America Who?

If the long ride from Richmond to the St. Stephen Motel in South Carolina showed us what the current South is all about (or at least aspects of it), Charleston and Savannah showed us what the old South was about.

Covered in gorgeous colonial homes and elaborate old cemeteries, these two cities are both breathtakingly beautiful and also morally ambiguous. They are at once odes to a glorious ante-bellum past and places that have no way to explain away the realities that underlay that culture—slavery.

Plaques all around the city discuss the wealthy owners of these homes, but only allude to the many slaves responsible for maintaining them. The signs present the realities of the pre-war past as fact, but use no subjective language to actually describe it. In Charleston, for example, we visited the Old Slave Mart, a museum explaining the domestic slave trade that once took place in that building in Charleston. The exhibit presented the fact that white people bought black people from “traders” to work as slaves in their fields or homes—a process that involved the inspecting and auctioning of human beings—but they never quite relate this experience to the beautiful homes that the people on horse-and-buggy tours of historic Charleston were taking pictures of right outside.

The Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, SC. 

Savannah, similarly—one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen—simply exudes old, Southern charm. Cobblestones pave the streets, Spanish moss hangs from the trees, and vast homes with double-decker balconies surround the several park-like squares that comprise the city (James Oglethorpe himself came up with the design when he landed in Georgia in 1733).

An old home in Savannah, GA. 

But, like Charleston, it felt like a place that was living in the past—a past that is neither straightforward nor easy to make sense of. The cemeteries that surround these cities each have large monuments to the Confederate soldiers that died in the Civil War—and, of course, innocent, young lives should be commemorated regardless of who or what they were fighting for. But plaques on some of these graves that mention a “lost” or “noble” cause, or the soldiers who “lie in distant graves around their Northern prisons” again muddy the issue. (We later visited Andersonville prison—a prison for Union soldiers in Georgia—and I assure you the accommodations were no more hospitable.)

America is currently, supposedly, a united country, but the question of what we are celebrating and who, exactly, we are commemorating is still very much unclear.

While Charleston and Savannah were both cities grappling with the past, however, our accommodations for those nights were anything but traditional. In Charleston, we stayed at the Not-So-Hostel—true to its name, an alternative hostel that offers travelers a space to camp in the backyard for ten dollars, but still use the house's amenities. In Savannah, we tried “couch surfing” for the first time with a spunky girl from Kansas who amazed us with her welcome of complete strangers. Other than the two large dogs we had to compete with for space in the living room, it was a great experience that we are definitely hoping to try again.

The kitchen in the Not-So-Hostel (Charleston)

Ricky with Petunia, one of our neighbors while couchsurfing. 

While at the Not-So-Hostel, we met a group of 24 teachers from developing countries around the world who were on an American-sponsored program to help bring our methods of teaching back to their countries. Given our journalistic instincts, Ricky and I couldn’t help but ask them all sorts of questions about their impressions.

“In my country,” said VJ, a native of Goa, India, “We have rules, but they are not followed. Here, everybody stands in line and does what they are told.”

His impressions of America as a law-abiding, docile place might be true to some extent, but it came as a particularly interesting revelation in light of a weeks-worth of learning about the extreme violence that resulted from a country that was anything but well-behaved.

Another teacher from Ghana mentioned that he expected Americans to be snobbish, but they were in fact quite nice. (I wanted to point him to New York or LA in order to provide counter-examples, but I decided against it.)

The point is, though, that while I may ask these questions to foreigners expecting to get some kind of single-sentence response, I myself don’t know where to begin on my impressions of America. America is a highly complex country that cannot be adequately described or explained in one or two sentences. In just the East Coast leg of our trip (the first week out of sixteen), Ricky and I have encountered several types of Americans, most of whom have little in common with one another. We have moved from cars with Obama bumper stickers to motels with “marriage=man + woman” signs; from “Go Green” license plates to gas-guzzling pick-up trucks and storefronts with signs ensuring customers that they’re “American-owned.”

We have encountered several Americans, and more precisely, several Americas. And it’s only just the beginning. We have several more Americas to seek and discover.

