Year of travel in the US

OVER the last year, I drove 30,000 miles exploring the western half of the US, staying in the extreme wilderness as well as glamorous cities, travelling on secondary roads rather than the interstates. I interacted with people of all classes and emerged physically intact despite occasional danger, even if many preconceptions were shattered. These are my big takeaways, especially in light of recent political developments.

Except for the largest cities, the country is frighteningly homogeneous. Listening to the drumbeat about the penetration of Hispanics everywhere, you would expect to find the hinterlands sparkling with multiracialism. In the presidential debate, we heard that “in Springfield [Ohio], they [Haitian immigrants] are eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats”. Instead, even in places where demographic data and local industry would indicate otherwise, migrants are rarely seen. Xenophobic sentiment is strongest precisely where there are fewest migrants.

Just north of San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, and Napa counties turn unbearably white. Quaint towns like Petaluma and Sebastopol remain mummified in fifties nostalgia. All along the sublime Oregon coast this summer, I rarely met anyone non-white (except for foreign tourists) until I hiked in a state park an hour west of Portland. I guessed instantly where the young biracial couples were from. Yet Portland itself, despite its bohemian reputation, is insufferably white, both in demographics and norms.

The eastern sides of Oregon and Washington have a justified reputation for historical racism. I plunged anyway into the alleged strongholds of white supremacy in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities remain predominantly white preoccupations, based on their origins as middle-class retreats from urban drudgery. Engaging in ‘white’ activities in unrelentingly white settings made me doubly self-conscious of the artificiality of the escape. The anomaly wasn’t so much white nationalism as rural poverty, which the country has little stomach to confront.

Urban gentrification has managed to reproduce itself in precisely the same manner everywhere.

After 40 years of neoliberal commodification, urban gentrification has managed to reproduce itself in precisely the same manner everywhere. Los Angeles feels the most dystopian, because of its gargantuanism, but all cities gravitate towards its viral anxiety. Los Angeles doesn’t work because it is oversold as a magnet of opportunity. I felt more comfortable among the homeless in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, although a recent supreme court judgement criminalises homeless encampments. I prefer the visibility of poverty.

Road rage, once a rarity, is everywhere, especially in liberal cities. Phoenix is where you suddenly encounter deadly speed if you’re approaching from the east. Its agonisingly elaborate suburban neatness parodies itself. The sprawl in Phoenix or Las Vegas is so stupendous that their long-term survival amidst water and other scarcities seems fanciful. All of this creates anxiety, which cannot be expressed honestly, except in such diversions as “healthy lifestyles.”

Caste consciousness in America has been reduced to a binary. The rigid segregation between what we might call ‘Brahmins’ versus “Dalits” is pervasive. Seattle had the largest concentration of immigrant desi professionals I saw. Wherever such cosmopolites proliferate, there exists the same set of unresolvable paradoxes involving inequality. But you can’t even find healthy food outside the big cities, so I craved the comforts of familiarity, despite the banal gentrification.

The two Americas, red and blue (as the Nov 5 electoral map showed), don’t talk to each other — but it goes beyond that. The tech bros in Silicon Valley speak an identical language of elitism. One former guardian of discourse at Twitter insisted that “the people are stupid” and must be protected from themselves, a sentiment I often heard among the techies.

American rage seems ready to boil over into overt violence at the slightest push. The Brahmins express it with speed and rudeness, while the Dalits show it with rampant conspiracy theory, often called ‘common sense’. The shoplifters, homeless, and illegals must be purged by militarist force, as I saw in Portland, lately the site of the George Floyd occupation.

Some of the rural rage might well emanate from the cultural dystopia, with few signs of spontaneous cultural expression. Not that the cities are different, with such former hotbeds as Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley, and the Sunset Strip mere husks of their former selves.

I could never get away from wondering if this civilisation is fragile or stable, on the verge of collapse or unshakably rooted. Would it take a slight trigger, such as a climate emergency, to topple it, or is it resilient? Perhaps both.

As with everything else, infrastructure is distributed unequally. I explored all four quadrants of New Mexico and Arizona, and the roads were so un-drivable that I swore never to return. The vast majority of towns seem on the way to becoming ghost towns, with little foot traffic, the same Family Dollars without customers, and Walmart and Home Depot as the forced hives of activity. The hustle and bustle ceases even in the reconstructed major downtowns in the evenings.

Taking in the entire western half of the country shocked me about the emptiness of the land; nearly all the people seem to inhabit a minute fraction of territory. Entire countries could be prosperously resettled in the emptiness. Not to have a modern homesteading initiative to give land to the landless seems a travesty.

Unmoored, nomadic, unclaimed, I became increasingly conscious of my forgotten roots in the colonial experience. In order to avoid mishap, calmness is the first priority on such a journey, but in the end, I too succumbed to American rage, disturbed by the uniform vulgarity, narcissism, and inequality of the cities, and the cultural desolation of the countryside.

I began with unbounded optimism and nostalgia, but soon found it difficult to focus on anything but death — not just mine, but of the civilisation around me. When I was stationary, the feeling receded, but when mobile, it returned with a vengeance. It may have something to do with the corrupted forms of modern motion itself, with driving as the only realistic option available. Yet I must resume next year, exploring the eastern United States, setting aside my resentment as unwanted baggage.

The writer is the author of many books of fiction, poetry, and criticism.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2024