We’ve all just returned from somewhere. Some of us from exotic tropicalities, some from estranged latitudes or war-ravaged provinces. Some of us just came from home, and others stayed here, in St. Louis, where there’s not a whole lot to do in the way of spring-y activities; then again, there is that big park across the way and a boiling ball of flaming gas hovering overhead.
I’m a townee, insomuch as one can be a townee in St. Louis. I’ve lived here since I’ve been around, and it’s okay, but not a whole lot more. Throughout high school and for my years here at WU, I’ve never strayed for spring break, never vacationed, or really `broken’ from anything, and that’s just as well in an apathetic-pathetic sort of way. Not that anything’s really prevented me from taking to the road, the circumstances have just never quite presented themselves.
So partly out of necessity and partly out of desperation, I decided that this would be the year for hard-core spring breaking, my idea of hard-core, in this circumstance, being getting the hell of Missouri, a state whose name rings all the more true when everybody and his brother are concording to every end of the earth.
Thus, road trip to Florida. To get to Florida from the big MO, you can take several routes-one through Nashville and Atlanta, the other through Memphis, Mississippi, and Alabama. We took the later route, and paused at opportune points in order to saturate ourselves in the unabashed Americana of the open road.
The `Road Trip’ as such is more of a novelty these days than the romanticized, Kerouacian adventure into the nature of the country and the nature of the self. These post-modern times demand a rapid adaptation to the cross-country culture; this means, you eat fast food or you die, you learn to rely on billboards like compasses, and you find strange religious outposts-caravans of Christians or temples devoted to Disney characters-as gypsies in the mist, wandering oracles with some kind of arcane and very important knowledge.
At WU, and even in St. Louis, we are not always exposed to such invaluable elements of the underbelly of America as the brilliance of billboards, polemical politics of Bible-belt dwellers, and the unification of fried foods throughout the country (although they put mayonnaise on your burgers some places in the south, and then there’s that sweetened iced-tea that everyone seems to like so much).
Inevitably, my road trip included a stop at Elvis Presley’s homestead, Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. Striking into the south via Highway 55, one is wont to study the signs and see where they lead. They lead to Graceland, to McDonald’s, to fast food gas station combinations that sell microwaves and TVs for big rigs.
Contemporary literature makes much of the intellectualization of raw America. Don DeLillo parallels Elvis and Hitler in White Noise. Michael Chabon studies the mathematics of marriage in Joe Dimagio and Marilyn Monroe in Wonder Boys. Where is the hoaky, country-fried America of the open road at WU? Well, we can look to American Culture Studies, which cross-lists into any and all aspects of American culture. But the closest WU comes, in a very general sense, to turning `right now’ or even `just then’ into something viable enough to study is in a class like “Music of the Beatles” or various 60’s culture-clash classes.
Even if we like to ignore the brash, bejeweled, Presley-ian jumpsuit of America from the backseat of a fast car, it’s prevalent and, it seems, becoming more so. It’s strange and a little bit creepy. Kind of like fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
-Peter Hanrahan