We took our friend Elizabeth (visiting from New York) down to Miami last Saturday and before dinner she noted that I was a finicky eater. I took exception to the charge.
Considering how food now dominates the world of travel, it was worse than being accused of having no sense of direction. Thanks to TV, travel writers can now mouth platitudes (they’re almost encouraged to do so) as long as they’re enthusiastically downing some hideous foodstuff that may or may not be indicative of what the local population eats.
Anyway, in my defense, I explained to Elizabeth that I am simply not a big meat eater. I left out – assuming it was understood – that I can’t stand organs or offal.
Later it occurred to me that if I just gave up meat, nobody would think of me as a finicky eater. They would just say, respectfully, that I was a vegetarian.
Every travel writer who writes about the United States (I’ve already excluded a number of travel writers, including, regrettably, some American ones) does so in the shadow of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. Quoting Tocqueville in articles about the States became such a cliché that Calvin Trillin, when he was filing regular reports from around the country for The New Yorker, started a small club of reporters who vowed never to mention Tocqueville in a story.
But I would argue that writers who go out to look for America (and that includes songwriters) owe a greater debt to the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s than they do to the French political thinker. The Project’s American Guide Series – which covered all 48 states, plus the territories of Alaska and Puerto Rico – showed that every area of the country was worthy of attention, that Arkansas was as deserving of a book as California.
It was not obeisance to geographical relativism but rather a recognition of the infinite richness of the United States. The Guide’s belief in the value of the marginal, the beauty of the unsung – under threat today from the supremacy of the popular (the curse of the Internet) – infused James Morris’s Coast to Coast, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak. Its greatest champion was Jack Kerouac who, heading back to New York after travels in the West, found grandeur in the Susquehanna River.
A friend recently went with a group on a cruise around Southeast Asia. On his return, he told me that he found most of the other passengers much better company than the people in his group, who, on the whole, had done almost no reading about the countries that the ship visited. In fact, he said, they showed very little interest in the destinations. This would not be noteworthy except for the fact that my friend was on a press trip with fellow travel writers.
Many everyday interactions in Myanmar - a ride in a cab, a purchase in a store - end with the question: "Where you from?" After the first few queries I couldn't get "USA" out fast enough for I knew it would produce an approving thumbs up, a ferocious betel-stained smile, a devout incantation of "Obama." (He was there the week before I was.) If the questioners spoke English they would sometimes add the commentary, "Great country." And looking around at the shabby buildings, the garbage-strewn streets, the exhaust-spewing buses, I wholeheartedly agreed with them.
Last week I wondered what they thought when they heard about Sandy Hook.
Seen yesterday on Facebook:
"If Romney wins, I'm leaving the country. If Obama wins, I'm leaving the country. It has nothing to do with politics. I just want to travel."
And so this blog's Election 2012 coverage comes to an end.
While up in New York, I took the subway to Brooklyn to meet the founder of the new online travel magazine Carry On. Josh lives in Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood which has become popular with young New Yorkers because it's cheaper than nearby Williamsburg (and nowhere near as relentlessly hip).
After a lunch at Krolewskie Jadlo (pierogies for Josh, potato pancakes for me) we took a stroll up Manhattan Avenue. At one intersection Josh pointed down the side street where, he said, an elderly Polish woman has a little watch repair business. He took a watch to her once - an old Soviet watch he had bought on ebay - and she refused to fix it. "She didn't look like she could afford to turn down business," Josh said, still amazed. "She said, 'Take it to the Russians on 42nd Street.'"