The First Three Days

I’ll start with New Jersey, since I wouldn’t know where else to begin.

Brahna and I set off from my house at around 8:30 a.m., waving goodbye to my mother, who was standing in the garage wiping tears away, and pulling out of the cul-de-sac. Driving through my neighborhood and toward the highway was as weird as I had imagined it would be. Instead of driving five minutes to high school, or 20 minutes into the city, or even the seven hours to Montreal, we would be driving for four months and across the entire country and back before finally returning to those familiar streets.

 

Leaving New Jersey.

It was as I imagined, but also different, because it was real. We listened to NPR and drove south. I missed the exit for the New Jersey Turnpike and had to double back—the first of what will surely be many thousands of travel boners.

We first stopped in Susquehanna State Park in northern Maryland, on the shore of the river of the same name. It was on the site of a pre-industrial hamlet, with a mill, a few outlying buildings, and a canal. There once was a long, double-barreled covered bridge stretching the length of the river, the old posts of which can still be seen in the river. The park preserves the small white house that served as the bridge-keeper’s residence while the span still stood. In exchange for the house and a small garden, he had only to oversee the bridge’s maintenance and repairs. While such an arrangement certainly captures my imagination, so does the idea of travel and constant movement. If I lived in the house, I would constantly envy the peddlers, doctors, and other travelers crossing the bridge and passing me by. We drove on.

Bypassing the nation’s capital, which we spent a few days in last August, we stopped next in Fredericksburg, Virginia—an area featuring several Civil War battlefields, together comprising what the National Parks brochure calls “the bloodiest landscape on the continent.” The intense research—I prefer that word to “planning”—we did before this trip yielded a few interesting things to see there, including the grave of the arm of Stonewall Jackson. Gravely injured by friendly fire at the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, Jackson had his left arm amputated, but he died anyway a few days later. Jackson’s chaplain, seeing the arm, buried it in the cemetery of his brother-in-law’s estate, the nearby Ellwood Manor, in the middle of yet another battlefield. Jackson himself was buried in Lexington, Virginia, several hundred miles away. We needed a special permit to enter the grounds, and were alone there, among the bloody hills, the drooping trees, and Stonewall Jackson’s missing arm.

Brahna at the grave of Stonewall Jackson's arm.

We continued into Richmond, our first real destination. There, we sought out the White House of the Confederacy, the official home of President Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, and the church where the revolutionary orator Patrick Henry spoke the famous words, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We had to satisfy ourselves with an outside view of these sites, since it was already dark and we had allotted ourselves limited time in Richmond, knowing that meant more time in places further from home. We got back in the car and drove 20 minutes down I-95 to the America’s Best Value Inn in Richmond South. After rearranging the sparse furniture in the room, we had a pleasant picnic of Korean take-out and wine, and tried to plan—research—for the next day.

In the morning we sought out two things I heard about from RoadsideAmerica.com, a great site for cataloguing and looking through the odd things to be found all around the U.S. First, we drove to Petersburg to see a house built entirely from over 2,000 tombstones for Union war dead. The man who built it, one Mr. Young, purchased the graves from a nearby battlefield cemetery in the 1930s. Next, in Colonial Heights we went to see the house of a man whose life goal is to rebuild Noah’s Ark for the impending second Flood. He and a friend were sitting on the porch of the house watching us photograph it; they didn’t respond particularly warmly to our wave, so we didn’t have a chance to ask the thousand questions we would have wanted to.

A modern Noah's Ark.

Back in Richmond for a few hours in the morning, we walked next to the James River and Kanawha Canal and did a driving tour of the Hollywood Cemetery, recommended by Bonnie, the Lancaster County B&B cook. Perched on a hill overlooking the river, the cemetery hosts the eternal resting places of Presidents John Tyler, James Monroe, and Jefferson Davis, and is itself a beautiful Southern landscape. After that we went to the Beth Ahaba Synagogue, which has a small museum on the history of Jews in Richmond. I found this particularly interesting because I wrote a paper at McGill a few years ago about Jewish abolitionists in the 19^th century, and am fascinated by the entire question of Jews and slavery. One thing I was surprised to read at the museum was an excerpt from a Southern Jewish mother to her son, who decided to lead a civilian life in Philadelphia rather than fight for the Confederacy. She wrote that he had never disappointed her—“until now.”

