Missing Canada, crossing the bible belt (or how our souls were almost saved)
Imagine this, two girls, age 18 and 19 are about to embark on a journey. Kirsten has driven all the way up the Northeast corridor, from D.C. in her lovely blue Toyota Cressida . She didn’t have the money to do a total tune-up, but had had the oil changed, and a few things fiddled with before leaving Bethesda in the mid-summer swelter, with the trunk packed full of her most precious belongings and necessities for the year to come.
I was not the original co-pilot, but when Kirsten’s other plans didn’t “work out” I jumped at the chance to spend two weeks with the coolest mamacita on the planet, besides I couldn’t let her venture all the way across the entire country by her lonesome. We were so excited, and really the adventure had begun several months before, right after final exams when I had flown down to Virginia and spent a week, cruising around the D.C. Pride parade, and getting swanked out to poke our heads in Escándalo, only to prefer a less in-your-face sort of evening. After wandering about Dupont Circle, we finally just had coffee, my first and only attempt at going out in “drag”, my body being too earth motherly to ever be able to pull off even a slightly butch look, sadly.
After playing city girls, we drove to the ocean and camped for several stunning days on Assateague with nothing but Rice Dream and almond butter and a few other sundries to nourish us, oh, that and the spectacular uninhabited island and a few joints to be smoked with our backs to the setting sun. The wild horses were as beautiful as the song that bears their name and the solitude, wrapped up in the twinkling inklings of our now rock solid friendship, we were two girls against the world, with razor tongues and wits like whips, and no need for anyone but ourselves. The island was too far off the beaten path, and the season was too early for tourists and we were marvelously alone.
The drive back to D.C. marked the beginning of an epic journey, two little dharma bums on the path of life, and then a woman waving madly at us, rolling down her window, her mousy hair flapping in the breeze, she leans out the window and we think she is some psycho, until we finally understand, “You’ve got a flat tire!” We promptly pull over and deal with the issue, unbeknownst to us, lurks the unfolding allegory, the via crucis for the 21st century.
Again, in New Hampshire, the oppressive heat, and mom, as always, feeding us all, with invites to keep us company. Aaron, the object of my affection, and presently emotionally inaccessible man wraps his arm casually around me for a photo, while his brother, the photographer, with his waist length hair falling behind, pulls in Sandrine, the Japanese-French exchange student who spent the summer moping about the house and corresponding with her 45-year-old “best friend”, probably to smell her hair. Kirsten’s fabulously boyish hair-cut suiting the occasion, all of us smiling, the moment caught for posterity. Then the last photo before leaving, me with my strappy, miniscule Indian dress and Kirsten in jeans, I think. We get in the car and don’t look back, it is exactly 10 am, and we have a long day of driving ahead… we plan on arriving in Canada, to camp outside of Niagara Falls by night fall.
The two of us, switch off, listening to Ani and Peter Gabriel and a mix of Brazilian and Cabo Verdian music, along with Paul Simon’s Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. Singing at the top pf our lungs, the wind blowing our hair, cursing the cost of tolls on the NY turnpike. Are we reading this right? No we can’t possibly have to pay $30 to cross the damn state, Massachusetts was bad enough and it was only $6 or $7. Route 90, straight across, hour upon hour and we are finally arriving in Buffalo, returning Ani to the stereo in homage of her working-class home town, we pull in to the toll booth to pay and again, a woman waving her hands, shouting, gesticulating, we can’t hear and we want our change back, dammit! “You have a flat tire?” Not again. No “Your car is on fire!!!! Get out of the lane, pull over, pull over!" And our torpid reactions are suddenly snapped out of slo-mo into real-time. What the fuck?!! And three highway workers running and spraying foaming extinguisher at the flames of the now smoking motor. Three whole extinguishers it took. What is that about?
