The world certainly looks different from the window of a 737 than it does from down here at “see level.” Before you groan and start gathering your stones and torches, “travel at see level” was a tagline I coined years ago back in college for a Greyhound advertising campaign. This was the same client for whom I designed an ad with the graphic of a yellow BUMP sign in front of a picturesque mountain vista that read, “At 30,000 feet it's called turbulence.” Blame it on the late nights and Schaefer Light.
Just days ago I found myself flying over this very same terrain -- a patchwork of ruddy brown and green peppered with red thatched roofs, above ground pools, and bisecting lines of asphalt leading to somewhere else.
Now I find myself on the Amtrak Wolverine heading west towards Chicago, ironically traversing the very ground I happened to survey from the air a couple of days back. I recalled the beautiful sights from above, with boundaries clearly drawn and definitive borders giving a sense of order where none really exists except in city halls and dusty land plats. It was an earthen quilt peeking through clouds splayed like lobster tails, full of possibility and wonderment, beauty and grandeur.
Down here below though it's a different story.
Mattresses under overpasses, boarded up windows, discarded refrigerators along the tracks, and a hollow look in the eyes... the invisible people clad in gingham and pilled flannel who walk these city streets that quickly flash by the double paned glass of this single level coach. There is a duality that is readily apparent to someone like me who grew up in this area and had the fortune to move away before everything went to shit. The people still smile through the haze; through sour economic times and a shared poor sense of proper daytime attire.
A mile down the tracks, the Kelloggs plant with its smokestacks spewing Corn Flakes ash while a fiberglass Tony the Tiger happily waves unaware from the front lawn. Also whistling by like an apparition, the Jiffy company... “cornbread since 1932.” and MacMillan and Wife Hand Car Wash, around the corner from the Elite Barber Shop -- manufacturing and small business monuments to the people who wake up every morning at 5am, wipe the sleep from their eyes, brush their teeth, and drive to the factories and shops in order to keep food on the table, pay their mortgage and keep America moving forward. What other option is there really?
(So these are the people that make up that elusive and intangible “Main Street” Obama keeps talking about.)
The Joan Didion book on my lap is a welcome counterpoint to the novel I just finished, H.G. Adler's “The Journey,” with it's harrowing account of transporting Jews via rail to concentration camps during World War II. Perhaps, I was meant to take this rail expedition now, my own personal journey through the heartland to a destination that cannot be printed on any ticket. It is a trip, an exploration that doesn't allow itself to be purchased or fully articulated in a blog. Interestingly enough, this blog was meant to be an amusing travelogue detailing my date with a cocktail in Chicago and a review of the fabulously inspiring music flooding my ears from my iPod. But, you know what they say about the best laid plans.
(I wonder what Dorothy Parker would have to say about plans being laid end-to-end?)
Regardless, this is a journey we should all take at some point that doesn't require physical passage necessarily. The destination is already there if you take a moment to look closely enough. I am now reminded that much like the unnamed towns passing by at 70 miles per hour I have been here before and I will return to this spot a million times in my ahead with the gained insight that comes from being an accidental tourist, and the knowledge of a better stop just around the bend.
