Tour Americana! Part One

Last week I drove from my parents’ house in northern Virginia to Los Angeles. The trip took six days and covered about 2,700 miles and seven states. I started on Tuesday, October 30 around noon. Earlier in the day, I’d stopped at my mother’s sixth grade class to say goodbye to her. She introduced me to her students and told them that I was moving to Los Angeles which, I was disappointed to note, didn’t seem to impress them very much. We hugged, and one of the students asked my mom if she was going to cry. She didn’t, as far as I could tell, and in any case, in about an hour I was on Interstate 80, heading west.

In Roanoke, Virginia, I stopped at a Triple-A travel office where I was given several heavy bags full of books and maps. The agent I spoke with asked me if I was driving alone. I told her I was. “So,” she said, “Do you have a job out there?” "No," I replied, "Not really,” as though there were varying degrees between having and not having a job. Maps in hand, I saddled up again and drove south to the town of Wytheville, Virginia, which is where I ended up spending the night.

I awoke the next morning to a frost and I used the plastic Kaplan ID, which I still carried in my wallet, to scrape the ice off my car. I stopped in at several Wytheville eateries, hunting for breakfast, but in each, the stench of cigarettes and grease overwhelmed the appetite and I decided to wait until Knoxville to eat. Actually, the biggest struggle of my journey consisted in locating food. Driving the Interstate Highway system, one is presented with endless opportunities to gorge on fried mystery meat of questionable nutritional value. I became obsessed, as never before, with finding fresh fruit and vegetables. In Knoxville, I found a brewery downtown where I was served pasta and beer and that was about as good as it got.

There was something strange about Tennessee, though, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. In the brewery, for instance, they were playing John Carpenter slasher films at two in the afternoon. When I stopped at Nashville later in the day, I encountered several odd characters walking the streets, and in a downtown coffee shop I was served by a suspicious-looking man in a comically oversized cowboy hat. Something was going on here but I was dazed from driving and hardly knew what day it was, let alone that it was Halloween.

Downtown Nashville was dead at five o’clock, which suited me fine. I walked around for about an hour, took some photographs and moved on. This was pretty much what it was like the whole trip. Most of the cities I visited were moderate in size—in any case, much smaller than New York, of course, and getting into the center of them and then getting back out proved to be pretty simple. I could usually manage a quick survey in about an hour or two and finding a place to park was never hard. The density in these places was largely confined to a few square miles, and all of the cities were well-served by freeways, so entry and escape never included the stop-and-go misery that’s de rigueur in New York.

After Nashville, I drove on for another hundred miles or so until I came to Jackson, Tennessee, where I found a cheap motel room. Finding affordable motels was usually easy, especially as I only had two criteria to fill: 1) that the rooms don’t reek of cigarette smoke, and 2) that the hotel have Internet access. By the time I reached Jackson, I had crossed into Central Time, and it was eight o’clock in the evening. I ordered pizza and after a few hours was asleep.