Long Way Home (2 page)

On my last day in Manhattan, I boarded a train at Penn Station for Westbury, off to see the America of my childhood. I'd grown up in one of those instant suburbs of the 1950s, in a tract slapped up on a Long Island potato field. Our Levitt house looked much the same as it did when Mickey Mantle played center field for the Yankees, with its postage-stamp front yard, droopy rhododendrons, and aluminum siding. In the pigskin weather of late September, footballs should have been flying through the air, but the kids must have been indoors tapping at their computers.

I walked to a nearby luncheonette where the senior citizens, dinosaurs of the print era, still reported like clockwork for their papers. Perched on a stool, I drank a cup of coffee strong enough to peel the rust off a bumper and ate an old-fashioned grilled cheese sandwich. The headlines were strictly contemporary, though.
NEW YORK COPS TASER NUDE BROOKLYN MAN
, shouted the
Post
.
FATE OF BAIL-OUT PLAN UNRESOLVED
, countered the
Times
.

At our old Little League field, I sat alone in the bleachers and defied Satchel Paige's advice by looking back to recall my first trip across the country. After college and a Peace Corps stint, I wheeled away from Mellow Lane in 1969, ready to help the hippies in San Francisco save the world. My mother worried that some rednecks like those in
Easy Rider
would shoot me on account of my hair, not yet as long as any of the Beatles', but a balky Corvair did the only damage.

As I climbed Stanyan Street toward the Haight-Ashbury, high on flower-powered dreams, the clutch cable snapped, and I managed to roll back to a Chevron station on Geary Boulevard. I still remembered the station owner's name: Irwin Ching. When he gave me a bill for the repairs, he signed it at the bottom
I. Ching
. I was young enough to interpret this as a positive sign.

OMENS. THEY STILL
had me at their mercy. A storm to match Steinbeck's hurricane dumped five inches of rain on New York the night before my departure. The wind howled so wickedly I couldn't sleep, and the road that once beckoned now seemed like a dead end.

“My warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desireable and my wife incalculably precious,” Steinbeck wrote on the brink of departing, and I identified with him, already pining for my dear Imelda in faraway Dublin.

At breakfast, I dawdled over newspaper stories I'd ordinarily skip, such as the one about Tomoji Tanabe of Japan, reputedly the world's oldest man. On his 112th birthday, Tanabe had expressed a desire to live for “infinity,” but at 113 he changed his mind and wanted only five more years—another omen, perhaps. I'd never studied the box scores so religiously, either, but the jig was up when I caught myself lingering over a Bergdorf Goodman ad for the fall line.

Limbs and branches littered Central Park West outside, and filthy water stood ankle-deep at the curb. Only gypsy sharks in black limos swept by, prepared to escort me anywhere at all for triple the standard fare. At last I flagged a yellow cab and took off for the airport to claim the Focus. People huddled under bus shelters, trying but failing to stay dry. We passed housing projects named for Washington and Jefferson, and a bank named for Ponce de Leon. What
this
portended, if anything, I couldn't tell.

At Budget Rent A Car, I encountered a delay. Two clerks were explaining the concept of liability insurance to a German couple, who spoke very little English and were beholden to a weepy blond toddler clinging to his mother's leg and wailing like a troubled infant from the Brothers Grimm.

“If I have accident,” the man kept repeating, “but not my cause, I pay?” and the clerks would shake their heads in unison, fold their arms, and spout more confusing legalese with the practiced air of thespians.

Finally, I lost patience and decided to step outside, where the rain had dwindled to a fine mist. I sat on my duffel bag and thumbed through the dog-eared copy of
Travels with Charley
that had started it all. “Well, John, here we go,” I muttered. “I hope America doesn't disappoint me as much as it did you.”

The omens were definitely improving, in fact. The toddler's crying jag had ended, and the Germans dragged away their luggage and the exhausted lad, freeing the clerks to deal with other customers. A ray of sunshine peeked through the clouds, unaware or unafraid of being a cliché. Ride toward the radiance—that was the order of the day. If I met with no other obstacles, I'd be in Dover well before dark.

