A Hitchhiker's Heartbreak

On Exile, America, and Iranian Cowboys

I guess real love hurts. It's a trite-but-true, no-bullshit formulation: If you love someone, or some thing — you're probably gonna suffer for it eventually. It's a story as old as Christ and probably older. Once love enters the picture, the edges of things start to blur together, and you start smiling even at all its zits and wrinkles. Dumber than an ass and beyond all rationality, you just can't help but guffaw over that old thing you love, or that old bird you married, or that wild little baby of yours who keeps on winding up in a jail cell for her love of highball gin, Percocet-50's, and desperado guys with a rap sheet as long as the Mississippi. With a smile, you don't even think — you reach for the checkbook and head for the bail bond office, or you find another acre on the dark side of the heart to clear out so you can give your beloved a spot to sit, even if he's filthy, broke, and hell-bound.

And the way I love America is a little like that. The gas station by the Greyhound bus stop sells the little bottles of fortified wine, right next to the stack of coffee cups for fifty cents apiece — and many heartland drunkards know the drill. Two bottles, a chili dog, and a styrofoam cup'll altogether fight off "the shakes" for the fifteen hours to the tornado warnings of Texarkana, or the rocky mountain neon of Denver, or the grit and concrete smog of Hartford. Any one of these guys knows they shouldn't do it. They shouldn't be drinking like this — and it's illegal anyway to drink wine on the Greyhound. Some men have been turned out of such buses on midnight highways in the cackling sagebrush, stuck in the Bayou silence or the icy Maine spruces, all for a tipple of the old bottle of Mad Dog 50-50.

Yes, some part of me knows I shouldn't love America at all; some part of me knows I should change the locks, hang up the phone, call her a bitch and hit the road after all she's done and seems to keep on doing. But like a stiff-lipped, mop-headed old lush swinging around a sawdust-floor tavern backroom, looking for his keys, tripping on his duct-taped boots, staring at the Piggly-Wiggly lights through the busted window, mumbling heartbreak as he stammers — I'm mouthing my adoration to America just like that. Every single day, I'm scrawling a dirty love letter to America in the back of my mind, and I know I shouldn't.

Maybe it's a hallmark of the lumpen underclass to avoid falling in love with things you know will only hurt you in the end. When you're dirt-broke and marginal — you can't afford any expensive love affairs. Rich girls, hotel bars, horse-racing fever — even New York City, that sweet starling — you know in your heart you've got to stay the hell away if you don't want to lose it all in the end. And if you're good, most of the time you can succeed at that — but once in a while, one of those straight-to-hell, white-knuckle, empty-your-wallet and grind-you-down-to-the-grave type loves is just an unavoidable fact of anyone's heart — underdog or not.

And I love America like that. I know more of this country than any man reasonably should, and a lot of times the memories of this land bring me right into the world of shimmering tears and teeth-gritting wonderment that haunts me badly. Pinnacles of salt-rock and hardpan like an alkaline acid trip out in the cholla and mesquite are the firmament of my private desert dreamworld. Basilicas of hemlock and loblolly pine grow at the high-trail switchbacks of my own mind. At the summit of the New World, hidden in gulches of oat-grass and delirious jimsonweed, I'm riding the Erie Canal straight to Mark Twain's house for an afternoon spritzer with the old coot, cracking jokes in the cigarette-smoke of an Amarillo steak-fried-chicken diner, donning the bomber jacket of the South Bronx glory days and riding my bicycle over the cattle grates in a snowstorm to Dollar General to get my collicky baby a can of made-in-China formula. I'm drunk outside my doublewide divining for well water with a hickory stick; I'm up in the Adirondacks with Joe Indian eating condensed milk from a Mason jar with a deerbone egg-spoon and playing checkers with resin-stained beaver teeth in a canoe with a doddering old Quebecker in Boundary Waters country. And I'm flying into Seacaucus at ear-popping speeds on NJTransit with a cast of wireless-earbud-clad characters, each from Bay Ridge or Bangladesh, pizza crust crumpled in my pocket, wondering who the hell I am. That's my country, all of it together — that's who I am.

