Cinemerica — The lines we draw and the spaces in between

In July of 2015, I was sitting at my desk job counting all the reasons I didn’t want to be where I was. I looked at a map for the one place I had always dreamed of going, the place that felt farthest away from Chicagoland — California. 

In five days, I’d managed to go to a place that was at once familiar and yet completely distant from anything I’d ever seen before in my humble, Midwest home, and yet they both feel as American as any place I’d ever been. How could I share a national identity with a place that maintained a different culture, fostered a different economy, and tucked itself into a geography worlds apart?

I started to ask questions about what this thing we call “America” is… about what kind of nation could contain these fundamental differences... how every kid born on the same day as me in California looks outside and calls it the same thing I do: America. I looked at a map of the United States and realized I’d only been to five of them. I saw nearly four million square miles of land, 99.9% of it as foreign to me as the next continent. Like John Steinbeck, “I discovered that I did not know my own country. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and the trees and the sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light.”

So began a quest, camera in hand, to find out what this place is that we call “America” — not the global media machine, or the diplomatic super power, but the collection of metropolitan areas, states, and regions on the map that tries to use the same name for “home.” That quest continues to this day, as I make my way through new cities that are compressing and rewiring their cultural DNA in pursuit of progress, while the many lingering frontier lands use their resistance to change to preserve where we’ve been.

50 states, over 40 national parks, and nearly 100 Airbnbs later, it was at the intersections of nature and culture that I realized what makes America most special, and why empathy is the most essential force we can strive for: Our Union is defined by its differences. I’ve learned that all it takes is a little traveling, even seemingly unambitious domestic travel, to realize that nurture made a deal with nature a long time ago, that the thing you call “you” is defined so immensely by your relationship to the place you’re in. These many territories we have drawn our lines around masquerade as many “Americas.” Everywhere you go, you can hear from people doing their best, people who will welcome into their home people they don’t know, people thinking about going somewhere else, traveling as much as you, if only in their mind.

Great Lakes. Mississippi River. Great Plains. Mountain West. Alaska. Pacific Northwest. California Coast. Desert Southwest. Pacific Empire. Gulf Coast. Spanish Caribbean. Deep South. Appalachia. Mid-Atlantic. New England.

The Second City rose to prominence as an intersection point. Its existence at the meeting point of lake, river, and sweeping farmland echoes its epic expansion of rail systems, its contribution to America’s longest interstate, its two international airports. I grew up in its farthest reaches, a small-town of hundred thousand, named after Scottish folks songs and remembered for its Mexican food, sharing claim over hundreds of acres of farmland opposite a 14-story building and a riverboat casino. The waters that gave Chicagoland its might are the importers of that intersectionality. The Great Lakes' culture is soaked with the Yankee heritage of its cultural ancestors — Puritan settlers established Yankeedom in the coastlands of New England, extending outward to western reaches of the Great Lakes.

Acres of farmland sneak through meccas of Suburbia, thick forest enclaves, and baking sand dunes to get to what seem like endless bodies of water, in a geography conveniently similar to the farmland and coastal havens of the northeast. Seasons dominate the land of lakes like an ancient deity — summer comes heralded like the end of a an epic ice age, before slipping quickly into a white cold that resembles the Canuck provinces that share the fresh water shores.

Many of the urban centers that fueled America’s rise to superpower status are dotting the coasts of these freshwater seas. Now, rust-covered underdog cities like Gary IN, Cleveland OH, Detroit MI, Duluth MN, and Chicago’s South Side are left to work through what the future of post-industrialized life looks like for their melting-pot populations, while boat-trafficked vacation destinations like Grand Marais MN, Door County WI, and Traverse City MI create an escape for work-worn suburbanites. Both manage to feel like home.

God bless America’s heartland… Where you can still drive straight for a hundred miles with nothing but golden fields on each side of you. I learned quickly that the land inside the state lines of places like Nebraska may be “fly-over”, but its people are anything but — a few minutes after locking myself out of that night’s lodging, a woman I met a few days before gave me a trip to Wal-Mart for clothes the next day and a couch to sleep on. I made the pilgrimage to its mecca, the Iowa State Fair, the pride of so many people whose lives are built and broken by the gifts and the curses of the cropland. I shielded my eyes from the sun radiating off the hoods of cars in the parking lot of the gas-station-diner-hybrid in Arcadia OK.

