I like to drop in on random Streetview locations in America. I grab the humanoid figure in the top left of this page and dangle it over the contiguous 48 states, lighting up America in a vein-like network of blue streets, and then I drop it somewhere. Anywhere. I spend some minutes of solitary wanderlust, double-clicking down the highways, Interstates, and other public avenues and boulevards, looking at the houses and the roadside detritus. I may stop at an intersection on a stretch of desert highway and think “What’s down that road?” Alas, the road is not Streetviewed and the signs pointing to it are unreadable through the 1994-vintage webcam image quality.
I am not so interested in the urban areas. In fact I start to resent the attentions lavished on metropolitan areas when the rare but usually (on Streetview) unreadable signs in unpopulated regions communicate a more urgent message than a city’s clutter of overloaded streetsigns. Urban signs on Streetview are increasingly becoming articulated in clear resolution while rural signage is left as a nearsighted blur.
This morning I landed the Streeview humanoid on US Highway 54 in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Straightly sprawling, I consider this kind of road to be a metaphor for the anger of unwanted sleep from which one can not awake, or for the passage of time forcibly wasted in bad jobs or bad lives. To look at a desert highway in this way, almost like a museum piece, is like studying the bottom of one’s feet. These are what get you places but how often do you contemplate the arch servitude and the physical landscape of these plains, the sweat and heat that rises up from the surfaces, and the evolutionary tale told in their structured contours?
Pointing and clicking my way along this arid, vacant road I spin to the sides, looking at the faraway mountains and the inhospitable clay landscape. Somewhere on the roadway this strange Streetmap-generated arrow guide appears:
Software like this might have me drive right off into the desert plains, choking on tumbleweed and exotic landhogs. One might imagine that unintended suggestions like this present philosophical quandaries and metaphorical mindstuff for poets to chew on, but I tend to regard technical errors like this as simply that: technical errors. Nothing unusual and nothing surprising.
I drop the humanoid on what I think is Virginia, but instead I end up in Clinton, North Carolina. More populated than the New Mexico desert I see both houses and mobile homes and I find myself looking into people’s driveways, imagining what significance a barn in someone’s back yard holds for the family that has lived there for an unknown length of time. Another structure has eight decrepit-looking cars parked in its front yard, reminding me of how each of those 8 slivers of space would rent for hundreds of dollars a month where I live now. I look for figures of human beings in the windows and doors of the houses but there is not even a glimpse of activity on this street or in these houses. I remember the turbid stillness of those Florida suburbs through which I used to wander, and how the generosity of space creates a greater sense of risk and danger than living in a city where many individual buildings have higher populations than towns like Clinton. We live on top and on bottom of each other, like strangers stacked in a morgue or a community mausoleum, our paths crossed only in the abstract despite our physical proximities.
This morning Streetview reverie reminds me, quite strangely enough, of Ronald Reagan. I am blessedly unpolitical but presidents and the presidency have interested me since youth. Unlike individuals whose mark on the world is made of mostly trivial stuff, the spontaneous observations of an American president rise up not as the product of a man but as a result of a life experience and perspective on the world that is shared by virtually no one else.
Ronald Reagan, as I recall the story, was in a helicopter surveying a disaster area somewhere in America. I think it was flooding in the mid-west that caused widespread damage to thousands of houses. Reagan, looking through the helicopter window, saw all the tiny-looking houses and remarked that every house had a family, every family a life, every family’s life a series of lives. And on this day many of those lives were washed away or destroyed. He was not so Dickensian in his language, but for one as seemingly non-introspective as he to have made such a wistful observation surprised this reader. The story may be apocryphal, it may be propaganda, or the memory of mine may even be fabricated. Sometimes I like to keep memory that way. Un-asterisked. In that moment Ronald Reagan seemed like a president whose dogma did not intrude upon his candor. At the time there was magic in that such an observation could have been by hardly anyone else but a president, and most likely not with the same meaning.
I am mostly a product of the suburbs, and as I point and click my way down those mostly silent streets and the surprisingly rural environs of roads only a few miles away I remember the expectation that comes from reaching an intersection, a highway interchange, a railroad crossing, or even a clearing on the side of the road. Empty paths are where travels cross, where possibilities invisibly linger, and as a solipsist I imagine that their spirits vanish when a vehicle’s headlights appear.
In high school I challenged friends to listen to the sounds of the suburbs. These suburban model home communities in which we lived were not just quiet. They were practically silent. To walk up the middle of one of the empty streets in the neighborhood where I grew up was to feel like a solitary explorer, wandering the mystery of the quietudes. Sounds of clattering dishes traveled through an open kitchen window. That sound continued but faded as I walked farther into more silence. The pavement of the road felt moist under my shoes, and if I looked up I saw the silence stretching into the skies. At night I would lie in bed and listen for a train that passed at exactly 9:45pm. The train was miles away but it sounded further. It made a lonely hoot on its way to a place I never knew. I kept the details of that train a mystery, but I also relied on its regular scheduled appearance as I looked for sleep. Over time I found that the train had never passed on a regular schedule. I may have heard it pass at 9:45 a few times, but most times if it passed at 10:30 I would hear it and think “Ah, there’s the 9:45” even as it passed nowhere near that time, if it ever passed at all.
I still play this game of listening to the distances. Silence here is different. The silence here is just a cake upon which the environment spreads the aural rape of car alarms and the putrid noise pollution of the Mr. Softee ice cream truck. Underneath that strangling noise is a numb silence.
