Journal: Driving, Society

I’ll blog more about my experience and the thoughts that I had during the trip (dutifully recorded to Twitter) later on…

I will mention one thought that did not make it to Twitter–the night before I got on the road, I caught myself in the motel mirror (no bed in my emptied-and-clean apartment) and saw something in my shoulders that communicated something contrary to what I have thought about myself my entire life. My shoulders struck me as “small”. Not underdeveloped, or fine-boned… but that my shoulders belonged to a smaller frame, a body with not so much excess fat… a healthier body. This stands in contrast to the words in my mind that have defined my body: thick, big, heavy. I may expand upon this later; I had a great convo with GM about this while I was on the road.

Another thought that did not make it to Twitter (in part because it feels somewhat provincial of me) is the way midwestern cities present themselves as you’re flying by them on some interstate. I grew up in the morning shadows of New York City, with much of northern New Jersey being a mere suburbian extension of the New York City metropolitan area. Hence, you never saw the sudden “island of buildings” compared to when you go even a little west. (You have to cross the Delaware to really start seeing it, but Pennsylvania doesn’t quite cut it for this effect.)

Living in New Hampshire was a different sort of oddity. It is sparsely populated, and there are various small towns, but you do not get the sense of long stretches of unpopulated areas–it feels sparsely populated. There are houses and farms and roads dotting the countryside, so in a sense, you almost never get “away” from people.

Driving through West Virginia and Kentucky yesterday yielded this “island city” effect more poignantly than Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan, in my experience. My gut sense is that I will experience more of the same as I head west. It feels odd to me, which is not ever to say that it is wrong, merely that, for me, it’s different.

It is a welcome change, to have more openness between settlements.

I will have more to say later.