The late summer sun is finally setting, it is maybe 8 o’clock, and AAA comes to drag our car off the highway, the man asks if we know where we want to go. What an absurd question. We wonder why the toll-collector kept insisting that we call a hotel, but we can think of no real answer. We are too perturbed to be bothered by that sort of thing. We are towed to the parking lot of some large chain hotel, a Ramada, I think. And I run inside. No vacancy. The concierge tells me she will call around. Still no luck, apparently it is the Erie State Fair and there are no open hotel rooms in a fifty-mile radius. Go figure, a perfect day to have a vehicular crisis. We are still in panic mode and the driver seems to be growing impatient. Kirsten and I debate whether we should just steal an extinguisher from the un-guarded hotel and make a dash for the border, it _is_ just an hour away, after all, and we have reservations at a campground there.
Our moral conscience prevails, that, or we are too scared of the consequences of being caught with stolen property while crossing the border, but not of the real possibility of our car exploding. The electrical system seems to have fizzled out, leaving one window stuck in mid-roll position. No way can we sleep in the car in the entrails of Bufalo with a window that does not close. What to do? And then, as if I light shines down from above we see, the shining red concentric circles. Target! Ok, we tell the nice man to leave us in the parking lot of the Target and I make a mad dash for fire extinguishers, with five minutes to closing time. The lovely sales clerk intercepts me and registers my panicked look. “I need fire extinguishers!” “Is something on FIRE?” “No, I mean, yes. It was, and it might be again. Aggh. I need to get to Canada tonight and our car caught on fire, and we have no where to stay.” She was about our age, this girl, and she listened as if her life depended on it. “Slow down… my boyfriend runs a weekly rental ‘guest house’ let me see if he can rent you a room for the night.” “What?”
But she is already dialing the number, and then plaintively and firmly repeating, “but honey, they’re alone, and you know, there is NO where to stay with the Fair, and they are MY age.” She turns to me, “he can rent you a room, it is usually just on a weekly basis, but he said he’ll charge you $50 for the night.” I buy a fire extinguisher and tear out of the market to find Kirsten. “We have a place to stay!” I breathlessly explain, but she doesn’t seem convinced. “No, really, this girl is really nice, and the place is only a few blocks up from here.” And if that weren’t enough to convince her of the rightness of the endeavor, she leans over and her elbow presses down, and suddenly, miraculously her window buzzes noisily back to its closed position. “We are saved! At the Target”. At least for now. We drive to the slummy part of town, where we gratefully unload our bags, but thankfully not the entire contents of the trunk with the newly closed and lockable car.
In the morning we take the car to be fixed and because the Fair has ended we spend the day lounging in the Jacuzzi of the room that we rented at (unscathed by our thieving hands) hotel Ramada. We have a perfect view of the Target and laugh about the strange twists of fate, the way life offers up its gifts. We wonder if we are being watched over, or protected, then in our snidest, most agnostic stance we laugh some more, wet from the tub and the bath foam lather.
Our trip continues. Due west. We miss our foray into Canada, having lost two full days of driving with the car mishap. We drive and drive and drive some more. We stop in Chicago at the Institute of Art, and briefly admire a Rivera, a Cornell box on which her step-mother is the Smithsonian expert, we snap a few photos, and the promenade with monstrous flower pots and the enormous lake-like-an-ocean are what stick in my mind. We drive on through the hills and valleys, we stop near Madison to see a Frank Lloyd Wright house and then the House on the Rock, a strange museum of eclectica, whose owner had been a truly bizarre man. We stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. We sleep at the foot of Devil’s Rock and take cold showers.
We visit the Badlands, and are dwarfed by the red beauty, rivers carved in stone, monolithic majesty. We hike into the back country and pitch a tent far from anyone. We admire the prairie dog colonies. Two girls on their own, shadows across the land. No one could harm us, no one could follow us. We wander in the fields in just our underwear. In the morning on the crest of the hill above us looms a bison, looking as if he might decide to charge. We quickly pack up, carrying out everything that we carried in, my 7 pound tent being very useful and accommodating.
