Elsewhere: New Jersey to Chicago. by Samuel Need

Behold a drive of much courage and nobility. Two young friends pushing out West, new to the wide world of highways and byways and slanderous toads at rest areas in Pennsylvania. They set out to drive from the Atlantic Ocean to Chicago in a single day. Some said we were crazy, heretics of the highways. Old women gaped, swiveling in hair salon chairs. A pastor spoke some quiet words for our oil filter. Hushed whispers signaled facts that we chose to ignore. Isn’t that fifteen hours in a day? Hush, hush, hush. Isn’t that over four states! Too long, too boring, too much gas money for one day. Don’t they know the distance formula? 1400 miles = too much for one day. Obama himself texted us. “Get a hotel in Ohio” he said. “You’ll never make it. You’ll die and be buried in Ohio, right next to John Kerry.” Without a respite, he would have us amidst the road-kill on route 80, struck down. This drive will eat you, they said.
Nay we said. Nay. We would take this strumpet of a drive, this great whale of a drive, and we would squeeze it dead. And we would be laughing like fools as we drove into the Windy City.
And we did. 15 hours later and only our backs are sore.


Some thoughts about the drive: I always make fun of New Jersey, but I really had to eat my words as we travelled west on Interstate 80. Gorgeous, I mean gorgeous, hills and valleys that seemed whole continents away from the infinite industrial gray of Secaucus. Vine-like plants draping down towards the highway like North Carolina kudzu. They remind me of dreadlocks. Deciduous forests further off the road, looking like festive jungles with a popping, verdant shade of green.
I just kept thinking, “This is the same state that Newark is in?” That gaping dock of crumbling row houses, fish stench, egg stench, industrial miasma from the gutter to the airport, cringing internally as you drive past people for whom this is home. This too is Jersey?
Saw a strange thing towards the end of the Garden State road, out past the town of Netcong. As we crested a small hill, Adam noticed some unusually large spider webs in a tree to the right of the road. There was like a ridiculous amount of them, maybe fifteen or twenty, and big, big webs. Clustered all over the tree. Like acne, freckles.
“Dude. Dude. Dude.”
“What.”
“Look at that.”
“They’re just webs man.”
“No, you don’t see it.”
He points out the same thing in another tree, and another. Suddenly I realize that along this 100-foot path of road, every single tree contains about forty enormous cobwebs — hanging up, down, left right, out over the road, packed thick as sardines deeper in the insidious underbrush. I literally could not spot a tree that wasn’t jam packed with these ornaments. Fat webs, hanging like tiny clouds of moisture.
“How could this happen,” I wonder aloud. I mean, could there even be enough meddling insects in this square mile to feed such a ridiculous population? I spend some time trying to craft explanations, but nothing is works.
Who knows – maybe this is ground zero for spiders. The hub from which all other arachnids emerged in the primordial ooze. Something spooky, that’s for sure. A place people were not meant to stumble upon.


Didn’t expect Western Pennsylvania to be as beautiful as it is. Like the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, only without the excellent, FDR-era stone tunnels. My father told me that they call them the Endless Mountains, this stretch of PA, and it’s clearly for a reason. I-80 just kept looping up and down these beautiful hills and valleys, one after another for near on four hours. No visible industry. Gentle slopes bordering ravines that peek out from between the tree line. In the distance, in the fog, the outline of farmhouses looks angelic. I mean, these are some kind of blessed valleys. They just exude this awesome energy of virtue. Hard to explain where this comes from, but every time we crossed a ridge, I thought, wow, if God is in some places, he is for sure in this place.
Of course, when Adam and I stopped for gas in Bellefonte, my dreams were banished from the realm of the romantic by crude locals in ATVs. They leered at us with our long hair and bandanas. Our foreign license plate and Batman bumper sticker.
Ah but still, there’s something going on in the actual land of the Endless Mountains. It does the heart good to drive through an interstate like this. I mean, interstates are supposed to be these giant modern beasts connecting states, with shopping malls hanging to the left and right like ugly, blinking tendrils of hair. Well, not this road. Not a strip mall in sight. Not much development at all other than agricultural plots. Fields just full of wheat or these bright yellow wildflowers. State troopers lurking occasionally in the bushes on the median, but I bet they wouldn’t have chased us even if we deserved it. Not in a place like this. They were probably just bliss-ing out in the sunshine. No arrests. Just angel breath fog, a season turning to fall, a slightly colder wind ushering from somewhere, and these sparkling gems of farmhouses that still look as good as they must have looked fifty years ago.

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Saw a strip of tire on the side of the road,
Frayed at one end, curling upwards
It looked like the single antler of some great black elk.
It looked like the upside down root of a backwards oak tree.
It looked like old fingers, gently breaching the surface of a cool pond.
Things are always entering or leaving –
Each other, space.
Your self, mine.