We drove out of Richmond on State Route 5, a scenic byway passing the James River Plantations—most of which were built shortly after the establishment of Jamestown as the first permanent English colony in the New World, and are where tobacco was first developed here as a profitable crop. That led us to Jamestown, our first stop in the Colonial National Historical Park, where we toured the site of the first settlement and the first fort, and quickly made our way through the fascinating Archaearium, a museum displaying only some of the millions of objects that have been uncovered on the site. Included were several skeletons, one of which was mysteriously shot in the leg by a bullet meant to tear ferociously through the skin. Political intrigue? An Indian ambush? It was our job, as visitors, to solve the 400 year old case.

 Jamestown.

We had to hurry, because the day was disappearing and our intended goal for the night—the Covered Wagon Motel in Washington, North Carolina—was still four hours away. We did a brief drive-by of Williamsburg, which has little to offer the strictly budgeted traveler, and paused meditatively at Yorktown’s Surrender Field, where Britain’s Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington in 1781, all but ending the Revolutionary War and winning independence for the colonies. We figured we had satisfied whatever symbolism we were striving for in visiting those formative spots in American history before embarking on the bulk of our trip; deciding not to stay in Virginia, we sped across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel and into North Carolina.

I could not understand a word spoken by Joseph, the man at the front desk of the Covered Wagon. Only because Brahna seemed to understand, and occasionally translated for me, did I realize he was actually speaking at all. We chose the corner room of an otherwise completely empty motel. It was wood-paneled and had a heater on the floor that seemed to emit an actual flame as we turned the radiator up. We slept well, and survived until morning.

 Covered Wagon Motel in Washington, North Carolina.

We started the next morning with a few brief walk in Goose Creek State Park outside Washington—which, by the way, is the first locality in the U.S. named after the then-future president: the name appears on municipal documents dating back to 1775. Much of the park was decimated by Hurricane Irene, though we took a nice walk along the Pamlico River. Again, we seemed to be in the park alone.
 

We drove through intense rain until reaching South Carolina, where we went for a stroll on the completed deserted Myrtle Beach boardwalk. Being in such a beach-oriented place in winter—and on such foggy day—seemed a particularly “us” thing to do, and was actually rather pleasant.

 Stretching at Myrtle Beach.

We ended the night at a motel in the tiny town of St. Stephen, about a mile outside Charleston and just on the border of the Francis Marion National Forest. Even though we were using both the GPS and, for back-up, Brahna’s iPhone to guide us through the forest and to the motel, we passed the building twice, and would have done so even more times had we not realized that the motel was not a building at all, but a set of converted trailers we had overlooked. It was well off the main road.

 

Featuring such luxuries as four walls, a roof, and even a bed, the St. Stephen Motel did, in fact, keep us sheltered through the night. Freight tracks passed directly behind the lot, which I found soothing. Brahna says she’ll write an entry starting with this morning, when we started the day by visiting a monastery. Right now, here in Charleston, I have to do some research on Savannah and Atlanta, and then, I hope, we’ll go to bed…I mean, the tent.

What it (Apparently) Takes to Feel Ready to Leave

Today, I held a beauty pageant for my wardrobe in order to determine which items would receive the privilege (or perhaps misfortune) of accompanying me on my road trip.

“There are eight sweaters before me,” I told my sweaters. “But I only have room in my suitcase for seven. The sweater I do not choose must immediately go back to my closet and stay there while I go on my road trip. So who stays and who goes? The sweater that fits really well, but doesn’t keep me warm? Or the sweater that isn’t as fashionable, but is made of pure wool?"

Holding beauty pageants for my clothing, with the voice of Tyra Banks in mind, is actually only one of the many peculiar activities I undertook in the past week in order to prepare for my trip. One other activity, for example, was consolidating, printing, and placing in albums the over 700-pictures on my computer from the past four or so years.

