MISCELLANY

Driving Home. The good thing about driving home is that it makes explicit the distance between you and Harvard, whatever that distance may be. If you fly home it's possible to maintain the illusion that Harvard and home are only a few hours apart, in spirit and distance as well as time. You go from anonymous airport to plane to airport, with nothing real in between. The traveling is a state of suspension, and one place rubs up against another.

If you drive, you experience directly each mile from here to home, and it makes both clearer if you understand what comes in between. It also takes all the jarring qualities out of the transition. It's something you should do; here are some tips?

Driving South, on the Eastern Seaboard. From here to Washington, D.C. there is one set of driving circumstances, and past Washington there is another. At first there are a lot of tolls and cities and tricky interchanges, and you have to be on your toes. From here to New York, it's all pretty familiar: Mass Pike, through the middle of Connecticut, New Haven, Bridgeport, the Bronx. Northern Connecticut is the prettiest part; the Connecticut coast is old and industrial. Outside of New York City you pass what must be the world's biggest cemetery and a White Castle where they sell silver-dollar-size hamburgers for fifteen cents each. The traffic is bad and the view uninspiring on the George Washington Bridge, and I wouldn't give you much for Northern New Jersey, which smells bad. The only things about the Jersey Turnpike that are worthwhile, in fact, are that it has a truck lane and a car lane (which must be some sort of ultimate triumph of highway social engineering) and that its rest stops are named after famous New Jersey residents Vince Lombardi in Hackensack Meadow, with Vince's football trophies in a display case in the lobby, Joyce Kilmer, Molly Pritcher, Walt Whitman, et al.)

Something clearly happens around the middle of Jersey. There are farms and things, cows, barns, fields, things like that. Philadelphia beckons from the west. New Jersey gives way to Delaware for a few miles, and then Maryland, the prettiest stretch on all of 1-95. If you've left early in the morning it will be just getting on toward dusk by the time you hit Maryland, and the Susquehanna River is lovely and smoky. Hills nonchalantly verge off into farms and thick woods. The land doesn't look patched together, but of a piece.

There are crucial decision to be made, take the beltways around Baltimore and Washington, or leave the world of Interstate unreality and drive through. Baltimore is a nice, old, evocative prot city where the best thing to do is eat crabs, either by the docks or a Paolino's in Highlandtown. Washington is fun to drive through at night because all the landmarks, which actually exist, are all lit up, no doubt at great expense to the taxpayers.

The way you can tell you're in the South, cruising along 1-95 after Washington, is that everyone you meet-gas station attendants, waitresses--has a Southern accent. At first, particularly in Virginia, the South is very ostentatious about itself, too self-consciously Southern. The roadside restaurants are packaged but named after Aunt Emmy or somebody, and they sell Robert E. Lee postcards in gas stations.

The distances between cities become greater, too, in Virginia, and it's possible to engage in elaborate highway strategy aimed at avoiding speeding tickets. A friend of mine subscribes to the Radar Screen theory, which says that police radar machines can't detect a smallish car if it's near a big truck. My friend finds trucks that are going fast, and follows them close begind for hundreds of miles. There are disadvantages to this close behind a truck, you get spewed by exhaust and can't see the road ahead, and for me it's too much of a price to pay.

I personally believe that the way to avoid tickets is to find a car with a citizen's band radio. You can tell by the extra-long antenna, and it means that the driver is in constant touch with a network of truckers and others who know where the cops are. I drove behind a car like this for three states over the summer. The guy would slow down, seemingly inexplicably, every now and then, and sure enough, a few miles on, we would pass a waiting state police car.

After Virginia and a little bit of North Carolina, anyway, you're in the Deep South, where the woods and farms look a little more gagged than before. You can stop at the cigarette factories in Durham for entertainment, and pick up your free pack of cigarettes, or drive off the Interstate and check out small-town grocery stores for local color. There are great peach stands in Georgia, and a huge amusement park outside Atlanta, a city that has resolved its existential dilemmas through relentless financial growth and self-promotion. Everyone in Atlanta is happy and young, pink-cheeked and double-knitted, a little overweight. You are reaching the outer limits of the Harvard-Eastern sphere of influence. You are entering Alabama. Your 1-95 days have come to an end.

