by Matt Weiland
And I’m glad to have learned something: I now know how to ditch-ski and how to make a good tortilla, how a salmon gets caught, and how a hog has sex (loudly). I know to ask for buttermilk pie in Texas, mint candy in Indiana, a Christmas kringle in Wisconsin, and a traveler in South Carolina. I know who Yoopers, Yup’iks, Sheepeaters, and Slower Lowers are; what frost heaves do; where the largest mass execution on American soil took place; when Michigan acquired its Upper Peninsula; and why there’s no such thing as a Massachusettsean.
And I know this: that the complete set of WPA Guides that belonged to Alistair Cooke is in good hands—our writers’. In the middle of commissioning pieces from our fifty writers, Sean bought the set from a bookseller who kindly took a shine to our undertaking. We shipped them off to our contributors to inspire their work, and we hope the great curiosity about America and American lives those magnificent guides evince is evident in their essays.
State by State may not be the “great storehouse of facts” that Kazin declared the WPA Guides to be. But we hope it will, in time, live up to the words that another critic, Malcolm Cowley, once bestowed on the Federal Writers’ Project itself: “a rowdy, idealistic, sometimes farcical experiment … that refuses to be forgotten.”
Introduction: State by State
Sean Wilsey
In the fall of 2002 I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pickup truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City—2,364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs, and the Holland Tunnel. A year before this drive the planes had hit the World Trade Center, twenty blocks from my apartment. And in the months before and after that my best friend from childhood had died, my best friend from adolescence had died, my senior-most aunt had died, the man I’d long thought of as a father and my actual father had died. I thought a long slow drive across much of America would allow me to catch up with these losses.
But I wasn’t going alone. My traveling companions were an architect named Michael Meredith and a dog named Charlie Chaplin. Michael and I had become friends in Marfa, Texas—the town where the minimalist artist Donald Judd exiled himself in the 1970s from the “glib and harsh” New York art scene—in 2000, when Michael was in town designing a house for Judd’s longtime partner, and my wife and I were guests of the Lannan Foundation, each working on a book. Michael left for a teaching job back east, and my wife and I stayed on. That’s when I first saw the truck, in front of the post office: boxy, banged up, covered in sky blue house paint, half smashed windshield a lattice of stars and linear cracks, like a flag. A Mexican man in his sixties walked outside with his mail and drove it away. Then I biked around town till I found it parked out by the cemetery. Jesse Santesteban, the owner, showed me where he’d signed the engine compartment like an artist, and said that I could take a closer look. The doors had handmade wooden armrests, and the seatbelts were fashioned of canvas and chain link. An orange shag carpet covered the floorboards. I offered him $1,200, cash. He handed over a green plastic keychain that read LAUGH, LIVE, LOVE, AND BE HAPPY! and warned, “Don’t take it over 45 or it’ll throw a rod.” A friend later explained, “That’s a polite way of saying the engine will explode.”
My wife and I adopted Charlie around the same time. When we took him back to New York a couple months later, I left the truck, which Jesse agreed to look after. Two years on, Charlie (now quite big) and I flew back in order to try and drive this piece-of-folk-art-cum-deathtrap, which had never gone farther than the nearby town of Pecos, across the country, seeing America slowly, a way almost nobody gets, or wants, to see it.
Driving slow both satisfied and ran contrary to my instinct to flee. And, pleasingly to my mind, it made fun of the two main preoccupations of our entire country: velocity and ease. Not that I didn’t appreciate velocity in particular. The will to speed had long been one of my defining characteristics. On a road trip a few years prior I’d tried to set a car’s cruise control at 140 miles per hour. Now I would piss off and get passed by everyone, including a guy hauling hay and a wide-load trailer pulling a house. I almost passed a school bus in Arkansas, but, when the sleepy driver spotted me, he floored it.
I would be the slowest person in America.
Marfa is surrounded by one of the few untouched landscapes remaining in the lower 48—a high desert formed in the Permian period and left more or less alone in the 250 million years since. All roads out of town lead across empty yellow grasslands, through blue sage and cactus-covered mountains, where the traveler’s only company is the weather. A hailstorm once blackened the sky behind me, caught up, dented my hood, starred my windshield, covering the pavement in ice cubes, and moved on into the distance. At night the stars glowed like phosphorescence in the sea and were as abundant as static on a broken TV.
At 9:00 a.m. on a Wednesday, I honked the horn in front of a small adobe, where Michael had spent the night with some friends. It was a clear sound in the dry desert air. On the phone we’d planned out the trip as follows: always take back roads, eat only in nonchains, never hurry, spend a day in San Antonio meeting a man I’ll call Don Harris for whom Michael might design a house (potentially his first to be built), write songs to perform at an open mike in Nashville. Charlie would ride in the bed of the truck, and we would have the cab. I tied his long leash to the truck’s roll bar, so he’d know not to jump out.
Michael looked like an architect—thin, with thick glasses, black pants, and a white shirt, the two colors separated by a belt with a brushed steel buckle. He’d met Charlie, but this was his first look at the truck.
“Hello Charles,” he said to Charlie, then remarked, “I like the shotgun rack.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s also good for keeping umbrellas.”