Part Two

  

O
PTIMISM COMES NATURALLY
to most travelers, both a blessing and a curse. As I drove away from the airport, I worked up some excitement again, but the route to Dover hardly qualified as scenic. Stuck on crowded expressways and parkways, I fought boredom to a draw until I reached the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and woke to a superb view of New York Harbor. When you cross a broad expanse of water, it creates a sense of voyaging. I truly felt under way now, sailing into the great unknown.

In spite of the bruising ten-dollar toll, I was glad I'd chosen not to leave from midtown Manhattan. That was Henry Miller's mistake on his American odyssey in 1944. Fresh off the boat from Paris, Miller bought the first car he looked at without even kicking the tires. He'd taken only half a dozen driving lessons, but he still felt confident of his skills. He could steer, shift gears, and apply the brakes. What else was necessary? He hadn't counted on the Holland Tunnel, his gateway to New Jersey.

“I had never been in the damned hole before, except once in a taxi,” he complained. “It was a nightmare. The beginning of an endless nightmare, I should say.”

For Miller, the tunnel became an emblem of the country's irritants, and he discovered something new to dislike around every bend. He was terrific at loathing, really, but he never sounded unhappy. Like most optimists, he had a blind spot.

“I always expect the angels to pee in my beer,” he said, explaining how disappointed he was when his publisher only coughed up a five-hundred-dollar advance for his travel book instead of the five thousand he anticipated. Briefly knocked off balance, he rebounded in an instant and started ranting.

I sank a bit myself when the horrors of the New Jersey Turnpike loomed ahead. Scholarly tomes have been written about the turnpike's ugliness. Smokestacks, refineries, junkyards, vacant lots, spooky compounds fenced off with concertina wire, there's no end to the ongoing assault on your brain. Miller could have squeezed fifty pages of bile from the first twelve miles alone.

The Walt Whitman Rest Area near Cherry Hill seemed too ripe to make much of as material. The turnpike has thirteen such stops honoring former Jersey residents such as Joyce Kilmer, Thomas Edison, James Fenimore Cooper, and Vince Lombardi. A plaque with the Good Gray Poet's visage and eight lines from “Song of Myself” hangs inside, but it attracted scant attention. Folks were too busy packing it in at Roy Rogers and Nathan's Famous—mostly large folks, it must be noted.

Soon I was back on the turnpike and enjoying another watery vista from the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The Delaware River emptied into the ocean below, the same river Washington crossed on Christmas Day in 1776 to defeat the Hessian troops in Trenton. In Emmanuel Leutze's famous painting, once tacked up in my third-grade classroom, Washington poses in a rowboat whose oarsmen nimbly dodge the ice floes.

On Route One, I turned south and lost the heavy traffic. I was in Delaware now, a state I'd never visited. Only Rhode Island is smaller, I knew that much, but I wanted some physical contact, a tactile sensation of arrival, and pulled over in Odessa, population roughly 350.

Odessa could have been on the Natchez Trace, so sultry was the weather that afternoon. Thunderstorms were brewing. You only had to glance at the mottled sky to confirm it. The crew at the fire department sprawled languidly over some benches out front, fanning themselves with newspapers. The buzz of cicadas was almost deafening. There was no breeze, nor any hint of one to come.

This was a day that advised you to move slowly, think carefully, and calibrate your life in inches. Two gents in ballcaps by the post office were obviously past masters of the strategy, as unhurried as a pair of leaves drifting idly down a stream.

They were discussing whether the Phillies could steal the pennant from the Mets, a subject I felt ready to tackle in detail after my devoted study of the box scores, and when we finished our deliberations and wound up predictably on opposite sides of the fence, I admired an elegant white colonial house nearby that suggested order and decorum and said, “Nice town you've got here.”

“We like it okay,” one gent replied. “They called it Cantwell's Bridge before they changed the name.”

Odessa people are proud of their history to judge by these men. The town, on the Appoquinimink River, was once surrounded by wheat farms, they told me, with six granaries to store the crop before it was shipped to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities on the East Coast. The name change, effected in 1855, linked the new Odessa to the other one on the Black Sea in Russia, also a major port for grain.

During the Civil War, Odessa acted as a station on the Underground Railroad, another point of pride. If a runaway slave from Maryland or elsewhere made it to the Quaker Meeting House, he or she was considered safe.

