This Land was Made for You and Me

Why did we take the trouble to drive more than 6,000 miles and across at least 14 states during three weeks? I suppose, like Mr. Simon says, we were looking for America, or at least bits of it we don’t normally encounter in our mid-Atlantic lives. We found it in the ever-changing landscape; even in states where everything seems the same, our enlarged scope showed us it isn’t really so – flat prairie and croplands rise slowly but surely until they hit foothills which become weird gullied and canyoned no-mans-land stretches which become great mountains that even I with my Japanese-engineered minivan felt intimidated to tackle.

We found it in the houses of different regions. The tidy, modest properties of Iowa gave way to humbler ranch spreads in South Dakota where one had to look twice sometimes to identify the house among the barns. Those gave way to more prosperous ranches in Montana, which morphed yet again into the disconcertingly perfect front lawns and facades in Salt Lake City neighborhoods. On the Arizona reservations, old trailers with roof patches held down by auto tires were interspersed with uninhabitable-appearing cabins that I kept suspecting were indeed somebody’s homes, with not a tree, flower, or any manmade object to stand for beauty, save the rugged view of buttes, mesas, and gorges.

We found it, further, in what constitutes normalcy – places where the wind blows unremittingly, places where locals wave to strangers as they pass, places where everyone seems to have a private sorrow, places where basic supplies are hundreds of miles away, places where a blooming geranium seems a triumph. When I travel, I always find myself imagining what it would be like to live here or there – really, what constitutes normalcy in that place – and on this trip we saw such variety of normal that I am staggered, and these difference sall in the same country! In one county I’d need to devote hours of the week to lawn care if I wasn’t to be a thorn in my neighbors’ sides, a hundred miles away and nobody gives a thought to such niceties. In one place I’d find being “bear aware” to be a daily concern, not much further down the highway bears are a non-issue. In one town I’d be surrounded by the seediness of casinos in nearly every business, go over a state line and, abracadabra, by the power of different ideals and laws, gambling need never cross my consciousness.

In addition to seeing more of America, we found reserves of stamina, communication, kindness, and family love within our own Sienna as it hurtled down various highways at various speed limits, but I suppose that is fodder for other posts. We are almost home – one more travel day and we’ll be back in our own part of America. We’ll be changed, though – more grateful than ever for some of what means normal to us, but no doubt longing for some of what we have tasted that does not live in south-central Pennsylvania.