Exodus: A memoir (19 page)

I can build a home, too, I thought. If I can’t do it here, because it’s too far, then I’ll find the right place close by. It’s out there somewhere, I felt with conviction—just waiting for me to find it.

It was time to make my way back to my origins, and I left San Francisco with my last coffee and doughnut from Four Barrel on Valencia Street. It was too early to encounter any traffic on the Bay Bridge, so I quickly reached the steadily flattening landscape of Sacramento and the other inner-California towns, passed the initial dryness of the Sierras to the first and most blissful stop on my route: Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in America, a voluminous basin of crystal clear water rimmed by ice-capped mountains and dignified firs. I pulled up to the rocky shore and parked my car on the side of the road, venturing out to the water’s edge barefoot and thrilling with anticipation. Although snow was visible on the surrounding mountains, the lake waters were warm and gentle, and best of all, I could see straight through to the pebble-lined bottom. There was no murky sediment to be stirred, no weeds growing between the stones. The lake was pristine. Locals paddleboarded nearby; I saw a parasailing team land on the opposite
shore. Everything was a brilliant blue, a sharp contrast to the landscape I was about to enter and spend the next few days in. I knew this, and it made me want to hold on to the moment even more tightly. I knew I wouldn’t see anything this beautiful again for a long time. I looked down at my toes, the nails of which were painted bright red and glimmered from under the surface, and wondered if I had ever imagined entering a body of water this freely as a child. I had once worn a baggy swimdress just so that I could splash in a pool with a cement-block wall that obstructed the sun. I had never before felt the pleasure of lake water on my skin, and it was enough to let the current swish around my ankles. I withdrew and headed back, leaving wet footprints all the way back to the car.

I drove out from under the shady pines of Tahoe, over the Nevada border to the sad, blinking-light town of Reno, venturing farther and farther into the part of state that stretches on for hundreds of miles without even a gas station to save you from trouble. There would be only a handful of lived-in places until I reached my first overnight stop, Salt Lake City. I took those miles like they were mine to take; it was easy to let my speedometer creep up to 95 without feeling like a daredevil—the scenery hardly changed, and the air felt less resistant than normal. Two hundred miles into the desert, just before the town of Winnemucca, I noticed, too late to slow down, a small tornado funneling a coil of tumbleweeds just ahead of me on the highway. I increased my speed and tore through it, my chest tight with fear, but felt only one deep, enormous tremor as I passed. Dust devils, they were called. Better to go through them quickly, I assumed.

In my approach to Battle Mountain, the town that Jeannette Walls opens her memoir with, I noticed rows of army tanks
exiting from what looked like massive garages dug out of the mountainside. The ground here glittered with metallic rock, bronze, silver, and jade, and the air felt thick, heavy with silence, as if some things were deliberately left unsaid in this part of the country. Army uniforms abounded in the town, which had a casino/diner and an old hotel but was deathly quiet on this hot summer afternoon. I stopped for a milkshake and tried to make conversation with a few people, but they would have none of it, so I simply took in the scene and tried to place Jeannette and her family there in my mind’s eye. Certainly no Jews had ever been spotted here, I thought, and wondered if anybody here knew enough to tell the difference. I did not feel especially noticeable among the quiet folk who kept their heads down and their voices low, as if it was too hot to waste energy on thinking or talking.

Soon I was back on the road, racing to catch the sunset at the Utah-Nevada border, where the Bonneville Salt Flats lay just west of Salt Lake City. I got there just in time. I crossed over and parked in an empty lot that seemed to serve as a station for freight trains; one of which stretched down the tracks as far as the eye could see this late in the day. Looking back at the receding brown mountains, I saw the sky above and between them pulsing bright pink, the cloud streaks of orange and purple. I had caught the sunset at its apex. Off to the east, a lone Joshua tree stretched up from the flat landscape against a quickly darkening horizon. The rest was all salt mud, looking almost like an enormous ice floe in the distance, reflecting the vivid neon sunset so blindingly that the effect was Narnia-like. The roaring sound of wind rushing over the flats filled my ears; the dazzling silver surface mesmerized me. I felt like I was in another galaxy. It was like no other vision I had seen or imagined, and for the first time on my trip, I felt floored by the
place I stood in, unable to communicate or relate to it, feeling my foreignness emphasized to the nth degree.

