The Best Travel Writing 2011 by James O'Reilly

Author:James O'Reilly [O'Reilly, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609520090
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Published: 2011-12-25T16:51:42+00:00

Martin Dillon worked for the BBC in Northern Ireland for eighteen years and has won international acclaim for his nonfiction books about Ireland, including The Shankill Butchers, God and the Gun, and The Dirty War. He is often called on as one of the foremost authorities on global terrorism.

JOHNNA KAPLAN

Flyover Country

It’s too big to grasp—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

BETWEEN BACK EAST AND OUT WEST, IN THAT OBSCURE sweep of green you glimpse from the airplane window before you close the shade and put on your headphones, roads roll out across the fields like shiny gray ribbons. The sun rises over tiny rivers that you can drive across in a fraction of the time it would take to pronounce their names. It sets over cities you never think about dominated by mountain ranges you never knew existed. During the years I lived in Missouri and almost everyone else I knew lived between New York and Boston, I drove back and forth many times across this unappreciated expanse of America.

Usually I took the Interstates, which were their own world, divorced from whatever was going on in the unseen towns beyond them. The presence of civilization was indicated by watchful cows and by truck stops, which periodically appeared in the distance like miniature cities. I drove alongside lumbering big rigs. I was forever passing them, and they were forever appearing in front of me again. I sometimes felt like the only person in a sea of things, all kinds of things being busily carried to and fro. It was an odd vantage point, I was unused to seeing so much commerce with so few consumers.

For entertainment there were billboards: “Avoid Hell. Repent. Trust Jesus Today.” “Where will you spend eternity? Jesus Christ is the answer!”

For reassurance there were Lewis and Clark Trail markers, which momentarily overruled the doubts I had about the sanity of my decision to move. I told myself that in leaving New York I was not giving up or stepping down. I imagined that I was better suited for another era, a time when West was the direction everyone in America wanted to go. Also comforting were the national forests, which reminded me that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t decide whether the East or the Midwest was my home; they belonged to the same country, after all, and I could claim that all of it was mine. Sometimes I was the only one driving through a national forest—not just mine, but mine alone.

Sometimes as I drove I forgot exactly where I was, which may have been because only those who lived there considered it a definable place. More than once, after an hour spent coaxing my car uphill, sure that I was crossing some grand and storied range, I looked at my map and saw that the peaks which I had just struggled to summit merited nothing more than a nameless green blob.

I spent too many nights in a dot on the map called Triadelphia, West Virginia.

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