Western explorers may have razed much the frontier spirit of these lands, but the sense of community that comes from wide open space has largely been preserved. Plains Indians still stand tall alongside rural White America in deeply spiritual lands like the Black Hills, the Badlands, and the Osage Reservation. The feeling of small-town America has never been more alive than on the Main Streets of Howard KS, and Custer SD, its spirit exported by the truck beds out of America’s Largest Truck Stop along the pivotal I80 to the coastal metropolises than depend on them.

Long have the Rocky Mountains loomed as the arch enemy of the colonial East’s attempts to “manifest its destiny.” To live among them is to live a life of extremity… peaks to summit, walls to climb, valleys to trek. It’s where America invented the idea of a “national park” inside the wildest place in the Lower 48, where cowboy boots are used to press the gas pedal of blue Porsches. It’s where John Muir immortalized granite peaks and ancient trees in valleys older than man itself. It’s where a kid from the flat outskirts of Chicagland dreamt of fantastic lines that rose above the horizon line. All that we fight over disappears in the shade of a Redwood and a Sequoia that seems to reach high enough to touch the sky.

Creative souls find their refuge in Colorado’s Boulder and Golden, the Big Sky Country outside Bozeman MT, the designer stores lining the streets of Jackson WY. I got some of my best lessons on existentialism from homeless artists in Boulder CO, a lesson on storytelling and free margarita from a designer-turned-bartender in Denver CO, a lesson on community and “Trump’s America” at the town rodeo in Bridgeport, CA.

I thought I’d learn about the soul of the Rockies, about the way the spine of America had gripped the soul of so many restless hearts the way it gripped my untested Illinoisan one, from paddle-boarding in Evergreen CO, from camping in Flathead National Forest, from sunsets casting their golden glow over titans like the Tetons and the Sierras. I found mountains to be sure, but the way they’ve moved people didn’t become real to me until I was graced with two hours of conversation on the midnight bus from Denver to Boulder, a veteran struggling with homelessness but not with heart, having no problem lending his only five dollars to a kid he didn’t know, a kindness that kindled a respect between strangers in a 7/11 parking lot surrounded by trust-fund hippies.

I felt the spirit of Alaska when I felt the body of the six-seat prop plane descend into the crystal blue water of Lark Clark. Like most of the best parks of Alaska, it’s a place you can’t get to by car or boat, where the only ones to greet you side from the occasional federal ranger are a few hundred grizzly bears and a territorial bull moose.

Ask someone how they found themselves in a place as far off as Gustavus or Talkeetna and you’ll hear stories about passing through for some seasonal work, about running away from the pace of life in the Lower 48, about having always been there — a descendent of the powerful First Nation tribes of people that opened up the continent for the rest of us.

Anchorage does its best at pretending its a convenient extension of Cascadia and Rocky Mountain sensibility — a delicate blanket of domesticity to mask the roar of life echoing through the infinite woodlands of North America’s greatest beats, highest peaks, and freshest waters. I went to Alaska to become reacquainted with a long-lost relative: the riches of Mother Earth, free from the grips of man. In that pursuit, I was far from alone.

America’s “Left Coast” is a place at peace with an omni-present grey, a patience I mistook at first for aloofness. America’s most wayward children went as far west as they could, until they reached the mystic fog of the north Pacific. It’s a waywardness I shared with them, passing through the urban gateways of Portland and Seattle to endless, lush wilderness… but a waywardness shared by the rampant homelessness that seek the cities’ temperate air. The mariner spirit boldly ignores state lines — outside of docks at Seattle themselves, it felt most pronounced in the unsung Californian towns of Mendocino and Crescent City. It’s a land built on harbors in line to chart westward off what for thousands of years was the edge of the Earth. Thousands of miles of ocean can’t shake off the passing similarities that the Space Needle and Mt. Rainier give Seattle with its latitudinal neighbor Japan. Rushing water runs through every empty space, creating towns not build alongside nature, but inside of it.