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Ohio after these mountains was like a Port-A-Potty after a holy mosque. Ugly as sin. No rest stops anywhere. The road was in a noticeably worse condition than any other state. Bumpy, asymmetrical, decimated by innumerable potholes. The whole state just had this terrible energy. I’ve read about the decline of the Rust Belt for ten years in history classes, but I never believed a state could die until I drove across Ohio.
Still a lot of trucks on the road, I suppose. However, I couldn’t help but imagine that the freight trucks were aimless, sending bits of unused steel backwards and forwards on the interstate just to avoid boredom. What if that was the way to save old American steel? Sending truckloads of cargo back and forth on cold and rainy roads, without telling anybody. Orders to have orders and not to have nothing at all.
During this time, a cold front descended upon us, and I drove for several hours through a drizzling and gray downpour. Somehow it seemed appropriate. Cleveland and Toledo flew by in shrouded overcoats.
We ate dinner in a food court right off the highway. I spent too much on a turkey sandwich, but I am crazed with hunger so it’s a no brainer. There are only two purchases that I don’t ever for a second reconsider: coffee in the morning and food when you have not eaten for twelve hours.
At dinner, I hear someone at the counter ask for “diet pop.” In the flesh. What a fake thing to say instead of soda. Hah. Seems we have indeed switched regions.
Thoughts on Indiana: not many. If it were a food, it would be plain white bread. We cut through the state in forty minutes of waning light, and it does not leave even the smallest mark on my skin.
Finally, in the dark hours of the night, as we are going crazy at the wheel and laughing at everything, Chicago begins to rise out of the flatness of the continent. First the telephone wires start to cluster more tightly around Gary, which by all accounts is a city composed entirely of empty industrial parking lots. As we get closer to one of the biggest metros in the world, the streetlights increase, bunching into ever-larger communities. Squawking transistors loom with hundreds of Dollar Store Christmas lights dangled around their frame. Toll roads appear and charge hefty supplication. Crazier drivers emerge from off ramps.
To the left, what’s this? A McDonald’s, in the middle of a highway? Why not. Maybe you get hungry while you are fishing in your trousers for enough coins to pay the toll.
And just when you thought a city the size of Chicago couldn’t be around a place like this, when you thought it was all some cartographical mirage, the skyway opens up and you see everything. All of it.
America is a huge and small place. Cities rise urgently out of plains that still make me think that somewhere out there, somebody still knows about the land.
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The first twenty-four hours of the Windy City fly by with the hazed out glasses of a hangover. The fifteen-hour sprint the day before haunts us. We wander back and forth around my aunt’s place in Hyde Park, eyes at half-mast.
“Isn’t that Obama’s place?” we ask, down the block from where we are shacking. My aunt tells us yes, and points out the two police officers forever stationed at its mahogany front door, ready to dissuade tourists, terrorists. Apparently you aren’t allowed street parking anywhere when the royal He is around.
Hyde Park is an attractive, homey neighborhood. A lot of townhouses, nuclear families, golden retrievers. If you look at a city map, you can see that it is right on the edge of Black and White Chicago, and thus, a cagey choice for a politician like Barack to own a home. Oh, Obama, forever a pragmatist.

My aunt’s apartment is a single. It smells like my grandmother’s house used to smell. Kind of like fresh bread and kind of like a dish of plastic that has been left out in the sun. There is a small kitchen closet that is literally overflowing with Tupperware containers. Some of them remind me of the exact containers my paternal grandparents recycled for use when I was seven and living with them for a year. After some inspection, I realize with horror that these are those same containers. For some reason Barbara has preserved these objects. She’s not even putting them to use. Just keeping them to keep them, in some sort of ritual to the idea of an object and the idea of a parent.
An entire sunroom is filled floor to ceiling with leaning file cabinets and brown cardboard boxes. I don’t need to inspect them to know that they are chock full of Need family documents and paraphernalia. She has carved away a tight, rectangular space for a mattress. Barbara chooses to sleep there, among the detritus and memorabilia, in spite of the minimally furnished but considerably larger guest bedroom halfway down the hall.
There are no fewer than four locks on the back door. Barbara has fantasies of being robbed. My dad says that this comes from his mom, who used to generate similar fantasies of crime in Durham.
I feel sad for my aunt, all alone here. There is something awful about her sleeping amidst all those keepsakes. I think she is trying to get from them what people usually get from other people — from family, confidants, lovers – and I know she’s never had much in that department. But things? Things? They’re never going to be enough to fill that gap.

