today is going counter clockwise
against the birds west towards a burning moon
into the snow and an uncertain comfortable wood
Tag Archives: travel
Knack or knacked?
The best way to travel, after all, is to feel, to feel everything in every way, to feel everything excessively, because all things are, in truth, excessive and all reality is an excess, a violence, an extraordinarily vivid hallucination. -Fernando Pessoa
Planning a jaunt for me is a kind of distillation. This isn’t to say that I plan closely, especially when I’m going out alone. The variables are just different when I travel with Amanda, who travels for different reasons than I do and who loves me inspite of my peripatetic soul. I’ve never been able to talk the progeny into a trip with me, which is probably for the best since she, too, embraces travel in a way unique than my own. Traveling on my own, I want to leave space for the unexpected in a way that a lot of people (rightly) consider unsafe. A bit of the knack and more than a bit of serendipity tend to fill in the details of my trips out. The unplanned and unplannable played a role in my last trip out, my failed walk-about along the Mississippi in May of this year.
Originally I’d planned another westward trip, all the way out to the left coast to visit friends, see the Pacific again, and wander the great square states with big sky broken only by the Rockies. I was considering another run at my failed walk. But then it occured to me that I hadn’t spent much time in my own backyard — the Ohio River Valley Basin.
There was a time that I covered the lower part of the valley in my car. This was the mid-1990’s. I was loose in the world more or less, trying to figure out how to live in the world with such an itchy foot. It wasn’t my intention to wander the lower valley. It’s just what I did. From Huntington WV to Ironton and Portsmouth, Seamen, OH, Cincinnati, Maysville, Lexington, KY. I worked just enough and often stayed with friends. I also stayed at my Mom’s when I had my weekend visitations with Stella, which offered the Kid some consistency and helped cover for the fact that I had no clue how to be a practical parent. A few times I tried to stop moving work. Once I moved back out to my hometown and paid rent to sleep on a cot in someone’s laundry room. One of my oldest friends got me that job and the crash pad, actually. I don’t know that I ever really apologized for imploding … as I usually do when I try to go straight and hold job like a productive member of society. Sorry, Bret. I really am. I’m also sorry for being a shitty friend and not keeping in touch.
But this time is different in that I don’t have a car, can’t afford a car, and if I’m being honest, I’m only romantically attached to the idea of having one. This means I’ll be traveling by public transport… which is spotty in a large chunk of the area I’m going to be wandering… on the kindness of friends and strangers (not that I’ve had much luck historically, hitchhiking) and on foot (as little as possible but still a possibility.) I’m open to pretty much all modes of transport and feel like I’ll get around to traveling in pretty much every way there is to travel before I lay down my walking stick and turn into a tree… which I’m not planning on for quite a few years. Longevity and stubbornness are on my side and so is my faith the serenditpitous nature of the universe.
I want to soak into the dirt that made me, follow the river to Cairo, IL, and bounce along the old National Highway. If you’ve read me at all, you know I’m not one for touristy excursions, but there will be some excursions, I hope. Geography is powerful, but maps are man-made collectively accepted delusions. One could even argue that a map is a kind of violence… an “extraordinarily vivid hallucination.” As a matter of fact, that’s what I am arguing. And that’s why I’m going. And that’s why I always come back.
What mud matters
To make it easier on myself, I’m setting a general boundary: to the east and south, of course, is the river. And once I leave Pittsburgh, the old National Highway, SR-40 will be my northern boundary.
The only other limitation I’m placing on my jaunt is that I need to be able to get to places either on public transit, rides, or on SHORT walks. In certain areas, this may present something of an issue. But I want to wander off the beaten track a bit, west on 40 and down as far south as maybe Nashville… which I know, exceeds my previously stated southern boundary… but it’s also part of the Ohio River Basin and I know the bus goes there.
SR-40 begins in Maryland and ends in Vandalia, Illinois. I don’t know if I’ll get to the western edge of the old National Highway, but I do intend to visit Cairo, IL, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.
That still gives me plenty of room to bounce around and take in the Ohio River Valley mud that I was dredged out of.
My original plan… to go west always west to the mountains, the big stretches of the country, the big sky … will hold until Spring. While I’m always drawn to the west coast and I have friends out there I very much wish to visit, I’ve been thinking (again and again) about what geography means.
People place a lot of power on geography. I’m thinking now of those fucked up maps that hung in my public school classrooms, the ones with United States being the biggest thing on the page. I’d say that it was the North American continent that was given a boob job but the the US was always inflated out of proportion with the rest of the continent. It’s no wonder that generations of American kids grew up with no sense of perspective and an unrealistic sense of the US’s place in the world. It all starts with maps.
That power extends to where you’re from…. something I’ve written about a lot. We assign literary sub-canons to geography: Southern, Appalachian, and recently, Midwestern literature have gained some ground against that antiquated East Coast bias that dominated American letters since the 1920’s. But we still tend to use the map we’ve drawn, inaccurate as it is, to determine inclusion in the canon… except for Applachian, though it does tend to get a Kentucky/West Virginia heavy repuatation for a mountains range that stretches much farther.
Where I’m from is worse than fly-over; it’s perpetually mislabled. It gets lumped in with the Midwest, which ignores the influence of the river in favor of the artificial maps lines we’ve drawn on the landscape. It’s my assertion that Ohio River Valley writing is fundamentally different from the Midwest, just like Kentucky isn’t strictly part of “The South.” This makes for a complicated map. But rivers make for complicated maps.
Where I now live where you’re from matters. Louisville, Kentucky is a river town that got a bit bigger, but it still behaves more like a town than a city. The arbitrarily drawn lines matter more here than other places I’ve lived. The reasons for that are complicated, but it all goes back to the river, that artery that drew and in some cases, dragged people westward downriver.
So that space between a 700 mile long highway and a 981 mile long Ohio River, hedged by the Appalachians on one side and the Mississippi on the other. That’s the georgaphy I’m exploring. It’s the mud that made me. And to the mud I am returning. The trip begins at the end of September and will extend (probably) through October.