New Road

We have decided to take a two-month road trip across the United States starting on September 14 and invite you to share our journey via this blog we are calling Cross Roads: Our Drive To See America.  Below is a description of the motivation for this adventure.  If you don’t wish to follow us, please unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.  If you would like to invite friends, please forward this email or share our website with them: www.brodycrossroadsamerica.com

Three things are motivating us to do this Road Trip. Most people we share these with have no trouble understanding the first two.  A two-month drive to visit National Parks and assorted landmarks we haven’t yet seen while stopping to see friends and family along the way isn’t too far outside the imagination of most people.  When we tell people we want to step outside our Blue State bubble with the goal of listening to Trump voters, the reactions range from incredulity to wondering if we have lost our minds.

Here’s the breakdown from both perspectives:

The Road Trip

Lora:

“Let’s drive across the country” was an idea I floated every few years even though I knew the timing wasn’t right.    There was never enough time, and when there finally was, there was always someplace more exotic and seductive to go instead of slogging 3 or 4 thousand miles west and then another 3 or 4 thousand back home so we could say, “We did it!” 

 India or Indiana?   Mumbai or Milwaukee?   Vietnam or Virginia?   For us, those choices were no-brainers. We’ve been unbelievably lucky in the opportunities to visit so many far-flung places.   Interspersed with trips that required long haul flights and vaccinations for things you hope you’ll never catch, navigating languages with no vowels, and having joyously insane adventures, we’ve done some terrific short trips in the USA.   We’ve climbed the Grand Canyon and hiked in National Parks all over the Northeast, and in Montana, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Wyoming.   We’ve driven the Blues Trail through the Mississippi Delta and explored the back roads of Alabama, and Louisiana, as well as a long loop that started in Kansas and wound through Nebraska, Arkansas and Oklahoma.    

But we’ve never started in Massachusetts and driven all the way to California. Sadly, we are not going to do that now.   Given our time limit of 2 months, and our desire to spend almost as much time out of the car as in it, coupled with the goal of visiting friends and family along the way, we have opted to fly to Chicago and start our cross country trip from there.   Even so, it will still be 8,000 miles of driving and that isn’t chump change.

So while we still have our wits about us and can still remember that red means ‘stop’ and green means ‘go,’ kitted out with our GPS, real maps, my camera gear, a voice recorder, some guide books and an Atlas, it’s westward ho.  LINK TO ITINERARY HERE.

The Friends:

My desk faces Cape Cod Bay. To my right scrub pines frame a panoramic sweep of sands dunes and beyond that is the Atlantic Ocean.   Our house in Provincetown sits within a mile or so of the end (or beginning) of US Route 6, which stretches 3,198.87 miles west until it hits Bishop, California, which according to Wikipedia is called the Mule Capital of The World.  

When I pick up my phone to call my friend in California I don’t visualize my voice traveling 3,193 miles to St Helena where she lives.  I only worry that I have gotten the time zones mixed up and might be getting her out of bed before the sun has risen in her part of the world.   

When I wander up into the middle of Provincetown nothing I see has the power to surprise me.  This is a place where people come to be their true (or fanaticized) selves.  From my very first visit here almost 60 years ago I knew that this was place where no one would ever tell me to “Just calm down!”  It's a place that makes me proud to say I'm from Massachusetts. 

Here things, as strange as they might be to the unprepared day-tripper, are for me, comfortable and familiar.   In fact, I find I have calmed down to the point where I worry that the wanderlust that used to fuel my desire to travel and explore has begun to dissipate.  That’s not good.   

Emailing my friend to ‘catch up’ or having breathless conversations while one or both of us takes a daily constitutional (her up past a vineyard covered hillside and me on the flats at low tide), is not the same as sitting at her table or on her couch, talking over coffee or wine for hours until we are almost caught up. 

Seeing photos of dear friends in Santa Fe or Tempe or Tucson waving to us on Facebook is not the same as watching them laugh, or sharing a meal, or a hug. 

Retelling family stories with dear cousins in Northern Louisiana and in Ashville, North Carolina in the company of their children creates the possibility that these stories might be inscribed in the memories of the next generation.

The Listen:

David:

62,979,879.  That's how many voted for him, 46.1% of everyone who voted.  How can that be?  If you gather 62,979,879 people into a room - any 62,979,879 people - millions of them have to be nice, thoughtful, generous, open-minded, accepting, charitable, and all the other adjectives we like to think we deserve.  Why did they do it?  How could they do it?  Would they do it again?

We'd like to try to find out.  But that means engaging with the 62,979,879.  Not to enlighten or persuade.  Just to listen.  "Uh huh.  Yeah.  Tell me more."  But that means leaving the Barbour jacket, the Lululemon pants, the funky glasses, the BMW and Mini, and other East Coast liberal paraphernalia back home.  It's jeans, flannel and a Ford with an Illinois license plate.

We've done our homework, reading, and have even taken workshops, usually run by marriage counselors.  One had an advance assignment: Before you show up, have a conversation with someone who was among the 62,979,879.   But we didn't think we knew any.  We may have some deep lurking suspicions, but why try to find out and risk spoiling a nice friendship? 

The best advice was from a friend.  "That looks like a delicious piece of pie" should be an easy way to start a casual conversation in a diner.  And if there's no pie around, try "Nice day."

 We've already had two test runs.  Lora parked behind a car with a bumper sticker that said "I Hate The Liberal Media." She tapped on the window and the woman lowered it.  "Excuse me, I just happened to notice your bumper sticker."  Ten minutes later, each told the other that it had been a worthwhile conversation.

 The other test run was different.  He looked like a jolly guy leaning on a rail next to us in our home town.  There was no cherry pie around, so it was "Nice day."  It went downhill from there.  After getting "we've got to stop them from coming into our country" and "we need to make the country great again" in response to what I thought were two innocuous questions on other points, all the workshops and suggestions about cherry pie added up to nothing.  I tried to resist but couldn't stop "don't you understand" and "how can you possibly say that" from coming out of my mouth.  Luckily he suddenly complimented Lora: "You know, you look just like Kellyanne Conway."  That ended the conversation.  

So who knows?  Stay tuned.

Lora:

Every day the news is worse.  Every day we wring our hands and pound our heads on the table.  Every morning we read the New York Times and start the day in a more pessimistic frame of mind than yesterday’s trudge through the Slough of Despond.   We read like-minded friends’ posts on Facebook and Twitter.  We sign petitions, Tweet, send money, and we march.  I've stopped describing myself as Jewish.  Now I say right upfront and in your face, "I am a Jew."  

The truth is we do all these things in the company of folks who pretty much think the way we do. 

We simply grew tired of being among the people on our blue state who stand facing West (or South) and declare that everyone ‘out there’ who voted for DT is either illiterate, intolerant, anti-Semitic, homophobic, or racist.   We refuse to believe that’s true. 

We want to try to listen to some of those people who told us clearly before the election that no one listened to them until DT did and that’s how they ended voting the way they did.   In diners, truck stops, at church suppers and county fairs we will look for people who might be willing to tell us their stories. We hope it’s not too late to listen and then to try to find one thing we might have in common so that we can have a civilized conversation. 

We invite you to follow along.  We will be blogging from the road.  There are times it will be pretty lonely out there and your encouragement will be wildly appreciated.