South Dakota, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

I survived last night's thunderstorms! No one seems to have been hurt by tornadoes, so it was a false alarm. Probably happens pretty often up here. Still, the memory of the hail and the shaking street lights is sort of unsettling.

To catch up with yesterday, I neglected to mention dinner, which I ate at a firehouse that had been converted into a microbrewery. (This provides some nice symbolic unity with my first stop of the trip, where I visited a firehouse that had been converted into a museum.) I had a microbrewed root beer! It was nice -- about halfway between grocery-store root beer and the dark, rather bitter stuff at the Fort Myers microbrewery restaurant, and better to drink than either one. I've mostly been avoiding soda this trip, but I make exceptions for unusual stuff. No other culinary adventures yesterday or today, though; getting enough calories at the right intervals in interesting restaurants has been a little problematic in Wyoming and South Dakota, so when I find a place to eat I tend to order something I know I'll like.

Also left over from yesterday are two odd phenomena about South Dakota. One is that some restaurants have smoking sections. I was taken aback to be asked "smoking or non?" when I asked for a table! The other is that in South Dakota, not only is gas very cheap compared to other states I've been to, but mid-grade "plus" gas is cheaper than low-grade gas. This bizarre inversion is present at every gas station I've seen in the state. I'm told it's because they put 10% ethanol in the mid-grade gas and get big tax breaks for it that allow them to lower the price, but then why don't they put ethanol in the low- and high-grade gas as well? An enigma the gas station attendant was not equipped to answer.

Today was mostly driving end-to-end through South Dakota. The big adventure of the day was the Badlands. For context, let me explain that South Dakota is basically four hundred miles of open prairie with one town (Rapid City) in the west and another (Sioux Falls) in the east, and today I drove from the former to the latter across all that prairie. I'm emphasizing the prairie here because the Badlands is utterly shocking, terrible and eye-boggling primarily because of the contrast it makes with the grass and scrub. The Badlands look like this:

Two hundred years from now, some mad scientist invents a tractor beam and a time machine. He travels back in time to millions of years ago, where he uses the tractor beam to capture several large asteroids full of ravines and ridges and odd jutting contours like nothing on Earth. In an attempt to destroy the world, he crashes the asteroids into what will become South Dakota; this causes the extinction of the dinosaurs. The asteroids, however, do not destroy the world as planned. Instead, the above-ground parts of the asteroids loom ominously over the Dakota prairie, emitting their odd chemicals into the soil and fouling the land and water. The grass tries to reclaim the land from the asteroids, hardy weeds cropping from the rock where they can find a foothold, but in the end this feeble growth only makes the asteroids look more unearthly.

The Badlands, of course, are not actually asteroids, but they should be. You look at them flabbergasted and say "how on Earth could that have happened?" (The answer is almost invariably "erosion," so it's better not to ask.) I liked them better than Yellowstone. Less wildlife, to be sure -- only a few brave species are well-adapted for life in the South Dakota Badlands, such as the critically endangered black-footed ferret -- but the terrain was truly different, while Yellowstone was just "things you've already seen this trip packed into a smaller space." Of course, I'm prejudiced by the sheer fun I had climbing over the ridges of the Badlands. You can pull over at any number of turnouts and trek as far as you care to into that country, every step treacherous, the dirt and clay loose under your feet. I climbed the north side of one ridge and got it into my head that I had to go down the south side, which was steeper. I went step by step as far as I could, but in the end I had no alternative but to crouch and slide down the side on my sneakers, ripping at the earth with my palms to keep from somersaulting down the rocky slope -- sneakerboarding, if you will. This could have torn my hands open but didn't, so it was a good day. Afterwards I chatted with a woman from Atlanta returning from her own West Coast road trip. She had wisely stayed on the boardwalk and suggested gloves if I should try that sort of thing again in the future. One thing I didn't think to pack...

