How exactly did I meet my destiny? Through ADHD, lack of money and leaving things to the last minute. I was due to go to Salt Lake City at the end of May for the graduation of a student I used to work with at my last job. I was taking time off before starting school in the fall, and because I had the extra time, I thought I might tack on a trip to Seattle to visit a friend after the graduation. Because I had the extra time, I'd also been watching a lot of the Travel Channel. Once the idea of taking a trip was hatched, my mind went into overdrive. I think I developed a kind of travel ADHD. Every day my itinerary changed. I need to go to Jerusalem, I decided after watching a special on the Old City. No, I would go from Salt Lake City to Ecuador. Or rather, I'd fly back to New York and then go meet my friend Jeremy in Uruguay. Or was it Bolivia? How about both? And who knew that Buenos Aires is just a boat ride away from Montevideo?
Some time in April, Susie came down from New Hampshire to say goodbye to all her New York friends before leaving the East Coast for good. She decided to move to Bellingham, WA to focus on her love of hiking, climbing and the outdoors and would drive cross-country after Memorial Day. At the bar, I perused her Road Trip USA book of weird sites and there it was--the Mitchell Corn Palace, captivating me once again in its corn-covered glory. "Maybe I should go with you," I joked. "Yeah, you should," Susie replied. We began talking about her tentative route and where she wanted to stop, when she was planning to leave and how my schedule might fit in. Then we fell back into conversation with Lynn, Wil and Jennie and took goodbye pictures with Susie's Polaroid camera. We all signed the Polaroids and on mine I scribbled "Corn Barn, here we come!"
So here was another permutation to add to the mix, because juggling imaginary itineraries between the West Coast and various parts of South America wasn't enough. May was rolling around and I needed to book my flight. What made it easier to cut out South America in the end was my April credit card statement. Reality, my nemesis, made it pretty clear that a plane ticket to Uruguay would not be a wise move. I was left with Seattle and the road trip. I called Susie to see what her plan was and she said she'd get back to me, so I held off on booking my flight. I also tied a strait jacket around my brain so that I wouldn't try to add any more destinations to my plans.
I'd never been on a cross-country road trip before. My preferred method of transportation is public. New York is probably the only city in the country where it is less convenient, not more, to have a car. The subways here run 24 hours a day and get you almost anywhere you need to go. Long distance, I like trains and planes. I had been thinking for a while of travelling across the country by train, watching the landscape and how it changes, seeing the middle part of the country, the part that for a long time, I had considered just that area one flies over to get to San Francisco. When I was younger, my idea of a travel destination was big cities in Europe or Asia, places with incredible art, architecture, and historical landmarks, great food and extra large helpings of culture. Or dramatic, exotic landscapes like the Himalayas, Iguacu Falls, the Serengeti or Patagonia. I actually enjoy going places where I don't speak the language, and seeing my passport stamped with foreign words makes my fingers tingle with excitement. What was the midwest but a land full of cowboys and inbreeding and right-wing conservatives who vote for guys named Bush and all those horrible stereotypes that one thinks of because one is from New York and has no idea what life is actually like there?
In all honesty, this fascination with the Corn Palace wasn't just about the corn. It came from a growing curiosity about Middle America. I realized that even though I lived in New York, I was not immune to a certain narrow-minded provincialism. When Bush got re-elected in 2004, it was a sobering realization that there is a whole America I don't know. I began to wonder if New York, for all its diversity and liberalism--maybe even because of it--was really the exception to the rule rather than the one who sets the rules in the first place. Short of decorating buildings with different colored corn, what else happens in America? What do cowboys do exactly? Is everyone really named Billy Bob? Who are my fellow Americans, and why did they vote for Bush? Why? WHY?????
These aren't questions I expected to answer by trekking on I-90 and visiting turtles made out of tires or a 20-foot basket in the middle of a field. And given my preference for planes and trains to automobiles, I didn't think I would last a three-week road trip to Seattle anyhow. But as I began to research South Dakota I saw that the Corn Palace was just one among many sites along the way--the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Native American reservations, old saloons and the Black Hills. For a week or so, this could be really fun. Let me just check one more time to see if the prices for plane tickets to Ecuador had dropped a few hundred dollars in the past three days. And apparently, Vancouver is beautiful this time of year...
I was supposed to leave for Salt Lake City in a week and I still hadn't booked my flight. Susie told me that by the time the graduation was over she would be in Chicago to say goodbye to family and friends there. Then she'd head up to Madison to visit a friend, through Minnesota and to South Dakota. We did a general estimate that we could travel from Chicago and hit all the sites in SD in 7-8 days. One week on the road, then I could fly out to Seattle and visit my friend for a week. I could have my cake and eat it too.
I picked up my cell phone and texted Susie: corn barn, here we come!
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