Abroad in America

Much prettier in personIn high school, my English teacher told us that the part of college she missed the most was being able to learn for the sake of learning, at your own pace, which to her meant being able to sit with a book in a library or coffee shop, drifting back and forth between reading it and staring out the window. Reading about the first leg of Sal's travels in Washington Square Park, I stopped a few times to people watch and began to wonder how many of these New Yorkers (these "city folk") had ever had the experience of actually seeing the rest of America, beyond the city. I wondered how many of them had stuck their feet in red Georgia clay, or ran through the backwoods of Mississippi, or made the trip - my favorite - from Houston to Austin and understood what it looks like to find the flat land suddenly rolling until finally you drive over a big one and there, sprawled out in front of you for miles and miles of green, is the seemingly endless Hill Country - the kind of view that makes me fall in love with Texas all over again every time. At night it's really perfect; you can see the stars. In this class we've read about Americans' encounters with the foreign, which generally has meant their encounters abroad, but in many ways I think America is still foreign to Americans themselves.
It's interesting to me that, in order to escape the monotony of his life at home in New York City, Sal travels to the "heartland" whereas many people would consider middle America to be the most monotonous place in the world. And while I'm sure much of the draw for Sal was the people he would be traveling to and with - characters like Dean and Carlo could spice up any trip- there was likely some appeal too in the fact that America between the coasts was kind of an unknown, this huge undiscovered mass, full of different customs and accents and adventures just as one might find in Europe or Africa. Even today, I think a lot of people who've been conditioned to city living tend to forget that the more rural, untouched parts of the country aren't necessarily backwards - that there is a sort of beauty, or at least something interesting and worthwhile, to be found in that kind of life.