Recently there have been numerous cases of haunted mirrors in New York, and this has caused problems for the police as well as for residents. A typical haunted mirror appears normal until it is hung on a wall and then the surface shifts, warps, and becomes a reflection not of the room or person physically opposite it but of the place the viewer really wishes to be. This can be a disturbing thing to learn about yourself or about your spouse, and a number of apparently happy marriages have been damaged or destroyed by haunted mirrors. The attorney who led the class-action suit against the manufacturers said in her briefing to the press: “You think that your husband is content at home, and you discover he’d rather be trapped in a factory that manufactures beads with a woman he once sat next to on an airplane. My clients and I consider that this forced disclosure of subconscious desires causes undue pain and suffering to the victims and, in many cases, significant loss of income.”
The police have been instrumental in disturbing the chain of supply for the haunted mirrors, though some residents feel they could be doing more.
The official state vermin of New York rotates biannually between the greater glowering cockroach and the egg rat, which can be distinguished by its blue webbed feet.
CAR RENTAL
Once you leave New York, we suggest you rent a car, even if you do not usually like to drive. You will find that driving in America is quite different than it is in other places in the world. In most countries, the roads are narrow, badly paved or steep. Driving requires skill, practice and concentration.
But in America, the landscape has been redesigned so people can slide through it seamlessly inside their cars. When you get behind the steering wheel, you feel as though you have finally arrived at your intended destination. In America, it is not driving that is difficult. It is finding a way to stop.
PENNSYLVANIA
Pennsylvania is the softest state in the Union. It is a good place to continue with your journey.
Early in its history, when it was still a colony, Pennsylvania passed an ordinance outlawing sharp corners for the good of the citizens. As a result, the craftsmen of Pennsylvania pioneered a style of furniture making that came to be known as “Rustic Curvature” for its solid forms and smooth, undulating lines. In recent years, reproductions of these designs have been enjoying a renewed popularity.
The no-corner rule meant that Pennsylvania never became a center of industry like many of its neighbors but instead has remained indebted to agriculture for much of its economic base. The statute has never been removed from the books, though today it is rarely enforced.
In Pennsylvania, the mountains are shaped like breasts. This is not discussed by most people or taught in the public schools. The culture of the rural western half of the state tends to be conservative and also to exhibit a great love of birds, fried foods and small boxes. People there are friendly and belligerent at the same time, which is an unusual combination. Good friends greet each other by pretending they are going to punch the other, then drawing back at the last moment. For first-time visitors, this custom can be unnerving. If someone seems like they’re about to punch you during your time in Pennsylvania do not be alarmed; it just means they consider you a friend.
Pennsylvania is an old state and therefore a sad one. More than two hundred years ago, it was vivisected so it could be made into farms. The houses peel paint, and the little towns, knotted around crossroads, seem often to have forgotten what they wanted to say next. We recommend that you stay in Pennsylvania for only a few days, even if you will be in America for several months, because after that the sadness can begin to diffuse through your skin. If you stay longer, you may find yourself taking photographs of derelict buildings or disused machinery. Or you may start to feel an urge to write a letter to a former lover who left you several years ago, suddenly and without explanation, to tell him about an old harvester you found rusting in the corner of a field. You may feel compelled to write to him because who else would understand how beautiful it is, with the bird’s nest where the driver’s seat once was and the wheels netted in with weeds?
If this occurs, it means that Pennsylvania has seeped inside you surreptitiously, and it is time to leave.
The official motto of the state of Pennsylvania is: “When in doubt, breathe, but not through your mouth.”
VERMONT
Once a year the people of Vermont all go out of their houses and shout “Chimney Witch, Be Gone!” at the top of their lungs. This occurs in early November and is the best time of the year to visit. The tradition originated in the French Acadian culture, which filtered down from the territory that is now Quebec into the state’s remote but beautiful Northeast Kingdom. According to legend, the Chimney Witch squats in the chimneys of unsuspecting householders and prevents St. Nicholas from entering the dwelling unless she is given notice to get out before the first frost. This is the only time that Vermonters shout in public and all of them do it simultaneously at 4:00 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month. A witty local writer commented, apropos of this practice, that in left-wing Vermont even the evil spirits are given almost two months’ notice before they are evicted from their abodes.
For people from our country this tradition may seem very strange, since as a rule we dislike loud voices and raucous noise, and our public ceremonies tend to be dignified and quiet. But many visitors say they find the Vermonters’ shouting strangely comforting, especially the way that the sound echoes off the faces of the mountains, which makes it sound like the hills are calling back.
In America, Vermont is considered unusually liberal, and this outlook is a point of pride for the state. Although there have been some difficulties between longtime residents, who hold more traditional views, and newcomers, most communities have been able to find common ground. The MJ Dairy incident is a case in point. MJD produces the infamous Mary Jane line of cheeses, all of which contain the resin of the cannabis plant among their ingredients and are said to have a mild narcotic effect. When the dairy’s buildings were burned down last year by arsonists, it united libertarians and liberals who believe in marijuana legalization with law-and-order conservatives who don’t like to see Vermont become the ground for lawless violence. Prayer vigils were held outside the torched buildings, and within a month enough money had been collected to rebuild the facility from public donations alone.