Speaking of which, I haven't been doing badly on talking to strangers recently. I've swapped stories with this woman from Atlanta, a guy from Quebec, a Texan, a New Yorker, and some others. From our chats, I'm astonished how un-unique my journey is -- how many people share an experience like this one. My Atlantan traveled the Trans-Canada Highway, which is by some metrics the longest single road in the world, end-to-end and had a fantastic time. It seems almost everyone has driven coast-to-coast, though not too many have done it solo. Of course, my sample is biased -- I'm surveying only people I'm coming across in my own coast-to-coast trip full of places tourists go -- but it's interesting to reconcile my experience of Lover's Lanes as a personal and irreproducible journey with the ubiquity of the transcontinental road trip in the American collective consciousness.

A holy place

In American Gods, the novel generally considered Neil Gaiman's best work in conventional prose, it turns out that America's holy places are the kitschy roadside stops that travelers flock to without ever being quite sure why. Pulling over to stare at the world's biggest ball of twine or whatever is a form of worship, according to Gaiman's mythos, and so when gods in America want to have a meeting, they hold it at a tourist trap that has been sanctified by the gawking of people like me.

By this metric, Mount Rushmore is possibly the holiest place in America.

It's just a bunch of presidents carved into a mountain. It's not even an especially impressive mountain by local standards, and the statuary is inconsistent; Washington's face is well articulated, while Lincoln looks like the artist forgot that people's heads have backs. But it's a symbol of America we rank just behind the Statue of Liberty and the bald eagle. And you know what, it is pretty awesome to round the corner and discover, wtf, there are presidents on that rock! And we've lavished so much attention on it that by reason of its popularity alone it has actually become a symbol of America up there with Lady Liberty.

I snapped a few shots, the same shots every tourist snaps, put in my worship, and went into the gift store to see if they sold the Constitution, as I thought they should, since the gentlemen on the mountain were among the luminaries who wrote it, fought for it, died for it. To my delight, a nicely bound Constitution was just $10! I picked it up -- a Mount Rushmore Constitution -- along with a similarly small volume containing the three poems Abraham Lincoln is known to have written and which I have never read. I'll let you know if he's any good.

I also need to write about the Reptile Gardens -- but first, oh my gosh, guys, the sky out there is getting dark! They're saying a terrible thunderstorm is heading towards where I'm staying in Rapid City, and there's a tornado warning out. It would be the day I'm doing my laundry. (The Days Inn has facilities.) So if you're not reading this, it may mean I'm being absorbed by a tornado and need your help right away!

Where was I? Right, the Reptile Gardens. The path to Mount Rushmore is like Carnival -- the parts that aren't federally protected, anyway -- lined with lesser holy places trying to pick up some of the mountain's powerful tourist radiation. I picked the Reptile Gardens to investigate, and it turns out the park's collection of reptiles is among the most comprehensive in America! They had at least half a dozen snakes of varieties that you literally can't see anywhere else in the country. I think it was the enormous animals that made the biggest impressions on me, though: the crocodile and the Komodo dragon...

Holy shit, the street lamps are shaking back and forth outside. I'm going to abbreviate this post.

P.S. Editing this entry to say I'm still not dead twenty minutes later, but I wanted to mark that today is the one-month anniversary of my departure. It staggers me to think I've actually taken care of myself okay for thirty days and nights, usually not sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, and have crossed America one and a half times in that span. (I'm definitely clear of the Rockies now, though the foothills persist; those mountains never end, they just roll away.) I'm both bolstered and sobered by what I've achieved. Now I just need some luck with the funnel clouds and I may even make it home in one piece!

P.P.S. It's hailing out. In mid-July. 70-mph wind gusts. The guy on TV says it's going to get worse.

The middle of nowhere

I had a very lucky morning today, in the following way.

