Travel Writing Takes an Unexpected Turn

I'm not really sure what this is, but it makes me laugh. 

DRIVE TIME

Questionable...

THE CAST

Erin–a combo of peace signs and stilettos, punk and princess. We were best friends in grade school until she moved to Seattle, but somehow fate reunited us, five years later, five years wiser, and with a common ground graduated from an obsession with Arthur to an  obsession with boys.

Nancy Lynne–blonde-bombshell-high-school friend and now Chicago-living-bestie-in-possession-of-a-spring-break-destination-and-a-floor-to-crash-on.

Betsy Powell–The mooch. ‘Nuff said.

Myself–one cannot describe oneself without sounding unoriginal and/or pretentious as fuck.

SETTING

A gently curving red line on a US map during Spring Break 2010.

THE CURTAIN RISES

I am driving my old Chevy Lumina. I call him Elvis because it fits. Erin and Betsy are following in Erin’s little Honda with the GPS which I don’t need yet. At this point, I know where we’re headed. Iowa City, Iowa, my home for nine months out of the year and the convenient halfway point between Lincoln, NE (the escape from) and Chicago, IL (the escape to). We’ll spend one night, leave Erin’s car in my school parking spot and continue in Elvis to Chicago. It’s a five hour drive to IC, but I’m glad Betsy rode with Erin. It’s easier for me to absorb the golden shimmer of sunlight on wheat fields into my bones to save for later when it’s just Elvis and I humming radio tunes and tires on asphalt.

FAST-FORWARD : WELCOME TO IOWA CITY

It is an unexpected splash of white stone buildings and tie-dye neon signs in the midst of Iowa corn fields and open highways. It’s a city outsiders don’t believe is real until they walk down the pavement themselves and see the swirl of colour and noise. Here is the raging college co-league of frat boys and little size 0 girls in dresses I would have thought were meant to be shirts. Here are their bars with strobing lights and pumping beats and the touch and the sweat of bodies, bodies, bodies mashed together on a sticky floor moving until they pass out or find someone to leave with. Here are the hipsters drinking PBR in the ped mall and comparing beard length and wondering when Ragstock would get a new stock of skinny-but-not-too-skinny jeans. Here are the writers with their plaid shirts and moleskin notebooks tucked in their back pockets drinking red wine at The Mill and wanting the whole world to hear how talented they are from the single microphone on stage. Here are all these and everyone in between raising a toast to our oasis.

I paint the picture for Erin and Betsy, but there is one thing I forgot. A college town on spring break is a ghost town. It’s fine when we do our shopping in underground stores with new and used, touching shoulder straps and price tags. It’s fine when we eat our noodles and veggies at Z’marks. It’s fine when we sit on the steps of the capital building and watch the sun set between the stone columns.

But when night strikes, the dance floors are closed and our non-21-year-old selves can’t get a drink from the lonely bar tender if we wanted to.

Solution?

Vodka shots in my dorm room. #4443 Burge Hall with its two lofted beds, 2 desks, a futon and a fridge. We sit on the purple carpet and laugh about things we forgot we haven’t told each other in the months we’ve been apart at our separate Universities. We turn on the music. Betsy requests Lady Gaga. We tell her to shut the fuck up and turn on Jack’s Mannequin instead.

One shot, two shot, red shot, blue shot.

Shoot. I’m out of rhymes.

And everything is fuzzy and I want ice cream. Preferably chocolate. Erin and Betsy want  sandwiches. Jimmy John’s is next door to Coldstone Creamery...

THE LIGHTBULB TURNS ON

Ring, ring.

JJ: ‘Hello, Jimmy John’s. Subs so fast you’ll freak.’

Me: ‘Speaking of freaks, I have a weird question.’

JJ: (pause) ‘Oh...kay...?’

Me: ‘Well, my friend wants to order a sandwich and I really want ice cream, so I was wondering if there was any way you go could next door and get a “Gotta Have It” Birthday Cake Remix in a waffle cone and then deliver it and the sandwich to Burge Hall. I will tip very generously and you will ensure my endless devotion to Jimmy John’s.’

JJ: (pause) ‘They sell Ben and Jerry’s at the Kum & Go down the street.’

Me: ‘But I don’t want to walk.’

JJ: ‘Sorry, we can’t do that.’

Me: ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

JJ: ‘Have a good night.’

Me: ‘Without ice cream?’

Click

‘Fine, fuck you Jimmy John’s. Next time I want a sandwich, I’m going to Subway.’

Erin and Betsy: wild cheering

I don’t have the heart or the humility to tell them they were the only ones who heard me.

We settle for dry cereal and a discussion of who we’re currently in love with.