If you had to pick one place pressed most intently into imaginations of post-20th century kids, it’d be California. Not the Sierras, or the Redwoods, or the Mojave, though they certainly get their chance to enchant millions. No, when young kids in post-industrial suburbs look outside their car windows and imagine “anywhere but here”, what they’re really imagining is the sun-soaked beaches of America’s most salient state. Its golden glow hit me from a few thousand miles away.

The lands named for saints and angels have not so ironically become the cultural printing press for our national obsessions — what we watch, listen to, play, wear, and idealize. The Californian megalopolis has cornered the market on the American Dream. Transplants flood the state for beautiful people, the warmest weather, lavish homes, the best wine, the newest tech, the grandest beaches, and an illusory chance at the greatest fame. It’s easy to rest on this and miss everyone else left with the American nightmares — impoverished ghettos, raging forest fires, radical housing inflation, disappearing aquifers, and rampant homelessness. Where the ocean meets the desert, so too have America’s visions of utopia and dystopia wrestle for ground: For every Santa Monica, there’s a Compton; for every Monterey, an Oakland; for every La Jolla, a Tijuana.

If water is the source of all life, then the desert presents itself to me as life turned upside-down. In America’s most extreme worlds, those that resemble Mars more than Earth, only the most distinctive forms of life survive, individual and cultural — life or death separated by a prismatic horizon. The saguaro cacti, stalking vultures, and radiant-red buttes have enshrined the sun-soaked cowboy as our most enduring national icon. The Southwest’s ferocious Mojave, Sonora, and Chihuahua deserts mark the final tests for the millions of Hispanic migrants brave enough to trek them… the same people who brought life to my eyes in search for the warm embrace of Mexican food after challenging the desert across Death Valley, White Sands, and Big Bend.

The desert is where America’s most ardent seekers of refuge have finally found relief from the cultural rigidity of the East. I couldn’t shake the feeling of self-made sovereignty when I witnessed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, or when I dined among the Navajo of Oljato-Monument Valley, or when debating the essence of masculinity to a young Republican retreated among the snow-covered hoodoos of Southern Utah.

While the oases like the Coachella Valley, the Vegas Strip, or Sedona’s Red Rocks may be the destination for a few, many more find the desert to be their launch point — into the valley of a million-year-old canyon, or into the psychic plane of a peyote vision, or on the back of a Virgin Galactic-funded rocket carrying on the search for far-away worlds not unlike the rocky extremes they left behind.

America is a world of many worlds, and no lands exemplify that better than the nation's most remote holdings far off in the Pacific. Hawai’i, called "America's most exotic outpost" by Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, may be the country's newest state, but its ground was first explored by some of the world’s oldest populations. Islands this size have a very present relationship with change — I watched molten lava pour into the ocean and form Earth’s newest land a few miles from where we’d celebrate the resilient independence of the indigenous “Kingdom of Hawai’i” at the Kalapana Night Market.

Hawai’i as a world within worlds is more than just metaphor — its eponymous Big Island alone is famous for containing 10 of the world’s 14 unique Köppen climate zones. On just over 4,000 square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a microcosm of Earth’s different climates persists. When the whole world can be spanned in a two-hour drive, road-tripping felt like an act of teleportation. In 24 hours, we walked along the white-sand beaches and fell asleep on black sand beaches, hiked across cracking volcanic rock and snorkeled through neighborhood tide pools, at breakfast in the glow of the sun and shared chocolate under the light of the stars.

When I remember the coast-lands of the Gulf of Mexico, the word that sticks in my head is “brackish”. Not just for what it is, that estuary-zone where salt water and fresh water blend, but for how emblematic the word seems to for the area itself. It looks perfectly like English, but doesn’t quite sound like anything you’ve ever heard. It may have once been an adjective, but local flair has turned it into a noun. Even just saying it feels harsh, like something you can learn to respect without being to comfortable with.

