Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  Baudrillard had started in California, Geoff Dyer explains in his introduction to America, and so I thought I would start there, too, the farthest point, and work my way back. I chose San Francisco, not Los Angeles, for what I was looking for wasn’t necessarily the source of America’s cultural mainstream, but its social inclusiveness. The Bay Area, I had been told, was a liberal bastion, the equivalent of New York without the Jews. It seemed a strong starting-off point, a place where I would not be too much out of my element—a place where the self-proclaimed strange could blend in.

  I arrived just in time for Gay Pride, when the city comes riotously alive with parades and performances and parties that spill onto the streets. Nearly naked men streaked by, leaving clouds of colored glitter in their wake; women whose fat spilled in luscious rolls over skimpy costumes danced provocatively on stages; buttoned-up lesbians in short haircuts revved the engines on their bikes aggressively, as skinny, lip-glossed femmes clung to their waists. I was at once titillated, overwhelmed, and ecstatic. It seemed all the people around me were engaged in the business of being their most extreme and unrestrained selves, blissfully oblivious to anything else. The rest of the country might as well have disappeared; you could almost believe that America had been transformed into a place free of judgment and censure.

  I stood in a crowd in front of Dolores Park to watch the Dyke March. I looked on curiously as a young woman waving a rainbow flag climbed intrepidly onto a streetlamp, aided by others in the crowd who supported her while she yelled encouragement. A generous portion of her back was visible between the hem of her shrunken men’s suit vest and the waistband of her low riders. To me, she seemed a symbol for the tidal wave of American unrest in that moment, an icon of enthusiasm that would inevitably slide down that lamppost, aided by the grease of her own sweat, back into the crowd.

  I was with two lesbians I’d met earlier that week: a lithe, golden-haired Scandinavian woman who had snagged a Jewish brunette for a wife. They seemed like a poster couple for the perfect gay relationship. I felt, for the first time, a sense of regret that my mother, who identified as gay, had not been able to actualize her own form of happiness for herself. I sent her some pictures of the event from my phone, telling her I wished she could be there to see it for herself. To which she replied, “I’ve got the parade here in New York, it’s plenty.” And I thought, for her it probably is.

  The next morning I went to Humphry Slocombe in the Mission District to try its famous Secret Breakfast ice cream, realizing too late that the bourbon it contained was raw. I couldn’t walk a straight line for the next three hours, and so I stumbled happily around Haight-Ashbury listening to dreadlocked guitar players strum three chords. Everything was foreign, which felt both delightful and frightening at the same time.

  After a few days spent discovering the city’s breathtaking S-curves, its variety of one-dollar tacos, designer coffee, and tai chi enthusiasts, I picked up my car from an acquaintance who had driven it out from New York for me and ventured north. I crossed the Golden Gate on a brilliantly sunny day, but the bridge was suspended in its own personal cloud of fog. It reminded me of the biblical cloud pillar that had been said to follow the Jewish people in their forty-year exodus through the desert; I drove through it feeling thrilled by the blindness it imposed, as if I were relying on some higher, truer compass to see me through to the other side. As soon as the fog lifted, I found myself in Marin County, and the expanse of verdant fields rolled down on my right side to Sausalito and the shimmering Richardson Bay below. I veered west to Muir Woods, snaking along the one-lane road that curved sharply around the jagged edges of Mount Tamalpais. I sidestepped the glimmering peninsula of Stinson Beach in favor of the rarely appreciated Bolinas, a town so surrounded by natural reserves that it was practically off the map of civilization. Bolinas had a general store and a saloon, complete with swinging door. Inside was a pool table, a jukebox, and a very grumpy bartender who clearly didn’t like serving the occasional tourist. I stopped there only for a quick Coke before shoving the half door open again with my hip, strolling past the lagoon to the stretch of beach that overlooked Bolinas Bay, where a local man, originally from Texas, sat in his usual spot nursing his third beer of the day. I stayed long enough for him to share his earnestly expressed, hardly flattering opinions about Jews, although he could only attest to having met two in his lifetime. I congratulated him on finding a third. “Better yet,” I said, “she came to you!”

