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The city of Memphis was in our midst. I-40 circled around it and we danced the length of its periphery. Peripheral our encounter was, as we were not going to be visiting the city any time soon. Our destination was somewhere over the bridge that went over the water, that whatchamacallit named the Mississippi. Memphis, the Mississippi, I was barely noticing any of it and didn't even realize we had crossed the Mississippi until we crossed it. With little fanfare, the great river that divided East and West slogged its course to whatever it was doing. I had more important things to focus on than great cities and rivers. I was crossing into Arkansas, and that, to me was cause for celebration. I was used to getting excited over destinations that other people would shrug their shoulders at in bafflement. The idea of Paris, France exhilarates a lot of people, I have heard. It sounds good to me, too, but so does: Paris, Texas, or Paris, Ohio or Paris, Illinois. Or any other configuration of Paris. In other words, I like to see places because they are there and I have never seen them before. I enjoyed visiting relatives in the Bronx because they lived in a place that wasn't like mine. Anywhere could be a place of fascination if I took the right framework of mind with me. That was what it was for me, the idea of visiting Arkansas. Truth be told, I didn't even realize I was crossing the Mississippi when I went over the border. I only saw signs that read Memphis stops and the all-important designation "Welcome to Arkansas". This was a trip that I had just pretty much gone out on a whim to embark upon. It wouldn't be the first time I wouldn't have things all marked out and it wouldn't be the last. Though I had learned plenty of Chaucer in high school and Descartes in college I hadn't done much looking at a map in my university days, and this lack of knowledge caught up to me a lot along the way. I only saw the border of Arkansas and Tennessee and knew that crossing it meant new territory to me. Up until this point, my life had only been lived in the eastern half of the United States. I'd been to a lot of places in that half, and I'd been to other countries. But that western half, the place of deserts, plains, huge mountains, and Hollywood, that was a place on television and imagination, a terra incognita. Though I didn't know how neatly split in half the Mississippi created East and West, I was about to step into a realm I had never experienced, a kind of thrill along the line of being able to stand in four states at one time. And now, as we crossed the border in Arkansas, I met a new part of the world, like meeting a friend for the first time. The state of Arkansas, home of the President in the year of 1997, was now spinning by me as fast as Tennessee raced before. I looked at the cars that drove past us, the trucks and the pickups and other cars that stayed with us along the road. The big rigs came from many different places, but the passenger vehicles mostly were Tennessee, and eventually, pretty much Arkansas. I was a stranger in a sea of natives, and it sent a rush and a thrill to me to be in this kind of place, both mentally and physically. I wasn't sure what it meant to the other people here to have a vehicle with Yankee plates driving on their land. Presumably, it was not any different than any other Southern state. I'd been to Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, and it didn't seem to be any different than if I were spinning around New Jersey or Connecticut, the exception that when I ventured to the former places in December, it was a heck of a lot warmer than any climate up north. The same here: I still wasn't used to summer like weather in May, and the need for windows being opened in order to feel cool enough to breathe. As we pulled away from Memphis and further into Arkansas, the road became more and more silent as the city traffic pulled away and found its niche amidst an urban landscape. Coming from suburban New York where the country didn't show up until one was practically in Montauk, I still wasn't used to how quickly this drop-off from urban to rural took place. I don't know what it was that I expected when I went to Arkansas. For some reason, the idea of plains and grasses crossed my mind. Maybe because I thought of Oklahoma and Texas being desert and plains, and just superimposed this perception on a place that I had never been before and knew little about. Which of course would make as much sense as deciding all Danish people are like Germans because Denmark is a hand of a peninsula sticking out from Germany's north end, but that was besides the point. All of the trees and streams and grasses, deceptively similar in its deciduous nature to my general botanical ignorance and northeastern sensibilities, seemed like a marvel to me as my assumptions were carved away. Fast food restaurants and Wal-Marts decorated the highway like crumbs left along a path, intersected with small towns that had farms great and small. Not all that much different than the western Tennessee that I had just left, but fascinating enough because of my perspective. I recently heard that a common misperception about the state of Kansas is that the entire state is flat. I imagine these misguided people coming upon a hill somewhere near Topeka and staring at it in wonder like they just saw a meteor crash. Although I can't carp too much, seeing my own assumptions of locales such as Arkansas were just as misplaced. The good thing about actually going to a place is that these kinds of things can be rectified, so that people such as myself have a better idea of what the heck I'm talking about when I think of a place. Which goes for people as well. Meeting a place, like a new friend, has a way of chipping away at assumptions, that is if one is willing. There was no way that I was going to get to Arkansas, or any other place for that matter, completely and fully. But going there and correcting an assumption was a good start. |