While this may seem like a strange choice of activity before embarking on a trip of this nature—there is plenty of research, reading, and shopping I could and should have been doing instead—it was, however, what I needed in order to feel ready to leave. Not only did it make sense to erase these pictures in order to make room for new ones, but I felt that I had to to contend with ex-boyfriends, ex-roommates, and ex-friends before moving forward. Before embracing my future, I needed to feel at one with my past.

I’m nervous to get out on the open road, and to face all the unknowns that lie therein. I’ve heard countless cautionary tales from friends and family—mountain lions in Texas, grizzlies in Yellowstone, serial killers in Texas, and various car-related incidents. And of course there are many loved ones I am going to miss (though Ricky and I have ensured them all that they’ll be hearing from us at least every 48 hours). But like all those who have gone west before me—unburdened by too much baggage—I’m just about ready to begin the next chapter.

Remember How She Took Those Carolina Hills

One ubiquitous feature of those works officially anointed the Great American Road Trip Books—those, unlike On the Road, whose writer used only one automobile for the whole trip—is the nearly fetishistic relationship between the driver and his car. In The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller wrote of his 1932 Buick: “The damned thing behaves like a flirtatious woman.” The scary part there is that we know quite well how Henry Miller treats flirtatious women. Worse even was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose 1924 serial in Motor magazine issues a challenge to all later road trip writers to beat, or at least meet, his intense and creepy anthropomorphization of the 1918 Marmon he and Zelda christen, referring to the car’s lopsidedness and general state of disarray, “The Rolling Junk.”

The car, Fitzgerald writes in "The Cruise of the Rolling Junk," suffers from “a broken backbone unsuccessfully reset.” It has “spinal trouble” and “suffered also from various chronic stomach disorders and from astigmatism in both lamps.” When the Rolling Junk blows out a tire in Philadelphia, a passerby asks whether the couple has another tire in the trunk, for such an emergency. “We did have another,” Fitzgerald writes. “Its name was Lazarus. It was scarred and shiny and had had innumerable operations upon its bladder.”

 A Marmon, similar to the one driven by the Fitzgeralds on their 1920 adventure from Connecticut to Alabama.

Those who have hunted covered bridges with me, those who have driven with me from Montreal to New York or vice versa, or, let’s be honest, those who have had a conversation with me lasting more than five minutes—any readers fitting these descriptions know that I don’t exactly enter this discussion with clean hands. You have heard of Mortimer. You have heard all about Mortimer.

Originally purchased by my parents for Cassie's last years of high school, Mortimer is a 2002 Honda Civic—beige, comfortable, gregarious. I began driving him when I got my license in May 2007. We have grown closer in recent years, clocking countless hours in upstate New York, southern Quebec, Maine, New Brunswick, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania. I seem to have forgotten the origins of his name, though for a while I had a ceramic koala bear also named Mortimer taped to the dashboard. It represented Grandpa, whose balding pattern and bone structure makes him look very much, and in the best way, like a koala. There is also a minor character named Mortimer in a minor Woody Allen film, though seeing as I remember neither the character nor the film, it seems unlikely I would have named my car after him. 

Until recently, the only problems in our relationship had originated with me. I slowed down too slowly, sped up too speedily. My insistence on listening to jams at an unhealthily high volume ultimately led to some communications issues, as when it took who knows how many miles to hear the rusty metal bit scraping along the Trans-Canadian at 90 mph. Then there was the rainy day when I accelerated—accelerated—too fast around a wet curve, swung 270 degrees counter-clockwise and across the double yellow, backing Morty’s ass up on the opposite curb and into a couple small trees. As little shoots of water slid down his headlights on that empty, rainy road, I felt I was not crying alone. But Morty was pissed. He left home and shacked up with some grimy mechanic for almost a month.

Late in December, when Mortimer pooped out at the mall, I felt abandoned, disappointed. That weekend, when Brahna and I drove my mother’s red Mazda 6 to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania—of course, the only place for civilized people on New Year’s Eve—we drove around the old country roads examining the Amish and gawking at covered bridges. I felt Mortimer’s absence, and, quite strangely, felt sorry he was missing out.

