Colin Marshall

I’d looked forward to our arrival in Oklahoma City, less because I knew anything about it than because it came after an eight-hour, three-state-spanning drive from Albuquerque, through what I mostly remember as a sense-deadeningly repetitive pastoral punctuated by vast fields of windmills. After that, I felt just about ready to settle forever in any place with “City” in its name. But National Geographic Traveler did also name Oklahoma City among the “20 go-now destinations” on its “Best Trips 2015” list, which fueled my suspicions that we’d find something genuinely worthwhile there.

We found, on our first morning, the genuinely worthwhile Myriad Botanical Gardens, an acclaimed (and, coming from California, shockingly bum-free) public space in downtown Oklahoma City just across the street from the Devon Energy Center, the recently built 50-story skyscraper that, so far out of scale with any other nearby structure, pretty much constitutes the skyline by itself. On the opposite side of the gardens, a children’s pumpkin festival had got into full swing, providing perhaps the highest concentration of wholesomeness I’ve ever beheld first-hand. At every intersection, electronic voices offered — and repeated, and repeated — detailed descriptions of which streets we could cross and when. Professional downtown guides zipped by, their canary-yellow uniforms in perfect color coordination with their Segways.

We passed through a few torn-up streets, but they’d been torn up, so the signs informed us, in the name of Project 180, a $176 million pedestrianization scheme, reaching the edge of a neighborhood called MidTown (yes, capitalized T). There we sat down, across the corner from a tempting ramen joint, for a cappuccino, hot chocolate, and “sparkling cold brew” among the bearded baristas, MacBooks Air, and Macklemore haircuts of Elemental Coffee. They’d even put up a stand of tools with which to tune up your bicycle while awaiting your drink (which will sometimes require, as the beards put it, a serious “time investment”). But you won’t have to worry about that if you use Spokies, the city’s bike share system, which has placed one of its stations right in Elemental’s parking lot. Clearly, the center of Oklahoma City, in common with many other greater downtown areas across America (some of which we’ve experienced on this very trip), has a revival going on.

Still, mention the name Oklahoma City to anyone outside it — and surely some inside it — and they think of one thing and one thing only: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Though only ten years old and in Seattle at the time, I still remember the day it happened, and from then on the disaster, for me as for so many others, stood for the city. I didn’t imagine then that I’d ever have occasion to visit Oklahoma City myself, much less the memorial grounds to be one day built on the Murrah building’s cleared footprint. But there I ultimately went, and there I saw the bronze gates, one representing the minute before the explosion, one representing the minute after. Between them stretches a shallow reflecting pool (dotted, dispiritingly, with pennies), and beside that stand 168 sculptural empty chairs. It ranks high among the massacre sites I’ve seen, lacking either the sinister feeling of Tlatelolco or the whole city of Hiroshima’s faint air of unreality. (The giant weeping Jesus across the street does go a bit far, but a Methodist church built it on their own property.)

On a length of chain-link fence hang stuffed animals (the building’s day care center having infamously absorbed some of the blast and most of the news coverage) and photos of the victims. One studio portrait stood out for its now strikingly retro hair and lighting, and then for the dates below: 1971-1995, 24 years old, hardly more than a girl but not much younger than the bomber himself. The violence of the event haunts me less than the question of how Timothy McVeigh, clearly an intelligent young man of iron resolve and philosophical consistency, somehow arrived, through a seemingly coherent set of principles, at what he saw as the necessary step of car-bombing a federal building. (Incidentally, he did his planning in Kingman, Arizona, where we happened to stop earlier this trip for lunch at a barbecue place called Redneck’s.)

