Heroes

Eventually, we grew impatient with the interstate. We wanted to see the country, but here the trees walled in the highway and blocked our view. On the rare occasion that this monotony was broken, it was done so by buildings that managed to be even less exciting than trees—flat-topped, windowless, behemoths devoted to the manufacture of cabinets or something equally mundane. Just over the Pennsylvania border we exited, arbitrarily, to US-322 and a town called Woolwich, where we stopped for bagels at a place called The Commodore, named after a nearby bridge. The bridge was named for a local Revolutionary War hero who may or may not have enjoyed bagels.

I’d been to plenty of bagel shops, but this was the first one I’d ever seen that had a used book give-and-go. A number of worn paperbacks populated the rack, mostly suspense thrillers and trashy romance novels. Some boasted “NATIONAL BESTSELLER” labels in letters that dwarfed their titles—to maximize sales, naturally. After all, the pull of a good title is no substitute the pull of public opinion. If people didn’t know what everyone else is reading, how would they know what to read?

We were among farms. Roughly equal in geometry and expanse, the fields varied in color and texture: Some had tilled, brown soil; others had tire-tracked yellow dirt. Some had close-cropped grass as dense and lustrous as fairways; others had short, prepubescent plants, sometimes lashed to optimistically tall wooden stakes. By a narrow  road that broke off US-322 at a right angle, we saw a sign that read “Hero Tournament.” We turned, thrilled that we might stumble upon some sort of a joust. But after a ways we found no heroes or adoring crowds; only a dilapidated auction theatre, peeling in the hot afternoon sun.

We drove up the road to a hardware store. It was a True Value franchise, but had the rustic exterior of an old general store, including a sign on the door that invited us to “kindly step in.” We obliged and were greeted by a suit of armor—an undersized and decidedly ridiculous-looking suit of armor, but a suit of armor nonetheless. When he heard us asking around about the old auction theatre, a man spoke up behind us. He was an employee, probably about 50, with a light-brown goatee and tattoos covering the parts of his arms that his golden-yellow True Value polo did not. His nametag said “Willie.”

“It used to be a place where growers would send big trucks full of produce out around the back,” he said. “And folks would be sitting on the steps holding paddles, and would bid on the trucks. I know ’cause one summer I wasn’t working, and I drove a truck for a guy. That was in 1974. Nowadays, they just have a flower show over there once a year.”

Rachel asked him if he knew anything about a Hero Tournament. Willie told us the competition was not any sort of mythic clash of titans, but a golf tournament held yearly to honor the area’s best businessman. This year’s “hero” just so happened to be Willie’s boss, the True Value franchisee.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” Willie said, “you see that piece of junk over there?”

He gestured toward the suit of armor by the door.

“He bought that…after the tournament there’s a dinner, right, and there’s an auction, and whoever bids on that gets it for a year.” Willie’s boss had won it with a bid of $550.

It seemed a bit steep for something I could imagine selling for $10 at a garage sale. But then, the money from the auction was being donated to a good cause: to rebuild the town clock in honor of a recently deceased mayor.

Posted from the Caribou Coffee Shop, corner of 17th and L, Washington, D.C.

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Modernity’s outposts

Exiting our host’s Upper West Side apartment yesterday was like stepping out of an icebox and into an oven. The morning heat had us surrounded, beating down from above and rising from sidewalks and subway grates below, and we did not stick around to see it mature. We located the Lincoln Tunnel by defying two misleading detour arrows, one of which pointed in the opposite direction of the tunnel and the other pointing in a different but equally incorrect direction. Traffic was light, and we soon crossed into Northern New Jersey, “the embroidery capital of the world,” according to one billboard. The city gradually faded into the haze until all we could see were cranes doting on unfinished skyscrapers while finished ones pointed the way toward heaven.

We passed Jersey City, which Ben told us was one of the most diverse cities in the world. “One of those places CNN will go to if they want to get a polling sample that represents as much of the country as they can,” he said. I wondered how much we would save on gas money by taking the network’s lead and confining our search for America to the Jersey City limits. I cannot wait to see the rest of the country and judge the resemblance for myself.

The next stretch of highway did not resemble the classic, amber-waves-of-grain vision of America—in fact, it barely resembled the planet earth. Every few miles, it seemed, the unassuming landscape would open up to reveal what appeared to be a moon bases. Intricate networks of pipes connected large white globes and even larger round-topped cylinders, huddling in clusters among ominous smokestacks and spindly-legged towers. On closer inspection, these complexes were not extraterrestrial outposts but industrial units. Bearing esoteric titles such as “Linden Co-Generation Plant,” they had been relegated to the outskirts of civilization and seemed utterly devoid of life, yet probably essential to modern living. Still, all that appeared to connect these wastelands to the human world were the power lines. These hung suspended from the outstretched arms of electrical towers, which marched single-file toward the horizon, bent under their burdens like the sons of Atlas.

Posted from the car, idling in front of a residence with an unguarded wireless network, Tenleytown, Washington, D.C.

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