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Adam and I spend four days in the Windy City. And it is a windy city. Sometimes nicknames are more for flair than description, but this was not the case with Chicago. Brutal wind, all the time, all the time, all the time. Didn’t help that we were in the midst of a cold front. The first day I tried to battle it, figuring out where it was coming from (Lake Michigan) and shielding away, but it kept sneaking around the corners of walls, dashing back down the sides of telephone polls to pinch my face with icy fingers. This was the first city I have ever visited (and I’ve visited some cold ones: Augusta, Maine, and Boston, Mass) where I felt like I physically could not hack the weather. That kernel of me that is a rote biological animal was sending alarmed text messages to my brain:
“Organism cannot do this. Situation is too cold. Evacuate. Evacuate.”
I mean, it was below fifty degrees on the final day of August. My step mom tells me that winter is even more brutal, and it’s hard to imagine how many coats enduring it would require.

Other than the bleak weather, Chicago is a very charming city. Even though it’s world famous, and one of the really significant hubs for American cultural activity (like a New York or an LA) everyone seemed pretty mellow. I like to judge a city by the attitude of its regular service workers. Bus attendants, ticket office staff, paper boys. Jobs that must be done everywhere if a city is to run, but oh dear, oh dear, these jobs aren’t fun.
I also judge it by the people you rub shoulders with on the sidewalk, in line for coffee, in the actual corners of a human tapestry, where people allow a true nature to be uncorked.
In Chicago, all of these people seemed relaxed and polite. An “excuse me” as they sit down next to you on “The L”. A “how are you doing” from folks on the street. I see tourists asking bus drivers for directions without being shouted down for their non-“local” infraction. My aunt says that everyone gets nicer the further you move west in America, and it might be true. Now, this isn’t to say that Chicago had anything like good old fashioned, wait-in-line-chatting-with-the-attendant-about-the-weather-without-mean-looks-from-strangers aura of the American South. That’s some sort of friendly angel cloud. But you know, this wasn’t bad.
A little blond pixy gives me a note on the first bus we take in the city, headed to a downtown art museum on Madison Street. Says she thinks I’m handsome and have a nice day. How about that? You get something like that and you won’t feel raindrops for days and days.
I turn to flash my benefactor a smile, but she is already a shadow on the sidewalk. So it goes and goes.

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At the Art Institute, I am blown away by a collection of late period Monet landscapes. Adam doesn’t like them and leaves me be. I end up staring and gaping for nearly three hours.
Impressionism is quite the trick. Who would have thought that the most honest way to capture a landscape would be to look through a glass shakier, blurrier, with eyes just rubbed by knuckles attached to a body that just saw a field of poppies for the first time? Who would have thought that the task of recording a reflection in a current of water – of capturing a moment of partial sunshine on a group of gray pebbles, that precise instant in history and time and people’s lives and the world’s expanding breath – who would have thought that a fuzzier image would do the trick better than sharp lines and proper angles?
When I look at a Monet, I am instantly there beside him, on the French hillside, looking with his eyes on that exact day, at that exact minute. I see a landscape, clearly, clearer than I have ever seen a landscape that I have not myself witnessed. I see with eyes that are not my own, more clearly than realist painting, more clearly than still life, more clearly even than photographs. It’s the next best thing to seeing a thing firsthand.
“He captures the wonder of a beautiful scene.”
“No, that’s not quite right. He does that, definitely, but there’s more.”
“He captures the movement of light.”
“He does that too. But so do other painters. That’s still not enough.”
“He captures the sky. I mean, really, the sky. Not the sky as it would be categorized in a crayon box. Not a sky painted with a light blue pastel, uniform from horizon to horizon. But the sky as it is truly experienced by our own eyes, a sky that is not a blob of color but instead a tapestry of millions and millions of barely differentiated scraps of radical color: vermillion, emerald, brown, gray, green, turquoise, brick red.”
Were you to tell someone this, they would deny you. “No, the sky is blue,” they would say. That’s what I thought too, before. Sky = blue. Duh. You learn that in third grade. But then I saw a Monet, and I realized, wait a second. The sky is more than blue, always more than that, always always all colors showing up in unexpected places, always a brown flake in the heavens that you would never acknowledge with your conscious ego, always scraps that exist but go forth without recognition, that form a sky unheralded, unmarshalled, unmerited, always changing. An active prism on even the murkiest, smudged coin of a city day. It too is alive with color. And not just the sky. The grass is the same. Animals too.
Not just the natural world, either. Buildings, human space. Think of Van Gogh’s famous “Bedroom in Arles.” The most important strokes in that painting are the almost comical, bright green streaks on the floorboards. If you were to suggest such strokes at the outset of a portrait project, you’d be laughed at. Wood can look many ways, but bright, caterpillar green, and that much?? No way.
But the visionaries, these fellows who saw with eyes that deserve medallions immemorial, they somehow figured out the comedy of the actual world. A world where floorboards are actually light green, among other garish qualities. Where everything on the canvas is composed of outlines and touches of color that our eyes drink eagerly, but our brains would doubt.
A common reaction to a beautiful landscape is to wonder, “How am I going to preserve this beauty, this overwhelming, all around me brilliance that I couldn’t begin to capture in a photograph alone? How can I bottle this fleeting grace?” You try, of course, but when the photos are developed, you know in your heart of hearts that something is lacking. This is because the approach is wrong. To capture this bounty, to capture the truly comical and brilliant world where a bright green winks impishly, unnoticed, in a floorboard, you need to take a comical route, a less rational approach, with a glass fuzzier. Hence, impressionism.
We know they’re right. We do, when we look at a Monet and marvel at that “something extra” that we feel in the pit of our hearts. When it outstrips a photograph, we know they got it. Because, at the end of the day, that rogue green, that most outrageous complicated soup mix slash bang of a stroke among others on the canvas, that’s the world you’re looking at. Those are the right strokes, and they are also the most difficult to come by, because your brain is screaming that they don’t belong. But you know.
And because of that connection, the greats like Monet can reach through the channel of time, to a city in 2009, to a gallery and a curly haired boy, and they can pull me back to 1891, to that hillside, to that moment when the clouds finally broke after a cold front and something like god fell down from the sky onto the river port city of Vetheuil.
Finally there, sitting with him intimately in this place, I clap him on the shoulders and exhale at the beauty of a moment captured, truly captured.
There is magic here.