ENTER DAY 2

On the road by eleven. Erin rides shotgun. Betsy’s asleep in the backseat with my duffel bag as a pillow. She doesn’t stir as Erin and I perform an enthusiastic rendition of the “Elephant Song Medley” from Moulin Rouge, complete with as many dance moves as are possible in seat belts.

The GPS is plugged in and set to the British man voice. Erin and I have decided to christen him Leopold. He directs us to continue along I80 and seems positively offended when we take an unexpected exit to visit The World’s Largest Truck Stop. We pass by cars and cars lined up at twenty gas pumps, and then enter through the automatic doors of a place that takes pride in the unnecessary. There are shelves and shelves of knickknacks and things no sane person would drive to a truck stop to purchase. Example: ‘Oh what a gorgeous ring. Oh thanks, darling, Bobby got it at the truck stop. He got me this ‘World’s Largest Truck Stop’ t-shirt too! Or What beautiful China! It must be from WLTS.

We find the toilet, stop at the food court for lunch (Erin’s Wendy’s hamburger is raw, but a busload of grade schoolers have stopped for lunch as well and we don’t feel like waiting in line to complain) and get back on Leopold’s plotted course.

Past flat plains,

Past sunny lanes,

Past a toll booth, and another, and another

Psst, pass me a dime, I’m out of change.

A CHANGE OF SCENERY

The Chicago skyline cuts across the sky.

Enter tall grey buildings.

Enter the former Sears Tower that is newly named but I don’t know to what.

Enter a knot of criss-crossing roads spilling cars and angry honking. I ask Leopold for help but he throws up his metaphoric hands and tells me I’m on my own.

Forty-five minutes of start and stop traffic, a missed turn, and several outbursts of wild cursing, I park Elvis in front of Nancy’s apartment and release my white-knuckle hold of the steering wheel. We’ve arrived.

CHICAGO

is cold. And windy. And it’s snowing.

I almost wish we’d stayed in Iowa City for Spring break.

More than a Headline

When I heard about the attacks in Norway, I thought: "This is terrible." I thought: "Why do we hurt each other like this?" I thought: "How much longer until I get off work?"

When tragedy happens somewhere else in the world, it's so easy to express the appropriate amount of sympathy and then move on. What else can we do? It only touched us for a moment. I feel guilty about my short-lived sorrow, but to give all the the tragedies in the world the proper reaction would be a full time job, and I feel helpless to do anything to ease the pain. So I live my life, where my individual actions have an immediate impact.

Maybe we just need more pictures. Pictures that show people just like me living their lives, lives that have been turned upside down in a moment or even extinguished. I still don't know what I can do to help, but today I cried for a stranger. Maybe that counts for something?

The link below has photos from the aftermath in Norway. Warning: They do not hold back. But I think that's key. They make this more than just a news story.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/07/tragedy-in-norway/100113/

Home on the Plains

This same exact sign used to hang above I80 as I crossed the invisible line between Council Bluffs and Omaha. Somehow in all the construction going on it got taken down, which makes my drive from Iowa City to Lincoln seem somewhat less monumental. It had been an official 'welcome home' in the midst of interstate cement and scary drivers. 

A recent conversation about home towns and small town claims to fame (ie: Welcome to Pocahontas, Iowa : a real place, I swear.

)

and finishing Willa Cather's My Antonia (a novel about Nebraska in the days of sod houses and wagons), I feel like 'Home on the Plains' is a perfect topic for this week's blog. When I was in London, I took a module called "Creative Writing and Place," which ended up being the most broad-ended, open-genre class I've ever taken. My classmates were everything from travel writers to poets and as long as our work somehow related to 'place' (in whatever way we interpreted that) we could write whatever we pleased. I wrote surprisingly a lot about Nebraska and Iowa. It wasn't that I was homesick per se, it was just whenever I sat down to write about a place, interstates and sunsets over cornfields weighed heavier on my mind than Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it was because people already consider Europe gorgeous and I wanted to prove the Midwest is too. Maybe that's why Willa Cather wrote My Antonia. But that's beside the point.

Anyway, one day in class we were reading a travel essay out loud about...IOWA. My English classmates seriously examined the way in which Bill Bryson had portrayed this country so different from their own, while I nearly went into hysterics laughing to myself in the corner. The essay was an account of the Des Moines-born Bryson who was back in America after twenty years in the United Kingdom. He was retracing the route his father drove to get to his grandparents' house in Winfield, Iowa, and making comments such as: "Apart from the ceaseless fidgeting of the corn, there is not a sound. Somebody could sneeze in a house three miles away and you would hear it (Bless you! Thank you!),” or “Small towns are equally unhelpful in offering distinguishing features. About all the separates them are their names. They always have a gas station, a grocery store, a grain elevator, a place selling farm equipment and fertilizers, and something improbable like a microwave-oven dealer or a dry-cleaner’s, so you can say to yourself as you glide through the town: ‘Now what would they be doing with a dry-cleaner’s in Fungus City?’” (Bill Bryson, ‘More Fat Girls in Des Moines).

