And what’s a nice girl like you doing out on a day like this, Sue? Great earrings. It’s set to snow something awful, I hear. Pancakes, the usual? Yeah, I’m here right through Christmas.”
The place is draped with tinsel garlands; Christmasy cut-outs of Santa Claus, Rudolph, and Frosty are stuck to the walls. Elves dangle from the ceiling on red ribbons. A necklace of Christmas lights flashes at our waitress’s throat as she leads us to a table topped with a silver-dusted red plastic poinsettia.
“What can I bring you this morning?”
“I think it’s already afternoon.”
“Honey, here it’s morning all day long. Coffee?”
“Do you have decaf?”
“I’ll have to make some fresh.”
Breakfast is a plate of grease. That’s how the gumshoe would have described it in The Bookman’s Promise, the audiobook we’ve been listening to for the past hour. I order bacon and hash browns with a single poached egg, no toast. Wayne orders eggs and links with biscuits and gravy.
“You ever had biscuits and gravy?” I ask him.
“No.”
“You sure you want that?” I used to work in a short-order kitchen. I know where gravy like that comes from.
“Sure I’m sure,” he says defensively. “Who doesn’t like gravy?”
A few years ago, we took a road trip through Quebec that turned into a search for the perfect confit de canard—duck leg simmered to a tender crisp in its own lard. Before that, a trip to France became a quest for the perfect crème caramel. When my breakfast arrives, I decide that on this drive through America, I’ll be on the lookout for the perfect hash browns. The ones on the plate before me are grated and browned on the grill to the consistency of fibreboard. The yolk of my egg, which should be absorbed by the potato, runs in thin, pale rivulets across the plate. The bacon is deep mahogany and tastes of salt, not pork. Wayne’s biscuits are buried in a grey lava flow.
“How we doin’ so far?” the waitress says brightly, refilling our cups and moving on while we are still deciding whether to be honest or polite. By the time we smile and nod, Wayne’s mouth full of dry biscuit, she is long gone.
But really, I love the place, weak coffee, burnt bacon, greasy potatoes, grey gravy, and all. The morning smell of it. The fuggy warmth. The way everyone calls out, “Bye, Dorothy, Merry Christmas!” as they push through the door into the driving, sleeting rain, saying it the way you’d say, “Bye, Mom.” As if you know you’ll be back soon.
“What’s the best way to get to the Pacific coast?” we ask Dorothy when she brings our bill.
That stops her. She sets her coffee pot down on the table and looks up past the garlands, as if the answer is written on the ceiling tiles. We’ve seen this look before, on the face of a matron on a sidewalk in Pittenweem, Scotland. We’d asked her where to find the Harbour Guest House, the only bayside hotel in a village of not much more than a thousand souls. She’d looked at us blankly. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve only lived here these nine years.” Wayne was gobsmacked. “Never ask a local,” I’d said.
“I wouldn’t know,” Dorothy says finally with a laugh. “The Sound is right here, but the coast? I’ve never been.”
WE turn off the I-5 onto Highway 30 just south of Kelso, Washington, and cross the Columbia Gorge. The Columbia River is the dividing line between Washington State and Oregon. Highway 30, as we call it (we still aren’t used to saying “route” instead of “highway”), looks deceptively tame on the map. In reality, it hugs the high land above the Columbia Valley on the Oregon side, twisting and turning like an asphalt snake that is losing its grip on the slippery granite cliffs. The Columbia gleams occasionally far below. There is a logging truck behind us, more impatient to get to the coast than—in its estimation—we are. On the few straight stretches of highway, it comes so close to our tail that the word “Freightliner,” read backwards, fills the rear-view mirror and seems to be snapping at us to get out of its way. On the curves, which arc out over the sheer drop to the river below, it shrinks back as though momentarily looking for a weak spot on our unguarded flank.
“How far to the coast?” I ask Merilyn.
She looks at the map and counts. “About sixty kilometres,” she says.
“Kilometres?” I ask.
“All right, miles,” she says, as though the difference isn’t worth quibbling over.
Finally a road appears on our left, rising away from the river, and I turn abruptly onto it. The truck roars by behind a wall of water, sounding disappointed, like a tomcat whose catnip mouse has fallen down a furnace vent. I turn the car around, and we sit at the intersection for a while looking out across the valley. The rain is still coming down hard and a strong wind is bending some fairly substantial trees above our heads. Before us, far below, we can make out the edge of the river on the Washington side, a fishing village, perhaps, or a farm. Maybe a winery. It looks calm down there.
“There’s a nice-looking hotel in Astoria,” Merilyn says. She spent much of last night surfing the Internet for likely lodgings. “Maybe we should stay there tonight.”
“Sounds good,” I say half-heartedly. We are vagabonds in America, dogged by rain. But Astoria seems too close to Seattle. Shouldn’t we try to make it farther down the coast?
“We have lots of time,” Merilyn says, as if reading my mind. “We’re on holiday.”
PERHAPS IT was our close encounter with the transport truck, or my post-border jitters, but I am still nervous about our trip. I have always had rather ambivalent feelings about America or, at least, America as seen from afar. It speaks a version of our language, but with its own idiosyncratic touches: chinos, sneakers, zee. Maybe that’s why America makes me uneasy: it’s eerily familiar, like a song I don’t remember hearing yet somehow know the words to. Being in America is like walking around in someone else’s dream.
Here is what I have come to believe about America, based, I admit, largely on circumstantial and even hearsay evidence: America is an annoying and dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Its citizens barge around foreign countries looking for hamburgers and pizza and fried chicken, unaware of, or unconcerned about, or impatient with the possibility that the country they are in might have its own cuisine, customs, economy, political system, and religion with which it is quite happy, thank you very much. It holds that “different” is a synonym for “inferior.” In an Irish pub in Buenos Aires I met an American who told me his hotel was better than mine because his was closer to a Wendy’s.
The dream we’re walking around in is “the American Dream,” which seems to involve having a chicken in every pot, a new Detroit car in every garage, 2.86 television sets in every home, and broadband Internet access on every street. It’s the dream of fame and fortune, of success measured in material wealth. This is a newish version; the original American Dream, as defined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, had more substance. It was of “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity to each according to his ability or achievement.” Nothing would be handed to you on a silver platter: you had to earn it: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high
