Barnes & Noble, Nebraska Road Trip Planning
It’s funny how the receipt truncates and mis-capitalizes the name of the second book. The book is called “Nebraska Off the Beaten Path,” but according to this record the title stops at “Beaten”, leaving one to imagine what a book called “Nebraska off the Beaten” would be about. Is it the story of Nebraska as told by its victims of domestic abuse? “Beaten” starts to sound ludicrous when repeated several times, as its manifold meanings start to intermingle. Beaten eggs. Beaten paths. Beaten children. Beaten off.
I bought a couple of other Nebraska and Dakotas travel books as well. The books were useful and entertaining, which is not to say that I followed the paths suggested therein. In some ways I think these books biased my experience, front-loading it with expectations of wide-open grasslands and serenity when in fact the land was rugged and lacking peace under all that big sky and endless horizon.
In Nebraska I stopped at the side of the road many times, though, asking “Where is everybody?” After so many years in the city it baffled me to look so far into the distance and not see any evidence of human beings. Being “guided” by the content of these travel books I imagined at first that this lack of humanity cleansed my spirit and freed my mind from the crowds and clutter of urban life. Before long, though, I felt that the singular appearance of a vehicle on the horizon caused as much concern and even anxiety as a city street blasting with noisy car alarms and cacophonous ice cream trucks.
I was reminded of an incident near where I live, in which two murders occurred in my neighborhood within 24 hours of each other. The two unrelated and isolated incidents took place at locations not even a half-mile apart. This is a safe neighborhood so the two incidents drew some attention and seeming concern, but the interest quickly faded. Today I would expect that few people around here remember those murders.
I compared this reaction of passing concern to horrible events in urban areas to similar circumstances in a rural or suburban community. I grew up in a Florida suburb and a double-murder or even a single murder in that area would be talked about at community board meetings and in the local papers for years afterward. A murder would be given a name, or it would be referred to simply the date on which it occurred, and this name would assume mythological portent.
Here, though, the anxiety around these incidents is lessened, absorbed into the comforting anonymity of a dense population.
In another incident (more to do with urban environments generally) I was in Tampa, at a steakhouse on Dale Mabry Highway (the same street as this book store), when suddenly everybody there, customers and employees alike, leapt from their seats and raced to the windows. I thought this was a performance art piece, a flash mob, or some sort of blog fodder in which I and others caught unawares would be made fools.
In fact, everyone raced to the window in response to a couple of police sirens, a sound so common to me that I barely acknowledge it except to let the sound fade so I can resume a conversation, should those sirens intrude upon such things.
I love the sound of sirens, though. If I have the presence of mind I like to listen and appreciate the texture of that sound.
I remember a story I wrote some years ago, about a siren prodigy — a child who is born with the unique skill of identifying sirens by what type of emergency vehicle they are on, in which country, and under what circumstances. I’ve written and re-written the story many times, once accompanying the tale with a siren sound I recorded at the cemetery. Here is my November, 2009, visit to the siren prodigy. In July, 2010 I accompanied the tale with a siren sound I recorded at the cemetery.