He stared. “No, man. Umbrellas? What kind of wuss-ass keeps umbrellas in his shotgun rack?”
Before I could answer he noticed the stick shift.
“Oh, shit, I didn’t sleep all night because I was worried about that. I can’t drive stick.”
“What?”
“Sorry, I didn’t think it would be a stick shift. It’s American. Everything’s easy in America.”
“It’s from 1960.”
I figured I could teach him. There was nothing to hit out in the desert. Then he told me we had to be in San Antonio by 9 a.m. the next day to meet Don, his potential client. San Antonio was just under 400 miles away. I’d been thinking we’d reach Del Rio, half the distance, following along the Rio Grande.
“You know we can only go 45.”
“What? C’mon—you’re joking, right?”
“No. Really. Look at this thing,” I said. Michael took in the ancient interior and medieval seatbelts. “Can you call and say that we’ll get there around noon?”
“I only have his email. I just told him we’d be there.”
“Well,” I said, “We’ll keep driving till we make it.”
Partially out of courtesy, I didn’t want to tell him the engine would explode. As Jack Kerouac said about himself and Neal Cassady, his friend and driving companion in On the Road, we “tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends.”
From the Marfa grasslands, east through the Glass Mountains, we made the town of Alpine, 30-odd miles away, in forty-five minutes. The gas gauge fell by a third. Afraid there wasn’t a lot of gas in the next leg we decided to buy two six-gallon jerry cans, along with tools, water, and food.
I should mention here the weird coincidence that we were driving our way through a book I’d never read: John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, wherein—I’ve now read it—the author and his dog, Charley, lit out on the back roads of America, in the fall of 1960, in a new GM pickup, in order to “rediscover this monster land.” Steinbeck is precise and prescient about America, observing that “there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea.” And in a letter Ste
inbeck wrote to Adlai Stevenson (quoted in Jay Parini’s introduction), he makes the dead-on assessment that as a country we “can stand anything God and Nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
But I engaged in no such musing as we made our way east—too absorbed with correcting the steering, an act of constant attention. Around lunch time we’d made it 70 more miles. We stopped outside the town of Marathon and filled up the tank again.
A lean old man touched his cowboy hat, pointed at the truck, and said, “‘65?”
Michael replied, “Yep,” and the man walked away.
I said, “It’s a ‘60, actually.”
Michael said, “Yeah, but why bother correcting somebody? He doesn’t care what year it is really, he just wants to feel like he knows something—now he feels good.”
We were on a slight downhill—a good place to learn stick, so I let Michael drive. The truck got going after a few stalls, and we rolled through the Chihuahuan Desert. Getting cocky, he tried to sneak it up to 50 and I shouted him down as he struggled with the loose steering, veering into the oncoming lane—me scared and hollering “Watch out!;” him apologizing “Sorry, sorry, I got a trick leg!”—until a rank of orange plastic drums, like buoys in the sea of the desert, shunted us to the side of the road. Two border patrol agents asked where we were going.
In this context, Michael in his architect’s uniform and me in a skateboard sweatshirt and Kangol cap, I imagined we made no sense as anything other than a gay couple. They walked off to confer, and seemed to be snickering. Eventually they waved us on. I willed Michael not to stall. And he didn’t. Instead he threw it in reverse, and we started rolling back toward Marfa.
The agents didn’t bother hiding their laughter.
Then Michael stalled. Charlie lost his balance, fell over in the bed, and gave me an aggrieved look. A few minutes later he tried to dive out of the back. I jumped from the cab and somehow caught him before he could hang himself on his leash. He lifted his nose and gave me a gentle tap on the neck. I sat him between Michael and me, and took the wheel.
Charlie was a Catahoula, the state dog of Louisiana, which looks like a spotted wolf, a dingo, or, as a man who spotted him on the street once put it, “one of those wild dogs of Africa.” When he was happy, Charlie’s eyes—deep, orange, unblinking—laughed, and he opened his mouth, curled back his lips, and nodded his head up and down. He was also conversational and made a lot of noises that definitely weren’t barking, growling, or anything canine. Things like: “Wroarowlwolf.” “Oohwar.” “Rrolf.” “Aaahlh!” “Meol.” “Wrrp.” Going by all the distinct letters I heard him pronounce (a talent shared by Steinbeck’s Charley) I was pretty sure I could have taught him to speak a few words in English.
The landscape unfolded, changing only because the light was changing. It seemed we had made no progress. Only my discomfort had progressed. The truck’s bench seat had springs that poked most of the way through on the driver’s side, and the result of a couple hours sitting on it was searing pain. Adding to the discomfort, Charlie kept subtly shoving me, until my arm was fully extended to reach the Bakelite knob on top of the shifter, my left hip pressed into the door, and he was at the wheel.
Michael broke his silence and said, “I found out a couple days ago that I’m one of the six finalists to design a memorial for the victims of the attack on the Pentagon.”
It took me a second to realize what he was talking about.
“What? The 9/11 memorial in Washington?”
“Yeah. Right where the plane crashed.”
“Wow. What’s your design?”