“Any fish in that river?” I asked.

“Some bluegills. Carp. Some bass.”

“They go to any size?”

“Not that you could prove by us.”

The Appoquinimink, more than sixteen miles long, flows into Delaware Bay. Corn and soybeans grow along its banks now. The beautiful marshes constitute the last such undisturbed system in the state. Hidden in the grasses are meadow jumping mice, who thrive on the humidity. The mice will leap as far as three feet if you take them by surprise, but I failed to roust any on my watch, although I would have liked to.

FIELDSBORO, PINE TREE
CORNERS
, Blackbird, the road rolled on toward Dover. The thunderstorm I'd been promised broke with a fury and brought a welcome freshness to the thick, swampy air.

Though I was eager to get settled at my motel in time to watch the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama that night, I couldn't resist a fast stop at the You'll Come Back Flea Market because (a) its worn-out merchandise was strewn over a weedy lot the size of a football field and (b) the woman in charge sat in a lawn chair ten feet from the highway with two ham sandwiches on her lap.

She didn't lift her eyes from the traffic or raise a hand to wave when I began to browse, so involved in her own eccentric pursuits that the big picture didn't affect her at all. If Wall Street crumbled to dust tomorrow, she'd still show up for work with her ham sandwiches, or maybe tunafish for variety's sake. She had the inner calm of the Buddha, an enviable state of grace. A talent for living in the moment is a wonderful gift.

If you ever need a refrigerator coil for your 1948 Kelvinator, the You'll Come Back Flea Market probably can oblige. At first glance, the place appeared to be a randomly accumulated mess, but it had a crude organizing principle. Grouped on a wobbly table, for instance, were three dented cyclists' helmets. A cardboard carton was home to many plastic baby dolls often hairless or missing a limb. A gallery of Crock-Pots and microwaves rested on another table, as if several embattled couples had hastily cashed in their wedding presents before they divorced.

Cables and wires coiled like snakes in the grass. A bin of rusty kitchen knives, a metal bed frame, broken appliances, fishing rods, mismatched hubcaps, the inventory went on and on. Oddly, no books were for sale, though, not even a copy of
The Da Vinci Code
.

The woman kept staring at the traffic, oblivious of her only potential customer. When I walked toward her, she took a bite of her sandwich and nodded cordially. It was good to know that I existed.

“Amazing market,” I ventured.

She dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin. “Find what you're looking for?”

“I wasn't looking for anything in particular. Where do you get all this stuff, anyway?”

“My boss, he's real good at it. He goes to backyard sales and garage sales. He loves to collect things.”

No lie, I thought. “I'll come back,” I joked as I left, but the joke flew right over her head.

THE GUIDEBOOKS TELL
how William Penn laid out the Green on State Street in Dover in 1772, so I'd formed an image of the capital as a quiet backwater with quaint historical buildings like those in Odessa, but as I approached Dover, U.S. 13 shed any trace of its rural character and mutated into Dupont Highway, a congested strip of franchises, outlet stores, and gigantic malls.

The phrase “blight on the landscape” doesn't do Dupont Highway justice, but there's no use in carping. Steinbeck railed about it, Miller protested, and yet the march of commerce goes on. Our ability to tolerate trashiness in the service of making money is amply documented. Perhaps the only truly contented Americans at present are those who feel a spring in their step at the sight of a Wal-Mart or a Kmart.

Still, it rankled. To locate my motel in the welter, I called it twice and covered the strip three times before the logo popped out. On a letterboard below the logo was a message,
GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS.
Almost four thousand soldiers were on active duty at Dover Air Force Base and might welcome such a blessing.

As I checked in, I asked the desk clerk, “Where's Dover?”

“This is Dover.”

“The other Dover. William Penn? The Green?”

He caught my drift. Old Dover lay just around the corner. Its outskirts were pretty, too, with mature trees and houses often fitted with screened porches to keep out the fleet of bugs that the humidity encouraged to hatch. The sultriness, along with the madly electrical cicadas, again recalled the Deep South.