I took off my shoes and let my toes squish into the cold, stiff salt mud. It did not give, like I was afraid it would. It was not a quicksand, simply a soft solid. I ran and ran and ran around the empty flats, shouting soundlessly into the harsh wind. After about fifteen minutes, I felt as if I had imprinted myself on it in some way, albeit temporarily, and I got back in my car, toes encrusted with salt crystals. I drove past the darkening flats along a quiet highway, into the compact, symmetrical skyline of Utah’s capital.

After a quick night at the Hyatt, I was ready to abandon the bland, featureless city, with its poker-faced churches, its indifferent sculptures and fountains. I slowed down as I passed the Mormon headquarters, only because I noticed a group of women congregated outside, dressed in long pleated skirts and high-necked shirts, their hair modestly slicked back, who could have easily been mistaken for the peers of my youth. It was strange to see such a long-ago memory from my past projected onto this celestial wet dream of a city. If I talked to those girls, would they be like the girls of my childhood, thinking and acting in chorus?

I drove through Utah’s hill country, where clusters of modest mountains huddled under the scant coverage of stunted conifers. After three hours I seemed to cross an invisible line drawn in the sand as I descended yet again into the purple-veined skin of the desert, looking back at the fertile landscape that had so bluntly come to an end behind me.

I drove for five hours straight, in what felt like nothingness, on a one-lane road, and felt grateful for the red pickup truck in front of me. Its Utah license plate made me feel more comfortable about traversing such a long stretch of uninhabited and inhospitable
desert. Surely someone lived here. Eventually there would be a gas station.

There were none until I reached the Green River, at the intersection of Interstate 70, and I exhaled a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding. How long would I have had to wait for a kind stranger to pass if I had run out of gas? Would I have survived on the measly supplies I’d packed in the morning?

The water of the Green River was an anemic brown trickle, but it was enough to support some life, as evidenced by the tiny settlements on its banks. After I filled up my tank, I swung left on I-70 and headed for Moab, home of Arches National Park.

It was ninety-eight degrees in Moab on a July afternoon. I climbed as far as I could past the red rock sculptures but didn’t make it far enough to see the famous arch formations. I became anxious to get to Colorado, where I would be spending the night.

The road back to the interstate was a narrow dirt path that trailed the Colorado River, which was hardly six feet wide. Its waters churned and frothed like milk being steamed for a cappuccino. Bright green shrubs bordered the river’s edge, but the landscape reverted to dry red earth only two feet from the bank. I passed gated entrances to ranches, but there was nary a cowboy in sight.

I drove through what could be considered a town, which boasted seven houses, all in various states of egregious disrepair. A roof had almost completely caved in on one; another had windows made of cardboard and plastic wrap. On one of the rickety front porches, I spotted a toothless, bearded man in mud-caked overalls, cleaning his shotgun. He glared at me as I passed; I shivered and sped up.

Turning the dial of my car radio this way and that, looking for a station, I could only find one discernible program—a man
ranting about Obama being a Muslim terrorist. It struck me then that I had never been farther from my New York roots, and suddenly, looking around once again at the endless flatness, the enormous sky, I longed for the familiar feeling of being hemmed in, of being cradled by tall buildings and low-hanging skies.

This is America, then, I considered. Not the teeming, vibrant metropolis I had left behind on the East Coast and rediscovered on the West, but the vast stretch of emptiness in between, the dusty, arid stretches of desert that nurtured nothing but a feeling of being so isolated as to be cut off from the world and its events. The peripheries of America had been transformed into hectic landscapes; immigrant communities and transplanted hopefuls had built great cities, but here, in America’s gnawing belly, it was clear that you were either swallowed up or spit out. I drove the rest of the way through Utah’s parched southeast region feeling a tension grip my spine.

