Mileage: 2793 miles.
Location: Florence, South Carolina.
Traffic tickets: 0
States visited: 9
Mood: :)
Surreal: meeting with 'The lady in the Dark'
I had no choice but to give up my ambitions of traveling the Florida panhandle. I'm pressed for time. The panhandle would have deprived me of more than 72 hours, which is a long long time. As such, I spent Sunday in Brunswick, Georgia. Historically handicapped (nothing of interest), I couldn't stick there longer. James Reynolds (remember him? The trucker) had claimed that "even if you go at 100m/hr in Atlanta, somebody will pass you." Well, I'm not going there. A word on life on the road: I have gotten used to it now, I mean I now flow with the rhythm. I usually drive an average of 250 miles a day. Sleep in a motel/hotel (sometimes). I generally spend most of my time running around the city/town that I visit. Seeing new places, is an awesome experience. I see a new place everyday. You can imagine the toll it has taken on my capacity to navigate the places. The country, is very big. Sometimes, it feels like I'm in another country, different from the one Iowa calls home.
"So, how did you learn to read maps?," enquired trucker David Jameson. When I saw him disembark from his red-headed 'diversified carriers', 18 wheeler, clutching a yellow atlas in his hands, I thought he was just one other guy taking a break from driving. He was completely lost. "Which exit should I take to get to Hardeeville?," he asked me. I was glad to help him. I remember in one of my journal entries I had said something about how it is a loss that they don't teach geography in some high schools coz it produced high school graduates incapable of using an atlas? Mr. Jameson, was handicapped when it came to reading maps.
The USS Yorktown. One of my objectives of going to Mobile, Al was to get a chance to get onboard a real aircraft carrier. I arrived in the city late, and NPS had already closed USS Alabama. Unbeknownst to me, the USS Yorktown was waiting for me in Charleston. I was filled with glee to get onboard the Yorktown today. Big, is how I would describe the ship. You see, growing up as a boy, I read stories about the men in the navy. These stories inspired me. Seeing the deck, the engine room, the mess, the captain's quarters, etc was an experience I will never forget. It took me three hours to see every inch of the ship! To cap off the adventure, I got into a submarine, and a navy destroyer! Consult my webpage for new pictures.
I walked the historic district in the city. It was largely quiet, apart from a sprinkling of tourists who were roaming about. Seems to have a black majority, and is surrounded by colleges. I saw a lot of college students. Unlike St. Louis the like, there was life on the streets. The downtown area struck me as benign, which makes me wonder about the claim the officer (below) had made to me earlier on in the day. I saw Fort Sumter, the Aquarium and the like. It is expensive to partake in some of these events, especially since most of them are not under the National Park Service (NPS). When I come to think of it, some of these historical sites seems to be more driven by commercial ambition, than by the need to preserve them for future generations. I do pray I'm wrong.
The highway patrol officer, and lady in the night. South Carolina, is a breathtaking place. The people seem genuinely concerned about the welfare of their visitors, especially tourists. Since I been here, I have heard encounters which showed that people here care. The first, I don't know what to call it; care/concern or racial profiling? I will let you decide. Taking a nap in the car on a Rest Area just outside Charleston, I was rudely awakened when somebody knocked on my window. The person turned out to be a state trooper, in the company of his timid, young inexperienced assistant. Without giving me a chance to recover, he said "May I see some ID please." Half asleep, I grouped around for my ID and deposited it in his hands. He asked his young assistant to have check my record in the country and south Carolina. The young assistant, visibly confused etc, couldn't do it. I think it was his first day on the job. To cut the long story short, the officer proceed to assert that, "We saw you sleeping, with your driver's side door propped open. People would try to rob you. You should be careful Sir."
The other day, in the dead of the night, I decided to stop and take a nap. A few hours later, somebody knocked on my window and said "Do you need help?" I think it was a lady. The encounter with her, seems surreal. Maybe it is just a figment of my imagination? But I swear I saw her vanish into the darkness. I have decided to call her "Lady in the Night." These and other incidents compel me to designate the Carolinians as caring people. I guess that’s why they call the state "Smiles Faces. Beautiful Places."