I think my English classmates and tutor (English-term for professor) felt it would be rude to laugh, and I wonder how I would have reacted if they had. I feel perfectly at ease cracking jokes about my home (and I consider both Nebraska and Iowa home – even though I will be cheering for the Huskers next Thanksgiving [dear God, please don’t let the Hawkeyes kill me]), but I find myself so offended when people who aren’t aren't actually from these states make the same jokes. My response was to write the following for class:

THE GOOD LIFE

By Sarah M. Kosch

I know it’s not fair for me to make jokes at the expense of my home and then get offended when others do the same. But I do. I know Nebraska as a friend, a companion for twenty-one years. We’ve had our quarrels; I’ve stormed out on multiple occasions, but I always come back eventually. I never stop loving the place in all its infuriating smallness.

 But those people who know Nebraska by name only, or in passing—even if I smile and accept your jibes about the flatness, the dull expanse, the belief in a backwards country with horse-drawn buggies and no electricity— there is a sadness around my lungs. I can still breathe, but I wish you would breathe with me, and we could merge into one, just for a moment, so I could paint you a memory and together we could remember that Nebraska is beautiful.

               

I think I would paint you this one.

A long yellow line, sloping across the page.

I know it’s not much. No mountains, no forests, no desert. It is not extreme here. Just gentle. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Right now, we’re driving on the interstate. It’s an easy drive, although I admit, it does get a bit long. But sometimes, when clouds brush on blue in just the right way, or the pinks of a sunset melt like strawberry ice cream, they crown these open fields with gold. The wheat is alive, expanding - inhaling and exhaling. The fields stretch. Cornstalks dance. It is life in the simple. In the yellow. Keep inside the fading lines and drive onwards into a new canvas.

A light blue watercolor. Translucent shimmer.

Sunrise in a gauzy gown. So light she barely feels it. So light it barely hides the curves and pale skin of her body. She is walking down a gravel road in the country. I don’t know the name. There is farmland on each side of her. The stalks and leaves are sequined with dew drops, and the damp cool whispers on her bare arms. Soon the smell of dust and the touch of heat will waltz through the dirt rows and leap onto the road to join her. She will hold their hands, and together they will sprint over the hill and disappear.

Now, the crisscross weave of a screen door painted with thin silver.

I think it has always creaked. I think it has always smelled like remembering  what was: a kitchen  the color of toast and orange juice, a bedroom of pillow fights and little girls missing teeth, a living room with the best armchair for naps, a basement where bank robbers and restaurant owners danced to polkas and sold purses for plastic money. I think Grandma can’t be lonely surrounded by all the fond memories, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they are better seen from a distance. On Grandpa's last Fourth of July he sat on the back patio while the rest of us, the children and grandchildren, stood past the trees where we could see the sky. I went inside to get a drink of water, and when I came out I asked Grandpa why he didn't sit closer. He told me he could see fine from where he was.

A gentle breath; let it dry.

For every stereotype, there is a grain of truth. This is what is true about Nebraskans. We like to sit around campfires out in the middle of nowhere. We love to drink beer, but it is an acquired taste. We start out with cheap vodka and rum. We listen to twangy guitar music about love and loss, but we also listen to bumpy beats and rhythms that make our hips want to swing on their own accord. We love and lose. We cry sometimes. We drive our cars with the windows down. We like to look at the sky at night and be able to see the Big Dipper and Orion’s belt. We wish we knew the names of the rest. Some of us find out. Some don’t.  But there is a thread stitched onto our backs that tugs us when we walk too far. We cannot see it, but I think it is yellow. Or blue so light it is invisible.

Tune in next week for some Travel Writing about I-O-W-A! 

Proofed

A long, long time ago, I believed that masterpieces were created on the first go. When I wrote the ending of a story, I felt nothing put pride and contentment. It was finished. It was beautiful. The end. It took me awhile (and some brutal workshops) to realize it takes a lot of work to create good writing (so much in fact, that I still have a hard time deciding when something is truly done).

 

One of the things that has stuck with me since my first poetry class last Fall is a quote from William Wordsworth's preface to his book Lyrical Ballads: "...all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but...Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced but by a man (or woman--no need to be sexist, Will) who...had also thought long and deeply" (Lyrical Ballads). Basically, the spontaneous feelings must first be screened and pondered before they make it onto the page if one wants to write a poem that's more than an emo bleeding mascara streaks. We have to edit our feelings in order to make them art.

