Getting Away Makes You Want More Getting Away

More dispatches from the road.

On Sunday we finished the first half the cross-country road trip I mentioned last time, making it to Cape Cod in the late afternoon. Pacific to Atlantic in one week. (Our route out of Seattle ran along the Puget Sound, a large inlet of the Pacific, which I’m counting for our purposes.)

I taught my students on the other side of the country on Monday afternoon and then rode with my wife’s grandparents out to Fort Hill. I wandered solo along the trails there, scaring up small bunnies and brushing aside the pokeweed, the marsh grasses hissing softly in the breeze. Fat bumblebees idled in the late summer roses.

It is such an obvious observation that it barely feels worth making. But this entire trip—and especially now, anchored on the opposite coast from the one I’ve lived on for the last eight years—I have been struck by how really different all these places in America are. Sometimes the change comes in soft gradients, like how the whole midwest slides smoothly between deciduous green forests and gray asphalt-and-concrete and back. Sometimes the change comes starkly, like how when you cross the Cascade range in Washington you go from misty lush pine forest to stark scrub high desert in a matter of minutes. Here on the Cape there are all the famous muted tones of the Atlantic beachside, and the light doesn’t hang as low as it does out West.

The people are different, too. I don’t mean this to contain any grand conclusions about What America Is or Who Americans Are. But it is somewhat jarring to drive to all sorts of places where people don’t act how you’re used to them acting. Strangers stop and talk to you in places outside Seattle, it turns out. In three days in Detroit I was roped into more friendly small talk than I experience in any six months in the city where I live.

Every single person you pass on sidewalks in the Pacific Northwest looks like this.

This is not to say there are no friendly people in Seattle—quite the opposite; I have many friendships that I love and cherish that were formed out there—but that the cultural norms can be stifling and frustrating on good days and depressingly alienating on bad days.

Still, were I to be elsewhere for any length of time I would surely find plenty to disagree with, just along different dimensions. I have no illusions that Seattle is a uniquely bad or good place. It’s just a place—one that, like all others, has plenty to both recommend it and condemn it. I am enjoying my time away immensely, and I am also sure that in another week or two I will be longing to be home again.

Thanks, as always, for reading. If you need me I’ll be on the beach.

-Chuck