red clay halo
Surprise visit to the east coast this weekend. The leaves were flamboyantly doing their thing, gathering up against our shins while we walked through 19th century neighborhoods, as red as red could be. Everything seemed so wholesome and unpretentious. No contrived standards of coolness to maintain. Genuine people with drawn-out speech, patriotic to a T, support our troops, latte what?
The flight from Baltimore to Houston passed directly over Roanoke. It's cruel, to see familiar ridgelines and reservoirs from 32,000 feet. The predictable blue of the mountains, a Virginia sunset freebie. Here I am, but you absolutely can't touch me. Maybe it was the one time I thought that an emergency landing or plummeting to the ground wouldn't be such a bad thing. At least it would be on that red clay.
I talked to both Laura and Peter about this. Laura likened a desire for old land to the ease of old friendships - there's something more emotionally rooted there that isn't present in newer friendships, no matter how good they are. And though Oregon may be aesthetically amazing in every geographical way, that emotional attachment doesn't run as deep. Peter said that I was a seed borne out of red clay, and nothing changes that, no matter how long you're gone. He said he would have felt the same way if a plane took him directly over the Nebraska farm that eventually shaped the course of his life.
I saw those mountains. I actually saw them yesterday. But didn't breathe that air, didn't lay on that grass, didn't stain my hands with that soil.
where you from girl?
i am the very embodiment of our techy generation, laptop on hand for whatever wireless networks appear, ipod trustily doing its overzealous thing, cell phone set to vibrate (please, no interruptions).
ended up in the travel cafe on broadway - according to the note on the wall, today's tour is set for Paris, Glacier National Park, Lucerne, and Budapest. Oh Budapest, why did it have to be Budapest. He's stealing every image that I've dreamed of and wasn't creative enough to capture. Come on dear, let's go - on a whim, a weekend fling. For no reason but to be on that impossibly long escalator, headed to the bowels of a divided city - see if we make it out unchanged. We'll move past the women with thick ankles stuffed into sturdy shoes. Heads towards the ground (the melancholy magyars)- is that me i see getting on the metro (how many home videos are we unknowlingly in)? Nondescript communist-era buildings - like every other one around. Unique in their sameness, straight lines, and calculated balconies (this is what i predict for the booming pearl district - just give it 25 years). the plaza outside of deli palyudvar, where a man committed suicide just minutes before i arrived one tuesday afternoon. the promenade where the lightposts pretend to be trees - i laid on those benches and read le miserables until my eyes clouded with tears and i became another huddled mess that passersby nervously looked away from. the plaza where i pretended to not understand english and used only hand gestures and some weird mix of german and hungarian and nonsense - oh please let me pass for eastern european this time around.
And how many times have I done that? Our senior year of high school, Emily & I took a roadtrip to Charleston, West Virginia for spring break (no sarcasm please - you take what you get, right?). On our way up I-77, north out of Wytheville, we stopped for lunch in a town by the name of Bland, Virginia. We ate at a local diner - the other patrons being 4 overall wearing men - third generation coalminers. In our quest to be exotic, she spoke to me in spanish, and I would answer in german (unfortunately, we weren't in the same language programs) - figured these mountain people don't know no better. When approached by the waitress, we acted confused and relied on each other for translation help. Using overtly bad grammar, we asked for biscuits & gravy and I spent the rest of the meal repeating germanic variations of "who's shirt is that? i like shirts. your shirt is red. my shirt is blue." and so on and so forth. i can only assume Emily's spanish consisted of the same sort of thing. The conversation between the four men had grown quiet by the time we made our way to the cashier. All eyes on us, the foreigners.
"So....where ya'll from?"
"- ahhh excuse me sorry?"
"i said, where ya'll from?"
"-ahhh...Alberta".
Whatever that meant. Alberta. I don't even need to begin listing all of the ways that our thoughts of reasoning were flawed. But we were exotic - that's all that mattered.
After this lunch, we went to Bland High School with Amanda Walton's video camera (this was in the heyday of Wicker Deer Productions, our "indie film company") and walked through the hallways videotaping everything we saw as if there was something worth seeing again (i was always one obsessed with high school buildings). The lunchbell rang and we were in luck, now making an impression on aforementioned coalminers' children. A few suspicious looks by teachers later, we hurried out and went to the antique store next door, using our stock pseudo-language. By the time it was all over, we figured we would have the whole town of Bland talking about the strangers who didn't speak no American.