“It’s a viewing pedestal. The people who come to remember are the memorial. They’re living statues. The idea is to be really small and intimate next to something that is out-of-control big—one of the few manmade objects you can see from outer space. For a memorial it seems better to be modest—it’s more likely to be built if it isn’t expensive. But I can’t believe they picked me as a finalist.”
“It’s amazing.”
“To be able to memorialize something on the same ground where people died is amazing. But I don’t know what the victims’ families are going to think about my idea. I have to meet with them next week in D.C. And the New York victims’ families, too. The New York families also want the New York names in D.C. Of course the D.C. names aren’t going to be in New York.”
This struck me as an insult to grief. “When do you have to meet the families?”
“Uh.” Long pause. “Tuesday.”
I told Michael it was impossible.
“Let’s just keep driving,” he said.
Signs of civilization had begun to appear along the road, indicating our emergence from the landscape of the Paleozoic and into twenty-first century America. A strange tension had been set up, and it would pull at us for the rest of the trip. What would happen to my plans to go slow?
At around midnight we arrived in San Antonio, pulled up to the Menger Hotel, in Alamo Plaza (next to the Alamo itself), where we were to meet Don, and asked about a room. The answer: no dogs. So we found a motel right beneath I-37. I noticed there was a back entrance, checked in, and while Michael took our stuff inside, I walked Charlie around the neighborhood, then through the back, catching the door before it closed behind a woman in a tight gray business suit. Charlie followed me and sat like a gentleman. She gave him a look of withering contempt.
Had she mistaken Charlie for another, very similar looking, Texas Catahoula, named Smut, then notorious in certain parts of the state for swimming in President George W. Bush’s pool, and moreover, when Vladimir Putin came to visit, per an article in the Dallas Morning News, “barking and chasing after the president and his visitors”? (The paper also quoted the Westerfields, Bush’s neighbors and Smut’s owners. Mrs. Westerfield said, “He chased those Russian dignitaries all over that place.” Noting that they’d eventually castrated the dog, Mr. Westerfield lamented, “That old boy lost everything because he wouldn’t stay off the president’s place.”)
The lobby of the Menger Hotel was pillared, balconied, sconce-and-stained-glass-lit, Victorian. Don Harris, a middle-aged man in the midst of all this distinctiveness, was perfectly nondescript. He had a white shirt and a rounded physique that seemed to make the light fall away from him.
Michael said hello and introduced me as a writer. Formalities concluded, Don asked if he could tell us a bit about the city, then started talking, without stopping—delivering a monologue, that was, to me, a coastal American, with a general bias against our landlocked interior, a total revelation about the history, depth, and texture at the heart of the country. He said:
“San Antonio has always seemed to me to be a city out of a Borges story, particularly one with knife fighters, political thugs, and Hispanic-Irish gangsters, like Death and the Compass. The past here is so intense that it’s also the present, and nothing ever really disappears. The city’s always existed with wild Indians, soldiers, priests, vaqueros, pachucos, socialites, aristocrats, writers, and working people, in a constant mix. Conrad’s favorite writer, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish lord—the real king of Scotland some say—spent several years in San Antonio, attempting to become a cattle baron, going broke, and then, out of desperation, beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane wandered around with the Chili Queens in the same plaza where the Comanches would ride into town and receive tribute—pay or the town would be burnt and looted. Till recently it was represented by Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez, the boxer congressman—who flattened another congressman with a single punch, and tried to impeach the first Bush. This lobby is the setting for a scene from All the Pretty Horses. John Grady Cole spies on his mother, sitting with ‘boots crossed one over the other’ (I know El Cormac is being reappraised here and there—but he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter—another cat
tle king hotel—is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie Carrasco, while in prison at Huntsville, made a suit of armor in the style of Ned Kelly and tried to shoot his way out. This is what I mean when I mention Borges.”
Then a brisk walk outside. A few quick turns, and we dodged inside a bar where three gamblers blatantly played cards for money. A drunk shouted “Dammit!” and lurched at nondescript Don, who wove and kept walking toward a glimmer of sunlight at the back. It was a very long bar, terminating at a balcony overlooking the San Antonio River. We stepped out onto it and Don hooked a thumb behind us. “The Esquire Bar, the lost state of Esquire. Claimed to be one of the longest bars in Texas. Kind of place that people have their booths in. Completely democratic crowd, too, in the social sense: criminal lawyers and their clients, thugs, and socialites.”
Later I looked the place up and found it reduced the following customer reviews on Citysearch: “Pros: cheap drinks Cons: staff, bathrooms, local Hispanics,” and, “Only nefarious locals go here. Not recommended for northerners or passers-by.”
Don showed us the courthouse, “machine gunned one morning during the early ‘70s amidst a ferocious drug war that came to a head with a federal judge’s assassination by Woody Harrelson’s dad.” Then he placed San Antonio in continental context, taking us to the edge of a sleepy square and declaring: “Travis Park, in my view, is where Latin America begins. Everything north of this park, in governance and culture, is English; everything south, all the way to Cape Horn, is Spanish. It’s the actual border of the two Americas.”