As we continue our westward journey, we are struck by the seemingly harmless, but nevertheless insidious billboards announcing that Jesus is Lord and that we are to be saved. It feels creepy, as if some moral pressure is bearing down upon us. Cruise control is the best friend of weary travelers, and we alternate several times a day, me falling asleep daily for a cat nap just after 1. The deeper into the heartland we go, the more messages from “god” we get. And then it happens. Late into the night, after too many hours on the road, we pull off into a truck-stop for gas. The truckers look us up and down, I wonder if they notice the rainbow triangle on her window, and if they know what it purports to mean. I switch spots once again, back in the driver seat. I am so tired that I forget to put cruise control back on. In that very moment, we see a light. “Look at that star!” In a moment of distraction I ease up on the gas pedal, and in that very instant a stag, towering two heads above our little toy of a car, dashes across the highway in front of me, narrowly missing by a fraction of a second. “Holy shit!” “That wasn’t a fucking star!” No. The light in the darkness, the hesitation that saved our lives, was nothing more and nothing less than a huge cross, luminescent as if on fire, standing in the middle of a black hill. “If I didn’t know better, darling, I would say someone is trying to convert us.”
Amazing how circumstances -forces of nature, distraction- collude, or is there really someone watching over us?
We persist, grateful for life and another day. We stop for medication, Kirsten is not well, we are shocked by the emptiness of this middle land, it is like purgatory, there is nothing, not good nor bad, just the waiting for judgment to come and nothingness, the limbo. There are several mortuaries, but little else in Sioux Falls. We stop to see Mount Rushmore, ha! The construction of the idea of Nation if there ever was one, we contemplate the Trail of Tears, we stop at Wounded Knee, we are saddened by the state of the Indian Nation, selling moccasins and tobacco to passing tourists. We finally drive through the winding mountains down into Yellowstone, it is late, we will not be able to do the back country camping we had planned. We see a grizzly on our way down the practically vertical drop, there is a jack-knifed trailer hanging precariously over the edge and we hold our breath as we descend. The night is so cold, but in the morning, we see Old Faithful and the sulfurous bogs, that leave gorgeous blues and greens in crystalline memories in the rock. There are whole mountainsides shorn, fire-ravaged trees. It is the natural course, it is necessary for renewal. We continue, driving through Minnesota robed in darkness, stopping only to lie by the side of the road and admire the stars and the chirp of the crickets and cicadas for a few, fleeting moments. Idaho passes, green and beautiful and unassuming. I had no idea. We are finally at the edge of Washington. We make our last tourist detour to see the falls made famous by David Lynch in Twin Peaks, Badalamenti’s music rings in our ears, rippling over us like the falling water, harkening to our shared obsession with Laura Palmer and Special Agent Dale Cooper. We finally arrive in Seattle, my final destination, a day early. We find shelter at a youth hostel. We made it. Near disasters averted, still alive and kicking, still not converted. We laugh about the messianic quality of our trip…
In the morning we go to move the car and it is NOT there. We call the number, it shouldn’t have been towed, we checked the time, we left it under Pike’s Market. “No,” the woman says, as Kirsten makes urgent inquiries, “no, we haven’t towed that car.” The panic sets in. All of her worldly belongings, everything she needs for her life in Vancouver, her CAR, gone. We call the police, and then the insurance company and then her mother, and then her father and then her mother again. Meanwhile, ironically, I wait for the police by the bronze pig statue. A wild-eyed hippie boy wanders up to me, offering me flowers, “No thank you!” I respond tersely, “This is not a good time.” He explains that he had met some Danish girls and bought the flowers for them, but that they had disappeared and so he was offering them to me instead. Again I tried to will him to dissipate into thin air. “Pray for me,” he says, “’cause I’ll pray for you.” Bizarre utterance. And in that very moment the police officers descend from their vehicle, I run to meet them, “we have your car.” I spin on a dime racing down the ramp to the inner market, “Kirsten, they have your car, it was impounded because someone tried to break in!” I shout. She finished scribbling on a piece of paper that was lying by the phone, the female officer lingers behind me, Kirsten bounds up towards me, pauses, snorts with a sort of stifled laughter. I look at her as she is turning over the scrap that she found. On the back it says, “Jesus is our Saviour.”
