It was a pretty sight. Rolling snowy hills of woods and farms, cleverly hiding - in winter! - the snaking railroads, the cookie-cutter houses, the junklots. Trees in fluted shapes from their competition for light. A low, dishwater grey sky hid the sun. A smoggy mist of woodsmoke and dew shrouding the river valleys. The great eyesore of the interstate highway humming beneath me. Good, grey places, befitting my monochromatic palette preferences.
I feel a fondness for this country, Pennsylvania and whatever else there is of New York north of Rockland. I don't want to say patriotism, as I don't feel particularly patriotic about the US. I'm not proud to be an American, I merely don't mind it. It's just something that happened to me. Besides, patriotism is about nationhood, and a nation is a people. There aren't many nations I gladly call myself member of. But a country, a country holds a people, or peoples, and I've enjoyed every country I've been to, though I've encountered some unpleasant nations occupying those countries. (mostly lesser, petty principalities of the NO TRESPASSING variety)
This country though is familiar from childhood. Oddly, in reflection, I am surprised at how much of it I have seen from this identical thoroughfare. How many hours tallying up to months - years? - of time have I whiled away inside of an automobile? How many errands dragged along to in infancy, coming along for the ride because I couldn't be left at home? Looking out the glass window, the fluted trees, the rolling snowy hills, the droning interstate. Strange the things we get wistful for.
I think most people feel at some point a desire to go back to where they had been a child, if only for a brief while. To the familiar topography and simplicity and looming dark confusion. To the maternal feeling of belonging to a place. It's like what William Burroughs said in 1950 when asked what he would like for dinner. ("A Lake Huron bass from 1920) Personally, I wouldn't mind spending an afternoon in 1992. Provided I would not be required to go along grocery shopping or be obliged to wait in the car.
Just before crossing the state line, I listened to the second half of a hockey game broadcast from Binghamton, not out of any real interest in the sport aside from nostalgia. When I was an undergrad hockey was the only sport that people actually went to see. Of course, there were few alternatives for spectators, as aside from swimming and track the college lacked all other athletic affiliation. Hockey was the sole incarnation of grownup capture-the-flag on menu. The game fizzled out of reception shortly after it was won in a decisive goal an Ontario guardsmen snuck past a Quebecois goalie in the American league.
After that I just let the radio scan thru for nearly a half an hour, playing a slurry of country-western-rockabilly-Jesus, gradually settling onto conservative talk radio, till I got disgusted at the rage and contempt of the host and switched to liberal talk radio, till I got bored at the polite delicacy of panel and let it cycle again. The music stations trotted out the old garage metal of the 1980s like they would never go away, with an occasional dip into the most insipid pop of the present day. I cantankerously switched off the radio.
There's a danger in going back to the place you last lived as an adolescent.
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