The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [73]
When I took the smaller roads I stayed in places that felt as if history had stopped just before the steamboat was abandoned in favor of the train. They felt not merely preserved but suspended, as if in amber. In Madison, Indiana, everything was pastel-colored. It seemed every business was an ice cream parlor, or a soda fountain, or a candy store. At a bright little coffee shop, you could have your coffee black, or you could add cream, as if the modern notion of milk in coffee had not yet arrived. From Main Street the side streets led down to the river or up to the highway. The town faded at its outskirts, its pastels turned to sepia, and then it simply stopped.
The Ohio River spawned other places like this, quiet and as sweet as if they were dusted with confectioner’s sugar. The river was quiet too. It had none of the mythology, the romance and tragedy, of the Mississippi and the Missouri. But it had a sort of confidence, being the pathway to those other rivers, the first leg for every East Coast dreamer’s journey. It flowed lazily; in places it hardly moved at all. It tolerated the pale blue bridges built across its width and the little boats, American flags flying, tied up along its docks.
From these fragments I created lasting associations, mostly to do with time. In my mind, it was always just before dawn in Ohio: either dark and cold and scraping snow from the windshield in motel parking lots, or waiting for the summer heat to come and burn away the fog. Ohio was sleeping trucks humming at rest stops, and sleeping towns.
Indiana was mist rising from fields and flocks of black birds taking off in formation and streaking across the newly sunny sky. It was a single pick-up truck racing along an access road, for the fun of it, not because there was anywhere to go. Indiana seemed to exist perpetually in intense daybreak; how could it ever be night or noon in towns named Aurora and Rising Sun?
Illinois was afternoon, bright and encouraging, because if I was in Illinois that meant I had just set out or was about to arrive. Since I was never tired in Illinois, I was always seeing things I might have overlooked when less alert, like vintage Americana arranged in the windows of antique stores, and post offices so tiny and bright white that they seemed capable of delivering only letters handwritten with a quill pen.
West Virginia was night coming on, which made the Alleghenies mysterious. I could never orient myself properly in West Virginia, because it had extra dimensions, not just forward and back but up and down. I admired the buildings planted tenaciously on the sides of mountains, the drivers who fearlessly navigated the roller-coaster roads, the hidden rivers with names I always forgot but which converged and flowed as proudly as if they were major thoroughfares. There was something a little dangerous, too, in the inscrutable mountains and the unexpected rivers. And then there were the back roads, roads that curved and dipped and sloped and bent, that kept your hands clasped on your steering wheel and your arm muscles tightened for hours at a time.
Pennsylvania was all about the weather. The skies there were like a time-lapse film of seasons changing. For years I never washed my car, I only drove every few months across Pennsylvania, and it was washed for me. In an instant the clouds would darken and the rain would pour down until the only sound I could hear was water splashing on the roof of the car and windshield wipers vainly fighting the deluge. Then the sun would come out and the landscape would feel altered, purified, blasted clean. In the fall the leaves changed in sections. On my left out the window, spectacular reds, yellows, and greens. On my right, soft russet and butter and pale pumpkin and sea foam, shimmering in the wind. It was in Pennsylvania that I rounded a corner and saw, for the first time, purple mountains. I thought, Now I understand.
Over time the patchwork quilt I had once seen only from airplane windows unfolded itself for me. I came to know this flyover