Most of the people who talk about her have never seen her much except for in the briefest fits and starts. Layovers at O'Hare en route to Panama City Beach, truck stops in Iowa and Arizona, Wal-Marts and oil tank infrastructure in Oklahoma, selfie sticks at the Grand Canyon and — mostly — pictures on the news. For a lot of Americans, Billings is more foreign than Berlin. And for others, anything outside a ten-mile stretch is foreign territory. There are a great many of us who've barely left the county much less the country.

This doesn't seem to stop most everyone from talking about America. But in their case, the living America is a world they've never quite tasted even in the briefest sips — theirs is an America that only enters the newsfeed and not the dream-cycle or the bones of a man. Two-dimensional America, a textbook picture, a glitch in Google Maps that zooms you way out to see this big digital patch of green so you can zoom back in — a vagary. Those who think much about her often enough do so as a way to stimulate the reptilian side of the brain, whether it's with jingoistic hawkishness about foreign wars and propaganda about The American Way of Life — or whether it's acrimony about how "America was never great". Like some words, the word "America" has almost been sapped of its meaning as it becomes the avatar for ten-thousand faces of grift, deceit, conspiracy, and rage. And like other similarly abused words — liberal, for example — this quality of it can make it plain-old-difficult to write about. When anyone sharp starts to hear any overtures about America, the brain (rightfully) sends signals to the mind, saying "buckle up, you're about to hear a string of absurdities from a buffoon."

Maybe this is especially true among my ilk — the traveler types. For while I cannot hold anyone in contempt for their ignorance of most American states and their respective fortunes of regional color, I sought at an early age to set a mythically-charged westbound course to understand my country as deeply as I could. I jumped into the bloodstream of these states as a latter-day hobo, a child of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations and Hank Williams Junior's A Country Boy Can Survive. With a forty-liter rucksack and a little punk anarchism thrown into the mix, I was sauntering across America's contiguous states like truck-stop litter in a Santa Ana wind. And I know well that when traveler types start to write about this country, one very well may hear many strings of romantical absurdities from a class of strange and belaugered buffoons. Irresponsible Kerouac, nutty Alexander Supertramp — a bunch of flaming wingnut vagabonds have written this country up and down, playing Pied Piper for disaffected young men hearty enough to sleep rough. But while I've got no inkling to keep up this dubious tradition, I can't help but carve out a few words in service of Old Glory as she really is. I've just seen too much of it to keep quiet.

In at least one sense, the romantics are right about this old Union — it is a high-flying, throttle-twisting, mind-bendingly vibrant world of supreme beauty that likely knows no match the world over. There's a certain something — an immeasurable quality — to the peculiar manner in which the lands within our borders are all stitched together into the souls of our people. Whole cultures within our own marinate in the Ozarks and up fire roads in the White Mountains, Black Mountains, Green Mountains, and purple loosestrife of Delmarva swamps. Everywhere, people living in a certain way, all their own — the product of tough, resilient ancestors who sought a canvas for some new thing. Far from home, sans electrical appliances and Sporting Utility Vehicles and income tax withholding, these rough-and-tumble folks came to this continent with outrageous dreams and ancient wounds, and with nary a letter to home or a roof that didn't leak — they figured it out. One could analyze and assess things in all manner of ways; one could make an Excel spreadsheet of the morally-dubious means by which this all took place, they could make much ado about nuclear bombs and certain exploded towers and tax codes and calculate the relative efficiency of the Big Mac or the interstate system or whatever else — but the simple fact that the forerunners of this nation all took such an unthinkable risk and somehow made it work should inspire awe even in the most dedicated anti-Americans the world over. 

That the sum total of this procedure continues to stand, even where it is hunched down with the burdens of a post-WWII monoculture and its exhausting bureaucratic gravity — is incredible. The traveler through our Baptist backwaters and peyote deserts alike can taste this thing, and if they aren't too mired in distractions and such, they can feel it inside of them. Whatever great-great-great-grandad did in old Iowa is still there in the heart; all of those capabilities and feverish moments of tearing-across-the-plains and hollering revolt and sodhouse shanty Christmasses are still there. They sleep under a world of parking tickets and chicken nuggets and twelve-dollar coffees — but let me tell you, if you're listening, they'll be tingling as you wander through the vital organs of the still-living American nation.