 Mom, Brahna, and Dad watch Mortimer loaded onto the tow truck, late December 2011. He needed a new transmission.

As explorers, we name a new world: “America.” As parents, we name a new child: “Richard Henry Kreitner.” As quixotic knights, we name a horse: “Rocinante.” And now, as drivers, we name a car: “Mortimer.”

We name that which we can name—that which has no name already, that which cannot, or cannot yet, name itself. We name something in order to dictate the future life of its still embryonic character. We name that which we do not yet fully know in order to feel that we do know it—a small, stolen intimacy that is the first step to what we hope may someday magically become the real thing.

There is an inverse correlation between one’s technical understanding of one's car and the extent to which one forms an anthropomorphized relationship with it. For several reasons, I never bothered to learn anything about who my car really was as a person, so to speak, preferring to craft a silly projected identity, "Mortimer," and to let my father's preferred mechanic do the job.

In this, I have stood, contrary to Newton, on the shoulders of fellow ignorant dwarfs. Henry Miller and his traveling companion, the American painter Abe Rattner, were just the same. “The first car we looked at was the one we selected,” Miller writes. “Neither of us knew anything about cars; we just took the man’s word for it that it was a good, reliable vehicle.” 

Though The Cruise of the Rolling Junk is a heavenly fictionalized account of a drive the Fitzgeralds took in 1920 from Connecticut to Alabama, one aspect of the book is too pitch-perfect to make up: the depiction of the couple as hopelessly Yankee and hopelessly stupid about the workings of the automobile. Like many ignoramuses past and future, they are ashamed at this stupidity, and take refuge from that shame in the formation of bizarrely personalized, and ultimately superficial, relationships not just with the Rolling Junk itself, but with its various parts. As the Philadelphia mechanic sets to work on their tire (“after a gay spasm of cursing”), the Fitzgeralds stand idly by and watch:

He took off the injured tire and contemptuously showed me a large hole I’d overlooked in the casing. I assented weakly to his assertion that I’d have to have a whole new tire. While he effected the necessary substitution Zelda and I amused ourselves by naming the rest of the tires. The two in front we called Sampson and Hercules, because of their comparative good health. The rear axle was guarded on the right by the aged Lazarus, covered with sores…

 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and the Rolling Junk.

According to Jameson Wetmore, a scholar of technology and society at Arizona State University, we form relationships with our automobiles to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed both by the complex operations of the vehicle and by our embarrassing ignorance of them. In an article titled “Moving Relationships: Befriending the Automobile to Relieve Anxiety,” Professor Wetmore notes that “the practice of envisioning an automobile as a companion is often wrapped up in concerns about reliability and safety and can be a psychological response to calm the anxiety that such concerns cause.” The Fitzgeralds, in this view, obsessively name the tires and various “appendages”—their word—of the Rolling Junk in order to overcompensate for their lack of any sincere relationship with, or interest in, the workings of the car itself. The vehicle is to its passengers just a novel way to get from one place to another, a means to an end: quite the opposite of friendship in the real and original—the human—sense of the term.

If "Mortimer" is just a projection and a defense mechanism, that identity I forced upon the Civic will surely begin to crumble as I am forced, over the next few months, to acquaint myself on a deeper and more sincere level with the car on its own terms. Already, beginning to learn the practicalities of what makes the car run makes me feel silly for having spoken to it as if to a person, and for having coaxed it up high hills.

And yet, I expect that something of "Mortimer" will remain. There seems to be a certain type of relationship one can have with one's car that is not based on fear and anxiety, selfishness and miscommunication, but rather on pride and performance, dignity and fidelity. If Mortimer does land Brahna and I safely back home after four months and 12,000 miles, and drastic changes in weather, how could I not be proud?

Shortly after the Fitzgeralds arrive in Montgomery, the reminiscence begins. "Remember how she took those Carolina hills?" Such an ascription of will to the Rolling Junk seems different from the Fitzgeralds' earlier silliness, as it is this time based on shared experience, achievement, and respect.

