Falling in Love with America

Growing up in New York City, I was deeply indoctrinated with the view of the world that Saul Steinberg summed up in his famous 1976 New Yorker magazine cover. As far as I was concerned, if you headed west, there was 10th Ave. and there was New Jersey (which you avoided as much as possible) and then there was a whole bunch of nothing worth mentioning until you hit the Pacific Ocean.

When I was 19 years old, I tagged along with a friend on a cross-country drive to deliver a baby-blue Plymouth Duster to her brother in Los Angeles. On that trip, I saw my first cornfields. My first hay rolls. I saw Chicago. The Great Salt Lake. (Yuck.) Cows. The Rockies. For real? I thought this stuff was just rumor and legend. We drove from New York to San Francisco and then down the jagged coastline to Los Angeles, where I dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean and fell madly in love with America.

Over the next few years, I romanced the nation in a series of aimless month-long Greyhound bus trips using what was called an Ameripass—like a Eurail Pass but less comfortable. (And seeing America by bus might be the exact opposite of flying over it.) I zig-zagged around the country with a sketchy itinerary, stopping as the mood struck me, staying in cheap motels and rundown small-town hotels, surfing the couches of friends of friends and on one occasion, resorting to a night on the floor of a Billings, Mont. bus depot, for lack of an alternative. Those were grand trips. The scent of bus-restroom disinfectant still makes me nostalgic.

During one of those trips, I first visited Texas, staying with friends of a friend in Fort Worth. I returned a couple of times in subsequent years before deciding, on little more than a whim, to move to Dallas in the 1980s. That’s been a long, interesting ride in itself—I wrote about it in my first book, The Yankee Chick’s Survival Guide to Texas. I didn’t intend to stay, but here I am and there you go. At this point, I’m as much Texan as New Yorker. (Sort of. When I say I’m from Dallas, people usually say, “No, where are you really from?”)

Since that first cross-country trip, I’ve traveled the world. But I’m not done with America and never will be. I haven’t seen all 50 states yet. Much of the north-central part of the country remains virgin territory for me, aside from glimpses through bus windows. I begin this blog with a mission in mind: North Dakota, here I come. (When the temperature warms up, that is.)

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