Manifest destiny

It would be strange to suddenly be living in Idaho, not least of all because I know nothing about it. Ask any random person what they know about Idaho, and the answer invariably comes back the same: “Uh, they’re the ones with the potatoes, right?”

 

Right. But that’s not exactly helpful. That’s like a defense witness saying, “Oh yeah, the murderer. He’s the one with the knife.”

 

Fact is, aside from potatoes, Idaho as a state doesn’t have much of an identity, at least to us ignorant fools on the East Coast, with our croissants and drawled-out R’s. That Big Dipper-shaped oasis might as well be Siberia. For all we know, Idaho is crammed tight with bug-eyed Martians and anthropomorphic cows who stand upright and play solitaire by the light of oil drum fires. Its chief exports could be baby formula and crystal meth. We simply don’t know. A few quick keystrokes on our computers or phones may be enlightening, but then we’d be making our assumptions on the basis of knowledge, thus ruining Idaho’s identity of having no identity.

 

Places like that abound. They promise mystery solely on the basis of having no defining characteristics.

 

Daydreaming leads to such thoughts. For me, the wistful, stare-out-the-window fantasy was a common one: Dropping everything, leaving my life behind, and starting fresh someplace, with nary a string connecting me to the world I once knew. Many of us tinker with this tought from time to time. Mostly it’s an idle whimsy, a what-if scenario that removes us, temporarily, from our troubles and stresses. In this state of mind, nothing is a better balm for what ails than packing up, heading west, and settling in a one-horse town, our goals no loftier than opening a modest dentistry practice and collecting stamps in corn-stalk solitude.

 

When the daydream becomes reality, though, it’s rarely the corn we head for. Those of us brave enough to relocate into another life usually target the well-known meccas, the population centers caricatured and made accessible by movies and TV. We’re lured by the siren songs of honky-tonk bars in San Antonio, music festivals in San Fransisco, coffee shops in Seattle. There’s a false familiarity there, somehow no less valid for being false. The potato fields of Idaho are almost better as vague abstractions, mirages that shimmer and then disappear the closer to them we get. If they didn’t dissipate like steam, the appealing enigma would be lost.

 

Picture yourself in Worland, Wyoming. You can’t. You can’t because you don’t know where the hell it is, or what you’d find if you went there. Not even Worland’s Wikipedia page is much help. From it, I now know that it’s a town of a little over 5,000 people spread across four square miles in Washakie County, geographically situated in the north-central nowhere of this vanilla expanse. Average temperatures are moderate. The median age is 39.8 years. There’s a post office. That’s about it. Nothing about industry, which means it’s probably a bedroom community; nothing about nightlife, because there probably isn’t any. If the Space Needle and Golden Gate Bridge are well-known icons of otherness and new beginnings, Worland is a generic substitute for everything else – not a place you escape to, but the place where you do your dreaming, where wanderlust is bred in the first place. Paradoxically, that’s the very reason I wouldn’t mind visiting sometime.

 

I was in Australia once. For three weeks when I was 15, I was a student ambassador for People to People, an international organization dedicated to introducing young people to different cultures. Chaperoned but parentless, fortified by countless miles in a chartered bus, my experience was a crash course in the unfamiliar – mammoth cities of towering steel, rainbow choral in the Great Barrier Reef, Outback plains lit only by stars. One memory has retained more clarity than the rest. My delegation was being shepherded out of Sydney after touring a factory that makes opal pendants. Our tour guide, Bubbles – yup, that was her name – suggested to the bus driver that he pull over at a rest area so we fidgety teenagers could take care of business before the long haul to our next destination. The rest area was on a thin fingernail of grass bordering Sydney Cove, in full view of the Opera House, the inside of which we had seen the day before. I stepped off the bus just as a twilight sun had sunk below the waterline beyond Harbour Bridge, leaving residual smatters of purple and crimson streaking at corkscrew angles across a candy-colored skyline.

 

You know a moment carries a certain significance when nothing has to actually happen for it to stick with you. Aside from emptying an uncomfortably full bladder, it was a pretty unremarkable five minutes, all told. But between the view, the chilly late-autumn breeze, and my mood – tired from traveling, blank and unthinking – something shifted in me. All the pieces fell into place like the tumblers in a combination lock. I saw a life different from my own. It was like temporarily wearing the skin of a foreigner, seeing the world through their eyes; looking back, it may have been my first conscious moment of empathy. It was also the first time I seriously considered that maybe there were places in the world where the grass was greener. Still an idle whimsy even then, but fertile ground for a hungry imagination: I’d been there. I could picture it. My thoughts now had a point of reference; Sydney was no longer the great unknowable, a city lost in the metaphorical cornfields.

 

Maine is my home. I have no plans to leave it. But sometimes you look west, and wonder.

 

And is there a person in San Diego, or Fresno, or Portland, Oregon, who’s now looking east, wondering what’s on the other side of the horizon? I hope there is. I don’t know if I buy into the concept of a “soul mate,” per se, but I’m comforted by the thought that there are like-minded people out there – people closing their eyes and envisioning a life along the banks of the Mississippi, or nestled into the western mountains of North Carolina. They do it just to escape themselves for a little while. Because they can. It’s a source of nourishment.

 

Maybe they hop in the car, bid see-you-later to their Pacific bungalow, and hightail it toward the rising sun, not knowing what they’re looking for but expecting to find it anyway. Maybe I head west, looking for my next Sydney. And in a small pub in Worland, Wyoming – the only kind they have – we sit at opposite ends of the bar, make eye contact, and recognize each other. We smile and tip our drinks. The rest is up to us.

 

Someday.