Although this is true, I do think there is a certain beauty to the rawness of an unfiltered first draft (not just of poetry, but of any writing). In a way, it's the most courageous thing we can can write. It's easy to edit ourselves and make it appear that we've always been this talented, but a first draft is just a bare heart and some word vomit. It doesn't necessarily make sense, but we wanted to say it so we tried. Even if we never share the work with anyone else, it's still a testament to change and growth. It's a story that reflects our past, our old ways of thinking, and our old ways of feeling; and with each new draft it's like visibly watching ourselves grow up and change with each absorbed experience. It makes the final draft just that much more impressive. 

So here's something from way back in the archives. It makes me feel a bit like Taylor Swift, although I didn't capitalize any random letters to spell out the name of the boy who broke my heart. 

Odium

I hate you like

spinach noodle salad,

rubber cement,

and yellow Laffy Taffy.

I hate you like cats,

cooler doors,

over-ripe bananas,

and your stupid car.

I hate you like

pork chops,

scrawny man calves,

and snide comments about slutty catholic school girls.

I hate you like Akon,

Mountain Dew without ice,

ear pimples,

and swallowing gum.

I hate you like

Miley Cyrus,

half-cooked toaster strudels,

and the line tangent to f(x).

I hate you like bulgy arm veins,

Candle wax,

bacon-cheeseburger pizza,

and looking closely at feet.

I want a you like

bubble-wrap,

the smell of coffee,

and belting out Journey.

A you like electric fans,

laughing at horror movies,

cherry slushies,

and knee-high socks.

A you like

coconut and lime hand lotion,

long-sleeved t-shirts,

and vanilla lip gloss.

A you like jelly beans,

eating pancakes for dinner,

British accents,

and lightning bugs in a jar.

And you are not you,

and I hate your arm around me

like I never said:

“Go canoodle with your top heavy harlot.

I hope you get herpes.”

Because I did.

And I mean it.

And I hate you like third chances.

Now What?

I bet you didn't know this, but it's been thirty-seven days since I wrote my goodbye blog for "London, Jaunts, and Full-Frontal Blogging." Thirty-seven days of telling my travel stories to my family, friends, distant relatives,and (occasionally) random strangers. Thirty-seven days of getting an American-sized fix of country music, good 'ole PBR, Runza, driving on the right side of the road (especially back and forth on I-80), etc. Besides the accent withdrawal and pangs of heartsick longing whenever I even hear the word 'London,' I'd say I'm generally readjusted.

I just forgot how quiet life in the Midwest can be. When I first got back, there was such a whirlwind of people to see, unpacking and repacking to do as I divided my time between Iowa City and Lincoln, work at the Englert, and a road trip to Kansas. Now the craziness is dying down (case in point: I'm spending the entire weekend hibernating in my apartment). I've got time to think, and the question on my mind is: Now what?

This is a dangerous question. It led me to doubt my entire decision to major in English as I looked at my meager work hours and my dismal budget and felt reality stabbing me in the side with a broken pencil tip. I saw a foreshadowing of what my life was going to be like after one more year of ignorant college bliss. I saw a future of impoverished struggling with a useless university degree and a lead weight of debt. I saw piles and piles of rejection letters and crumpled manuscripts.

But then I realized what an awesome adventure that struggle has the potential to be. A little grimy and dark, yes, but so was London at times and that never stopped me from loving it. Even more encouraging than this epiphany was the fact that with all my down-time I decided to go through every word document on my computer last night to delete stuff I didn't need, and you know what I found? A hell of a lot of writing. There's a reason I'm an English major. There's a reason I came to Iowa for school. My future can sort itself out. That's an ending even I don't want to put into words yet.

What I am going to do is start another blog (ta da!). I want all my writing to have a chance to be more than a forgotten word doc. file. Some of it's funny because it's so bad. Some of it's surprisingly full of potential. Most of it is stuff that I would never send to publishers because my writing style is so changed, but I'm going to publish it here. Just because I've readjusted who I am doesn't mean the journey of how I got here can't be at least read, just noted.




How to Write a Love Poem that's not Stupid
By S.M. Kosch

A) WWJD (Why Weave Jaded Designs?)

I want to sing but I won’t. That’s cliché.

Poetry is cliché too, but in not quite the same way.

It’s only bad when the things you have to say

rhyme.

My alternative—

I like the music you like, and I like the thought 

of me strumming a guitar in my room while you think about kissing me.

[That’s kissed-shade poetry instead.]

B) Against the Pod Squad

They say: “This feeling inside.

My heart is smiling.”

Is it?

Hearts are muscles and tissue and if one smiled it would mean

an alien creature infestation or robots.

That’s scary shit.

But I will admit I feel lighter when I see you.                                                                                                              That must just be gravity shift^ing.