From Idaho: The hotel is great – so glad I got a courtyard facing room. Had a great time in the hot tub chatting with those two old Navy buddies and their wives (one couple local and one visiting). Talking about kids and lives. At one point, the older wife said “we all just have to put aside our differences and realize how much we have in common.” Later, the kid said “people are so friendly and nice, I can feel the ‘Seattle Chill’ thawing the further East we go.” The kid also said “those guys are swingers you know,” and I scoffed until we saw them all rolling out of the same hotel room in the morning.
From a “city” in Montana: The quotes are because this particular city has a population of about 1600 people and not a single chain fast food place. No Starbucks, no McDonalds. Just local restaurants and coffee shop / diners with excellent reviews. We’re in a gem of a Motor Inn that looks like it leapfrogged directly from mid-Century with a large and spotless room.
Had a great chat with the owners about the housing crisis that Covid visited on all these tiny Montana towns. Every rental sold to rich, out-of-state buyers sight unseen. No housing to be had and house prices inflated beyond all reason. Mine workers staying in the hotel for 2-year contract stints. Help wanted signs in every tiny business and it’s not that people don’t want to work, it’s that there’s nowhere to live, so they had to leave town (think on that). I could live in a town like this, but where? Hot tip though, apparently all the rich coastal buyers weren’t ready for the Montana winters and it might be possible to start scoring deals as they sell. But prices will never go all the way back down. They never do.
From not even a city in Wyoming: Even one-star hotels are fine when they’re clean and have an amazing location right on the river. In the morning, under the eve outside our door, we saw a tiny bat sleeping. Travel messes up your schedule and digestion, so dinner was Campbells Soup cups heated in the microwave. But I bought a bag of popcorn for our showing of Brokeback Mountain (because of course we did). Yes, I cried, but even before that, Wyoming seems to have brought out the strong emotions. Venus Retrograde as experienced through a cross country road trip.
Devil’s Tower was absolutely amazing and worth a visit. Something immanent and powerful there (also, side note, Close Encounters is completely unrealistic, you need belay and climbing gear to really meet the aliens).
From the smallest town yet, in South Dakota: This hotel might have rooms by the hour (so much red neon – Rooooooxanne – and the rags in the nightstand “for your convenience”), but we don’t care as long as it’s clean. It was also the cheapest hotel, under $100. The trick is to find the hotels without prices listed on Google, but with excellent reviews (“so clean” “hidden gem” “almost don’t want to review so it doesn’t get booked up”). Some of them didn’t even have websites and none of them were listed on any of the ripoff 3rd-party travel sites. When you call and they flip through a book to see if they have a room, when they can’t take a credit card on the phone, when you have to fill out a little paper card and they hand you an actual room key from a little hook behind the counter — those are the best. The bar across the street (AKA the only game in town) didn’t even bother to card the kid, so we enjoyed burgers and beers in the land of the free. We did not order Bud Light.
We took our time through South Dakota, knowing there was lots to see. It was… interesting. The first time we really sensed the gulf between the state where we live and the forgotten lands in the middle of the country. The tourist stuff was fine. Deadwood was packed because of a classic car rally. The kid described it as “all the best and worst of America all in one town.” Mt. Rushmore was really off-putting and weird, like something from North Korea with all it’s concrete and flags and giant statue of Borglum (and a more appropriately named fucker, I never saw). The zip line and such was scary-fun, but we skipped the Trump memorabilia tent. Some of the schwag we saw was amusing, some just dumb, but some was scary. It’s like the memes all escaped the Internet.
There was one stop at a gas station / bait shop / flea market / 4-wheeler rental / gun store where we felt outright uncomfortable. We zipped out of there quicker than a zip line.
I wish there was a state where you could be really free. Not one political party’s version of free, but really truly free. I’m convinced the divide is manufactured: by the media, politicians, churches, universities, certain mindsets, and above all rich mother fuckers who love money and power and know that this is how they get it. But that doesn’t make it less real on the ground.
Why are we mad at each other instead of all of them? Why do we have to choose the freedoms we’re allowed? Don’t we realize that when we limit some freedoms we don’t like we put all of them at risk? Why do we keep setting up certain groups of people to be ostracized and oppressed? I’m not just talking Brokeback Mountain here, I’m talking about people who don’t want the vax, who want sovereignty over their health, or who don’t want to be taxed to death and have the government decide their lives for them.
Why does connection feel increasingly illegal, unsafe, impossible?
I remind myself that it isn’t. I remember the swingers in the hot tub. The hotel owners in Montana and their awesome cat. The guy in the bar in the no-stoplight South Dakota town who has the right to refuse service to anyone, but who served us and let us chat and drink in the corner while the same seven regulars drank and drove and traded local gossip. The lady at the diner, with her dangly cross earrings, who originally came from the West Coast and expressed how spiritual Devil’s Tower was. The sarsaparilla hut ladies who listened to the kid gush about culinary school and said “you must be so proud!” to me. I will remember those people and remember that when someone knows you it’s harder to hate you.
From our friends’ house, Ohio: Saying a tearful goodbye to the kid as he takes the last few days of his journey alone. 150 years ago, this same journey would have taken about 5 weeks of very hard traveling. Driving coast to coast is at least 8 days if you want to stay sane and not kill yourself. But I remind the kid that it’s a 6 hour non-stop flight back home for holidays. It seems further because we drove all those long miles in his car, but tomorrow I’ll catch an early flight and because of the time change I’ll be home by lunchtime.
For a very long time the world was getting smaller and smaller, with all the good and ill that caused. Now it’s getting bigger again. And that process has it’s own good and ill. It’s not a process that you can change. You can only be in it and spread your little message of light as you go.