  I turned south on Highway 1 and drove back through San Francisco to the hazy beaches of Pacifica and the hairpin turns of Devil’s Slide, which offered breathtaking views of frothy waves crashing against the rocky shore below. This then gave way to Montara and the blink of a town named Moss Beach, where two new friends of mine, whom I had been introduced to at a group dinner in San Francisco, lived in a light-filled house overlooking the ocean.

  Their names were Justine and Max. Max was a performer who traveled frequently, and Justine was a writer who spent most of her time in that remote house, working on her magnum opus. She invited me to stay with her while her husband was on tour. We discovered that we had the same birthday, although thirty years apart. I was, at first, mostly confused by her overt efforts at friendship, and I responded clumsily when she told me she saw herself in me. “What part?”

  It does get better, she wanted me to know.

  “How did you do it?”

  “It’s this right here,” she said pointing at her house, at the ocean below it, at the fog that wrapped itself around the town like a woolly scarf. “I carved out the space I eventually realized I needed. I created the stability and peace that I longed for.”

  And it did seem that simple. She had left an urban life behind to live in the middle of nowhere, with her flowers and animals and fog tentacles, and retreated into the active space that was her mind. Like me, she felt assaulted after spending too much time in a city. Her thoughts needed more room to grow. We were all different, but it took us too long to realize that the mainstream formula for happiness might not fit and that we would have to find our own.

  We walked alongside the ocean, just the two of us, with no one else around. The beach here was ringed in rocky ground upon which grew diverse and colorful species of moss; stretches of yellow and purple and green extended from the narrow highway out to the drop, after which a slight strip of sand gave way to indifferent slate waters. Here and there a harrier hawk swung low to the ground; a scrub jay squealed frenetically in the brush. As I walked, I contemplated the value of a life lived in the wild, experiencing for the first time the peace inherent in isolation, and felt the first images of my future germinate quietly within my soul. If I was to find a real home someday, I thought, then it would be like this, surrounded by trees and water and birds, my identity allowed to grow into itself, privately and powerfully, without being shaped and molded by any community of humans.

  I can build a home, too, I thought. If I can’t do it here, because it’s too far, then I’ll find the right place close by. It’s out there somewhere, I felt with conviction—just waiting for me to find it.

  It was time to make my way back to my origins, and I left San Francisco with my last coffee and doughnut from Four Barrel on Valencia Street. It was too early to encounter any traffic on the Bay Bridge, so I quickly reached the steadily flattening landscape of Sacramento and the other inner-California towns, passed the initial dryness of the Sierras to the first and most blissful stop on my route: Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in America, a voluminous basin of crystal clear water rimmed by ice-capped mountains and dignified firs. I pulled up to the rocky shore and parked my car on the side of the road, venturing out to the water’s edge barefoot and thrilling with anticipation. Although snow was visible on the surrounding mountains, the lake waters were warm and gentle, and best of all, I could see straight through to the pebble-lined bottom. There was no murky sediment to be stirred, no weeds growing between the stones. The la
ke was pristine. Locals paddleboarded nearby; I saw a parasailing team land on the opposite shore. Everything was a brilliant blue, a sharp contrast to the landscape I was about to enter and spend the next few days in. I knew this, and it made me want to hold on to the moment even more tightly. I knew I wouldn’t see anything this beautiful again for a long time. I looked down at my toes, the nails of which were painted bright red and glimmered from under the surface, and wondered if I had ever imagined entering a body of water this freely as a child. I had once worn a baggy swimdress just so that I could splash in a pool with a cement-block wall that obstructed the sun. I had never before felt the pleasure of lake water on my skin, and it was enough to let the current swish around my ankles. I withdrew and headed back, leaving wet footprints all the way back to the car.

  I drove out from under the shady pines of Tahoe, over the Nevada border to the sad, blinking-light town of Reno, venturing farther and farther into the part of state that stretches on for hundreds of miles without even a gas station to save you from trouble. There would be only a handful of lived-in places until I reached my first overnight stop, Salt Lake City. I took those miles like they were mine to take; it was easy to let my speedometer creep up to 95 without feeling like a daredevil—the scenery hardly changed, and the air felt less resistant than normal. Two hundred miles into the desert, just before the town of Winnemucca, I noticed, too late to slow down, a small tornado funneling a coil of tumbleweeds just ahead of me on the highway. I increased my speed and tore through it, my chest tight with fear, but felt only one deep, enormous tremor as I passed. Dust devils, they were called. Better to go through them quickly, I assumed.