I'd made plans to take a long route through Yellowstone, but an hour into my explorations I realized I had forgotten my stuffed fox Kazuko at the hotel. I toss and turn a little in my sleep, and she must have fallen onto the floor and escaped my notice as I was packing. I panicked. It was already past check-out time, and I had no idea what the Super 8 does with stuff its guests leave behind in their rooms. I sped back to the hotel, going well over the restrictive Yellowstone speed limits (while still driving safely, I thought). And wouldn't you know it, I got pulled over for speeding for the first time in my life.

Here is where the luck comes in. As luck would have it, the officer who pulled me over had not had his radar gun turned on, and as a result couldn't issue me a ticket. He sent me off with a stern warning that if I was pulled over again in the next three days I would get an automatic ticket; the whole encounter took less than a minute. I was soon back at the hotel, where I discovered housekeeping had not gotten to my room yet and Kazuko was right where I'd left her. I restored her to my car with apologies, and I actually cried quite a bit. I'd been so scared I was going to lose her.

Which of course is rather odd. Over a stuffed fox I got myself pulled over and worked myself into a small emotional meltdown. I guess I can't attribute it to anything other than needing the familiarity that Kazuko -- the only other pair of eyes that's gone with me in every phase of this journey -- represents. I feel isolated and far from home. Maybe that's also why I found myself oddly unmoved by splendid Yellowstone, its peaks and canyons and steaming springs so different from Florida terrain. I didn't feel emotionally up to a hike, and apart from hiking all there is to do in Yellowstone is drive around staring at pretty things, all of which look pretty much the same. Thus it came to pass that I actually found myself bored in a national park famous for a breathtaking view around every corner.

Old Faithful I liked. The geyser's eruption itself was pretty aesthetically astonishing even to my jaded eyes, but I found the mathematics even more astonishing: the reason Old Faithful reaches the 150-foot height it does is that eight thousand gallons of water pass through a four-inch opening in about three minutes. What's more, the eruption was predictable down to the minute (2:07 PM), which I learned is more complicated than I thought; Old Faithful has long and short eruptions (defined as whether the eruption lasts more or less than two and a half minutes), and the interval after a long eruption, 90 minutes, is different from the interval after a short one, 65 minutes. There is nothing in between. There are no medium-length eruptions that produce intermediate intervals. The rangers didn't seem to have much of an idea why you get these two lengths and no others, though they were very helpful in explaining that the reason Old Faithful is so faithful is that it doesn't share its water source with any other geysers in the park, so there are few variables that could affect its timing.

The most moving thing in the park, though, was the color of the sky above Yellowstone Lake, a deep, pure sapphire blue that I've never seen in midafternoon east of the Mississippi (but saw once in Oregon), and which the lake reflected back a shade deeper and purer. That and the massive burnt forest, tree after tree barren like abandoned frameworks in a housing project almost as far as the eye can see, to my mind outdid the geyser for beauty.

Also beautiful: the green waters of Buffalo Bill Reservoir, somewhat east of the park, smooth and unruffled, with small grooved hills gently rolling out of them as though patting the reservoir on the head. In fact, I thought Wyoming got more beautiful once I'd left Yellowstone, the buttes more interesting, the gorges more -- well -- gorgeous. And at length the prairie set in, just grass and grass to the horizon, often flat, and that reminded me of home. There's a joke that since I've never been to Wyoming and I don't know anyone who has been, the state probably doesn't actually exist and cartographers just made it up to fill the space. Well, now I'm here, and I stand by it. This is the middle of nowhere. And I sort of like it.

I am also a fan of the little town I'm in tonight, Greybull. From these few hours' observation, Greybull is desperately trying to be the Wild West. The local steakhouse I went to tonight was all done up with adobe pots and rugs knit with the traditional Southwestern motifs, every other guy is wearing a cowboy hat, and even the blanket on my bed at the Greybull Motel is cowboy-themed. I half expected to see artificial tumbleweed made from Easter grass blowing across the road. I thought about why this was funny and realized that in a way, Greybull is the Wild West. Tiny town, built around mining (bentonite), everything falling down around the edges, most everyone just passing through... even the modern aluminum warehouses, dented and with piles of rubble everywhere alongside them, feel like they could be from Buffalo Bill's time. If you wanted to write a novel set in the modern Wild West, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Greybull.