That natural estuary well-mirrors the cultural one, thanks to the colonial activity of the Gulf ports having created the present swirl of English, French, Spanish, West African, and Native American flair. The culture of places like New Orleans and Siesta Key are too cosmopolitan to be Southern, but too Southern to feel as foreign as Miami. It’s at once an escape for snowbird retirees like my grandparents, state-school spring-breakers, and rampant bachelorette parties, as it is the home of the Everglades, America’s very own slide of Australian-style natural hostility complete with gators, panthers, pythons, and a thousand other ways to die.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing American history as one of English colonization. It’s what they taught me. Doing so makes it easy to forget that Imperial Spain laid claim to more land and people in the “New World” than every other European power combined. Nearly 75% of the Hemisphere we call “the Americas” speaks in Spanish tongues.

Where in the Rio Grande Valley I found armed guards and border fences, our country’s best attempt at shielding the nation from Latin Heritage, in the Caribbean I’ve found the great monetization of Meso-America. Some of Earth’s bluest waters lure beach-bounded travelers to vacation outposts within barely foreign places like Cancun MEX and the Bahamas, territorial holdings like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and even pieces of homeland like Miami and Key West, FL, where waking up to a Cuban grandmother who spoke no English cooking me breakfast at 5am felt closer to America’s island neighborhoods than the continental empire alongside them.

If the idea of “place” can be defined by the give and take between nature and culture, then the American South is our strongest example of what happens with culture rigs the game. Hundreds of years of leveling forests and fields at the ends of a workforce in bondage has created a land dominated by its history.

For people like me born outside of the South, it’s near impossible to travel through it without the coloring filter of its past. To move through it is to exist in one world living on top of, alongside, in shadow of another, waiting to be found if you’re brave or naive enough to go find it, like a traveling German businessman that I befriended found when we took the red-eye Greyhound bus through the south to Mobile, AL en route to New Orleans, where every passenger except the two of us were black. The almost European richness of coastal bell-cities like Charleston SC and Savannah GA have made idyllic squares of color and cobblestone on top of the mass graves of witches and slaves.

America’s blackest city, which has helped define the culture for an entire generation, feels like an urban island in a tense sea of gun stores and Confederate monuments. Seeking out the finest bourbon in the land requires stopping at four-way intersections in towns that don’t sell liquor on Sundays. I felt a near-equal spiritual weight between the many baptist churches as I did the near-as-popular Waffle House.

Long before America had a “west” to claim it found the endge of the world in the highlands of the Appalachian Mountains and its many splintering tributaries. It’s the home of America’s original outlaws, a slide of freedom carved out by the poorest of British Isle refugees and Native American that comprised the ultimate counter-force to the country’s Victorian heritage, made real in the form of places like Kentucky and West Virginia.

I learned that the Fourth of July celebration in Potter County PA rages on just as hard as it did in the Midwest, but that fireworks had to share the spotlight with the fire department, the local high school football team, and the NRA. The people of places like the Blue Ridge, the Smokies, and the Alleghany Plateau have created a home for some of its most fringe (and easily most fun) obsessions, from backyard shooting ranges, hand-carved ATV courses, and mind-erasing moonshine distilleries.

If the idea of an “America” can be said to have been invented, it was done in the coastal string of great American urban corridor between Boston and Washington, and encoded into the DNA of cities whose collective and connected metropolitan areas are home to one of every ten citizens of the United States.

It was here I found the ideas used to decorate and propagate the American mythos enshrined not in the land itself, but in the colonnades and steel beams… urban playgrounds made just impermanent enough to let its populous experiment with America’s most progressive ideals: Massive public spaces like the DC’s National Mall and NY’s Central Park built for any and all to pursue retreat or reform; the campuses of our grandest educational pursuits in NJ’s Princeton and Connecticut’s Yale and the idealization of learning they’ve created; a fierce social sector like that in Baltimore driving a civic renaissance that’s rebuilding communities on behalf of people of color; extending the ideals of preservation beyond the natural and into the cultural, including Philadelphia’s over 67 national historic landmarks.

New York, America’s longest standing player on the international stage, and in many respects still its social and economic heartbeat, feels like a microcosm of the multi-cultural energy that helped a fledgling group of industrializing Atlantic cities become a super power. Where all roads once led to roam, now roads, trains, planes, and waterways pour citizens of the world into its islands and coast-lands that resemble next to zero of the natural world taken from the Lenape peoples, replacing it with a virtual republic of neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves that mirrors less the country than it does the world.