A large park with a lake was deserted in the late afternoon. The grand home across from it—the grandest around by far—boasted a
MCCAIN FOR PRESIDENT
sign on the lawn, next to some ceramic Canada geese. This was the neighborhood's only partisan gesture, a Republican volley fired on Democratic turf. In 2004, John Kerry had carried Delaware by a wide margin.

On Loockerman Street, a man stood in his driveway, playing with a brilliantly colored parrot. He nudged it with his shoe, and the parrot danced away. He wore a dreamy smile, the kind that results from indulging in a favorite pastime.
Unguarded
, that was the word for it. In the simplest terms, he was just enjoying himself and not afraid to let the light shine through. Why should he care what the neighbors thought? He was enjoying himself.

“Won't he fly away?” I wondered.

“Nah, his wings been clipped.”

“Where'd you get him?”

“He's from the Amazon.”

“Long way to go for a bird.”

He laughed at that—joke on target. “There's a guy down that street over there, he's got an even more spectacular one.”

Old Dover just limped along, barely surviving. The historic buildings were splendid to see, but the malls and the franchises had killed off most of the businesses. On every block, stores were vacant, boarded up, or for rent. The shoppers had voted with their feet, or rather with their cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Only an army-navy surplus store was thriving. Its windows featured dummies in camouflage uniforms, underage soldiers that might have been acquired from a boys' clothier gone the way of William Penn. One boy soldier waved a flag, while the other held a .22. Hunting season opened soon, so firearms and ammo were selling briskly, although not as briskly as watermelons.

A woman in a Chevy pickup delivered the melons fresh from the farm. They were stacked in the truck's bed, and she'd park or double-park, lift one from the pile, cradle it to her chest, and dash to someone's door. Her melons were the familiar type—green skin, red pulp—but you also can buy Delaware “sugar babies” with black skins and orange bellies, as they say in the trade.

You don't need much land to farm watermelons. Five acres or so will suffice, although the harvesting, still done by hand, is tough enough to exhaust your average Mr. Universe, with the trophy specimens weighing as much as forty pounds.

A STRONG ODOR
of cooking oil and fried food hung over Dupont Highway that evening. It did not whet my appetite. For dinner, I skipped Boston Market, Denny's, Bob Evans, IHOP, Olive Garden, Applebee's, Pizza Hut, and TGI Friday's, all radiating a cheerfulness I distrusted, for a bowl of pho at a tiny Vietnamese café—rich beef broth, thinly sliced flank steak, crisp bean sprouts, and Thai basil. The price was $7.99, and I had the place to myself.

I thought I'd watch the McCain-Obama debate at a corner bar, the better to sample opinions. Like everyone of my generation, I remembered the first televised debate between John F. Kennedy, tanned and confident, and the shifty-looking Richard Nixon with his telltale five-o'clock shadow. The program had scored the highest Nielsen rating up to that point, breaking a record set by the last game of the '59 World Series, between the White Sox and the Dodgers.

The parallels between the Kennedy-Nixon election and the current one were obvious, of course. The Grand Old Party had been on its knees in 1960, as it was in 2008. The Republicans controlled only seven state legislatures and fourteen gubernatorial seats, causing a weary, desperate Nixon to grasp at straws. Eisenhower's popularity hadn't rubbed off on him at all.

“He has a magic,” Nixon grumbled about Ike. “He makes people happy.”

Nixon attacked Kennedy for being a bad citizen who refused to support the team because he couldn't be its captain. Moreover, Kennedy had given America an inferiority complex, he said, by implying that our international prestige was tarnished. The Democrats were spendthrifts, Nixon also charged. Their economic policies were guaranteed to increase the cost of “everything the housewife buys” by 25 percent.

As for the
good
citizens, they couldn't afford to put their faith in a young, untried leader who hadn't been tested by fire when an arsenal of Soviet warheads was purportedly aimed at the United States. Nixon ratcheted up the fear factor, casting Nikita Khrushchev as a coeval of Emperor Ming, the nemesis of Flash Gordon.

“Incidentally, I have talked with Khrushchev,” he bragged, an experienced statesman lording it over the “inexperienced” Kennedy. “He is a cold, hard, ruthless man who feeds on weakness and doubt.” His words would find an echo in Republican depictions of Osama bin Laden.