I don’t want to overstate this point, but I’ve spent a great deal of this time behind the wheel trying to understand something more of America, and from that perspective I see McVeigh as not just a “domestic terrorist,” but a thoroughly American terrorist. Brought up on this country’s mythology, more than a few of us entertain the fantasy that we, too, might one day grow into tyrant-toppling outlaw. Many more of us harbor an inherent distrust and even perpetual suspicion of any visible center of power, especially one as colossal as the federal government of the United States: we think of the state as not Us, but Them. McVeigh certainly regarded it as Them, and as malevolent a Them as They come, insisting on describing his act in Oklahoma City as “morally equivalent” to the recklessness of the U.S. government not just at home (he framed his bombing as “counter-attack” in a war initiated by the United States at Ruby Ridge and Waco) and abroad: “Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones — Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

Few Americans, I suspect, feel active guilt about the Dresdens, Hanois, Tripolis, Baghdads, Hiroshimas, and Nagasakis of the world, due to a tribally instinctive categorization of the foreigners there, even noncombatants, as Them rather than Us. (I admit to feeling no guilt myself at Hiroshima, less because I regard wartime Japanese as Them than because I regard the Americans who ordered the bombs dropped as an even more alien Them.) McVeigh abandoned that particular concept of Us and Them (to say nothing of “two wrongs don’t make a right”), and so the death of innocents in one place looked as unjustifiable, and so as justifiable, to him as the death of innocents in another — a sentiment with which all 21st-century American liberals would surely agree. For most of us, the less we think in terms of Us and Them, the more humane individuals we become. Timothy McVeigh, on the other hand, became the deadliest mass-murderer in American history.

Even just 800 miles into this trip, I don’t care if I never see another “unspoiled” landscape again. Spend enough hours driving through rolling hills or dry scrub or big skies or whatever, and you — or at least I — start to long for any sign of civilization, no matter how unpromising, even just a billboard telling you you’re going to hell. And so I met the modest Albuquerque skyline, the pyramidical tops of the Albuquerque Plaza towers jutting stubbily but distinctively into the air, with something like rapture. Finally, back in a city — maybe only the 34th largest in America, but a city nonetheless!

There we stayed in what I consider one of America’s truly, fascinatingly generic spaces: a Holiday Inn Express. I’ve only stayed in about a dozen Holiday Inn Expresses in my time, but even that has led me to expect that, when you stand inside one, you stand in no particular neighborhood, no particular city, and indeed no particular country: you stand in a Platonic hotel realm, standardized to perfection. The Holiday Inn Express realizes, to bring it back to A Single Man, George’s vision of America, in which a “hotel room isn’t a room in a hotel, it’s the room, definitively, period. There is only one: The Room. And it’s a symbol — an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like — for our way of life. And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself.”

And so, despite spending two nights in Albuquerque’s Holiday Inn Express, I perhaps spent even less time in Albuquerque than I thought. I often laugh at those New York Times “36 Hours in…” travel guides, but the country-crossing exigencies of this trip put me in a psychological position where I’d kill for 36 hours in one city. But their “36 Hours in Albuquerque” didn’t include what, for me, ranks as a destination of paramount importance: Burt’s Tiki Lounge, which Thrillist’s guide to the tiki bars of America describes as “like stepping into a TGI Friday’s that married a dive bar in Oahu, then wandered off into the desert to raise their weird kids.” Alas, my desperate need for such a dive went unfulfilled; we turned up at 8:30, when every reliable source said they’d open in the evening, but its doors stayed locked, its neon stayed unlit. The on-the-ground impression I take from New Mexico’s largest city thus amounts to not much more than brightly colored freeways and metal sculptures of various desert creatures real and imaginary.

But we got a much more vivid impression from the air by taking the Sandia Peak Tramway, which offers a fifteen-minute ride up a cable to a restaurant from whose vantage you can take in a full nine percent of the state of New Mexico while drinking margaritas. (IF YOU GO, as the travel articles would put it, don’t forget to order them in plastic cups so you can take them out to the deck.) This being the 21st century, a great many of the tram’s riders held their phones to the window as we ascended. I had my camera too, but I couldn’t figure out a non-obvious shot to take, so I just waited until the sun went down and the lights came on, snapping the kind of shot from the tramway’s boarding platform that almost never works. But this time it worked.

