My one confession is this.
That for many, many years I never even contemplated traveling to the USA. It just never entered my mind as a travel destination. It never interested me. There were too many exotic places out there waiting for my footprints on their shoreline. Too many hidden paradises. You may even have thought the same thing right?
But I think it was the culture. It started niggling at me. I met travelling Americans. Something inside me stirred with curiosity. It grew into a kind of enigmatic attraction, loitering somewhere between the delightful ambiguity of a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich and the carnival-like sound of a half crushed Coke can rolling higgledy-piggledy down an empty city street at one in the morning, filtering into my restless dreams.
For me and Alex, and our jar of Vegemite, it was our first time in the United States. Pre-landing the fragrant stewardess handed us our Visa Waiver forms.
Welcome to the United States
I-94W Non-Immigrant Visa Waiver Arrival 1 Departure Form (Instructions)
No. I haven’t got a communicable disease. I’m not an addict and I don’t abuse drugs of any kind. If there’d been a little square box for pistachio nut addiction I’d have contemplated a tick.
At the risk of sounding boring I have never been convicted of an offence or crime involving moral turpitude. Nor was I seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities. No, I haven’t been involved in espionage, sabotage, terrorist activities or genocide, and I wasn’t even born before 1945 to be in any way involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies. Actually, if I had been somehow related to any of these activities, unsavoury as they may be, did the diligent people of US Immigration really expect me to tick the little box?
I was however a smuggler, and in exile from a hurting relationship. But they didn’t really have a box specific enough for that, so my 455 gram jar of Vegemite would go undeclared and I would put on a brave face. For a two month trip in the US, we were going to need a supply of Vegemite and they never have big enough jars, so I bought my own from home. My only real concern was that I didn’t quite match my passport photo. Maybe then, I had changed.
Alex certainly thought I’d changed over the years he’d known me. He handed back my passport after rifling through it on the plane.
“You’re a little more relaxed, but you still have that daggy quality about you. Nothing over the top. Just a comfortable, easy going, amicable nice guy. Typical boy next door material.”
My mate Alex.
Just the fella to add a pinch of school ground humour and refinement to the trip. A bit artsy, a fellow musician and just as much a guy dedicated to the fine art of bloke-ism without getting too involved in its many tragic and unhygienic tendencies. He also shared a mutual interest with me of people watching. We agreed to a trip across the States as we sat on the verandah of his fibro house in rural Western Australia. In recollection it was St Patrick’s Day and over a couple of cans of Guinness and Beamish and a big pot of hot Irish Stew, we agreed to ‘do America’ while sitting on the front porch and watching road trains rattle and thunder past. Alex is the kind of character that, as the reader of this road trip, you may wish to sink a bit of emotional investment into. If you wish.
So there we were, eventually making progress towards our American adventure. I was looking forward to it. To the new adventures and the big distraction I was hoping it would provide. I was ready to enjoy America and what it had to offer. Use the time and opportunity to investigate the person I was. Ever mindful of the Zen understanding that first a person needs to awaken on their own and see their own light before they can begin to see and appreciate someone else’s. I figured it was a good place to begin. Back to basics.
Then there was the sound of rubber on American tarmac. And Alex and me were there.
wildGazoo 