Better Than Fiction by Lonely Planet

Author:Lonely Planet
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lonely Planet

Death Trip

BY PETER HO DAVIES

Peter Ho Davies is the author of a novel, The Welsh Girl, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and two story collections, The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. One of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’, he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan.

The first time my wife and I moved across the US – from Atlanta to Eugene, Oregon – was in the late summer of 1997. I was changing jobs, swapping one university for another, and although my new position came with relocation expenses, we opted against putting our car on a truck and flying out, and instead decided to take a week and drive west.

We were young(ish) and indulging in the romance of the great American road trip, as popularized in books and movies and, in a sense, reaching back to before there even were roads to take such trips on. We crossed the Mississippi in the shadow of the St Louis Arch, monument to the city’s role as gateway to the West, stopped outside Salt Lake City at Promontory Summit where the tracks of the first transcontinental railroad were joined, and paused near journey’s end at an Oregon Trail museum, where the original wagon ruts of the pioneers could still be seen worn deep into the rocky ground. This wasn’t my history – I’m an expat Brit – but I was at least as thrilled as my American wife to see these famous sights (and several lesser ones). To see them and, of course, be seen with them in the obligatory photos, since secure in the knowledge that our trip was purposeful, necessary, we could while away the miles – guiltlessly – as gawking tourists.

We got to Oregon, to a friend’s house in Portland, on my 31st birthday, and after celebrating late into the evening, woke the next morning to the news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris.

It felt like news from another planet. Not just for its abruptness – we’d barely looked at a newspaper in days – but because after a week of travel, all of it westward, England and France felt impossibly remote. And then, in the days that followed, came the unreality of the mourning, watching the funeral in the small hours of the morning on a borrowed TV in our otherwise empty house in Eugene (our furniture wouldn’t arrive on the delayed moving truck for two more weeks, adding to the dislocating sense of limbo). Britain seemed distant geographically, but also suddenly culturally and emotionally, to judge from the unprecedented scenes of mass public grief. Diana’s death dismayed me, as that of any young person would, but never having paid much attention to the Royal Family, I didn’t feel the loss with the personal intensity of those crowds on TV. To make matters stranger, as the new Brit in town, I was constantly being asked about her death, and even having people offer me their condolences.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.