Reflection (Road Trip 2024)

I got home to New Jersey from my Midwestern road trip last Friday, and I want to conclude my travelogue with some reflection. Before I left I had pretensions of seeing what was going on in different parts of the country during a contentious election year. Little did I know my trip would coincide with one of the most tumultuous two weeks in American political history. 

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump happened two days before we left. At that time the calls for President Biden to withdraw from the race were dominating the headlines. That left the center stage of the political news for maybe two days. The Republican convention followed while we were on the road and in Chicago. Despite some rather, well, weird behavior at the convention, Democrats still dedicated themselves to a circular firing squad instead of highlighting the extremity of their opposition. Speaking of, JD Vance gave a straight up blood and soil nomination speech to began his run as a true wet fart of a candidate. By the time my trip was over the couch memes were dominating my feed.

That week ended on the Sunday when Biden announced his withdrawal from the race. The news flashed across during a family gathering, and I have to thank my cousin (who does not share most of my politics) for jumping in and cutting off any political discussion. The next day Kamala Harris had already claimed the mantle of presumptive nominee. I ran some errands with my wife and kids in the car, abuzz with the kind of political conversations we were avoiding at my parents' house. I knew things were changing when my 12-year old daughters whooped and hollered when we told them the news about Harris. I had been thinking that the Democratic Party was in an impossible situation, that either with or without Biden the election was unwinable. Suddenly progressives had their mojo back, and the needle had been threaded. Biden had stepped down, and a new nominee had been found without a destructive intra-party dispute. That nominee was already generating the kinds of enthusiasm from Democrats unseen since 2008. It was some kind of miracle. The last night of our trip my family gathered around my laptop in our roadside hotel room in Ohio, watching a Harris organizing meeting with barely contained energy. Between July 15th and July 26th it felt like the entire world had changed. 

On my trip I kept looking for clues to the national mood, but since I spent most of my time with family and old friends I would have to admit I can't say I observed much. My anecdotal observation is that I was pleasantly surprised at how little evidence of MAGA I detected. A house in my hometown not far from my parents that once flew a "Fuck Biden" sign no longer did. (I did see another house in another part of town flying one, though.) On our drive to and from Nebraska I saw a lot fewer Trump bumper stickers and fashy emblems than usual. I have long suspected that Trump is losing the juice, and that Biden's fumbling had obscured Trump's decline. With Harris's vitality dominating the news, Trump's doddering incoherence seems that much more pronounced. Nevertheless, one day when we drove through the Nebraska countryside a house on a backroad decorated to their fence to say "I am voting for the convicted felon." As the ranks of enthusiastic Trump supporters have dwindled it feels like the remaining ones have only intensified their zeal. This is a dynamic that mimics that in the churches many of these folks belong to.

It was eerily appropriate that we spent the last morning of our trip on the campus of Kent State University. We had decided to spend the night before at a random spot in Ohio because it was eight hours down the road from our previous stop. I soon realized we were right near Kent State, and I was lucky enough to have an online friend there in the history department who showed us around the site of the 1970 massacre. I learned a lot, to be sure, but I was also shook by the knowledge that when deep political divisions meet authority figures willing to wield violence, the blood will flow. As excited as I was that Democrats had come back from the dead, I also knew the reality of the situation we are in. Thinking about May 4th, 1970, I could not help but be reminded of the violence of our own political moment. I could not stop thinking that a new Trump administration would probably result in dozens of Kent States. My trip to the Midwest and back reminded me of how much I love this country, but also that the people who cheered the National Guard gunning down protestors are still alive and well. I'm more committed than ever to keeping them out of power. 

Nebraska Sojourn (Road Trip 2024)

I'd been too busy back in my hometown to write much, but now I am back on the road and staying the night at a hotel in Iowa City and able to get my thoughts down. I spent almost a week in Hastings, Nebraska, seeing family and friends alike. It's always a joy to see my loved ones again, and sad that I only get to spend this much time with them once a year. 

This time I also had the good fortune to be home during a spell of moderate weather. Three years ago we got to go tubing on the Niobrara River, but temperatures jumped up to one hundred degrees. This coincided with staying in a bargain-basement motel in Valentine, Nebraska, that never seemed to be comfortable. That year over Christmas we had to drive to the airport in Omaha in an ice storm. The next Christmas bad weather had us stuck at O'Hare. Last year it was brutally hot again in that blustery Great Plains way that make you feel like you are living inside of a hair dryer. 

This year the moderate weather reminded me of just how beautiful Nebraska can be in the summertime. The corn rises tall and the grass waves green under impossibly vast blue skies. In the evening the sunsets dazzle on the flat horizon, while the coolness of the morning air makes perfect weather for thoughtful walks. The cottonwood trees, which look like weeds with trunks and branches in winter, abound with thick green leaves.

