Some people still feel the need to send me news items about what is happening in my home country. I don’t read the news much for the very reasons that people feel compelled to keep me updated. What is happening in the US is so disturbing that it must be shared. Like any dark secret, the burden compels disclosure.
I used to be in love with America. But like all good love stories, the initial honeymoon phase couldn’t last forever. My story is that of a breakup. I’ve been letting go of the US since I decided to quit my job in defense and study theology in Europe in 2013. It’s a slow process. I kept thinking: I could go back still…. pick up where I left off… it wasn’t that bad… Like so many lovers before and since.
A writing mentor of mine once remarked that I am a hawk and a dove; I contain the divisions of my land. It was easier to leave the country and create another division between European me and American me than to heal or solve the divisions between the American self.
Most of what we call “being in love” is just how that other person or thing makes us feel. We don’t really even know that other person yet, so how can we say we love them? We love the feeling we get, the magic, the suspense, the thrill, the adventure, the potential of what could transpire between us. That is what we call being in love. But it is not love, for love is eternal. It doesn’t fade out of fashion, like yesterday’s bread—to borrow a phrase from German. Does it mean that now that I know America, I don’t love her? Maybe this is where the analogy breaks down or simply needs to be extended to that of an abusive relationship. I love the ideals of America, but we get along better when we live apart.
For the first 33 years of my life, I was bedazzled: From sea to shining sea.
In 1997, I was ecstatic to hear my family was moving across the country after I graduated from high school in Massachusetts. California’s sun and glitz beckoned my teenage self; I craved suntans and fresh sea air. Los Angeles was the city of big picture dreams, and I wasn’t immune to the allure. Saying goodbye to my two best friends before we left, we took photos outside the big old house where I grew up. I think we hung our pale white arms over each other’s shoulders and tearfully posed in front of my mother’s herb garden at the end of the driveway. I was excited to leave the small town to see America. We caravanned across the wide expanse of the lower 48 in two Toyotas with walkie-talkies to coordinate our pit stops.
My parents, older sister, and I took turns driving, and my younger sister sat in the back. Whenever we stopped, out came the red cooler in the trunk, which we’d restock with ice every morning. We’d enjoy a snack or eat a sandwich we’d put together in the parking lot of our motel. There was a bag of plums intended to be a healthy option, but those didn’t get any takers despite my mother’s offering them every time we took a break. It became a running joke: Can I offer you a delicious plum? As we progressed across the continent, the plums grew softer and even less appealing.
We stopped to visit friends in Detroit, and on our way out of town, they referred us to a gas station to tank up before we got back on the interstate. I turned around from checking the air in our tires to see my father held up at gunpoint next to the pump. It all happened so fast. “I’m being robbed.” He stated matter-of-factly, with his hands above his head. The young man took off with his wallet and the barely $20 in contents. The gas station owner came out, shooting his pistol in the air, shouting, “Stop, thief!” I ran after the criminal. I don’t know why I did, my father’s wallet seemed important; action was required! The young man turned around and fired off a few shots. That’s when we all hit the ground. The sound of gunshots is much less glamorous in real life than on the big screen: ping, ping, ping! The only time in my life I’ve been shot at. I won’t forget it. What I did forget a few days later was my camera. I left it in the pool area of a Motel Six somewhere in Missouri. All the goodbyes and the images of Detroit and everything in between were lost on that roll of film. The sound of bullets whizzing through the air and the smell of ripe plums is all that remains.
In 1999, I finally saw the Grand Canyon on the drive to my first year of college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Los Angeles. My father allowed me to drive a few hours, and I got one of my first speeding tickets somewhere. I didn’t know about the speed traps set outside small towns on the highways, used to boost their revenues. My father regretted letting me drive that small section, but every life lesson has a price. We didn’t have time to spend more than a few hours on the upper southern viewing point of the impossibly vast cleft in the earth, but the memory is imprinted into my heart, much as the Arizona sun burned my skin. As we wound our way up the road in Santa Fe to my new school, the smell of the pine trees in the mountains was delicious. The air was so dry in New Mexico that I had constant nosebleeds, but the smell was almost worth it.
In early 2003, after I graduated college in southern California, my sister was accepted to medical school, and we had to get her from northern California to upstate New York in record time. I was recruited for the task. We drove nonstop, sleeping a few hours in rest stops and bitching over each other's choices in music. I was into Italian alterno-pop, and she was into Red Hot Chili Peppers, to give an example. I was schmaltzy. She was edgy.
As we drove under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, my heart expanded upwards to touch those silvery steel arms. I welcomed this massive embrace of my country. My sister took a photo of me under a huge American flag at a rest stop in Missouri; I was smiling and posing in a semi-salute. A few months later, I enlisted in the US Army and was scheduled to attend Basic Combat Training in the autumn in that very same state at Fort Leonard Wood.
Before I left for my new life with Uncle Sam, my older brother was now moving “back East” with his young family in the summer of 2003. I offered to help by driving their car, with a hitch trailer and their dog, from Los Angeles to New York. The old Volvo had a breakdown on a lonesome stretch of highway in Arizona, and I developed a case of shingles from the stress. Those stretches of endless highway through Oklahoma taxed my patience, and I took my breaks on more lonesome rest stops where I could leave the dog in the car with the windows cracked while I went to the loo and then enjoy a smoke while he frolicked in the picnic area. I avoided the big cities, and when we got to New York, the greenery and moist air enveloped me like a steam sauna after the dry heat of the southwest.
I arrived back in Arizona on Thanksgiving 2003 as an enlisted soldier in training at Fort Huachuca. The base is in the desert, very near the border with Mexico. I loved those dark, cold mornings when we ran and trained before the weather got too hot. The dry desert air is sweet as candy to my nose. I loved the feeling of being united with land, country, and purpose. The beauty of the surroundings couldn’t make up for the strict rules of training, and I rejoiced to depart for Los Angeles five months later in the spring of 2004. I got a ride with a fellow soldier, and we rolled down the windows and sang along to the radio, celebrating our brief freedom before getting to our next duty station.
I finally got my own car at my next posting at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. After studying Persian for a year, I received orders for Fort Hood in the fall of 2005, so it was time for my next road trip. I drove the 1,738 miles in 27 hours in my metallic-green Toyota Corolla, which I christened “Darius” after the Persian king. By the time I crossed the border from New Mexico, I was listening to country music on the radio and genuinely getting into the Texan mood. Then I got pulled over for speeding. I was pleasantly surprised, however, by a tall, handsome State Trooper wearing cowboy boots and a white Western hat. I breathlessly and somewhat nervously told him I was on my way to report to my first permanent duty station at Fort Hood, and as he handed back my license, he said: “Welcome to Texas, now slow down, ma’am.”
I was smitten. If this is how great the police are, imagine what other adventures awaited me? The fact that gas was under $2 a gallon also helped to boost my confidence that life in Texas would be grand.
Such naïveté. Within a few months, I had been taught a bit more about Texas and its less-than-grand history. (Some of those stories are in my essays and memoir-in-process.) But still, it took a few more years, and my husband’s deployment to and then injury in Iraq, in an illegal war of capitalist-imperialism, and other misadventures, for much of the wide-eyed lovesick stage to be completely corrupted.
I was thinking about this all again lately, as the phrase “World War Three” gets bandied about more often due to “the news.” Also, Lauren Hough, one of the excellent military veteran writers I follow, wrote about her time in Monterey on Substack. The memories I have of that place pour back into my brain, the dark secrets needed to see the light. Four years ago, I wrote a small piece about the Presidio of Monterey, and today, the road trips get their moment on the page.