I hope to attain a similar level of understanding between me and Brahna and Mortimer on the trip, and also between us and the people we meet. On past trips, Brahna and I have loved meeting strange new people--characters, we call them--and adding them to our list for future reminiscence. There is, of course, Bonnie, the impossibly down-home breakfast cook at the Lancaster County B&B. There was the couple in the Acadia campground who told us about all the dogs they had rescued, and who then yelled bloody murder at them all night. There was Bruce, the waiter in Bar Harbor who, though the restaurant was otherwise empty, stood silently next to our table through the whole meal.

As travelers, we treat those we meet in new places as strange characters worthy of fiction: it heightens our sense of ourselves as travelers and writers, and wards off the sense--always threatening to rise to the surface--that just because you drive through the Carolinas doesn't mean you know the Carolinians. To have a mental list of characters feels enriching, but it just covers up for a deeper and more ineradicable poverty. To crystallize someone in a frozen pose, to act as if she exists on Earth only in order to enrich our vacation and, later, our stories, to basically use her as a means to our own ends--this is precisely what the Fitzgeralds did to the Rolling Junk and what I have always done to Mortimer. It is to pretend an acquaintance with, and knowledge of, that which you are actually too scared or ill-equipped to get to know on its own terms.

The establishment of real human relationships instead of these fake caricatures requires the same determination and effort as does the process of opening oneself to learning the actual operations of the automobile. Henry Miller himself noticed how one's understanding of a car can influence the way human beings themselves interact with one another. “The automobile was invented in order for us to learn how to be patient and gentle with one another," he wrote. "It doesn’t matter about the parts, or even about the parts of parts, nor what model or what year it is, so long as you treat her right. What a car appreciates is responsiveness."

Just like a woman, or a man.

The official (tentative) map of our route

A Trip to Some of Europe's Oldest Cities

If my trip to London and Amsterdam taught me anything, it’s that perhaps I’m not as nonchalant as I thought. I think of myself as hardworking when it comes to academia and my career, but rather chill when it comes to everything else. But on my first trans-Atlantic trip by myself, I learned that in fact, I tend to apply the same obsessive care to travel as I once did to my schoolwork.

After studying British history and literature for four years—and feeling exceptionally excited about all the related sightseeing London has to offer—I arrived there with a detailed itinerary as well as a map of Central London, clearly marked with all my favored destinations. My first mistake, however, was assuming that after a 7-hour overnight flight, I would be in any mood for sightseeing. So, my first day, which originally included a walking tour of the West End, a visit to the National Gallery, and an Ani DeFranco concert, became a short walk in Hyde Park (which, was lovely nonetheless) followed by dinner with a college friend studying in London, and much-needed rest shortly thereafter.

The next day, however, I began to tackle the city the way I wanted to. With Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in mind and my trusty map of London in hand, I set off for Bloomsbury, former home to the intellectuals of “The Bloomsbury Group,” and current home to the massive British Museum. Later that day, I took the tube—which is infinitely more user-friendly than the New York Subway—over to Liverpool Street, where I met up with Tyler, the friend who I was staying with, to go to Spitalfield’s Market and to experience East London—the less posh, but more flavorful, side of the city.

Me and Tyler in Spitalfield's Market

The next day brought about my first, but certainly not my last, “Oh my God” moment of the trip. After stepping out of the tube at Westminster station, I found myself face to face with Big Ben and the Parliament building. Whether it was the inevitable excitement of seeing postcard London come to life, or similarly, my studies finally jumping of the page, I couldn’t help but mouth those words upon stepping onto the busy street in front of the building. Five minutes later, I was standing inside Westminster Abbey experiencing several more of these moments as I stood next to the tombs of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and Mary, and even more interesting to me, Chaucer, Dickens, and Hardy.