I was not the original co-pilot, but when Kirsten’s other plans didn’t “work out” I jumped at the chance to spend two weeks with the coolest mamacita on the planet, besides I couldn’t let her venture all the way across the entire country by her lonesome. We were so excited, and really the adventure had begun several months before, right after final exams when I had flown down to Virginia and spent a week, cruising around the D.C. Pride parade, and getting swanked out to poke our heads in Escándalo, only to prefer a less in-your-face sort of evening. After wandering about Dupont Circle, we finally just had coffee, my first and only attempt at going out in “drag”, my body being too earth motherly to ever be able to pull off even a slightly butch look, sadly.
After playing city girls, we drove to the ocean and camped for several stunning days on Assateague with nothing but Rice Dream and almond butter and a few other sundries to nourish us, oh, that and the spectacular uninhabited island and a few joints to be smoked with our backs to the setting sun. The wild horses were as beautiful as the song that bears their name and the solitude, wrapped up in the twinkling inklings of our now rock solid friendship, we were two girls against the world, with razor tongues and wits like whips, and no need for anyone but ourselves. The island was too far off the beaten path, and the season was too early for tourists and we were marvelously alone.
The drive back to D.C. marked the beginning of an epic journey, two little dharma bums on the path of life, and then a woman waving madly at us, rolling down her window, her mousy hair flapping in the breeze, she leans out the window and we think she is some psycho, until we finally understand, “You’ve got a flat tire!” We promptly pull over and deal with the issue, unbeknownst to us, lurks the unfolding allegory, the via crucis for the 21st century.
Again, in New Hampshire, the oppressive heat, and mom, as always, feeding us all, with invites to keep us company. Aaron, the object of my affection, and presently emotionally inaccessible man wraps his arm casually around me for a photo, while his brother, the photographer, with his waist length hair falling behind, pulls in Sandrine, the Japanese-French exchange student who spent the summer moping about the house and corresponding with her 45-year-old “best friend”, probably to smell her hair. Kirsten’s fabulously boyish hair-cut suiting the occasion, all of us smiling, the moment caught for posterity. Then the last photo before leaving, me with my strappy, miniscule Indian dress and Kirsten in jeans, I think. We get in the car and don’t look back, it is exactly 10 am, and we have a long day of driving ahead… we plan on arriving in Canada, to camp outside of Niagara Falls by night fall.
The two of us, switch off, listening to Ani and Peter Gabriel and a mix of Brazilian and Cabo Verdian music, along with Paul Simon’s Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. Singing at the top pf our lungs, the wind blowing our hair, cursing the cost of tolls on the NY turnpike. Are we reading this right? No we can’t possibly have to pay $30 to cross the damn state, Massachusetts was bad enough and it was only $6 or $7. Route 90, straight across, hour upon hour and we are finally arriving in Buffalo, returning Ani to the stereo in homage of her working-class home town, we pull in to the toll booth to pay and again, a woman waving her hands, shouting, gesticulating, we can’t hear and we want our change back, dammit! “You have a flat tire?” Not again. No “Your car is on fire!!!! Get out of the lane, pull over, pull over!" And our torpid reactions are suddenly snapped out of slo-mo into real-time. What the fuck?!! And three highway workers running and spraying foaming extinguisher at the flames of the now smoking motor. Three whole extinguishers it took. What is that about?
The late summer sun is finally setting, it is maybe 8 o’clock, and AAA comes to drag our car off the highway, the man asks if we know where we want to go. What an absurd question. We wonder why the toll-collector kept insisting that we call a hotel, but we can think of no real answer. We are too perturbed to be bothered by that sort of thing. We are towed to the parking lot of some large chain hotel, a Ramada, I think. And I run inside. No vacancy. The concierge tells me she will call around. Still no luck, apparently it is the Erie State Fair and there are no open hotel rooms in a fifty-mile radius. Go figure, a perfect day to have a vehicular crisis. We are still in panic mode and the driver seems to be growing impatient. Kirsten and I debate whether we should just steal an extinguisher from the un-guarded hotel and make a dash for the border, it _is_ just an hour away, after all, and we have reservations at a campground there.
