95 South:
Eventually, the skyline turns from gray to green, with trees instead of telephone poles and hills instead of hotels on either side. On the tops of these hills, in between the forest and the freeway, the animals stood around, detached and mostly disinterested. Not quite believing what they looked down upon, they wryly observed the random madness rushing past. Instinctively, it seemed, most of them kept a safe distance, not wanting to partake in or become a part of the carnage of the twentieth century as it cruised by.
And then you slowly enter the South. Everything gets a little heavier: the scenery, the air, and the nonexistent breeze in the late afternoon of an unseasonably warm May. It’s not unlike the languid buzz bourbon delivers: you taste it and sense what is coming, and the deeper you go, the more intimate and intense it all becomes, and before you know it, you are exactly where you set out to be, whether or not you ever intended to get there.
The first thing you notice is the green. The trees, an impervious halo, hover around the highway. Suddenly, somehow, everything is green, greener than anything you’ve ever seen, so green it’s arresting and almost unreal to actually behold. You cannot believe how green it is: at some point it compels you to consider that for all the billions of trees we’ve butchered, it is extraordinary in its own marginal way how they have managed to remain relatively plentiful. It’s almost impossible to imagine how things used to look, in the days before before Cortez and Custer did their manifestly destined duties that are well-documented in textbooks made from the paper made from the trees they helped tear down.
And then a minor sort of miracle occurs as Maryland, without warning, becomes Virginia. Trees, with roots and branches extending into either state, stand at attention, hoping never to choose sides if brothers take up arms against one another for a second time.
Northern Virginia is an anomaly, it is neither here nor there; it is the gateway to the real south. The Washington Metropolitan Area is, in many ways, a bulwark against identity, a sort of spurious, neutral ground between North and South, Mason-Dixon Line be damned. Everyone to the north of northern Virginia correctly considers it the South; everyone south of Northern Virginia feels, not infeasibly, that it is the North.
You are nowhere near Faulkner country yet, but you are also, already, half a world away from Cheever’s concrete commotion, from Whitman’s lazy leaves of grass, from Updike’s arrogant New England imbroglio. When you open your eyes, you are somewhere else, staring expressively at the world around you, at the verdant trees looming overhead, at the inestimable expanse of lucid skies that stretch up and away. You see different colors, fully flowering in their fleet glory: the air has changed from salt to soot and again to honeysuckle, the taste of almond—the bounty of Spring—is on your tongue. You hear strange birds calling, and somehow you can understand this other language, words welcoming you into another world, words that welcome you home.
*excerpt from The American Dream of Don Giovanni
