“Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
they’ve all gone to look for America”
-Simon & Garfunkel, “America”
My new Allison Weiss CD and I rolled up for an early venture into Philadelphia this evening, carrying plenty of board games and extra jackets in the back. The GPS told me to avoid Route One and I-95 and pay for the use of roads as much as possible, so I decided to be charitable and comply. I was a bit concerned about the possible nature of traffic, but I needn’t have been, aside from the occasional merge or person insisting on driving twenty over the limit into the back of the truck ahead of me. I fumbled through the awkward unsurity of trying to sing along with songs I don’t quite know yet, alone with my thoughts and the vision of leaves blowing down the road like a living advertisement for the holiday to come. As though someone were standing in southern Jersey with a leaf-blower and a pile of bagged cast-offs, swirling the brown mass into the air in the hopes we’d all get in the spirit as they smacked windshields and flew away.
I spent the day with Russ today, wandering around New Brunswick like it’s my new home for the showing. A lost truck even stopped and asked for directions I was all too able to give. We ate at an empty diner and toured the campus of bleary vacation-hungry undergrads and played nine games of chess while we talked of the fickle aspects of place and purpose. How being cognizant and deliberate about these concepts sets one mostly apart from those who let fate clasp them hard by the hand and drag them in whatever direction represents apparent least resistance. That questioning place and purpose looks a lot like being lost. That Russ will always be as at home in New York as I’m not, but neither of us much wants to be there. Or here. Or perhaps anywhere.
The Turnpike dumps Philly-bound drivers out in the midst of Camden to traverse a couple sideroads adorned with signs for Rutgers’ least desirable campus. Navigating these required carefully divided attention between the accented voice of my GPS guide and the Indigo-Girls-imitation (she’s from Athens after all) belting of the disc, already on its third full spin. I was almost able to sing along by now, though a couple more complicated upbeat tunes eluded me as I just managed to keep up with the curvature of the roads. All the while, the wind picked up and threatened to swerve me into the next car, let alone the one brave/reckless individual hugging the cement median as s/he walked slowly in the eighteen-inch semi-shoulder left of the fast lane. What kind of desperation or disorientation has to inform walking that kind of path? And what viewpoint might someone that detached from safety might examine my own alleged risks with? The visage of industrious insects, impervious to the exterminator’s call, determined to build structures that would defy the greatest human architects if only we could make ourselves small enough to see.
The Ben Franklin Bridge and the lights around City Hall were purple and gold, as though Philadelphia had somehow decided to fuse November’s holiday with a February celebration in New Orleans. By the time I got to Fish’s neighborhood, it was obvious that the wind was no less drastic in the city, and also that it was trash day. Bags and boxes, cans and glasses, little bits of refuse and debris were doing their best imitation of leaves on the Turnpike. It took many minutes to find a place to park, jutting up against an overturned fruit crate while just managing to preserve the sanctity of my back-right tire. I gathered up five days’ worth of activities and costume, clutching them close less they intermingle with the billowing garbage on the air. Soon a doorbell rang and I was in the midst of something a bit more like home.