  In my approach to Battle Mountain, the town that Jeannette Walls opens her memoir with, I noticed rows of army tanks exiting from what looked like massive garages dug out of the mountainside. The ground here glittered with metallic rock, bronze, silver, and jade, and the air felt thick, heavy with silence, as if some things were deliberately left unsaid in this part of the country. Army uniforms abounded in the town, which had a casino/diner and an old hotel but was deathly quiet on this hot summer afternoon. I stopped for a milkshake and tried to make conversation with a few people, but they would have none of it, so I simply took in the scene and tried to place Jeannette and her family there in my mind’s eye. Certainly no Jews had ever been spotted here, I thought, and wondered if anybody here knew enough to tell the difference. I did not feel especially noticeable among the quiet folk who kept their heads down and their voices low, as if it was too hot to waste energy on thinking or talking.

  Soon I was back on the road, racing to catch the sunset at the Utah-Nevada border, where the Bonneville Salt Flats lay just west of Salt Lake City. I got there just in time. I crossed over and parked in an empty lot that seemed to serve as a station for freight trains; one of which stretched down the tracks as far as the eye could see this late in the day. Looking back at the receding brown mountains, I saw the sky above and between them pulsing bright pink, the cloud streaks of orange and purple. I had caught the sunset at its apex. Off to the east, a lone Joshua tree stretched up from the flat landscape against a quickly darkening horizon. The rest was all salt mud, looking almost like an enormous ice floe in the distance, reflecting the vivid neon sunset so blindingly that the effect was Narnia-like. The roaring sound of wind rushing over the flats filled my ears; the dazzling silver surface mesmerized me. I felt like I was in another galaxy. It was like no other vision I had seen or imagined, and for the first time on my trip, I felt floored by the place I stood in, unable to communicate or relate to it, feeling my foreignness emphasized to the nth degree.

  I took off my shoes and let my toes squish into the cold, stiff salt mud. It did not give, like I was afraid it would. It was not a quicksand, simply a soft solid. I ran and ran and ran around the empty flats, shouting soundlessly into the harsh wind. After about fifteen minutes, I felt as if I had imprinted myself on it in some way, albeit temporarily, and I got back in my car, toes encrusted with salt crystals. I drove past the darkening flats along a quiet highway, into the compact, symmetrical skyline of Utah’s capital.

  After a quick night at the Hyatt, I was ready to abandon the bland, featureless city, with its poker-faced churches, its indifferent sculptures and fountains. I slowed down as I passed the Mormon headquarters, only because I noticed a group of women congregated outside, dressed in long pleated skirts and high-necked shirts, their hair modestly slicked back, who could have easily been mistaken for the peers of my youth. It was strange to see such a long-ago memory from my past projected onto this celestial wet dream of a city. If I talked to those girls, would they be like the girls of my childhood, thinking and acting in chorus?

  I drove through Utah’s hill country, where clusters of modest mountains huddled under the scant coverage of stunted conifers. After three hours I seemed to cross an invisible line drawn in the sand as I descended yet again into the purple-veined skin of the desert, looking back at the fertile landscape that had so bluntly come to an end behind me.

  I drove for five hours straight, in what felt like nothingness, on a one-lane road, and felt grateful for the red pickup truck in front of me. Its Utah license plate made me feel more comfortable about traversing such a long stretch of uninhabited and inhospitable desert. Surely someone lived here. Eventually there would be a gas station.

  There were none until I reached the Green River, at the intersection of Interstate 70, and I exhaled a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding. How long would I have had to wait for a kind stranger to pass if I had run out of gas? Would I have survived on the measly supplies I’d packed in the morning?

  The water of the Green River was an anemic brown trickle, but it was enough to support some life, as evidenced by the tiny settlements on its banks. After I filled up my tank, I swung left on I-70 and headed for Moab, home of Arches National Park.