Friday morning, we awoke at 4 am to get to our 7 am flight to Amsterdam. From the rocky landing on the 45-minute Easyjet flight (the trip consisted mostly of take-off and landing), to getting on the wrong train from the airport (it wasn’t easy to navigate the Dutch self-service kiosks), it was 2 pm by the time we finally reached the hostel in the city center. (Our blunder did at least give us the opportunity to see the Dutch countryside—with all its windmills and quaint perfection—immortalized in the museums housing the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Gogh). When we arrived in our room, we were immediately taken aback by how the weather had barely changed from outside to inside. We quickly found the culprit in a middle-aged shirtless man sleeping next to a wide-open window in the bottom bunk at the far end of the room. But since our exhaustion outweighed our shivers, we decided to bury ourselves in the blankets provided and take a brief nap before touring. Once again, my perfectly planned itinerary went to shit as the day soon turned to evening. Through sleepy ramblings, my friends assured me that

one day (Saturday) would be more than enough to see Amsterdam.

When we finally emerged to truly see Amsterdam the next day, we found ourselves in the middle of a storybook world—a world where everything is clean and colorful, and all the people are eight-feet tall and blonde. That day brought about several “Oh my God” moments—this time to my friends and not just to myself—as we walked around one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen: the old , narrow houses along the canals, the adorable vintage stores, the upright bicycles everywhere you turn. We visited medieval churches, saw prostitutes behind glass windows (even that, somehow, managed to fit into the city’s quaintness), rode a cruise along the canals, visited Rembrandt’s house, and ate delicious Dutch cheese, bread, and coffee in an outdoor market along the water.

Me and Preanka on the canal cruise.

But the fairytale quickly soured upon my visit to the Anne Frank House Museum. Since it was open until 9 pm on Saturdays, we decided, perhaps unwisely, to make that our final stop of the day. Having grandparents who are Holocaust survivors (and having played Anne Frank in a school play), the house where Anne and her family hid before the Nazis found them, was a crucial part of my desire to visit Amsterdam.

Though I’ve been somewhat numbed to the tragic realities of the Holocaust over the course of my life, this touched me in a newly profound way. It was the combination of being in that house—which preserves an eerie silence—and within that city, which retains the very appearance it had sixty years ago, that left me with a strange sensation. The houses along the canals are almost unbelievably beautiful, but they are also the same homes that housed people who went about their lives while the people in the Annex experienced a daily fear that most of us cannot fathom; the same homes in front of which Germans and Dutchmen alike marched to a flag of the Nazi party.

In America, it’s easier to pretend that the Holocaust was a blip on the radar of modern Western history, and that the past is, well, the past. But being in a place that maintains its old-world charm, but which also retains relics of a life and a people so brutally placed in the past, is undeniably disturbing. There are plaques throughout the city acknowledging the bustling Jewish life that once was, but like all commemorative plaques, are ultimately impotent in their ability to change, or even apologize for what passed.

Back in London by Sunday night, I got right back to my schedule as I went to the changing of the guards ceremony at Buckingham Palace on Monday morning. The changing of the guards, and England more generally, is yet another example of Europe’s bizarre paradoxes. On the one hand, it’s a modern, diverse metropolis, but on the other, it’s home to a complex—and, in fact, still ongoing—history of royalty and class that is on display in so many different ways. Whether it’s memorabilia of the wedding of William and Kate, or the hammering in of the royal families in the museums, it’s a strange aspect of England to make sense of. At the Tower of London, for example, you don’t just see the towers where the Tudors sent their enemies five-hundred years ago, but you also see the current queen’s coronation robes and jewel-encrusted crowns. This dichotomy was also at work in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the political activists “occupying” London were camping out, by no coincidence of course, in front of the 17th -century cathedral that housed the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, as well as the golden jubilee of the queen.

Occupiers in front of St. Paul's Cathedral

Being an outsider in these European centers at least allowed me to be one thing that I never am in New York—an unabashed tourist: to pull out my map when I want to, to ask directions when I need to, and to walk for the sake of walking, and not for the sake of getting somewhere. That’s a lesson I know will be useful on the road trip: to be able to be a tourist even in my own country, and to get to learn the place as only a tourist can.