Vermont has been reforested in the last century, and its trees are still skinny and young. They cling to the granite sides of its mountains as best they can, but life is hard in this cold northern clime. Their roots snoop around the tumble of gray rocks and the thin soil, looking for a way in. Sometimes they find one, but not very often, and when they do manage to puncture the hard shell that the land here habitually wears, they sometimes don’t like what they find underneath.
The trees whisper messages among themselves, but they are not old enough yet to have anything more profound to say than human beings do, so it is not advisable to spend much time listening to them. The mountains by contrast are exceedingly old. But they don’t talk very often.
NORTH DAKOTA
North Dakota is not a place that most tourists would think to stop, but we recommend it for several reasons of which we give details below.
When you leave Vermont, drive west. Go around those enormous lakes through Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Eventually, you will come to a place that is as flat and empty as an ocean. Stop at a restaurant by the side of the road and order something to eat. Ask the couple sitting in the booth next to you where you are. If they look first at each other and then back at you and then the man of the couple sighs deeply, like his heart might break from disappointment, you will be sure you are in North Dakota.
People in this state are known for their absent-mindedness. They have a tendency to think of things they ought to have said or done after it is much too late to change them: Oh well, they are often heard to say. Next time. The official state gesture involves clapping the heel of the right hand to the forehead once, as t
hough you are just remembering some task you were supposed to already have finished. The state police do this in unison at their swearing-in ceremonies and accompany it with an extended exhalation of breath in the form of a long “o” (as in “zoo” or “fool”). It is a sight to behold.
No one in North Dakota is completely sure where the land underneath them came from, since it seems to be younger than the rest of the continental United States. There are two competing theories among scientists who study the subject. One holds that the land was an ancient asteroid shaped like a plate. Another proposes that the land in fact remained deep underground for many millennia before a seismic shift thrust it up in a single cataclysmic movement toward the light. The evidence is inconclusive. The fossil record shows animals from vastly different eras crammed together into a single stratum of rock, and this remains unexplained by either theory. Perhaps in North Dakota old forms of life find a final harbor before dying off at last to make room for what is new.
The most beautiful thing in North Dakota is the blue lightning, which, because of the flatness of the terrain, can be seen from hundreds of miles in any direction. It sutures together the clouds and the ground, and in this way it reminds people of the compromises they make between the part of them that wants to stay but flies away, and the part of them that wants to fly away but crouches on the ground, blinking its eyes and licking the air.
After you have seen enough of this marvelous spectacle, continue heading west until you reach Montana.
MONTANA
From space, Montana looks like a supine lion covered in its golden fur. In fact, if you put your hand on the earth in certain places in this state, the ground does omit warmth like the side of a cat flopped down in a square of sunlight. If you see the earth shuddering very gently in and out or hear the deep thrumming noise that might be the hills purring, this is only an illusion—though it is an extremely convincing one.
Montana is known for its vast rangelands that have supported herds of cattle since the state was first settled by Europeans, and its culture centers on cows. People pursue a number of pastimes involving these versatile animals, including cow-racing, cow-vaulting, and the cow-toss. A recent attempt to bring these sports to a wider audience through television has not diminished the specifically local flavor of the contests, and many Montana natives consider these pursuits integral to their way of life.
Montana is one of the few female states in the Union. While there are many states that take the “-a” ending, usually considered feminine, only Georgia and Montana and Maine are actually female. Many people find this information surprising. They are shocked to discover both the scarcity of female states and the fact that Montana—with its pioneer culture valorizing physical strength and emotional reserve—should in fact be one of this small number. This reflects more on our contemporary expectations of male and female than on the state of Montana, which, after all, cannot help how it was made.
HITCHHIKERS
As you continue westward, you will see many people hitchhiking along the roadside and you may wish to pick them up. Usually you can do this without problems: they are mostly young people for whom this is an inexpensive way to see the country. However, there are a few things to be careful of when picking up hitchhikers. Some of them may smell. Some of them may have bad taste in music. Some of them may tell untruths. Several accounts have come back to us about a hitchhiker who is often seen just outside of Billings, a man in a long, midnight-blue coat. According to the rumors, if you pick him up, this man will seem perfectly friendly and benign at first. But eventually he will try to convince you that you must, absolutely, without fail, go and see the state of Louisiana right away. He is persuasive on this subject, extolling the beauties and interests of the place, its history, its unique culture, in an almost mesmerizing tone that makes you feel you cannot miss it, that you must go there immediately.
More than a few travelers have followed his advice. But we must warn you: Do not become one of them. Do not listen to this man. It will lead only to frustration, unnecessary expense and wasted time.
The reason for this is explained below.