Our moral conscience prevails, that, or we are too scared of the consequences of being caught with stolen property while crossing the border, but not of the real possibility of our car exploding. The electrical system seems to have fizzled out, leaving one window stuck in mid-roll position. No way can we sleep in the car in the entrails of Bufalo with a window that does not close. What to do? And then, as if I light shines down from above we see, the shining red concentric circles. Target! Ok, we tell the nice man to leave us in the parking lot of the Target and I make a mad dash for fire extinguishers, with five minutes to closing time. The lovely sales clerk intercepts me and registers my panicked look. “I need fire extinguishers!” “Is something on FIRE?” “No, I mean, yes. It was, and it might be again. Aggh. I need to get to Canada tonight and our car caught on fire, and we have no where to stay.” She was about our age, this girl, and she listened as if her life depended on it. “Slow down… my boyfriend runs a weekly rental ‘guest house’ let me see if he can rent you a room for the night.” “What?”
But she is already dialing the number, and then plaintively and firmly repeating, “but honey, they’re alone, and you know, there is NO where to stay with the Fair, and they are MY age.” She turns to me, “he can rent you a room, it is usually just on a weekly basis, but he said he’ll charge you $50 for the night.” I buy a fire extinguisher and tear out of the market to find Kirsten. “We have a place to stay!” I breathlessly explain, but she doesn’t seem convinced. “No, really, this girl is really nice, and the place is only a few blocks up from here.” And if that weren’t enough to convince her of the rightness of the endeavor, she leans over and her elbow presses down, and suddenly, miraculously her window buzzes noisily back to its closed position. “We are saved! At the Target”. At least for now. We drive to the slummy part of town, where we gratefully unload our bags, but thankfully not the entire contents of the trunk with the newly closed and lockable car.
In the morning we take the car to be fixed and because the Fair has ended we spend the day lounging in the Jacuzzi of the room that we rented at (unscathed by our thieving hands) hotel Ramada. We have a perfect view of the Target and laugh about the strange twists of fate, the way life offers up its gifts. We wonder if we are being watched over, or protected, then in our snidest, most agnostic stance we laugh some more, wet from the tub and the bath foam lather.
Our trip continues. Due west. We miss our foray into Canada, having lost two full days of driving with the car mishap. We drive and drive and drive some more. We stop in Chicago at the Institute of Art, and briefly admire a Rivera, a Cornell box on which her step-mother is the Smithsonian expert, we snap a few photos, and the promenade with monstrous flower pots and the enormous lake-like-an-ocean are what stick in my mind. We drive on through the hills and valleys, we stop near Madison to see a Frank Lloyd Wright house and then the House on the Rock, a strange museum of eclectica, whose owner had been a truly bizarre man. We stop at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD. We sleep at the foot of Devil’s Rock and take cold showers.
We visit the Badlands, and are dwarfed by the red beauty, rivers carved in stone, monolithic majesty. We hike into the back country and pitch a tent far from anyone. We admire the prairie dog colonies. Two girls on their own, shadows across the land. No one could harm us, no one could follow us. We wander in the fields in just our underwear. In the morning on the crest of the hill above us looms a bison, looking as if he might decide to charge. We quickly pack up, carrying out everything that we carried in, my 7 pound tent being very useful and accommodating.
