Wellington folks, wanna grab a coffee? I’m in the city next Friday, 15 August. Let’s say 10 a.m. at Thunderbird Café, 154 Featherston Street. No agenda, just a chance to meet up! Reply to this email or DM me to RSVP. Holler anytime at dan@american.nz.
This is the second and final download from our annual America run. In the first letter I wrote about what’s changed. This one’s about a habit, and a song, that are still blessedly the same.
Our car died on I-70 outside Salina, Kansas. While we waited for the tow truck, a local sheriff’s deputy kindly pulled up to wait with us on the highway shoulder. The deputy was a dad about my age, with mirrored shades, a Santa Claus belly, and salt in his beard. We chatted in the tall grass as the kids hunted for snakes. We talked family roadtrips, Colorado memories, crazy drivers. Then came the confession.
“I never was a seatbelt man,” the deputy said. “Then I went to the academy and saw the videos.”
All at once I was home. Kiwis are friendly folks but with strangers they cling to consensus and common sense. Americans, man, we’d rather spill our weirdest bad ideas than let a minute go by in silence.
So we were buds now, the cop and I. We’d both believed dumb things. Mine, I guess, was flying my family halfway around the world just to strap them into a dodgy 2011 Honda Pilot and drive across the Great Plains in high summer.
The cop didn’t judge. Kiwis, bless their hearts, will tell you how to ride a bike. The cop understood my broke-ass flopping about on I-70 not as a failure of fatherhood but as the latest imperfect expression of my dreamy, chaotic American self. I contain multitudes. I contain searching Kansas for autoshops open on a Sunday.
Maybe this is proper American freedom: to be your own mess, and to be seen for it. Maybe it’s just the relief any traveler feels coming home to a conversation he can never really leave.
And here’s where I tell you the cop had a Thin Blue Line flag tattooed all down his left forearm, drawn tattered and torn as if it’d been through a war. Goddamn, I hate that flag, which drains America of all colors but the gleam of a badge. Goddamn, I hate the general American veneration of bloodshed.
But I was happy to let it ride. I needed to let it ride. We shelled out for the monster plane tickets, didn’t we? I flew home to take confession.
The Honda Pilot needed an alternator. This, too, has apparently not changed.
“We’ve done four Pilots in the last month,” the mechanic said. No judgement here either. Bad Pilot alternators were just the lay of the land. He was a small, sturdy dude with a long red beard, a laconic Gimli in transition lenses and oil-stained basketball shorts. I gave him my keys. The tow truck driver took us to a hotel downtown.
Downtown, man, because I always want to be somewhere. We ate at a fast-casual Mediterranean franchise on the day of its grand opening, at a table under a giant plastic olive tree. We took the kids to the tiny Salina art museum, which had a cool show of UFO-inspired art. An installation by the late UK artist Susan Hiller included first-person accounts of encounters around the world, including one from New Zealand. I’d have better notes but I was chasing kids back to the hotel pool.
While we’re confessing: in my next life, or maybe later in this one, I will commandeer the penthouse of the United Building, one of those half-empty Prairie Deco skyscrapers that haunt the Plains. I’ll sleep on the floor with the windows open to the wind. I’ll file these letters from a typewriter propped on an old milk crate, writing bad poems about the mad continent ten stories below.
Gimli had the new alternator knocked out by Monday noon. I summoned an Uber to take me to the shop and drew a red minivan driven by a quiet, silver-haired gent. We did not speak. The AC was cold enough to store food. We’d gone a block when his satellite radio hit Like a Rolling Stone.
That opening crash—aw hell, man. But I flew home in search of such moments, didn’t I? I sang along under my breath with squawky young Dylan. I sang along over my breath. What do I care what the driver thinks? HOW DOES IT FEEL, to be chasing down a resurrected Honda Pilot in the dead goddamn middle of the America I left but can’t stop returning to? We cruised past the Union Building and the churches and the dairy drive-in advertising SHARK MONTH and made for the south side of town. Always the south side, in America. The trees get smaller, the paint flakier. NO DIRECTION HOME.
What will we do in New Zealand, when our PhDs are done? What hell is America bound for? What hell is New Zealand, for that matter? Where can I feed my kids? Where can I best replace my hip in 30 years? Just pick, bro.
Nah. Better to be lonely. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. I took pictures of the houses as they rolled past the chilled minivan window. Proof I loved it all. Proof I didn’t fucking belong. YOU’RE INVISIBLE NOW. YOU GOT NO SECRETS TO CONCEAL.
No song better twangs the lonely expat drift. But it’s an unavoidably American song, one of our top-shelf greats. I know it didn’t swing in the expat Star Wars bars of LatAm and Asia. Can’t imagine it clicks in old-blood-and-stone Europe either.
New Zealand’s young and unfinished enough, yeah. But it’s too dang small, too hedged in. Here every direction, home or otherwise, pings you right off the ocean or a wire fence. RNZ takes less than minute to read out the whole country’s weather, and that’s saying all the town names twice. You’re at home on an island, or you ain’t.
The song ended and we pulled up at the shop. The Pilot waited in the yard like a found lost dog. The mechanic’s assistant was upside down under the dash of a Ford Focus Titanium, a ragged cottonwood looking down.
“Thanks,” I told the driver through the open door.
He caught my eye and grinned. “I’m a Bobby fan, too.”
And for a moment, out on the street, we were brothers. //
Well done, Dan. Spoke to me. We’ve all been in a Salinas state of mind, unvarnished and transitory.
Loved this Dan.
In that little book I read as a child there is a line that says - "In New Zealand you can ski down a mountain, soak in a hot pool and swim in an ocean all in one day" In those days , I knew nothing about skiing or hot pools and my ocean experience was limited to being knocked over by waves in Far Rockaway - but for some reason that line stuck with me. My Wellington confession is that now, years after, there is often a sense of claustrophobia and saudade.