Trouble is, even where it shows through, this tingling in the heart and bones is quickly shunted into the two-dimensional vision of 'America-as-it-is-in-the-news'. That is, if it isn't pushed down entirely and ignored like a frightful and embarrassing spasm of something primitive and untrustworthy. The "Make America Great Again" types jump on the muscles of these tingling memories, using them as a mechanism for animating an army of enraged, Jacksonian voter-patriots; the "America Was Never Great" folks simply stuff it down, navel-gaze it into oblivion, or call it flat-out racist, colonialist, and criminal. I don't care about either of these political worlds myself — the deep realities of what this country are, on a metaphysical level, so colossal I simply believe that the various politicized re-thinkings of America are paltry and worthless things liable to dry up in the wind. This land and its story is far larger than the news-cycle freak-outs of the masses, and whatever 'side' a man has or has not taken will be an ephemerality next to the 4,800-year-old bristlecone pines of the West.

But while the American vagabond's romance is indeed borne of something real, and while it has its analogues in more unsavory bastardizations of this country's spirit — there's a darkness here that will drag any man's heart across the pavement quickly. In this case, the latter molests the former — the 'new America' of 24/7 news-casting, invective-hurling, tattle-taling, civil-war-round-two America hops onto its superior progenitor to suffocate it. That it might not ultimately win in its efforts shouldn't let anyone imagine that it isn't a threat. A hellscape burgeons and breathes  across the continent — and indeed, on that final golden spike that married two railroads across America, there's probably a CCTV camera and a wiretap. In the Wild West, there are cop-calling harpies and petty bureaucrats who prey upon the yard sheds of taxed-to-death, computer-monitored workmen. Truck drivers ride under the watchful eye of artifical-intelligence-based surveillance and armed "Robocop" DOT officers, and big stretches of this country look like a rash in satellite imagery — inflamed with the sprawl of a mega-corporate nightmare. Like a psychotic Disneyland for wannabe millionaires, the romance of this country's promise rises in the heart — and just as it crests, the DMV, IRS, ATF, County Courts, highway patrolmen, and every other clipboard-wielding gang of bastards jumps in to take their cut of it in dollars, cents, and fealty.

And the seeker of poetic vistas and sublime sunrises will find them as surely as he'll find himself having run afoul of the new America — whose police will hunt him like a fugitive for the crime of sleeping in a lonesome ditch or even simply walking across a small town. If he should dare to raise his thumb on the highway, he's transgressed hopelessly — if he's at the wrong border checkpoint in the wrong car, he'll be biometrically processed and booked for heaven-knows-what. If the green-lawned, squeaky-clean yoga-pants-and-Nikes set doesn't inform his presence to the authorities — perhaps the drug-addicted railyard zombies will raise their own alerts that a walking slice of fresh meat has entered the arena. Everywhere, where one does not encounter neatly-trimmed sprawl and zealous law enforcement officers — they're likely to encounter desperate men who are high on a whole gamut of synthetic drugs. One quickly enters a dark underworld of theft and prostitution, Motel 6 lead-pipe smackdowns for EBT cards, crackpipe-glass-on-the-sidewalk nightmares; sprawling human nightmares in great, sweltering, hopeless chains and webs.

Quickly, the tramp's life becomes akin to having a genius brother who is addicted to hard drugs; one minute he is brilliant, cracking jokes, offering discursive and mind-blowing theories and he is your best brother, your shining light — and the next he is a monster, drunk-driving on 3am missions for smack and crack and liquor, bloodied and wrecked, handcuffed, screeching as if he has had a total and devastating psychotic break.

Which brother do you love? You must love the whole man or you love him not at all. You must see through his terrors and fits and benders, eyeing the hours of his life with hope and apprehension, nurturing every tendril of his blessedness and mirth and intellect when it shows. Such a brother exhausts the heart — just as one finds some security in the 'old brother', behaving as he was, progressing, making strides toward the light, he crushes the fragile flower of his progress and you watch him die again, dying into something worse than death. You watch him become a monster. And some dark part of you wonders if he will be 'stuck' like this — or if he will expire completely, forever.