I relaxed slightly once I ascended into the winding, mountainous roads of Colorado’s ski country. I passed the perched chalets of Vail, noting the elegant, manicured gardens and contemporary vacation homes with a sense of guarded relief—this at least was familiar in the sense that luxury will always be familiar to a New Yorker who grew up just across the river from the vast wealth of Manhattan. By the time I hit Denver traffic, it was two hours past nightfall. I stopped at a roadside bar called the Grizzly Rose, where a neon sign outside announced that it was Ladies Night. That meant free drinks.

Inside the cavernous space, beers were being sloshed onto the bar en masse. Chili dogs were sold for a dollar apiece straight from the kitchen window. Cowboys lingered over pool tables in dark corners, and smack in the middle of the room was a polished
wooden dance floor, packed with women in tube tops and Daisy Dukes doing something I could only interpret as the hora, while country music played on the loudspeaker. As the women dipped and clapped, their glittering crosses jangled distractingly over their tanned chests. I wondered how Christian culture had evolved to allow one to worship Jesus and dress like a stripper at the same time.

Here my foreignness came back to smack me in the face. I did not own a pair of shorts that skimpy, nor did I know how to bat my eyelashes and keep my mouth shut when a cowboy offered to buy me a drink. How could there be so many American places in which I had no possibility of finding the familiar?

The next day I would drive to my last stop: Chicago. I felt hopeful that, in Chicago, I would find what I loved most about the West and the East, gathered there in the middle of the country in a summit of two cultures. So the next morning I zoomed past Iowa and Nebraska without stopping; it seemed there was nothing there but corn, rows and rows of it. My GPS said it was a sixteen-hour drive from Denver to Chicago, but I did it in twelve, stopping only once for gas, chips, and beef jerky. What a thrill it was to find myself again on a booming highway, a silvery skyline thrusting powerfully ahead of me! It could easily have been Manhattan; the traffic was similarly aggressive, and the New Yorker in me swerved confidently through it. I gawped at the impressive architecture as I followed the directions to my friend’s address, which turned out to be a brownstone very similar to the one I grew up in, tucked into a small side street a block away from elevated tracks, like the ones I heard rattling through my childhood dreams every night. It could have been the same neighborhood. Instantly I was soothed by a false sense of the familiar.

My friend and I went out on the town as soon as I arrived, because I insisted I could sleep later. Here was a city I wanted to get to know. Here was the possibility of finding my groove. We listened to battling saxophones at a jazz club, ate deep-dish and stuffed-crust pizza at 3 a.m., and made plans to get the city’s best brunch in the morning. The life here is the same as it is in Manhattan, I thought.

Before I left, I visited the famous sculpture
Cloud Gate
, known as “the Bean,” and made my way through the Art Institute. As I turned a corner from a room filled with Manets and Boudins, I found myself suddenly face-to-face with a famous Nazi propaganda poster,
The Eternal Jew
. The familiar image, that of a wizened, humpbacked Jew holding coins in one palm and a whip in the other, set on a bright yellow background, seemed discordantly out of place in a museum of art. Nothing could have prepared me for its assault on my consciousness. Underneath the poster was a description of the temporary exhibition of Nazi and Soviet propaganda posters from World War II.

I stepped inside the room, which was quiet, lined with brown carpeting that muffled my footsteps. Dimmed as if in a theater, spotlights shone softly on the yellowed posters stretched and displayed in glass cases on the walls. Many of them contained Jewish symbolism juxtaposed with images of horror and evil; always there was the ugly face, with its hooked nose, its piercing eyes peering from under thick, dark brows, and its menacing scowl.

I moved from poster to poster, feeling as I progressed through the exhibit that each one resonated with something inside me, that in every image was something recognizable, something horrible yet true.

It is this that terrifies me about the stereotypes I learned
growing up, and the ones I’m still incorporating as I make my way through the world as a new sort of wandering Jew—that there is always a speck of truth packed into the core of each accusation, and that I will never be able to fully rid myself of that self-affront. I did not want to leave my world only to be forever chased and haunted by the identity it bestowed on me. I had been raised in America without knowing what it was to be an American—it was that problem that I had hit the road hoping to resolve.