Tomorrow I'm making for Rapid City, South Dakota. Depending on how I do on time, I may be able to tell you about Mount Rushmore and/or the Badlands tomorrow night!

Fuck yeah America

Yesterday, July 3, I arrived in Seattle just as planned and commenced celebration! I've now driven corner to corner through this country of ours, and have completed this phase of the journey in time to celebrate our national birthday. Seattle was built amidst a Byzantine maze of rivers and lakes, and it was Lake Union, in the heart of the city, that Seattle chose as the site of its Fourth of July celebration. The lakeside Gas Works Park, itself built upon the ruins of a defunct power plant, was the center of the celebration, so of course Alexis, Aviva, and I avoided it like the proverbial restaurant no one goes to anymore because it's too crowded. Instead we found a nice public pier on one side of the lake to watch the show from.

The story of how we found the pier is itself worth telling and involves a firecracker, a frying pan, and the Seattle police department. The firecracker was employed by the neighbors in holiday festivities at about 2 PM, when we three were at Safeway, and caused a fire to start on Alexis's lawn. The frying pan was also employed by the neighbors, this time to put out the fire. The Seattle police department was employed by Alexis to file a nuisance complaint to cover her butt in case the landlady wondered why there was a five-by-twelve scorch mark on her lawn, and while they were here ("Ma'am, are you aware you're not supposed to set your lawn on fire?") Alexis asked where we should watch the fireworks from. They suggested the east shore of the lake, so that's where we went. Through the help of a privately employed security officer, we then discovered a pier that most people didn't know about or notice, yet which was perfectly public and centrally located -- best seats in the house if you don't own a boat. Anecdotally, I heard over eight hundred thousand people were there, eyes focused like mine on the water.

While we waited for the big show to begin, we picnicked on salad and sandwiches, chatted, did Tarot readings, had poking contests, and watched the various illegal private fireworks shows light up the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. But when the real show started and the first glittering flares went up from the barge, the breath was taken away, and it didn't come back until the final explosions twenty minutes later. There were spheres, cubes, smile faces, planets, and stars; the booms had shapes too, but English doesn't have easily accessed words for them. The magnitude of this fireworks show could be measured on the Richter scale. It was a fantastic fucking show. I'll tell you, whatever faults it might have, let no one say America can't paint the sky gold.

The show ended at quarter till eleven, and there was a little traffic, and long story short I'm exhausted from all the cheering and swearing. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow Aviva will say her tearful goodbyes and board a Greyhound bus back to Portland, and sometime soon -- the next day? -- I will say a goodbye of my own, kick patriotism across the curb, and set sail for Vancouver.

The dusty Winnemucca road

I bade a fond farewell to Salt Lake City this morning, but first I set out to explore its greatest remaining mystery: the Great Salt Lake. One would think that it would be impossible to drive past the Great Salt Lake without seeing at least three billboards for boat tours of the lake, but as far as my Googling and inquiries can discover, all the lake's boat tours are either luxury or bankrupt. The best way to experience the lake seemed to be driving across a bridge to Antelope Island, where there's a road that showcases the lake on one side and native flora and fauna on the other, but it would have been two extra hours of driving with nothing to do but gawk at things from the car. I generally like activities better that let me gawk at things from outside the car, so I took a pass on Antelope Island. Instead I pulled off I-80 at a beach (yes, the Great Salt Lake has beaches) and waded out to the water. The interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that you experience it with all five of your senses. The other interesting thing about the Great Salt Lake is that none of those senses can distinguish the lake from the Gulf of Mexico, the coast I'm most familiar with. There is simply no way to tell that this is a lake and not an ocean. Indeed, the early explorers thought they'd reached the Pacific.

