Short Stories, Long Odds

(The last in a series I did for Quorum Report in January.)

On Wednesday we turned south and headed for Georgia. When we were planning our trip we figured that if we were driving all the way to Washington, we should not come straight back if we did not have to. I wanted a different experience on the way home than I had on the way up.
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After a long time on the road we finally reached Ashburn, Virginia on Monday afternoon. We had made lunch plans with our friends who flew in from Texas and would be staying with us during the inauguration, but that was before being waylaid by weather in Wytheville, Virginia. What happened instead was that they made it to our lunch reservation and my wife and I dragged ourselves to the Metro stop in a late-day attempt to actually get into Washington, DC.

In the weeks running up to Obama’s inauguration, every front page carried at least one or two stories a day about how many people would Be There on January 20. I had assumed that these stories might actually serve to drive that number down a bit as people thought of standing in the freezing cold for eleven hours with strangers and no food and decided, instead, to witness history from the august environs of the couch. I was wrong.

At 3:00PM the day before the inauguration, the line to buy a ticket at the Vienna Orange Line Metro station in Virginia was about three hours long. After having had to engage in Mad Max-style road combat to get a parking spot, the only immediately apparent choice was to wait in a line that extended out of the station and almost to the highway. Read more…

(As long promised, so now delivered: The first of a three-parter I did for Quorum Report in late January.)

The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama – it would be dishonest for me to conceal that – but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.
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Things have been light here because I was working on this column for Fort Worth Weekly about censorship and hometown regression.

Interstate 40 runs a long way across the United States and it bisects Tennessee from west to east, from Memphis on one end to Knoxville on the other. The distance between those two cities is roughly 380 miles, and Nashville sits in between, the Vanderbilt radius to the Volunteer diameter.

There are many signs as you enter Tennessee from the west, imploring you to try Memphis barbecue or to visit Graceland. Unlike Arkansas, where most of the billboards are either blank or an advertisement selling the billboard itself, Tennessee has plenty to sell you and plenty of things to do and see in metro areas.

Tennessee could use one of those signs at the state line to warn drivers that the highways are not lit and that modern infrastructure does not extend into the hills and valleys, but this is not the case.  Instead you discover this the wrong way, at 8:00 PM on a winter night when the sun has been down for hours.

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