A road map atlas, a first aid kit, a portable stove, cooking utensils, plastic cutlery, a lantern, two flashlights, three sleeping bags, three pillows, three cameras, three laptops, three laptop cases, three moleskine notebooks, pens, two digital voice recorders and a transcription machine, three cell phones, three iPods, two car stereo adapters, two baseball gloves and a ball, a satellite radio, two folding chairs, two pairs of binoculars, four black trash bags, a bottle of Febreeze, a cylinder of handwipes, toilet paper, paper towels, rain gear, a freshly inflated spare tire, three suitcases full of clothes, and enough books to prevent us from glancing out the window once, including Democracy in America (Tocqueville), Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), Roughing It (Twain), The American Idea (various), Great Plains (Frasier), Somewhere in America (Singer), Deep Souths (Harris), The Dispossessed (Jones), and Mystery Train (Marcus). I suppose if we fail to learn anything about America on our own, at least we’ll have our own rolling reference library.
Anyway, all of this is crammed into the back of our modest chariot–a slightly dinged, forest-green 1997 Toyota Camry with Massacussetts tags and a bumper sticker urging other motorists to drink Vermont beer–tightly enough so that we may not unearth the toilet tissue until California. Miraculously, there is enough room to seat three comfortably, with room leftover for the several dozen ten-gallon hats I planned to purchase no matter what.
We left early this morning, if you consider 10:43 a.m. early—which, as of graduation, I do. Our moms saw us off, fawning and posing us for photos as though we were going to prom. We headed west on MA-2 and picked up Rachel in Deerfield. Her mother was no less doting, packing us sandwiches and three large, impractical glass bottles of sparkling water, which Rachel packed among our pillows to prevent disaster.
We took I-90 into New York before cutting south on the serpentine Taconic State Parkway, curling through the Berkshires and clouds of dandelion spores, and past the remains of shredded car tires and some of the area’s less nimble rodents. I fell asleep somewhere south of Fishkill, and when I woke up we had traded the state forests and rolling green hills of upstate New York for the towering suspension bridges and serrated high-rises of western Manhattan. “DONALD TRUMP,” read a sign along the side of the road, and I had to squint to see the superscript, “Hudson River Beautification Project, Sponsored by.”
New York City, a city of giants, where the landscapes are vertical and your best bet for seeing a horizon is to look straight up.
Posted from 62nd and West End, New York City.
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