America is not different at all — in fact, the realities of its nationhood, chock full of hundreds of millions of souls all running together in tandem, rambling around the landscape and its many-featured realms, verdant and arid alike, by coasts and peaks and skyscrapers and bumbling village bars — all of it together somehow makes the gravity of its bipolar peaks and valleys ever more difficult for the heart to contend with. 

On her good days, she is a wonder among all wonders; the old coal miner picks you up in his truck with a wordless smile, motioning you into the truck-bed with his scarred chin. Through curls of cigarette smoke and across wild, curvaceous county roads, you fly, catching glimpses of the Monongahela and her shirtless summertime yard-dwellers by their shacks and kiddie-pools. A beer comes through the rear window — a Pabst Blue Ribbon. And in an hour's time, you are in Mamaw's yard, being fed royally, greeted by a half-dozen drawling kings of the holler — who all inquire into your origin and purpose. Someone says grace. You wake up in Kentucky, uncertain as to whether hours have passed — or months.

But then she turns again. Rising as if in a stupor of giddy love on the Fourth of July, the stars and stripes go flaccid and ragged in only a second as you see the wandering hooker literally foaming at the mouth, emaciated, half-naked, screaming obscenities in the flashing lights of the fetid street. The baby in the carriage, the stiff-necked geriatric at the bus stop, the bullet hole in the glowing sign advertising discount chicken and fries. The whole street looks like the scene of a sordid party, trash-strewn and piss-stained; a dismal party that went on for far too long. Wandering, the police ask for your ID, addressing you not as America's own son but as a fugitive, and a smoke-belching truck revs on the wet pavement of the potholed street. And rounding the bend, the oil refinery, the orange-lit hellscape, the neon Burger King sign rising on the horizon as the moon's nightmarish surrogate. In all of it, the dark recognition that while part of America had lavished you in kisses and bites of the her black soil's sweetest fruits mere hours ago — much of the rest of her remains on a ghastly bender that one fears to be a spiraling choreography of pointless death.

Back and forth the traveler goes between the two poles of the American nation, tortured by the extremity of its antipodes. A country without middle ground, in America one is either on one side of the barbed wire or the other; they are either flying high and flush as a tycoon cowboy or they are slap-fighting over cigarettes in the filthy stairwell of an efficiency apartment. The land is either a portrait of primeval grandeur and historical, gardened brick-work and hand-hewn timbers or it is a case study in sprawl, extraction sites, superfund disasters and the most blearyingly reptillian conception of commerce imaginable. In America, one is either in love, breathing the desert blooms and mountain snows and singing the songs of the forefathers — or the interior of their heart is a squalid dungeon of computerized time-slips and payday loans and dreamless void of mind and meaning. 

To love America is, like loving the wayward brother — to love it all, no matter how it may bruise the heart in the end.

To any who do not know her so well yet — I might implore them to stop. Don't come close to her; stay wherever you are, take your trips to Paris instead of Kansas, or remain clear of the county line for fear you may be sucked into the heartbreak. But I cannot actually say this; I instead exhort all Americans to know her and to court her and to take a realistic view of her swinging moods and generous fruits and heinous flaming failures and surreal sunsets on her chaotic shores. While discussion of duty is presently unfashionable — I might even use this word to describe the attitude with which all Americans should approach the act of traveling through our heartlands. The more intimately our people can again get to know our own country — the greater the odds that we may heal our litany of present disorders.

That "America" and "freedom" are both concepts that are at least notionally consonant is well-known in an abstract sort of way. But much like the idea of America, the concept of freedom is only foggily conceived of in the minds of most Americans. A workingman mired in bills and interest-bearing monthly-payment loans can't take three weeks off to walk the Arizona trail unless the bossman says he can. If he says no, he can still go — but it'll cost him his job. And if the job goes, so does the house and the utilities, and next the car and the contents of his pantry. Even his wife might walk out in a huff. "Maybe I'll try hiking it when I'm sixty-seven instead, when retirement kicks in — of course, unless Social Security goes bankrupt." As he draws his bleak conclusion, a parade goes by with big banners proclaiming things like "LIBERTY" and "FREEDOM".