I guess I'm tired of the south? Maybe. This part of the trip is called 'the eastern seaboard.' Tomorrow I will push forth north. I will make a quick stop in Durham, see the chairman of the Duke University medical school (he said to stop by). And just nose around, but my real target is Richmond, Virginia. As you might have already noticed, it's getting difficult to send you my journal entries. I do hope that I won't stop completely. Keep thy fingers crossed! I haven't even reached the half-way point of my journey.
Wondering how I'm choosing the places to visit? Um, it's all got to do with my past. You see, I have read a million articles on the US. For example, I remember reading stuff about South Carolina's sea islands. I never forget things like that. Seeing pictures of the places, I would always dream of visiting them. I once read about NYC's Chinatown. "A e I o u," the new illegal immigrants are learning English," the author in one of the articles wrote. These Chinese, smuggled into the US were trying to make ends meet. I read about an Italian wedding in Little Italy, Boston. Etc. From these millions of stories I have read, a pictures of the places I wanna visit etches itself out. However, I'm opportunistic; if I find a interesting place, I always stop by! Below, read the theme of my trip:
Title: The ABCs of America.
Subtitle: Learning the ABCs of America; ‘A’ for made in America; . ‘B’ for blue jeans + baseball. ‘C’ for Cowboys + consumption. ‘D’ for democracy and dollars. ‘E’ for ‘energy use + Elvis’. ‘F’ for federal government. ‘G’ for………..
How does one try to conceptualize a big country like America without getting lost somewhere along the way? Like primary school, I believe that one can successfully manage to define America if they go to the basics. I remember in primary school my grade one teacher would put us through our paces
[1] everyday of class. And so the whole class came to understand the basics of writing, in other words the ‘ABC’s of literature. Consequently, the only way to know America is by learning the ‘ABCs’ of the country. These comprise the people, the history, the place, the culture and beliefs in America.
I grew up in Maranda, a small isolated village in southern Zimbabwe. It is a place where the outside world has failed to penetrate; people still live the way they used to live way before the British came. Even the coming of independence in 1980 failed to alter they way they live. The high school is still fifteen miles away, same as the clinic. Eighty-five percent of the populace in the village is still illiterate and people still die of curable diseases like Malaria and TB, these diseases, among others, contributing to the short life expectancy in the village.
However, despite this scenario, the influence of the land ‘beyond’ the sea called America is felt in the village. This influence manifests itself in various shapes, sounds and images. At one point it takes the shape of somebody wearing a tattered blue jean (probably a ‘hand-me-down’ from some relative who went to the city). Next, its in the music or the news on public radio; You hear the radio saying ‘Minister of Information last night said all the economic woes facing the country are a result of the sanctions bestowed on us by America’….which most villagers take to heart as true. Sometimes, when you visit the not-so-well-stocked school library, the influence takes the form of ninety percent of the books there, donated by well-wishers living in America. Back in the day, I used to wonder: How come in this library I can see a copy of the preamble to the US declaration of independence but not the constitution of Zimbabwe?
To define America, I read everything I could find, the history of the landing of the Puritans in Plymouth 1606, the founding of Harvard College in 1636 all the way through the Boston Tea Party and the beginning of the American Revolution. The War of 1812, slavery and JB Grinnell’s beseech “Go west young man, go and grow up with the nation” only saved to whet my quest to know more about this nation. The more I learnt about America, the more my desire to see the places where these events that shaped the young nation took place.
As I progressed in school, I came to wonder incessantly what somebody would say if I were to ask them a simple question; ‘What is America?’
I imagined a round-table discussion of people I know on the question of ‘what is America
[2]…..
It is a June night, the five people I know most have gathered in my Uncle’s thatched hut in order to delineate America. Outside, it is very cold; a bone-chilling easterly wind that descended on the village a week ago has forced villagers to dig deep in their huts looking for warm clothes. Tonight, even the owls that normally hoot the villagers to sleep are quiet. The hut is semi-dark, and the fire close to the door is keeping the cold at bay. The flickering embers of the fire are making the shadows of the five men sitting at the table dance weirdly on the earthen walls of the spacious hut.