We had some escape from last year's hotter weather via a trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I luxuriated in the cool mountain evenings. This year we stayed in and around Hastings instead of taking a long trip with my parents, and I was glad for it. This year more than any other I have witnessed how my hometown has become a more livable place. In my earlier memories (which date to about 1978-1980), the downtown was bustling, the commercial center of an agricultural region. As the 80s progressed the mall near my house grew in popularity as the downtown stores started closing. At the end of the decade the arrival of Wal-Mart put this dynamic in overdrive. Out in the surrounding countryside, farmers were getting slammed and leaving the land during the Farm Crisis. By the end of the 90s, the once mighty Imperial Mall had become an empire in decline and downtown was almost completely dead. Come this century venerable local restaurants like Bernardo's and the OK Cafe closed for good, leading to a restaurant situation so dire that people welcomed Applebee's and Dunkin as saviors. 

Miraculously, in the last few years things have completely shifted, thanks to people from the area who moved out than came back and to new arrivals from elsewhere. There is an abundance of tasty Mexican food, for example. Downtown there is a microbrewery, artisan bakery, new bookstore, multiple coffee houses, and a cheese shop and wine bar opened by a childhood friend who once plied his trade in Los Angeles. This morning at the Back Alley Bakery I had a delicious brunch I would put up against any place in Brooklyn. More importantly, these new, more interesting local businesses seem to be doing well. My friend told me to come to his place on Monday because that was his slow day, but it was still bustling. 

The foodie revolution has even penetrated rural Nebraska. More than that, people there were yearning for alternatives to the dominant corporate chains and boring traditional local food culture. The whole thing is a great example of what a little new blood can do. I guess it was appropriate to witness that first hand the same week a generational shift happened in the presidential election. 

While it might sound strange, the founding of better restaurants in my hometown gives me real hope. In so many ways we are oppressed by the dead hand of the past and by older people committed to keeping the status quo, no matter how shitty it is. A little bit of faith in the future, even in the form of a tasty breakfast, goes a long way. 

Back in Chicago (Road Trip 2024)

On our way out to Nebraska we decided to spend a couple of days in Chicago, a city I lived in for two of the richest years of my life yet haven't seen for 16 years. Growing up in the Midwest it loomed large in my imagination, especially at a time when several beloved movies of my generation from The Blues Brothers to Ferris Bueller's Day Off were set there. When I finally got to visit in high school and in college, I fell in love. Living in Chicago only deepened that love, and when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois after moving out of Chicago, I made the trek up interstate 57 as often as I could. 

After that, a strange thing happened: I spurned Chicago for New York City, the place I worked for the past thirteen years. I used to resent the condescending attitude of New Yorkers to "the second city" when I lived in the Midwest, but I slowly began to adopt it myself. Today I am reproaching myself for this, since I have had an absolutely delightful day here. My children had never been before, and they absolutely LOVE it. They have called it "New York but clean" and "New York but chill." While Chicago has a tough spikiness, it lacks the overbearing neuroses that hang in the air in the Big Apple. As I get older my tolerance for managing other people's anxieties has frayed to the breaking point. People in New York desperately need to get a dose of Midwestern reserve. 

Today has included some old stomping grounds, as well as things I never did when I lived here. On the former count, we spent the morning in Hyde Park and on the campus of the University of Chicago, where I excitedly pointed out locations of major and minor events in my young life. On the latter count, we went to the top of the Hancock Building (I know it's not called that anymore, but whatever) and took at architectural history boat tour on the river. Both let me see a city I thought I knew with new eyes and appreciation. It also didn't hurt that in between we ate Chicago-style dogs from Devil Dawgs. 

For most part I have been quietly pleased with how the city has matured since I lived here from 1998-2000. Hyde Park in particular feels safer and more economically stable, as do the surrounding neighborhoods. Driving up Stony Island I marveled at all the new buildings and flourishing businesses. The experience really shows how much all the Fox News propaganda about Chicago is lying. Yes the city has plenty of problems, but it has figured some things out that its supposedly superior cousin New York could learn from. Putting trash in alleyway bins is probably better than dumping it on the street, for example. Trees can, you know, shade the sidewalk in the summertime. These facts and the Fox propaganda bullshit are good examples of how you shouldn't always believe what you hear. 

West to South Bend (Road Trip 2024)

Today my family began our trip out to Nebraska from New Jersey by driving out to South Bend, Indiana. We are going to spend a couple of days in Chicago next, but this was as far as we thought we could get without exhausting ourselves. We also like South Bend (college towns are the best) and know a hotel here with a good hot breakfast. When you travel the same stretch of road so many times, you figure out important information like this. 

It's a much nicer hotel than what I would normally spring for, but we have credit card rewards points that get it for us for free. This is a far cry from my childhood vacations, often spent at low-slung cheap motels on the roadside with hard mattresses and sandpapery sheets. I've found classing it up helps morale among the troops after a hard day on the road. 