Some kind of Faustian bargain was made in America after World War II. That if only we'd raise the multinational corporations, big banks, and government agencies far above the status of old King George III and accepted tax rates far above those of the old Tea Tax of 1793 — that it might wind up being worth it. In so doing, of course, we might piss away the legacy of the founders entirely; we might usher in a Soviet world of window-peeping, call-in-on-your-neighbor, big-box liquor store hellscapes. But we might get air conditioning and big trucks, electric neon casino lights and big resorts with bodacious women on golf carts and fat annuities and cheap well drinks all night. Drywall and plastic tubs, polyester bowling shirts and menthol cigarettes, record players and iPods and all of it — you name it, we'll have it, and we'll stuff it all in our 3,000 square foot climate-controlled houses right next to the state-of-the-art electronic talking refrigerator. If it seems like it's all too much, we've got Prozac and Bud Light and the NASCAR races and Burning Man yogis and big fat Jeeps with heated seats. It'll all be worth it — and if you try anything else, or say it ain't all so great, why, we'll sue ya, we'll litigate your ass back to the stone age, and you had better not step on my lawn while you're on your way out. And tell your son to join the Marine Corps while you're at it — freedom ain't free, and neither is cheap gas. Don't like it? Try voting.

Ain't no room left in America for cowboys anymore.

These days, Iran has got more cowboys than America — 1,500,000 of them. Nomadic pastoralism in Iran's mountains is still alive; numerous tribal peoples wander with herds of goats, dwelling in tents, moving between summer and winter pastures and tracking down old springs in rough country that looks to be the cousin of Arizona or Utah. Qashqa'i, Shahsevan, Bahktiari tribes, all of them speak in tongues that would've been foreign to Billy the Kid and Buffalo Bill — but their manner of living would've been straightaway native to these long-gone sons of the American West. In the arid highlands of Iran, barbed wire hasn't encroached on these sturdy folks and their herds, and they hardly have to hide from the law to do what they do best. There's no DMV, no vinyl siding, no Medicaid in the world of these wild nomads — there's goat milk, sandstorms, AK-47's, mohair tents, dirt bikes, and fires of dried camel dung. Knowing all this, one wonders why US foreign policy has kept Iran in its sights for so long. Perhaps just as our bureaucrats and fencemakers sought to pin our last cowboys down to a W-2, a USDA inspection, and a chain of big bank loans, we're coming for theirs next, I guess.

But an American shouldn't have to abscond to Iran to get a taste of the spirit of his own country. Hell, who knows how that'd go anyway. I don't want to leave this country; I don't want to see her slide any further down the trail she's on. I want an America where the vision and heart of our history and land as it is — and it is wild and free — isn't just legal, but central to the ontological superstructure of our citizenry, unquestionably and without reservation. There isn't any choice but to know America, to walk America, to take America by the shoulders and shake her a bit and say "is this really who you are?" until God-willing, she wakes up, puts her shoulders back, and gets back to that little spark deep down in the center of her spirit and lets it loose. No more tattle-taling and clipboard-wagging, no more false neon moon, no more fentanyl, no more sprawling corporate Leviathan and all its clear-cuts and clearance sales. Back to Lake Superior — which God didn't get a permit to dig — and the mad, silty trot of the Columbia River. Back to Mount Washington and the Natchez Trace. Back to tar-paper shacks and pre-electronic engines and firkins of honey switchel by the hay loft in the vernal haze of bread-basket valleys. Harvest moon over the Hudson; conchas on the streets of Laredo and sprawling oat-grass and sheep upon the old mounts of Virginia. You'll find me there, on a packet-boat under the Manhattan Bridge, pointed north for Albany, laden heavy and low in the water, hauling the spirit of the New World in the cargo hold, hitching up my tired old mules.

If I can't find any buyers where I'm headed — you'll find me in Mexico some day, down in el desierto, or way down in Argentina in search of the gauchos. And I’ll be wondering who the hell I am just the same way as I ever did on the American interstate by the Burger Kings and rest areas of Ohio and Tennessee and Oregon. I’ll be a foreigner there just as I’ve ever been here. I’ll be sitting down there in my shack, sending letters back to my ragged old village, hoping to see the day that the tides turn in my old America. 

I sure hope it doesn’t come to that.