Where are we going Walt Whitman? / The doors close in an hour / Which way does your beard point?"" —Allen Ginsberg, ""A Supermarket in California.""
I think often of getting on a plane and going to some place that would require stumbling through a great deal of difficult pronunciations and lots of vaccinations. We all get tired of cramped bedrooms, semi-awkward party experiences and Helen C. White.
Fortunately, when you're young, there are still a hoard of grownups willing to finance and facilitate your travels, particularly if they are of the educational variety. You can put your college job on hold and find someone to water your plants. You can choose to live off stolen foreign produce in a godforsaken apartment because it's charming, rather than out of necessity. Most likely, you'll come back cultured, and in one piece.
Yet, I think Frank Setterberg in his book ""The Roads Taken: Travels Through America's Literary Landscapes"" may have it right when he comments on traveling abroad via the quintessential American traveler/author, Jack Kerouac. Setterberg writes, ""Kerouac was like a lost waif overseas; he was forced to declare himself indelibly, pugnaciously American.""
I think, for young Americans, discovering a desire to wander your own country can be comparable to figuring out you're kind of friends with your parents after years of trying to be as independent as possible. As often as we tend to rebel against tradition in our youth, as we gather experience, we seek comfort in heritage, in common blood.
Identifying yourself as an American can go beyond taking awkward pictures at the Grand Canyon. Hipster hero Chuck Klosterman recently published ""Killing Yourself to Live,"" a novel that, beyond his quirky, insecure prose about girls and bars, is a kind of cross-country quest to merge the aesthetic importance of American music with its physical landscapes.
My own father, in college, often hitchhiked down sweaty, southern highways to see bands like the Allman Brothers for one night. Klosterman's quest is noble and not beyond the average disgruntled youth, or to be more specific, the average literatus.
The American novels that succeed in seducing our imaginations rarely do it purely through identifications with characters. The descriptions of cities and places like Cannery Row or Harlem sometimes fascinate me more than fictional humans.
There is also the presence of the author. Throughout the United States are the decaying childhood homes and cheap rooms where books, poetry and plays were written. Seeing the physical place where a story takes place or where an author lived is going to give the reader an understanding that reading the text three more times is never going to achieve.
So, if you love Elvis, get to Graceland. If you love Henry David Thoreau, go see Walden Pond. It will require some grit and lots of coffee, but I want to believe such an excursion could be a lot more rewarding and purposeful than a Spring Break trip to [insert tropical location]. You should at least come back with memory intact about where that tattoo/piercing came from.
