The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [71]
I spent too many nights in a dot on the map called Triadelphia, West Virginia. For a long time I thought it was Wheeling; I think it thought it was Wheeling. I learned it was Triadelphia because I got out the phone book in a hotel and checked. In Triadelphia hotel lobbies, surrounded by burly plaid-shirted men, I blended into the walls, so out of place I paradoxically became invisible.
When I didn’t stop in Triadelphia I stopped in St. Clairsville, which was technically in Ohio but seemed to also want to be Wheeling. It appeared to have been built as a repository for cheap chain hotels. St. Clairsville was prone to intense fog, which confused the birds. They flew strangely, slow and lower than usual. Once one slammed its tiny body against my windshield. I was sure I’d killed it, but it left no mark.
At first I was surprised by the distances I had to cover. Ohio, a state I had never previously deigned to consider, was huge, its size all out of proportion to its importance. I learned to look out for particularly Ohio-like things: boats inexplicably stranded on the left shoulder of the highway, and barns brightly painted to commemorate the state’s bicentennial. Once in Ohio on a snowy morning I saw a line of cars along the left shoulder of the road. Police cruisers, their red and blue lights eerie in the white almost-dawn, surrounded a little car, parked; an eighteen-wheeler, facing the wrong direction; a Brinks truck, lying upside down in the little grassy ditch of a median; and a second Brinks truck, waiting patiently to collect the loot.
Sometimes time zone changes were posted on signs, and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes they popped up where I wasn’t expecting them. I drove across Tennessee, which looks small on a map but in reality goes on and on, and was surprised to find that I’d driven an hour in a second. I was vaguely confused for the rest of the day. The time zone changes in the middle of Kentucky too, but I never noticed it there. I once managed to drive across Kentucky and only step out of the car once, for three minutes. In those three minutes I was called “Hon” by two separate strangers.
Occasionally I would glimpse from the highway a gilded dome, of a church or a courthouse or a town hall, and think about how almost every place that had ever been built thought, at some point, that it was going to be spectacular. I thought about its inhabitants and investors, who must have dreamed of glorious futures, and bet on that one imposing structure, and eventually realized the whole thing would never pan out.
Mostly what I saw from the highways, though, was fields—soybean fields and cornfields and fields of crops I couldn’t identify. In Illinois I was once stuck in traffic in a cornfield, a thing I hadn’t thought possible. Also in Illinois, but not while stuck in the cornfield, I looked up and saw streaks of pink and blue, like a daytime sunset, stamped with a herringbone pattern of clouds. In the distance they stretched as far as I could see, their interlocking V’s reminiscent of a pair of tweed pants. As I got closer, the pattern became larger, until, above me, there was nothing but a series of lines.
I encountered a tornado only once, in Paducah, Kentucky. I hid in a highway rest stop which was like no highway rest stop I’d ever seen, a stately historic building that became, for a few hours, a shelter for travelers from all directions. In Paducah, for the first time, I met grown men who openly proclaimed their fear of weather. In Manhattan, weather had never seemed to stop anyone, and real New Englanders laughed at blizzards. It was like learning a new culture in a foreign land, one where weather was far deadlier, and people had less to prove,