LOUISIANA
There is no state of Louisiana. The fact that the myth of its existence persists so powerfully to this day can be attributed to the deep-seated desire we all share for a place between the water and the land that is simultaneously both and neither. In this place we are free to drift over a surface still and dark like glass, which parts before the painted prow of our small wooden boat. It is important that the boat is wooden so we can hear the creaking sound it makes as it eases through channels the color of licorice and among tangled vines trailing luminous moss. Our destination is a small lonely building, a house or sometimes an old general store or even a cantina hoisted above the water by broad stilts under each corner. What we find there differs from person to person. Sometimes the house is empty. Sometimes it is filled with people having a party and dancing. Sometimes there is only a single person waiting on the dock that extends out in front of the building, sitting as though they would have remained exactly in that spot for however long it took us to find them.
The other reason that the state of Louisiana continues to loom so large in our collective imagination is the Great Hoax of 1782. The hoax was orchestrated by a group of planters from the French West Indies who intended to entice capital investment in their enterprises from bankers in Paris and other European cities. They began to spread information about great and growing port cities along the southern coast of the North American mainland, which, they claimed, would soon precipitously increase the trade between the United States, then a recently formed nation, and the islands of the Caribbean. They named these cities after cities in France and even went so far as to have woodcuts and etchings made illustrating the various street scenes and public works then supposedly taking place in them. The artists they hired were talented and they evoked from nothing but their imaginations bustling, vibrant towns inhabited by people from all the nations of the world, mixing and living freely together—a spectacle that at the time had never been witnessed before. Soon it became au courant in the French capital to pepper one’s speech with slang purported to originate in the Gulf cities. Where this slang truly comes from no one knows, though it shows similarities to the Basque language and also to Welsh.
The campaign was a success. The investors in Europe were moved to open their purses, and money flowed to the French island colonies. But another unforeseen effect also resulted from the machinations of the conspirators, which was the increased interest on the part of the United States in acquiring this rich territory adjacent to its own. As we all know, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 took place a mere twenty years after the planters first gathered together over port and cigars to devise their plan. Once this purchase was made, of course, the Americans soon discovered their error: there were no Gulf cities. Louisiana was a pure fabrication. But so many among the new revolutionary elite had staked their reputations on the purchase of this territory, including of course Thomas Jefferson himself, that they could hardly admit this publicly. To protect the president’s dignity, the fiction was maintained. As it is to this very day.
If, despite our warnings, you travel to the place where Louisiana is supposed to be, you will find nothing but a few placards and signs and a Quonset hut containing an exhibition about the myth. This will doubtless be disappointing and upsetting. One way that Americans sometimes express their negative emotions is by assaulting inanimate objects; for this reason, you might want to kick one of the signs and shout an expletive at the top of your lungs to make yourself feel better. Don’t worry if a group of tourists nearby look over at you disapprovingly; glaring silently is also part of the culture.
After that, do not spend any more time in this place. It will only make your already-bad feelings worse. Instead, we advise you to get back in your car and drive away as quickly as you can within the posted speed limits.
NEVADA
If a garbage can was flat,
it would be called Nevada. This is what people in surrounding states say when they wish to disparage the state known variously as the Radiation State, the Dust State, and the Slot Machine State (this last is used only by non-Nevadans seeking to provoke Nevadans to fight them in a bar).
While these names are clearly intended to be pejorative, it must be acknowledged that Nevada is the place to which many of America’s worst nightmares are eventually consigned. It might be more accurately called the Nation’s Unconscious: it is where the American people put the things that they don’t want messing up their lawns. The most important of these are nuclear waste and the sex trade.
An odd confluence between these two domains has been remarked upon recently by a well-known pornographer. In both erotic arousal and radiation poisoning the subject undergoes an experience of melting, as internal boundaries and membranes give way allowing for the delirious loosening and mixing of the body’s tissues and fluids at an ever-accelerating rate. The dermis separates into its many tenuous layers and peels away, shed like a lizard’s scales. The soft tissue becomes tender and swollen as bruises. The limbs lose their rigidity and swim through the suddenly soft air, their motions freed of all consequence, closed off by darkness from any constraint or from the onerous weight of the future until finally the subject itself disperses in death or in “the little death.”
Our pornographer further submits that because Nevada is a desert, a place in which time does not appear to pass, we have reserved it as the place in which we collapse gently in on ourselves.
Most of the state is uninhabitable because it lacks water. Visitors slide through it in silver cars on the single great highway to traverse its northern expanse, and they get out to gaze with rapt horror at the emptiness, thinking: If you wanted to die, all you would have to do is choose a direction and walk. Numerous attempts to establish towns along this highway have failed, and their remains can be seen at the side of the road, where off-ramps lead to nothing but shuttered and derelict buildings, mostly convenience stores and gas stations. These buildings take several years to be covered by dust completely, and it is possible to judge the building’s age by how far up the front door the sand has crept. On our most recent journey through Nevada we saw many buildings in this state of half-submersion, but we did not stop long enough to check their age. There is a slight risk when you do this that you will want to lie down inside one of them until you are covered up by drifts of pale gold earth. If you do this you will not reach the last and most amazing stop on your journey: California.
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