Colin Marshall

The second phase of our farewell tour of America (if a Cher-style farewell tour, with little pretense of actual long-term retirement and plans for future performance more or less already locked in) has begun. The first phase took us north, up the West Coast from Los Angeles to Alameda, Ashland, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and back down through Eugene, Sunnyvale, and Santa Barbara. This much more ambitious phase has us crossing the U.S. of A in the other direction, starting from Huntington Beach and ending up, theoretically, in Raleigh, North Carolina — coast to coast. First stop: Barstow, a town I (as I assume many do) know only from the first line of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

With or without the drugs, I do get the sense that Barstow, now as then, serves primarily as a waypoint to Vegas, the fork in the road at which you must choose whether you really want to commit to the Sin City experience. Part of that came from the all-foreigner crowd around me in the breakfast room offered by our lodging for the night, one of many such establishments along what looked like Barstow’s motel mile: the silent young Germans, the gregarious old Brits. (Actually, I observed the highest level of gregariousness in the motel’s Indian owner, who told of his life’s previous chapter in Johannesburg and had probably insisted on the place’s most memorable touch, each and every room’s towels having been folded into little elephants.)

Even before launching into this ultimate American experience, I came up with a theory about the homeland of which I’ll soon take leave: America, as I see it, mashes up the forbiddingly eccentric with the frictionlessly generic. Part of that impression comes from the folksy roadside attractions that captivate so many visiting non-Americans (In these two weeks, I will live Wim Wenders’ dream). Another part comes from my favorite passage of my favorite Los Angeles novel, Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, whose English expat protagonist berates his countrymen for failing to understand how America has “reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences,” and that “until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free.”

We Americans, he says, “sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained and that terrifies them” — those “groveling little materialist” Europeans” — “fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it.” Experiencing America therefore means experiencing its generic spaces, and as we headed toward not Las Vegas but Flagstaff, Arizona, we experienced one of its finest: In-N-Out Burger, a reassuringly guaranteed presence alongside southern California’s freeways. We’d meant to end our last road trip with a protein-style hamburger and animal-style cheeseburger, but it didn’t happen, and so with a protein-style hamburger and animal-style cheeseburger our latest road trip begins.

We took a different route down from Eugene so we could continue stopping in different cities than we had on the way up. But given the total time we’d blocked out for the road trip, this meant we had to take the stretch from Eugene to Sunnyvale, the site of our next overnight stay, in one day. Google Maps said it would take eight and a half hours, but either it lied or I took too long buying comic books at More Fun when we made our second stop in Ashland. In any case, we left in the morning and got there, over 500 freeway miles later (quite a few of them on freeways I’d never heard of, during which I felt sure we would soon arrive when in reality we had hours to go), at night.

American culture, such as it is, has so internalized driving that this sort of haul has become, if not an everyday accomplishment, then a task pretty much everyone finds themselves doing sooner or later. Strategies to handle it vary from era to era and American to American, but I find that a steady flow of podcasts helps. We listened to almost nothing but 책 읽는 시간, or Time to Read a Book, Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s podcast where he reads aloud and comments on short works of fiction by authors from Asia and the west, his own included. The world of Korean podcasts has produced several such shows (I also like 읽어드림), and on this trip with so few opportunities for day-to-day practice, they at least helped keep my listening skills up. (It greatly improves one’s overall well-being to maintain solid daily block of study time — and work time and exercise time, for that matter — on the road, but we had to keep moving.)

I barely ever drive in everyday life, so every three hours, I found myself simply having to get out of the car and stand around. And I didn’t always follow this rule, but I think it works best to stop for more small meals rather than fewer large ones. “Hearty eating” is your enemy in 21st century America, especially when you have to spend all day in a car. Nevertheless, we ate heartily and gratefully upon arriving at the home of another Korean-and-American couple (for those playing the intercultural coupling home game, they go on the list including the other Korean-and-American couple in Alameda, the Filipino-and-American couple in Seattle, the South African-and-American couple in Vancouver, the half-Japanese-and-half-Japanese couple in Eugene, and the Korean-and-American couple taking this very trip) who moved to Sunnyvale from Pasadena a few months ago.

The nighttime approach to the city past office park after colossal office park reminded me of nothing so much as Orange County — and in some ways, Silicon Valley stands as one of San Francisco’s Orange County equivalents — but in the light of day I found their actual neighborhood, a classically postwar sort of place, free of the sort of McMansions one expects in “the O.C.” You can also walk from there to the Philz Coffee, which, though that San Francisco chain has recently made inroads into Los Angeles proper, has yet to become a possibility in points farther south. You can also bike to Cupertino, home of Apple headquarters, to eat in the company cafeteria, as the American husband does nearly every day to have lunch with his Korean wife, whose new Apple job necessitated their move.

She offered us a couple of guest badges to join her for one last proper meal before heading back to Los Angeles, and we did not, to put it mildly, refuse. In middle school, I once signed up for a week of tours around the then-hot tech companies that had established themselves in and around Seattle (we of course went to Microsoft, but also the likes of Starwave), coming away not quite understanding what most of them did but nevertheless deeply impressed with the food available right there in their offices. (I would later have the exact same experience touring college campuses.) But it turns out that tech-company food has come almost as far as technology itself, and we faced a difficult choice between all the tasty-looking offerings at the stations built into this giant iPod of an eatery. Having met the friends that brought us here through Korean language classes in Los Angeles, I ultimately went with the day’s “Korean pulled pork special” in a nod to the culture that brought us together in the first place.

At Apple, you talk about Google and Facebook — and more to the point, about the food at Google and Facebook. Word on the street says that, while those other big two of the big three do feed you for free rather than just at subsidized prices, for the highest pure culinary quality, you go with Apple every time. (And besides, at Google you’re subject to their endless psychological experimentation to get you to eat less: floppy trays, opaque candy jars, and so on.) Our plates of fish and Korean sandwiches and bowls of grilled shishito peppers and mushroom soup, priced down into reasonability by the company’s vast resources, attested to that, as did the one-dollar espresso at the cafeteria’s coffee bar. But I think I got an even better deal than that: black coffee not just for free, but dispensed out of a spout controlled by an iPad. We’d left home on a road trip, but arrived in the future.