The impetus for this road trip across America came from my dad’s move across America, from Huntington Beach to Raleigh. He’s driving the moving truck full of the last load of boxes, furniture, and such, and we’re driving his newly purchased Kia Sorento. I’ll probably have driven more in these two weeks than I’ve driven in the past decade, or than I will drive in the next decade — after this, I won’t want to drive for about a decade — and my perpetual out-of-touchness with the driving experience keeps me astonished whenever I see, much less use, the features built standard into automobiles these days. I mean, you don’t even need keys anymore!

These days, one hears a lot about the approaching debut of self-driving cars on the market, but I sense that non-self-driving cars are themselves asymptotically approaching the condition of the self-driving car. I sense it with special strength while rolling down Interstate 40 at a both climate- and cruise-controlled 85 miles per hour, glancing at the navigation system’s screen every few hours in order to find out where to exit next. When it displays that, it even assembles a reasonable graphical approximation of the scenery outside the windows, images reminiscent of the backgrounds in Sega’s OutRun, the very first video game I ever owned (albeit in a conversion for a Radio Shack PC clone).

I always liked that OutRun‘s creator Yu Suzuki insisted on describing it not as a racing game, but as a “driving game.” Now, 25 years later, it feels like all those hours I spent playing it in the basement have paid off, since the essential tasks of this real-live driving experience differ not at all from those of the driving game: go forward, occasionally choose which way at a fork in the road, get to the next destination on time, and try not to run into other cars. But in real life, I have a much more appealing lady in the passenger’s seat (though the way the Outrun girl would point accusatorially at the driver after each and every crash — or really, the way adults laughed when they saw it — told me all I needed to know about male-female relations in this world), and we passed today not into some pixelated Japanese fantasy of a Californian beach or alpine Mitteleuropa, but Flagstaff, Arizona.

Going to Arizona after a string of sweltering days even in California seems like a bad Idea, I realize, but Flagstaff, due to its high altitude and maybe some other environmental factors I’m not going to look into, gets cold, at least at night. And what better way to pre-emptively warm up than drinks at my coffee cocktail spot of choice in town, the Flagstaff Coffee Company? Actually, it ranks as my coffee cocktail spot of choice in any town, since I’ve never encountered anyplace else that specializes in mixing coffee and alcohol, especially not in at least eighteen different configurations. I went with the classic Irish coffee (which I suppose I could have had in Los Angeles, where we live four miles from The House of Irish Coffee), but Jae got an ideal last-minute suggestion of an off-menu item from some regular sitting nearby that involved matcha, whiskey, and almond milk.

After night fell and the Flagstaff chill set in, we ascended to the Lowell Observatory and saw the city from above as we waited in line to look through the telescope in the 120-year-old observatory building once used by Percival Lowell himself (and now standing mere feet from his mausoleum). One of the complex’s warmer indoor exhibits devoted to Lowell’s life and discoveries displayed an 1883 photo of him in a group of Koreans. “Lowell’s past before becoming an astronomer is also rather interesting, as he lived in in Japan for a number of years in the 1880s and 1890s, before returning home for good in 1893,” writes (past Notebook on Cities and Culture guest) Matt VanVolkenburg. “In 1883 he was invited to accompany Korea’s first trade mission to the US,” on which trip he posed for the picture in question.

“Upon returning to Korea in late 1883, he stayed several months in Korea, where he witnessed the 1884 coup d’etat, which he wrote about in the November 1886 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (which can be found here). He also took a number of photos of Korea at that time, which can be found here (click’ search’). Lowell also published Choson, Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea in 1886, as well as a number of books on Japan, such as The Soul of the Far East and Noto: an Unexplained Corner of Japan.” And so, 7,250 feet above sea level, I seem to have paid inadvertent tribute to one of my predecessors.