“Ah, let’s see. America is a super-power that was defeated in Vietnam,” Mr. Zhou, kicks off the discussion, displaying the information/propaganda spoon-fed to him by his superiors when he was a communist-backed guerilla fighting the British in Zimbabwe during the 1970s. The other three men, Mr. Chihota, Samuel and Paradza
[3] sitting at the table - which I have furnished with their favorite brew; Chingoto
[4] grunt in consent, for they have learnt not to argue with Mr. Chihota; Once he takes a position on something, it is useless to argue with him, for he won’t budge an inch. Mr. Chihota, a stout man in his late sixties, with a broad chest, grey hair, a full set of yellowish teeth, eyes sunk in their sockets, his overall demeanor showing that he has seen it all is my beloved uncle. “I agree with you Zhou, but I think what really defines America is Washington D.C. It has everything; Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Institution, the Vietnam memorial, Capital Building, you name it,” he says taking a sip of the Chingoto. “Oh wait wait, I got it, I think the thing that’s mostly defines America, is the American dollar. Its official currency in many countries, including our neighbor Mozambique,” Samuel pitches in. He is a black-marker money exchanger out in Johannesburg where he plies his trade as an illegal immigrant. Paradza, who got the taste of rock music when he worked at a commercial farm hand back in the day raises his hand and says, “Stop! Aren’t we forgetting something? What about the King of Rock himself, from Memphis? I’m talking about Elvis Presley. Do you know that, on the Space-crafts Voyager I & II, in addition to many other sounds, they included a track by Elvis?” ……and so the discussion carries on into the night.
Definitions of America like those portrayed above fail to capture the place, the people, and the feel of the real America. One cannot define America by looking at a single place and time. The question then becomes “What does Trymore think, how does he define America?” I believe that any attempt at the definition must be a holistic approach. What makes America also defines America. The beggar on the street in New York, the gothic house somewhere in New England, Chinatowns all over, Broadway, Gettysburg, Whitehouse, Little Havana, Yellowstone………. The list is endless.
Consequently, it follows that I hope to visit most of the places that I have mentioned in my itinerary. I completely understand that visiting all the places that define America would take me a life time and is beyond what the Fischlowitz grant entails. A cursory analysis of my tentative travel itinerary makes one realize that over the period of thirty days, I will attempt to visit each and every place in Eastern half of the country, places that I deem to be ‘American Icons.’
You might be wondering why I chose the train as my mode of transportation. The railroad is an American hallmark. When the Union Pacific Railroad was completed in 1869, it opened up the west and heralded the birth of an economic super-power. The railroad bolstered the Homestead Act… In short, spending a month on the railroad will make me get a feel of the country and I will go a long in giving a sense of how to define America.
If I’m nominated for the travel fellowship, completing all my travel plans will help learn what I call the ‘ABCs’ of America. I hope that by the time I come back in Grinnell, if one of you guys asks me to define America, I will have something to tell you, from the first hand information that I would have gathered over the summer.
[1] Paces, these included reciting the vowels ‘a e i o u’ and the alphabet ‘a b c d e f…’
[2] The following few paragraphs narrates such a fictional situation.
[3] Tawanda, the fifth person, couldn’t make it. He claimed he suddenly developed a running stomach during the afternoon today.
[4] I specifically chose this brew, because I know they love it and would help ‘loosen their tongues’ J.
I have learnt that, if you keep the engine of a car running, it will last forever!
I never knew that driving at a slow speed could be so joyous. I understand that now. I call it the 'joy of driving slower'
I went to a pub saving food/ and beer of course. They had live music. That day, they had a folk singer, who looked more like Willie Nelson. It was a one man show. Although the food was not great, the music made up for it. This brings me to the topic: The world & Beer. From the research I have done, beer is used all over the world, more so in Australia, the US and Europe. Beer has become a past-time. I don't remember people back in Zim drinking beer like this. Anyway, the issue of alcohol, I will tackle it later. Coz, when I come to think of it, alcohol is part of what defines America too.
