Jr.—seemed not to rise from that country’s soil so much as hover above it, where they were blown to smithereens. On a cold October day in 1969, I stood on the Ambassador Bridge, which spans the river between Windsor and Detroit, the busiest border crossing on the continent, and pounded my fists on the hoods of cars lined up to enter the United States, denouncing the war in Vietnam, the treatment of blacks in the South. I was in a permanent rage.
Now, thirty-five years later, I’m cruising the shelves of a bookstore in one of America’s biggest cities. I feel oddly at home, bending sideways to squint at the titles, moving through fiction to biography, past the children’s section.
That’s where it comes to me. My first Americans were two kids: a blonde girl in a pink dress and a brown-haired boy in shorts. They had a dog, Spot, and a kitten, Puff, and a baby sister, Sally. I loved them with all my heart. They ran through the pages of the first book I ever read, exuberant, laughing. I admired them even when they wept, for they weren’t afraid to cry. Maybe they knew, as Americans seem to, that things will work out for them in the end.
“Fun with Dick and Jane!” I exclaim. Wayne looks at me over the shelf, as if unsure whether to acknowledge me. But it’s too late to sidle away. I’m pulling at his sleeve. “I figured it out, and wouldn’t you know it? My first Americans were characters in a book.”
WE continue south the next morning on Interstate 5, a fine drizzle making itself noticeable on the windshield, the wipers giving a cozy kind of syncopated rhythm to the passing parade. Merilyn is in the co-pilot’s seat, navigating with the aid of two maps spread out on her lap, one American Automobile Association map of the entire United States as it appeared fifteen years ago and a smaller, more recent MapArt book open to the state of Washington. Various brochures and booklets are also arranged about her half of the car, but neatly, like the cymbals on a set of drums. She is marking our actual route on the larger map with a yellow highlighter and various alternative routes on the smaller map. Merilyn is both a dedicated planner and a Libran, which means that (a) there must be a plan and (b) every plan must be balanced by an alternative plan. Three alternative plans are better than two, but since that would upset the balance, a fourth plan is required. The small map soon becomes cross-veined with yellow marker lines. In my view, if you aren’t going anywhere in particular, it doesn’t much matter how you get there. To which she replies that if the destination isn’t important, then the route to it must be.
“We could stay on the I-5 to Portland,” she says, “and from there cut over to Highway 101 and go down the coast to San Francisco. I’ve never been to San Francisco.”
“That sounds good,” I say. “In Portland, we could visit Powell’s City of Books. It’s supposed to be the biggest bookstore in the world—a whole city block of books.” I mentally calculate how much room we have in the trunk. Not enough.
“Or we could turn east here and go down the 82 and the 395, which would eventually take us into Yosemite.”
“I’ve never been to Yosemite,” I say. In this state, all the minor route numbers are printed on a portrait of George Washington’s head. The I-5 is lined with the first president’s head on a stick.
“Neither have I,” she says, “but we can also get there from San Francisco. Or we could get off the I-5 and drive over to the coast. Find a romantic little motel somewhere overlooking the Pacific Ocean.”
“Let’s do that.”
As Merilyn returns to her maps, my mind drifts off into something I read in the New Yorker about the differences between what men and women expect when they’re on holiday. According to the article, men want sex, while women want mostly “an interlude of near-monastic solitude.” I’m sure that is a gross oversimplification. Men don’t want just sex. They also want to be left alone. Or maybe they want sex and then to be left alone, whereas women apparently just want to be left alone. But men, I contend, also want other things when travelling: alcohol, a good book, a quiet room, Internet access, great food, courteous and prompt service, other people’s kids kept at a discreet distance, clean water in the pool, the sand raked at night, something interesting to walk to around the point, like a bar. In other words, the same things women want.
“Or we could stay on the I-5 all the way down to San Francisco. That would save us some time. Or we could turn east at Eugene, cross the mountains, and hit the 395 at Burns. What do you think?”
“Fine by me. But wouldn’t that mean missing San Francisco?”
The word on the street used to be that men think about sex every twenty seconds, whereas women think about it once a week or so. This had a scientific ring to it, as though someone had actually timed it. Actually, somebody had: Alfred Kinsey, whose Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made all kinds of claims about what men do and think about based, as far as I can remember, on studies conducted with a group of college students in Florida in the 1950s. What the Kinsey Institute’s report actually stated, however, is that, on average, 54 per cent of men think about sex once or twice a day, 43 per cent think about it once a week to once a month, and 3 per cent think about it less than once a month, if at all. And that women think about sex approximately half as often as men do. The difference doesn’t seem to be enough on which to base an entire philosophy of the fundamental incompatibility of men and women. Besides, the whole Kinsey Report has been debunked. More recent studies show that women think about sex even more often than men do, they just don’t talk about it as much, at least not to men.
“We can see San Francisco anytime,” Merilyn says. “I think I’d rather avoid big cities.”
“Me, too.”
M AYBE we should eat soon,” Wayne says before we’ve driven very far. “I’m so hungry my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.” It was one of his father’s favourite phrases.
The morning broke with strong winds and rain that seemed pitched in great fistfuls from the hands of the gods. We ignored it, pulling the blankets over our heads. We are habitually early risers, but not this morning. We eased into the day, sitting up in bed with our books and mugs of Starbucks coffee we made ourselves, Wayne spiking his with cream he pilfered from the restaurant the night before. The room was small but cozy, strewn with our things, the air scented with the flowers I lifted from the waste bins behind the Pike Market.
We left with reluctance, pulling out of Seattle close to noon. We weren’t quite in travel mode yet, that frame of mind that makes the car, and the road, the best place in the world to be.
“We’ll eat at one of those great little diners,” I say vaguely.
Breakfast is our favourite meal on the road, the one that proves we’re not home. We often eat lunch at a restaurant, and dinner, too, but the first meal of the day is not normally taken with strangers. At home we cook our porridge with cranberries in the microwave, or grab pieces of fruit and go off to our respective desks. On the road, our appetites become gargantuan and we sit in diners before platters of food heaped with enough calories to last a lumberjack all day. It must be the ancient nomad in us coming out. Stock up while you can, our reptilian brain insists; you never know when you’ll eat again.
We pull off the interstate at an exit to nowhere that we can see, lured by a low wooden building with a huge sign tacked to the roof: All-Day Breakfast. Not a diner, but close enough. Everyone in the place but us seems to be a regular. We stand at the door as the waitress moves among