Wishful thinking on their part. They still had a ways to go. The western mountains in this country simply do not end! Whenever you crest one, there's another behind it. Sometimes they're craggy peaks, sometimes mesas, sometimes big ol' hills that look like contour maps out of an MMORPG. But there are always more of them. It's a good thing I'm driving primarily to see the country, because if I were driving primarily to reach a destination I'd be frustrated to no end. In fact, I was frustrated today. I turned off the interstate to look for a canyon they advertised. It turned out to be a forty-mile round trip, and so inadequately marked that I never did find what I was looking for. I did hit a prairie dog while looking, though. I don't think it lived. I cried a little bit on my way back to the interstate. I was going a little over the speed limit, and if I'd been going slower I might have stopped in time. It was one of the small, careless tragedies that happen every day. I'm so sorry.

Later I finally reached Winnemucca. Winnemucca is a small town that appears to be built entirely on transient tourism like mine. Small-time casinos are everywhere, poised to rake in the passing traffic. Well, I reasoned, if I want to experience Nevada I have to go to either a casino or a prostitute, and prostitutes are expensive. I got $40 turned into chips. This was my first time gambling and very nearly my first time in a casino. I didn't know the rituals. You pay for your chips in cash, no credit. No blackjack till six. Chip bucket on your lap, not the table. Only one hand on the cards. Scratch the cards on the table to hit, shove 'em under the money to stand. No touching cards other than your first two. Drinks are free while you play. I didn't know any of that stuff, but I walked in knowing there was a lot I didn't know. I still don't know how many of those rules are universal to casinos and how many are specific to Winners Hotel & Casino. What's important is that I overcame my intimidation -- and Winnemucca is an intimidating, masculine town -- for no other reason than to practice courageous living. I didn't do too bad, either! Conservatively, I kept my winnings separate from my principal and left when my $40 was gone. At that point I had $29.50. So I paid $10.50 for a drink, some entertainment, and a bracing memory. Absolutely a fair transaction.

Exhausting the list of things to do in Winnemucca was Sid's Restaurant, sort of a de-chained version of Perkins, walls decorated with everything from framed artwork to My Little Pony coloring book pages. I asked the waitress what her favorite dish on the menu was and got a chicken focaccia sandwich -- which was not at all what I'd been going to order but turned out to be very good! One thing I've learned repeatedly on this trip is that people who know more than I do about an area, or a restaurant, or a culture, are to be treasured; it's through them that I can approach that knowledge. They don't always help, but they almost never hurt. Of course, sometimes I stumble across things on my own, too, and that kind of knowledge is also sweet, like a little secret. Which I promptly blab about to all of you. :)

Over one week of junctions

I began my day in Aurora 5,471 feet above sea level and I'm now ending it in Grand Junction 4,597 feet above sea level. On net I lost about 900 feet. This does not quite tell the whole story. The whole story requires you to know that in between these two cities I passed through Alma, a town of less than two hundred people which is 10,578 feet above sea level. Yes, kids, I crossed the Continental Divide today. Don't think I didn't notice!

Unfortunately, prose is unable to convey the impossibility of the peaks and canyons of the Colorado Rockies to anyone who hasn't been there. Pictures are only slightly better. Lost in clouds though they were on this overcast day, the Rockies captured my eyes whenever I could spare them a glance as I navigated the winding roads. Poor Blackbird couldn't figure out where all the air went and had trouble maintaining her speed on the hills. She'll be happier in California. I don't have many stories from today, as rain limited my outdoor activities and the Rockies don't have a lot of indoor ones, but I do have pictures dating back to Paducah...

My room in Paducah, the first hotel room of the journey. Kazuko reclines on the bed at right. This seems like a really long time ago. I don't have any good pictures of the city.

Tunnel Hill in south Illinois. Longer and mistier than it looks. I also have a picture taken from inside the tunnel; all you can see is mist and some light at the other end.

Independence Temple's spire. The temple is the site of Jesus's Second Coming according to the Mormons. They may not believe in evolution, but I guess they believe in architecture. Magnificent.

