I spent the summer driving from Mexico to New York and back again - a quarter of my year in a slow-moving van traveling across the south and northeast - making me, I think, an expert on the state of the US. I know people claim to be expert about things that they know nothing about - Donald Trump does it all the time - so you may wonder why you should give a hoot about anything I have to say. Well, you shouldn’t. As John Steinbeck writes in Travels with Charley, his reflections on a three month trip around the US circa 1960, two different people can spend the same two weeks in the same location and come away with two completely different impressions of where they’ve been. So consider my opinions as similar to a review of an AirBnb. One person may rate a place a five and another may rate it a one, but you still consider each point of view. Just like you would for an Amazon or Yelp review. Then you go ahead and ignore the chucklehead that wrote the review and do what you were going to do anyway.
Trucks, Trucks, and more Trucks
I didn’t see a lot of these on the road, but everyone acts like they are driving a race car.
I drove nearly 6,000 miles. Three thousand to a cozy little lake in the Catskill Mountains of New York and the same amount back to my home in the desert highlands of central Mexico. During my often long days of driving, I reflected on some of the things I saw people doing in cars around me. First of all, people drive fast. I’ve heard it said that people in Mexico consider life to be cheap so act recklessly when behind the wheel. But the speed with which people drive in the US has to lead me to the same conclusion about that country. Posted speed limit signs are almost uniformly ignored, except for in the small towns that pop-up like pimples on the highways that connect places, and where the local constable, like in a cartoon, is hiding behind a billboard along the side of the road ready to catch out-of-towners too slow to ease off the gas. It must be that people think they are invincible inside of a car, that despite breaking every road rule meant to protect them, the scientific principle that states if you are driving fast and hit something, you will die, doesn’t apply. In this I know they are wrong. My evidence is the dozens of crosses often planted at the spot where someone had a roadside tragedy.
I also noticed that there are a lot of cars on the road, and the preferred type of vehicle is the pick-up truck, followed closely behind, too closely in most cases, by the SUV. At one point in Texas I counted eight pick-ups in a row that passed me, followed by a four-door sedan, followed by six more pickups and SUVs. And that was the only time I thought to keep track. I don’t know what is the love affair with pick-ups. They don’t have the same utility as in Mexico, where you can put passengers in the bed.
But how many people are on the road and how fast they all drive isn’t what I meant to talk about. What I meant to reflect on was the interstates. Generally, I avoid them. This puts me on what I quaintly like to consider back roads, but which are really the precursors to the interstates. That is, these are the roads that connected New Jersey to Pennsylvania, or Louisiana to Texas, before those massive asphalt scars came to rule our means of travel from place to place. Take US Route 1, for example. Prior to Interstate 95 connecting New Jersey to Florida, my grandmother told me it was Route 1, with all its traffic lights, storefronts, hotels, and life going on beside the road that she and my grandfather drove each winter. Route 11 runs the length of western Virginia and well on into Tennessee, passing through dozens of towns both large and small. Now it runs next to, under, and over Interstate 81 - with the dozens of towns still planted by its side, but much less visited.
The primary reason I skip the interstate is to avoid the loud, fast-moving, and wind-pushing truck traffic. Cresting a rise on I-81 with southwestern Virginia’s summer green forest spread prettily to either side, I counted 14 long-haul freight trucks eating up the next mile of pavement that stretched to the horizon. The trucks carry heavy equipment, trailers filled with goods, cars, prefab homes, and everything you and your neighbor order on Amazon. But when I forsake the faster travel time of the interstate for the country road, what do I find? Trucks! It seems even truck drivers want to avoid the truck traffic on the interstate. US Highway 202 can be filthy with flatbeds loaded with construction equipment moving from New Jersey to Philadelphia, while logging trucks disturb the peace on Highway 29 in Virginia, and freight trucks blow like tornadoes on straight, flat Highway 59 in Texas. There seems to be no escape. The delivery of what we want and need is relentless.
Nevertheless, I stuck to back roads as much as I could. But for all of the charm of the small town in rural Mississippi, the fact that someone deemed it necessary to put a traffic light on every corner could cause someone in a hurry, which all of the US seems to be, back to the interstates.
Confederate Culture
The Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice and equality is gaining momentum due to recent killings of unarmed African-Americans by law enforcement. As an offshoot of that awakening, governments, including the US Government, are being petitioned to change the names of forts, monuments and memorials, schools and other public buildings, which are named after people that have left a legacy of racism. While the news has focused primarily on the need to change things named for Confederate generals and politicians, there are other public figures who were honored in naming ceremonies despite their racist positions. T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Virginia, who openly advocated for racial segregation in schools during his three decade tenure as superintendent of schools ending in the 1960’s, and who now has the local high school named after him where more than 30% of the current student population is African-American is an example. Another is former US Surgeon General Thomas Parran, for whom the University of Pittsburgh named (and recently unnamed) its school of health. Dr. Parran promised free health care to hundreds of African-American men with syphilis and then failed to provide it so he could study the effects of leaving the disease untreated. Those effects are not X-Ray vision and the ability to leap tall buildings.