  It was ninety-eight degrees in Moab on a July afternoon. I climbed as far as I could past the red rock sculptures but didn’t make it far enough to see the famous arch formations. I became anxious to get to Colorado, where I would be spending the night.

  The road back to the interstate was a narrow dirt path that trailed the Colorado River, which was hardly six feet wide. Its waters churned and frothed like milk being steamed for a cappuccino. Bright green shrubs bordered the river’s edge, but the landscape reverted to dry red earth only two feet from the bank. I passed gated entrances to ranches, but there was nary a cowboy in sight.

  I drove through what could be considered a town, which boasted seven houses, all in various states of egregious disrepair. A roof had almost completely caved in on one; another had windows made of cardboard and plastic wrap. On one of the rickety front porches, I spotted a toothless, bearded man in mud-caked overalls, cleaning his shotgun. He glared at me as I passed; I shivered and sped up.

  Turning the dial of my car radio this way and that, looking for a station, I could only find one discernible program—a man ranting about Obama being a Muslim terrorist. It struck me then that I had never been farther from my New York roots, and suddenly, looking around once again at the endless flatness, the enormous sky, I longed for the familiar feeling of being hemmed in, of being cradled by tall buildings and low-hanging skies.

  This is America, then, I considered. Not the teeming, vibrant metropolis I had left behind on the East Coast and rediscovered on the West, but the vast stretch of emptiness in between, the dusty, arid stretches of desert that nurtured nothing but a feeling of being so isolated as to be cut off from the world and its events. The peripheries of America had been transformed into hectic landscapes; immigrant communities and transplanted hopefuls had built great cities, but here, in America’s gnawing belly, it was clear that you were either swallowed up or spit out. I drove the rest of the way through Utah’s parched southeast region feeling a tension grip my spine.

  I relaxed slightly once I ascended into the winding, mountainous roads
of Colorado’s ski country. I passed the perched chalets of Vail, noting the elegant, manicured gardens and contemporary vacation homes with a sense of guarded relief—this at least was familiar in the sense that luxury will always be familiar to a New Yorker who grew up just across the river from the vast wealth of Manhattan. By the time I hit Denver traffic, it was two hours past nightfall. I stopped at a roadside bar called the Grizzly Rose, where a neon sign outside announced that it was Ladies Night. That meant free drinks.

  Inside the cavernous space, beers were being sloshed onto the bar en masse. Chili dogs were sold for a dollar apiece straight from the kitchen window. Cowboys lingered over pool tables in dark corners, and smack in the middle of the room was a polished wooden dance floor, packed with women in tube tops and Daisy Dukes doing something I could only interpret as the hora, while country music played on the loudspeaker. As the women dipped and clapped, their glittering crosses jangled distractingly over their tanned chests. I wondered how Christian culture had evolved to allow one to worship Jesus and dress like a stripper at the same time.

  Here my foreignness came back to smack me in the face. I did not own a pair of shorts that skimpy, nor did I know how to bat my eyelashes and keep my mouth shut when a cowboy offered to buy me a drink. How could there be so many American places in which I had no possibility of finding the familiar?

  The next day I would drive to my last stop: Chicago. I felt hopeful that, in Chicago, I would find what I loved most about the West and the East, gathered there in the middle of the country in a summit of two cultures. So the next morning I zoomed past Iowa and Nebraska without stopping; it seemed there was nothing there but corn, rows and rows of it. My GPS said it was a sixteen-hour drive from Denver to Chicago, but I did it in twelve, stopping only once for gas, chips, and beef jerky. What a thrill it was to find myself again on a booming highway, a silvery skyline thrusting powerfully ahead of me! It could easily have been Manhattan; the traffic was similarly aggressive, and the New Yorker in me swerved confidently through it. I gawped at the impressive architecture as I followed the directions to my friend’s address, which turned out to be a brownstone very similar to the one I grew up in, tucked into a small side street a block away from elevated tracks, like the ones I heard rattling through my childhood dreams every night. It could have been the same neighborhood. Instantly I was soothed by a false sense of the familiar.