As we continue our westward journey, we are struck by the seemingly harmless, but nevertheless insidious billboards announcing that Jesus is Lord and that we are to be saved. It feels creepy, as if some moral pressure is bearing down upon us. Cruise control is the best friend of weary travelers, and we alternate several times a day, me falling asleep daily for a cat nap just after 1. The deeper into the heartland we go, the more messages from “god” we get. And then it happens. Late into the night, after too many hours on the road, we pull off into a truck-stop for gas. The truckers look us up and down, I wonder if they notice the rainbow triangle on her window, and if they know what it purports to mean. I switch spots once again, back in the driver seat. I am so tired that I forget to put cruise control back on. In that very moment, we see a light. “Look at that star!” In a moment of distraction I ease up on the gas pedal, and in that very instant a stag, towering two heads above our little toy of a car, dashes across the highway in front of me, narrowly missing by a fraction of a second. “Holy shit!” “That wasn’t a fucking star!” No. The light in the darkness, the hesitation that saved our lives, was nothing more and nothing less than a huge cross, luminescent as if on fire, standing in the middle of a black hill. “If I didn’t know better, darling, I would say someone is trying to convert us.”
Amazing how circumstances -forces of nature, distraction- collude, or is there really someone watching over us?
We persist, grateful for life and another day. We stop for medication, Kirsten is not well, we are shocked by the emptiness of this middle land, it is like purgatory, there is nothing, not good nor bad, just the waiting for judgment to come and nothingness, the limbo. There are several mortuaries, but little else in Sioux Falls. We stop to see Mount Rushmore, ha! The construction of the idea of Nation if there ever was one, we contemplate the Trail of Tears, we stop at Wounded Knee, we are saddened by the state of the Indian Nation, selling moccasins and tobacco to passing tourists. We finally drive through the winding mountains down into Yellowstone, it is late, we will not be able to do the back country camping we had planned. We see a grizzly on our way down the practically vertical drop, there is a jack-knifed trailer hanging precariously over the edge and we hold our breath as we descend. The night is so cold, but in the morning, we see Old Faithful and the sulfurous bogs, that leave gorgeous blues and greens in crystalline memories in the rock. There are whole mountainsides shorn, fire-ravaged trees. It is the natural course, it is necessary for renewal. We continue, driving through Minnesota robed in darkness, stopping only to lie by the side of the road and admire the stars and the chirp of the crickets and cicadas for a few, fleeting moments. Idaho passes, green and beautiful and unassuming. I had no idea. We are finally at the edge of Washington. We make our last tourist detour to see the falls made famous by David Lynch in Twin Peaks, Badalamenti’s music rings in our ears, rippling over us like the falling water, harkening to our shared obsession with Laura Palmer and Special Agent Dale Cooper. We finally arrive in Seattle, my final destination, a day early. We find shelter at a youth hostel. We made it. Near disasters averted, still alive and kicking, still not converted. We laugh about the messianic quality of our trip…
In the morning we go to move the car and it is NOT there. We call the number, it shouldn’t have been towed, we checked the time, we left it under Pike’s Market. “No,” the woman says, as Kirsten makes urgent inquiries, “no, we haven’t towed that car.” The panic sets in. All of her worldly belongings, everything she needs for her life in Vancouver, her CAR, gone. We call the police, and then the insurance company and then her mother, and then her father and then her mother again. Meanwhile, ironically, I wait for the police by the bronze pig statue. A wild-eyed hippie boy wanders up to me, offering me flowers, “No thank you!” I respond tersely, “This is not a good time.” He explains that he had met some Danish girls and bought the flowers for them, but that they had disappeared and so he was offering them to me instead. Again I tried to will him to dissipate into thin air. “Pray for me,” he says, “’cause I’ll pray for you.” Bizarre utterance. And in that very moment the police officers descend from their vehicle, I run to meet them, “we have your car.” I spin on a dime racing down the ramp to the inner market, “Kirsten, they have your car, it was impounded because someone tried to break in!” I shout. She finished scribbling on a piece of paper that was lying by the phone, the female officer lingers behind me, Kirsten bounds up towards me, pauses, snorts with a sort of stifled laughter. I look at her as she is turning over the scrap that she found. On the back it says, “Jesus is our Saviour.”
posted by ilana at 2:44 a.m.
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