Even George Washington, the so-called ‘Father of our Country’ and a seemingly universally beloved figure, has come under fire for his slave ownership.
What became evident to me driving through the Deep South states is that a lot of things are named after Confederate generals and politicians and that changing the names, even if there was an appetite in those states to do so, would be an endless proposition. For every John Mosby Trail, there is a Jefferson Davis Highway. For each Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, there is a Burr Ferry Confederate Park - the latter proudly flying side-by-side the flags of Louisiana and the Confederacy. And the things and places named Lee or Stonewall or Jackson are too numerous to count. Gosh, Virginia even has a shrine to General Jackson’s arm (which was buried separately from his body for reasons we don’t need to get into here.) What is the fascination with remembering the people who fought in this war that is now concluded over 150 years ago? Aside from the sad truth that some people still consider the principles that the South fought to maintain worth keeping alive, I don’t rightly know. The only thing I can come up with is machismo.
I look at it like rooting for the local sports team. Maybe there are some people in Alabama who really are proud of what some regiment from that state did in the war, separate and apart from any reference to preserving the “peculiar institution,” and wants to honor the courage of said regiment by flying the Confederate flag from the bed of their pick-up trucks.
Men with guns is another common theme. How many stores and signs did I see promoting guns and hunting? A lot. My favorite was this message painted on the side of a barn in Tennessee - “Jesus is Lord. We sell guns.” I wish I had stopped to take a picture. It’s worth noting that men aren’t the only ones feeling like a big man. One very friendly park ranger with whom I stopped to chat about hiking and travel and children, told me she always carried a concealed weapon, but only with eight rounds. “If I can’t solve the problem with eight rounds,” she said. “Then I can’t solve the problem.”
For the most part, I think, people are using their guns to hunt, not solve the types of problems that need bullets to solve them. But even if you have no problem shooting an animal, I’m not sure why, if it wasn’t a predator making off with your livestock, you would have a need to do so. It’s probably not the case that hunters need to put food on the table for six children and a wife like Davy Crockett. So, it’s got to be machismo. Sitting behind a desk (or on a tractor) doesn’t invoke the spirit of the American pioneer. But I can’t deny that going out into the woods to commune with nature redeems the soul from the corruptions of civilized life. I try to do it as often as I can. The difference is, my aim is not to shoot and kill something.
Mexico
The 1985 VW camper van I was driving across the country proved a great conversation starter. A lot of people used to own one, plan to own one, or were just curious. Often, after listening to their campervan related story, they would note the out of state plates and ask me where I was going. Few people know how to respond when you tell them you are going to Mexico. Most often the response is silence. The other common response was to ask whether it was safe. Occasionally someone would ask where in Mexico. It seems a lot of people have been to Cancun or Cabo San Lucas. Only one person knew San Miguel.
Lots of people I met wanted to talk about the van. Few people wanted to talk about Mexico.
Regarding safety, I responded truthfully: the media tends to report the sensational acts of violence that do occur in Mexico and that is what people take away, but Mexico is as safe as any place else I’ve ever been. Yes, there’s crime and violence, but it’s a different type of crime and violence. There hasn’t been a single mass shooting at a school or public gathering in Mexico in the three years we’ve lived here. (Ed. Note - a benefit of COVID-19, there haven’t been any school shootings in the US since March.) On the other hand, no gas station attendant in the US ever plotted an elaborate ruse to overcharge me so he could pocket the extra twenty dollars. One Mexican woman living in Laredo, TX told me she had not driven five minutes across the border to Nuevo Laredo (or any place in Mexico) in twenty-five years because she was afraid of being kidnapped or killed. She didn’t mention, and neither did I, an August 2019 El Paso mass shooting at a Walmart that targeted Latinos, a mass shooting at a Houston-area high school earlier that summer, or multiple recent church shootings in the state, including the deadliest mass shooting in Texas. You choose your own poison, I suppose.
My father is anxious for us to move back to the US, whether for safety reasons or to be closer he hasn’t said. But few people I spoke to during the summer were happy with their jobs. I was given the middle finger multiple times for some unintentional transgression I had committed that offended the finger giver. And no one can seem to agree on anything except what to watch on Netflix. In one community I drove through in Tennessee some wiseguy had carved out the T from the Trump signs that adorned certain lawns. A vote for ⃞ rump is a vote for a worsening of the country and a vote for Biden, I’m afraid, will only make things incrementally better. It’s not an environment I am in a hurry to reconnect with on a day-to-day basis. But I do enjoy driving across it.