A Weird, Out-of-the-Way Place

I find myself thinking about a book I read many years ago, about a man driving an RV through the backwaters of the United States in 1978. The writer took this trip after his wife left him and he lost his job, but the book isn't about his wife or his job or his life—these things are mentioned only in passing. The book is about a side of America that, in 1978, was already rapidly disappearing: weird little out-of-the-way towns, each unlike all the others, lonely roadhouse diners, people long settled into the land where they lived, stamped with the spirit of the hill or the bayou, drenched in particularity. I wonder what it was like to drive around this country 20 or 30 or 50 years before that, to see a world still largely unconnected by telephone and television, internet and interstate, when the little highways, winding over and under hill, passed through every town. To arrive in one of these towns was to find oneself somewhere specific and distinct, where speech and manners and beliefs were inflected with an irreducible local element.

Little is left of that world, and what there is seems to be largely preserved for the sake of tourism. It is a tired point: chain stores and superhighways and indistinguishable suburbs and so on. Never mind.

Here is what you can do: make of yourself a weird old place. Find a hillock or a wood of the mind and build your soul a house there. Build it oddly, unreasonably, with rooms and corridors to your liking. So that, when people meet you, they feel they have come to the threshold of a strange, out-of-the-way place, unlike the places they are used to, somewhere that will take time to get to know. There is no reason to be inhospitable—you may as well do your best to welcome them. (People in weird old towns are often much friendlier than people in modern, anonymous places.) Show the visitor into your strange, dark sitting room, offer them tea. But keep yourself some locked rooms where guests are not allowed.

Is this not part of what it might mean to be an adult—if we discard all those external class-based markers (career, house, towels) and look for qualities that are not grounded in a system that has lost its capacity to impart meaning to almost anything?