A rose from the garden across from Jacob's flat in Kansas City. Jacob taught me how to use my camera's close-focus feature. It's the button that looks like a flower, appropriately enough.

A very relaxed raccoon at the zoo in Oakley, Kansas. He probably wanted to be asleep, but tourists like me kept interrupting him.

This prairie dog, on the other hand, was bright and alert, as were his hundreds of cousins swarming the zoo!

Wiley's mother tends her lake garden in Aurora, minutes after being terrified by a snake. The native snakes are apparently eating her fish. It's a dilemma.

We close with three views of the Rocky Mountains.

From Panorama Point on the Denver side.

From Colorado Route 9 in the midst of the Continental Divide.

From Grand Junction on the west side, where the mountains have given way to mesas and the West proper has begun.

I have plenty more photos, but these tell the story as well as any ten photos can. Time will tell what I photograph tomorrow on my Sunday pilgrimage to Salt Lake City!

I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore

This post comes to you from Aurora, Colorado, just outside Denver. My hostesses this evening are my college friend Wiley and her mother, who -- like all my hosts so far without exception -- have been wonderful to me and ready to help in any way they can. In fact, I'm going to stay with them tomorrow night as well. This traveling has left me breathless! I need a one-day "weekend" when I don't have to drive five hours and can just recover from my adventures so far, and tomorrow is it. I expect I'll still be blogging, though.

Today started way back in Hays. I ate a continental breakfast of oatmeal and then set out for Fort Hays to see if I could uncover the reason a town of 20,000 grew up in rural Kansas so far from a large city. My instinct was borne out on this one! It turns out the town grew up around the fort, as the wives and children of the officers and enlisted men tried to carve lives for themselves out of what was then (in the barely postbellum United States) the frontier. The fort in turn was established as a staging area to protect the railroads from Indian raids. It was named after General Alexander Hays, a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg recently dead at the Civil War's Battle of the Wilderness. The tour of the fort was itself interesting -- it was much, much better to be an officer than an enlisted man, by the way -- but the reason it will stick in my memory was that a very old stranger from the Wichita area who I hadn't even spoken to went ahead and paid my $3 admission without so much as asking first. We chatted during the tour. He's a pleasant guy who seemed like he would really rather be sitting in an armchair than taking a walking tour, but he was in good humor. He left a big stack of printed cards under my windshield wiper evangelizing the Gospel of Matthew -- a stack that I've duly put in the souvenir bin to remind me of him and the fort.

In between Hays and Aurora I was intrigued by roadway signs advertising the "world's largest prairie dog" and various other prairie animals. On their cue I pulled over in a tiny town that turned out to be Oakley, Kansas. The zoo there was full of native fauna -- coyotes, foxes, buffalo, rattlesnakes -- and the kicker was that it was built atop a live prairie dog town. The whole grounds were studded with holes that prairie dogs darted in and out of constantly. They are adorable creatures. (The "world's largest" is a six-foot plastic molding of a prairie dog in the back of the zoo.) I was a little worried about whether the animals were well cared for in this fairly primitive roadside facility, but I didn't let it stop me from enjoying my first sight of many of these animals. Afterward I went across the street and lunched at a surprisingly yummy buffet before getting back on the road.

I'm not ready to write about Aurora yet, though there's plenty to say! I'm tired and need to go to bed. What I can say is that one's first sight of the Rocky Mountains as one approaches over the eastern Colorado hills -- when you first become sure that what you're seeing are snow-capped peaks and not low-hanging clouds -- is magical and nearly traffic-stopping. This first sight was another milestone on the journey, one more reminder that I'm far from home with no way of getting back but to drive myself and with every intention of venturing further still!