Jewish Mountains, American Mountains

I am home now, one week returned from Israel, a land varyingly described by the people whom my Birthright group heard from—farmers, Kabbalistic painters, tour guides, political and religious salesmen—as either our modern or our ancestral homeland. Certainly, one of the two.

However immune to salesmanship I like to consider myself, I caught the bug too. Hiking through a canyon in the Galilee, I began to consider that the surprisingly temperate, hilly terrain I was passing through was not the familiar Ramapo mountains of North Jersey, where I was born, nor the scattered volcanic rumps of the Montérégie in southern Quebec, nor the snowy fells of the English Lakes, which I explored two years ago. I was not hiking in England, or Canada, or America. Those mountains I was hiking through were not just ordinary goyische mountains. These, I reminded myself, are Jewish mountains.

 Hiking in Nahal Amud, a canyon in the Upper Galilee, northern Israel.

I hardly need anyone to point out the many problems with that statement, starting with the nearly two thousand years during which those mountains were ruled by Ottoman sultans or Christian crusaders, among others. To those we might add the hundreds of millions of years (just guessing here) before God sent Abraham to Canaan, during which, if asked, the Galilean mountains in question would surely not have claimed membership with the Tribe, nor, for that matter, any monotheistic beliefs at all. The mountains themselves are the result of—what else?—eternal conflict between the African and Arabian continental plates. Their loyalties to the Jewish nation are implicit at best. My characterization of them as Jewish was just a projection, albeit a very comforting, and thus convincing, one.

Just as, in the weeks before we left, I had smugly considered the 12-day Birthright trip the price that had to be paid so I could explore Israel afterward, alone, during my week-long extension, so too had I thought of the entire trip to Israel as one more hurdle standing between me and the truly exciting thing on the horizon—a nearly four-month road trip with Brahna across the U.S. and Canada. With Israel coming first, and, even more pressingly, getting through my last exams at McGill and saying goodbye to Montreal, I couldn’t always conceive of the U.S. adventure as anything beyond a fun idea to think about and pretend to plan for. “Mountains beyond mountains,” I told her on the phone sometime last fall.

Both of my assumptions about the Israel trip proved false. As the tour bus full of the rest of my Birthright group pulled away from our Jerusalem hotel on our last morning together, I donned my sunglasses, heaved up my two backpacks, and walked towards the rising sun, towards the Old City. I felt cool, independent. And I immediately got lost. Throughout Birthright, on all the extra-curricular adventures my friends—some new, some very old— and I had gone on, we simply trusted our own and one another’s instincts, and never once got lost. When those instincts led us to a grapefruit patch, or to a secluded beach at the Sea of Galilee, or through the Muslim Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and back to the Jewish Quarter in time for roll call, it seemed like a sign. Ordinarily a pretty skilled navigator, I saw another sign in my getting lost just a few minutes after the donning of the shades. I felt pretty low that whole first day of my extension.

And, what’s more, Israel itself proved to be anything but a lame opening act you might as well catch before the big show. Though I went in with my skeptical radar turned on high, I found myself, in the privacy of my own thoughts, more or less formulating similar observations and exclamations to those you would find—and I would certainly mock—on any Birthright brochure: “2,000 years of exile!” “It’s, like, my real home! Home, that’s a funny word. HOME!” I felt like Alexander Portnoy, sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv:

Under me the sand is warm: Jewish sand. I buy a Jewish ice cream from a Jewish vendor. “Isn’t this something?” I say to myself. “A Jewish country!”

The trip to Israel disrupted my march to the U.S. trip, but perhaps in a different way than, before leaving, I had thought it would. It led me to quietly question the whole premise of our upcoming road trip. Whose country, exactly, are we setting out to explore? 

Big Bend National Park in south Texas. This photo is my computer background right now.

I don’t have a good answer for this yet. I can say, for sure, that I am not about to make aliyah anytime soon. I felt something for the land in Israel, but there remains something disturbing to me in the thought that you can drive from the top of Israel to the bottom in five hours—something unfulfilling. But that is a projection, too. We ask the land to reflect our own beliefs, needs, and dreams. America's advantage remains, for me as for so many others past, the unfathomable vastness of its land.