Americana

Neal Burton

There's something about America. Not its connotations, what it has represented and what it now represents, good and bad and the impossible in between. It's something that exists inherent in those who live here, born or immigrated, raised or still stumbling through a new city. And it's exactly what Nathan Asch finds: "Cotton country, oil country, the mountains and the mines, the Northwest woods, sheep and cattle, the iron country in northern Minnesota, the mills around Detroit don't seem to mix, don't seem to speak the same language. And yet they do. They are held by something... It's what makes for a certain look upon the face and a certain smile."

That, that essence of America, that's what I've been searching to categorize, to pinpoint and reproduce in my own writing. So far, my conclusions are as vague as Asch's, and significantly less eloquent in its admission of such. Still, I see it, this thing that mean America. A good singer-songwriter friend of mine from Seattle stayed with me last summer, after a brash decision to try to make it in New York. He couldn't -- he slept on my couch for free for eight weeks, and still only had the cash to live off Guinness and bar snacks -- and instead he grew his beard out and boarded a bus with his guitar and an extra shirt tied around his waist. From Brooklyn, he rode that bus down the Appalachians and through the Blue Ridge, towards the Rockies, and when he showed up on my doorstep again mid-Fall, the first thing he said was, "I haven't spoken to anyone in weeks, not really." But what came next were stories. They kept coming, he talked more than I'd ever heard him talk, and what he talked about was America. Somewhere in Indiana he'd hitchhiked from the bus stop to his scheduled venue, a bar twenty miles outside of town, picked up by a passing truck driven by a man who ranted the whole trip about homosexuals, the government, gun control, and his wife, only to wish my (gaunt, tattooed friend in tight jeans) a genuine "Best of luck," and offer a hearty handshake. The man was my favorite of the characters; there were the girls, so many girls in every state with nothing better to do than drink and chat up a passing guitarist, and there were the families, the bachelors, the businessmen all crammed in on his bus, no matter where he got on and off. 2008, from Brooklyn, New York, to Denver, Colorado, and all the way back, my friend Neal recounted to me his discovery of America, identical to Asch's own: that Americans are not just mill workers, or bigots, or the girls you fall in love with. They are full of Asch's so-called American slogan, "When you're born you're not born to suffer." Whatever you're born for, whatever you live for, it isn't the end. You can always grab a guitar, live off beer and bar snacks, and wander to meet people just like yourself.