My kids are getting older and one dividend is that they demand fewer bathroom breaks. We made it all the way to South Bend only stopping three times: once in the morning for gas, once to eat lunch, once to gas again in the afternoon. This also meant that I had less of a chance to see what was going on in the areas we traveled through. For that reason I am not sure how much I can trust my observation that there was a real decrease in the amount of visible MAGA stuff in rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. I noticed a farmer with a Trump sign, a pretty elaborate "God Family and Guns" truck decal, and that was about it. There was a Cybertruck with Texas plates and a "Legalize Recreational Plutonium" magnet, but the political valence of that one was hard to parse. My gut tells me that Trump's appeal among his former voters is waning at the edges and this confirms my suspicions. 

While I was on the road proper I marveled at the beauty of some underloved landscapes. The mountains of Central Pennsylvania are quietly gorgeous, for example. The fields and farms of northern Indiana sure look pretty in the evening light, too. 

Now that I have been living in the Northeast for thirteen years, I get a little bit of a shock when I return to my Midwestern stomping grounds. I do not mean this as a judgement, but an observation: people in the Midwest do not seem to put much care into their clothing and looks. In my short time I've seen grown men in tube socks pulled up to their knees, women in ugly "crop pants" paired with the 90s "Rachel" haircut, and scores of people wearing what look to be dirty, unwashed t-shirts. People in general also look like they are taking less care of themselves than they ought to. Now I know going too far the other way leads to narcissism, but the average Midwesterner looks like the "before" image on a makeover show. 

That might sound mean, but I'm from the Midwest and I can say it! Also, that lack of care in personal appearance is the less savory outgrowth of one of the best Midwestern qualities: an aversion to bullshit. I am looking forward to a break from the status-obsessed Northeast.

Hitting the Road

I have neglected this blog for the past few weeks by concentrating on my Substack instead. That's where I am writing more things about the political moment, and well, that's been a busy beat lately. I have shifted this blog into mostly being about music and culture, and the "listen throughs" I've been doing of legacy artists has been a fun way to focus things. I am doing another one come autumn on Richard Thompson, but in the meantime I've had to figure out what I want to write about. I am realizing that the stresses of the current politics news will burn me out if I'm not careful. I am heading off for a road trip next week, so I will turn this site into a travelogue.

My inspiration to do this came from one of my nerdiest fixations: reading 19th and 20th-century travel writing. I have my hands in two separate research projects involving travel writing as a source base and as a kind of scholarly Stockholm Syndrome I can't stop reading this stuff. One of those projects centers around travel writing in the 1970s with the theme of "finding America." After the tumult of the 60s many wondered what had happened to the country and its identity, and went to find it in the out of the way places on what William Least Heat Moon called "blue highways." My own writing over the next two weeks might hit on similar themes of evaluating the state of the nation in an uncertain time. I'll be going to big cities as well as small towns, but almost completely within the Midwest. Maybe someday I will attempt a full cross-country trek. 

As a bonus, here's some of my favorites of the travel writing genre outside of the 70s that aren't household names that I would recommend. 

Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas

Two summers ago my favorite read was Frederick Law Olmsted's account of a trip across Texas in the 1850s. It brought a different time and place to life while also being a fascinating document of Northern disdain for life in the South on the eve of the Civil War. My interest had been piqued years ago when I was living in Texas and a highly fatuous colleague who was way into being Texan said he hated it. If that kind of Texas Uber Alles blowhard disliked the book I knew it must be good. I have a love-hate relationship with my former state of residence, and this book gets and the state's heritage of oppression and Philistinism that is represented well in the hate column for me. 

Tony Horwitz, One For The Road

A friend loaned me this one back in grad school and I had a wild hair to read it again this spring. Horwitz later became famous for his American history-themed travelogues like Confederates in the Attic. His first is still my favorite, though. In the 1980s he was living in Australia as an expat journalist, and decided to hitchhike across the entire Outback. As you would imagine, this was quite a challenge. In the process, however, he meets quite an array of characters that make you think the Mad Max films are close to being documentaries. The book reminds me of one of my favorite things about travel: seeing some really weird shit you'd never be able to anticipate.

Henry David Thoreau's travel writings

I kinda liked reading Thoreau in high school, but stopped thinking about him after. A few years ago someone convinced me to read all of Walden, and I was suddenly hooked. Thoreau understood one of the key questions of modern life right at its inception: what is necessary to live? He did not put creature comforts high on the list, but he did include nature. Apart from Walden, Thoreau's other book length works were travel accounts, only one of which (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) was published in his lifetime. Two others, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, came after his death based on unpublished writings. All are worth a read because he chronicles the early stages of industrialization and its impact on natural landscapes and our relationship to them. 

Joan Didion, South and West

Here's another work unpublished at the time, an account of travel in the early 70s, mostly through the deep South. Didion is probably my favorite essay stylist, and her tart observations hit just as hard here as in her published works. This book is also an interesting artifact of the South in the period right after the Civil Rights movement. I also appreciate that instead of fetishing the "blue highways" like so many other writers, she touches on the small pleasures of interstate highways and Holiday Inn swimming pools. The search for authenticity is the bugbear of too many travel writers.