There are two routes through Alabama, one through Montgomery and Mobile and the other through Birmingham. The second is better, for what it holds in store later; the first forces you through a great deal of time in Alabama, a state where there isn't much in the way of variety. Mississippi, though, is a different story, and if you take the Birmingham route you'll pass through its entire lower half. It's near-wilderness in a lot of places. There's no traffic, and you can go as fast as you want. Walker Percy called Mississippi a paradise, and he was right; it's the best place on the route for perfect highway buzz, cruising along, alone, the land stretching out before you, feeling completely in control of your whereabouts and direction.

Eventually the hills fade and the woods become piney, and you can tell you're near the Gulf of Mexico when the cumulus clouds start to pile up on horizon. The Gulf Coast is part desolate and soulless tourist strip, cheap motels and nightclubs where groups like Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts play, and part fishing villages and marsh and swamp. The swamps give way to Lake Pont-chartrain presently, and the Louisiana Superdome starts to loom on the horizon. Beyond the Mississipi and the alluvial silt of the Coast, Houston beckons.

Driving to Rochester. Flying down Interstate 90, which goes through upstate New York, a snip of Pennsylvania near Erie, Cleveland and Ohio, Indiana to Gary, where it runs next to the U.S. Steel Works, on past Chicago, veering north-west to the enclave of Madison, Wisconsin, crossing the Mississippi near Dubuque into the boring farmland of southern Minnesota, where Hubert Humphrey was born among grain elevators seen from miles away and welcoming like a pleasure ship to life-raft drifters (not like lush Iowa to the south) into South Dakota, the Badlands and Wall Drug and the Black Hills, a bit of Wyoming and up into shy-range country at Montana, through Idaho and Washington to Seattle the road continues this way, but before Rochester the biggest thrill is crossing the border into New York State. Then you know you're going home. Not that any sudden rush of sentimental elation sweeps over the resident of western New York at the tollbooth, but it's just different, immediately, for Massachusetts has a tidy feeling all its own that can make the Berkshires seem like Cambridge disguised in trees. The BMW's and Connecticut plates of college kids, the Judy-Collins-hip radio station in Pittsfield that you can get from the Pike in Massachusetts, ever since Dukakis supposedly cracked down on speeding violations, even the cops seem to drive estate wagons. Things are hidden from the Mass Pike, nicely shrubberied away, but upper New York is up front mobile homes on concrete blocks, set alone, and the decaying industrial cities like Amsterdam on the Mohawk River, where the carpet factory that bred the place is definitely not taking care of its own anymore, which shows. Outside of these towns like Herkimer and Fultonville sit grand junction-type Dutch mansions, propped-up and naked-looking, simple and sensible roosts for burghers long dead, and often no one lives in them anymore. And Canajahorie, where Mary Ann Krupsak comes from, where three toy factories line up in a row Beechnut Gum, Beechnut Lifesavers, Beechnut Baby Food. This town, too, is tired and rickety. No one gets off there, and it seems like all the young people have moved out. This is beautiful country, up to Herkimer, anyway, where things flatten out and get boring near Utica and Rome. West toward Syracuse, still boring, which is hard to understand when ten and twenty miles to the south the apple orchards and Finger Lakes and Ithaca and now, a lot of condiminiums are incredibly more interesting. Past Electronics Park at Syracuse, which is a behemoth, GE's big plant, along with Schenectady, and also a Chrysler factory, and thousands of cluttered plots of working homes. Farm country from there to Rochester, and with luck it's dark by then, and you don't have to see the farm on the right where the huge painted yellow smile button pollutes the side of a silo for people to point to and pass ten seconds interacting about whooshing east and west all year every single solitary day.

Things are open and exposed, somehow, and with no ivy or bricked streets you feel more vulnerable, look in the rear-view mirror for the old Attica boys tooling down the highway with the trusty thirty-odd-six strapped to the dashboard. Vicious radar traps; Rocky's drug laws, which are easy to forget if you've been sitting in the suburbs for a while, but on the thruway you pass Albany, and in the distance looms the series of edifices that the ex-governor built with Speer-like glee before he left office, a sop to his ego and construction-industry friends. They are buildings that will still be here when the world ends, inhuman enough for the J. Edgar Hoover Center in Washington to look like a Taos adobe beside them. With that, on a cold day when the windows are bubbled shut tight, and the army convoys from Camp Drum are holding up traffic way ahead at Troy, and the Savarin coffee tastes like boiled muzak, and you don't leave the highway once for eight hours...it feels good to get home.