Northwest can do it in seven hours

Over the weekend I read "The Essential Lewis and Clark," a book-length compilation of excerpts from that duo's journals. Incredible. If it were fiction it would be unbelievable because the determination of every member of this thirty-odd man expedition was superhuman. If the grizzly bear was still charging with five lead balls in its lungs, they shot a sixth! If there was no food, they hung on till there was! If the wind wasn't strong enough to move the boats up the Missouri, they got out and bloody well pushed! These guys contended with more hardship every day than I'll face for my entire life. And yet it's notable that no one in the expedition died of starvation, exposure, trauma, Indian attacks, or being eaten by wildlife. One guy randomly died of disease practically before St. Louis was past the horizon. That's it. Everyone else lived. They vomited up their stomachs because of unfamiliar roots the Nez Perce gave them, they came within a hairsbreadth of drowning when an unexpected rain poured torrentially into the gully where they took shelter, they spent a winter practically unprotected from the elements on the north Pacific coast -- but they lived. They lived, they all worked together for over two years under the worst possible conditions, they did it largely without sacrificing their integrity -- and they found a water route through North America, not that it ever got much use afterwards. Strongly recommended for anyone who wants to know what a journey across the country used to be like two hundred years ago, or for that matter anyone who likes whopping good adventure yarns.

After reading the story of their journey, it's hard not to regard myself as pretty damn lucky in the resources I have on the journey I'm about to undertake. I won't have to push my boat; there are railroad tracks and an interstate system that connect the coasts. I won't have to eat my horse or dog; there are grocery stores every few miles, and trains have a dining car. And if I think talking to strangers is scary, at least they speak my language and I can be pretty sure they're not going to rob or scalp me. Lewis and Clark set an impossible example for a weak modern human like me to follow, but I can look to them for inspiration anyway and take a few lessons. Come prepared. Treat those you meet kindly. And if a grizzly bear attacks you, run into the nearest river.

Semper probe in extremum

I did my taxes today. I mentioned yesterday that I'm something of a procrastinator, and filing my taxes is no exception. My 1040 had been sitting in a pile on the floor for about two months, getting covered up with and superseded by other mail and paperwork, and it wasn't until I realized I no longer knew where it was that I decided it was time to sit down with it. Even then I put it off until today, a short day at work which I was determined to put to good use. Because I'm self-employed I have to file two schedules in addition to my 1040, and of course they refer back and forth to each other and it's chaotic, but actually the whole process of filling them out only took an hour or so. I guess that's the payoff for keeping a careful account ledger during the year; when you need your revenue and expenses they're already calculated and ready to be plugged in.

Anyway, between filing taxes and watching Persepolis I spent a good deal of the day thinking about America. Or feeling about America, I suppose would be more accurate. I've spent my entire life here, apart from a week abroad here and there; it's easy to forget that the United States is one of a select few countries that Lover's Lanes could ever happen in. Other countries are too small, or too insular, or too uniform, or they don't have developed interstate systems, or their governments regulate travel or the press or for that matter love. Even America regulates love to some degree, of course -- but I can interview someone about how laws against gay marriage affect his relationship, and while my country still says he isn't entitled to the same stability and protection as a straight man, at least I'm permitted to write about it. That's the value of free speech and of democracy. When there is injustice, you can change minds and change hearts, and in the long term that is enough to change the law. To hell with "in God we trust;" our motto could be "we get it right, eventually." Semper probe in extremum. The story of our history to date, and hopefully far into the future.

And yet we're so diverse. It's breathtaking to remember that this is a country that unifies the Appalachian Mountains with the Mojave Desert, New York City with Oklahoma City, and a million points in between. I really can travel for a day and end up in a different culture. Yes, the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us, but which do you think we notice first? That's part of the reason the idea of Lover's Lanes has such appeal to me: love is one thing I can count on to be universal, though how we feel it and how we act on it might not be. I want to hear the stories of someone whose life has been different from mine, who seems to bear no resemblance to me, and see if I can find in the tales of such an exotic person themes I know from my own years. I want to find the common humanity that underlies our experiences. My subjects and I are all American. Can I discover our united states?