As I stand gaping in the exhibit, I turn my thoughts to the locations I will be fleshing out for the first time these next few months. The towering myths of Oregon, Washington, and California, wreathed in a wall of ancient redwoods. The American West, one of the last great destinations for dreaming in these awful days of men. I hope I can witness them with a similar gaze. I hope I can spot the garish green in their floorboards, and I hope I can find the courage to call it what it is. I would like to reflect some of this reality to others who cannot make a trip such as this. I would like to mirror some of the insane and paradoxical beauty of the real world and not something less. If I could capture one pure instant, I would be satisfied.

Adam shows up finally and asks if I’ve been here in this exhibit the whole time.
I say nothing, but inside there is an excited voice whispering. “Yes, I have been here. But other places too.”
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I see an old friend from China later that night in Lincoln Park, uptown. We do the wandering-youth-in-city-but-also-drunk-thing. Sit in an almost empty bar on a U-shaped couch somewhere. Talk to a guy from Yale who wants to rule the world. Watch his chubby friend inhale self-destructive brew because of the size of his stomach.
Later we wander the streets with these guys. At this point there are six or seven of us. All of us are five beers deep, a pack of dogs at this point, howling and leering and weaving back and forth from the store front to the curb, in front and then behind one another, synchronized as swimmers, debased as thieves, roaring always for attention. I won’t remember any of them in morning, but that’s fine. We can remain strangers and still perform this ritual the right way.
Later still, we meet a wild-haired guy in a different bar without front windows. He tells us his family owns part of the entire state of Montana, and that we should look for people with his last name out there. Sounds like we met the prince of the west. The only thing is, I can’t remember his last name in the morning.


The next night, we go to a movie. It costs too much money. Eleven dollars a ticket. I am already fretting, just clamping electrical panels onto the sides of my heart about expenses. We are spending too much money and the trip isn’t a week old. Gas is so expensive, and Adam’s Jeep does horrendously in the fuel efficiency department. I did not expect to be filling up as often as we have been. I doubt my coin will last until December. Yet here we are, heading away from home, away from safety. Stepping past the geographical region where you can still make an error and avoid complete punishment. We’re in the air now.
Ah, I swallow, and think of the talking heads of calmer folks. “You cannot sweat money this much,” they say, “or it’ll get a grip on your neck that it shall never let go.”
“Here we are,” I tell myself. “Here we are, however we got here.”

Adam, Barbara and I take a walk along the river after the movie. The skyline really pops at night. With the lights all on, and the fireworks bursting out off Navy Pier over the Lake Michigan, it’s mighty. Looks like Gotham, like super heroes belong here, jumping off the sides of crenellated gargoyles on top of the Tribune tower.
I tell this to Adam, and he informs me that the last Batman movie was filmed here. Makes sense. All the buildings are very antique and box-y with a distinct, gothic element. Strange how majestic they look close up.

Ah, but how quickly do I learn that this vision too can change in a fleeting moment. This glory is also conditional.
The next morning as we sail along an elevated freeway headed out, I look over my shoulder and imagine that the great big buildings are actually just tiny Lego rectangles on the floor of some kid’s bedroom, stacked up one after another in some rudimentary pattern. There is something strangely satisfying about such a basic geometric skyline, something tasteful.
I ask myself which one of these Chicago’s is the real one. The majesty up close, or the building blocks from far away on the freeway? The real or the myth, the close or the distant, the known or the travelled?
In a colossal baritone, the city responds. “What do I care? I swallow them all. I am them all.”