The building has a peeling glamour, and its porch houses more rocking chairs than I have ever seen in one place at one time before. The Balsam Mountain Inn first opened in 1908, and though it's been renovated extensively, it still feels as though it is of another time. My accommodation last night was undoubtedly the most interesting of the trip so far (and I mean 'interesting' in a positive sense). We wandered the evening streets together in search of food: hungry, glad to have arrived, and yet, more than anything, sorry that our journey was over. It feels foreign, and charged with an energy that seems both of another place and perhaps of another time. This is a city unlike any other in this country. It was an eye-opening discussion.įinally, after yet more driving and yet more rain, Jennifer and I reach our destination: New Orleans. In the afternoon we drove north to visit a local writer, Bev Marshall, and her husband Butch, who told us a great deal about the area, about differences between Louisiana and Mississippi (where they both grew up), and about life before integration. It was beautiful, but somehow terrifying. We took a tour of the swamp in the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, saw herons and egrets and alligators, and felt ourselves to be in some weird, unfamiliar world. It began beneath a sun that felt remarkable after yesterday's torrential rain, and a heat that felt remarkable because it seemed, quite literally, to be cooking us in our skins. I hope that somewhere in the many pages of notes I made, and in the hours of conversations I had with Jennifer and with others along the way, I will find what I need to do that.Īfter three weeks on the road, this was my last day of travelling. Now, my task is to turn those observations into something more substantial: into words that I am willing to share. What I have tried to do on this journey is to observe honestly the things that I have seen. What is interesting about that flag is not how it made me feel, but why, in 2017, it is still there. But I didn't come to this country to confirm what I already knew. The sight of a Confederate flag waving in the hot, Mississippi sun made me feel deeply uncomfortable, and I know why. It would be easy to draw words out from that shock, and to criticise what I don't understand. I have seen and heard things on this journey that have shocked me, offended me. Writing literature, in part, is an act of empathy, and as such it ought to cut through this hyperbole, this sweeping condemnation. What truth there is in these criticisms is lost in the muddle of hyperbole. 'Liberals' condemn and caricature half the population as ignorant, racist, backward while 'conservatives' condemn the other half as hysterical elites, out-of-touch with reality. It is a result of the failure to take time, to make the effort, to understand those you disagree with. Much of the political division and tension in the United States today is a result of intolerance, on both right and left. I am not going to pretend that it does not, still, baffle me. I have spent only a little time in this huge, complicated country. And those answers, inevitably, will be tentative. The questions I have been asking – and that Jennifer and I have been discussing as we drove, ate and wandered – will take time to nudge in the direction of answers. I have been wary of publishing anything that might seem like a conclusion. In part that is because my time has been so limited. The blogs I have published on this page have scarcely touched upon the ideas and questions that have most interested and troubled me along the way. Spending this time with her, talking to her, I learned more than I could ever have done from travelling alone. I started using Oxford commas.įor most of this trip I travelled with the novelist Jennifer Haigh, and it was an enormous pleasure to do so. I saw floods in Louisiana, blazing sunshine in the Dakotas, and electrical storms in Indiana. I made literary pilgrimages (Red Cloud, Port Royal, and Rowan Oak) and musical ones (Tupelo and Highway 61). I saw national parks, national forests, and national monuments prairies, mountains and swamps bison, groundhogs, and alligators. I passed through seventeen states, all but two of which voted for Donald Trump in November 2016. During the course of this journey I drove thousands of miles (4390, according to Google Maps 5165, according to the odometer). For just over three weeks, from 10th May to 1st June, I travelled through the United States of America, from North Dakota to Appalachia to Louisiana.
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