have ‘services’ such as motels or restaurants. So we drove through to Billings, passing Wounded Knee, and were slightly bothered by “Custer’s Bar and Casino”. What the hell is it about taking any infamous person in history and making a bar and casino out of his name?

After staying just outside of Billings, we finished our trip through Montana into Idaho and Washington. We followed I-90 as it wound through the mountains of Montana, crossing the Clark Fork at least 17 times before I stopped counting.

Montana enchanted me. Anyone who’s ever seen Legends of the Fall can begin to appreciate the beauty of the land in Montana…the high plains enchant until they collide into the mountains, then there’s a suffocating sense of claustrophobia because after miles and miles of nothing but big sky, the vista is reduced to a crack between sheer mountain walls. We crossed the Continental Divide at 6ooo+ feet in Montana. I remember looking out the side windows and seeing massive boulders that had been thrust up when the plates collided at some point many millions of years ago, and thinking again just how very small I am in comparison to most of the stuff I’d seen.

The mountains kept going and going…and I had gotten to the point where I had to stop for gas. We stopped in a small town that was UNDER the interstate (the very first time I’d ever seen anything like it)—I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was a perfectly replicated small town from the 50s, complete with movie theatre showing “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The woman behind the counter of the Exxon, Lisa (I can remember her name, but not the name of the town…hehe) told me that I had 90 more miles of mountains.

90 Miles. It was already 9pm.

We pressed on to Spokane, memorable only because I REFUSED to look down at Coeur d’Alene out of fear that I’d fall off the side of the mountain. Paranoid, yes, but at this point…well, let’s just say 300 miles of steep mountain terrain had me a little edgy.

Washington itself was not very memorable, but it was unexpected. I didn’t , for instance, anticipate the span of desert-like terrain between Spokane and the Cascades. I didn’t expect the Colombia River to be so big. I didn’t expect to fall in love with the territory around Snoqualmie Pass, though it was terror inducing.

I’ve never been so happy to enter Seattle in my life, nor so immediately vexed by the 4pm traffic…but I felt like I had completed a life-altering journey, and managed to keep everyone alive while doing so. My only regret is that both of my daughters are too young to remember it, and my son is too stupid to savor the ride.

We’re planning to do it again. It seems to be addictive. And this time…we’re going to take our time and savor the beauty of America."

I wish it had been more detailed, or more timely...and accompanied by photos. However, time was tight, and we were mowing down anywhere between 600 and 700 miles a day...we just didn't have time to enjoy anything but what we saw out of our windshields. I've made a personal promise to myself to do it again...and do it right.

Look Homeward, Angel....

"If I had known. If I had known,” said Eliza. And then: “I’m sorry.” But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth."

--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

I've been inactive on the blogs, and on the forums, and for that I apologize. I've been trying to adjust to the Pacific Northwest and its constantly but beautifully inclement weather. My body has revolted against the entire move; after running myself into the ground getting here by committing a cross-country drive, I have been getting sick, then sort of well, then sick again. It finally all culminated in a case of pneumonia, and I've been home for three days trying to get back to the point where I am able to perform my job well.

As for where my head is, well...I'm homesick, I think. Not for family or friends, but for Virginia itself. My family has lived in Richmond for the last three hundred years, and I am the first to move away in all of that time; as a result, I think that part of my head and my heart is revolting at the change on some fundamental, elemental level. Or perhaps I'm being dramatic. I read an essay that Edna Lewis did on Southern cooking a little while ago, and it brought back so much that I'd forgotten--the smell of freshly turned soil in my Grandfather's garden, the season's first cresses, the morning glories at dawn strung across the fence posts of the soybean field--and it's this that I blame for my current malaise. What is more fundamental than the smells and sights of your childhood?

Not to say that Washington State is not wonderful. I am still fascinated by the hemlocks, dripping with rain and releasing the most fantastic woody scent...and the sight of Mount Rainier in the distance still awes me. The traffic awes me less, needless to say, but Washington's unrivalled in natural glory. I've always been more impressed with the ambiance of a place than its people or sights--being rather non-religious, I find a lot of meaning and purpose in the natural world as opposed to the spiritual realm. Washington's beauty lifts me, somehow.

I've been feeling kind of fatalistic here lately. We've put a bid in on a house in Orting, ignoring doom-and-gloom reports from my co-workers regarding Mount Rainier and lahars and lava. If it is going to happen, if it is my time, then it will happen regardless of where I am at or what I am doing. As Thomas Wolfe said, we're all simply "casting the tiny rockets of [our] belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth".

In the end, we make the best go of it we can, and hope to hell we're able to produce something more than a mediocre life from the whole thing.

Enough of that. This is more of a personal blog than I intended, since I usually keep this more as a professional site than anything else. However, at the moment, it seems appropriate to post my current thoughts here.

I love my job at Puget Custom Computers, like I knew I would--no complaints there at all. I'm not really ready for Christmas, but then...are you?

I did a personal blog on my trip over here...I'll post it up here at some point. It was quite an experience.