Samaritans?

Kwame, I swear your life is just cooler than other people's. There you are, crisscrossing the landscape, being rescued and inspired by benevolent strangers, ruminating on the ultimate rightness of the world.
My experience on America's byways has been exactly the opposite.
I've traveled cross country a couple of times n my life--Boston to L..A., Chicago to San Francisco. I'll admit these sojourns involved a certain level of naivety on my part.
The first time at least, I fully expected that America would be the America of glittering rivers, sweeping sands and awe-inducing forests. I wanted to shake hands with every John and Judy Q. Public on Main Street USA. I planned to do all the touristy stuff--the stuff most of us make fun of but wish we'd seen--the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, Tombstone, Cooperstown, the Golden Gate Bridge, the World's Largest Skillet. (NOTE: If you've got a hankering to see said skillet--and who doesn't--it will be frying up a mess o' poultry--not 10,000 pieces at a time, but almost--at the 2007 World Chicken Festival, September in London, KY. Sadly, I'll be somewhere--anywhere--else.)
In short, I intended to wallow in the heartland, for once to be fully American (I know, I know, just stay with me here). The heartland, however, had other ideas.

First of all, I wish I'd known that black folks don't travel like other folks. We're not hopping into our RVs and meandering down the interstates with our faces pressed against the windows. There's no star-spangled theme music tinkling in the backdrop. We get on planes, get off, see what we've got to see, get back onto planes, and go home. I did not know this.
My first sense of displacement, my first inkling that the heartland wasn't exactly thrilled to see me, came in the teeny hamlet of Elk City, Oklahoma. Elk City is one of those places with a town tumbleweed and scores of grizzled Marlboro Men with big hats dipped over their eyes and cattle-wranglin' ropes wrapped around their upper arms. I sauntered into a diner for a quick bite, primed to chat with the locals and learn a thing or two about that part of the world. But instead...
...everything stopped. Forks froze in midair. A droplet of sweat from the fry cook's brow paused on its way to the griddle. Diners, their mouths flapped open, were motionless over their gravy-drenched entrees. Even the clock stopped.
When the spell was broken (every single person in the diner watched as I walked to a table, as if they expected me to revert to all fours), no one gestured, spoke, nodded hello or turned their eyes away. They stared the whole time--to see if I knew how to use a knife and fork, to see if I knew how to pronounce two-syllable words, to see if I grunted after dining and wiped my mouth with my foot.
After that experience, I tried not to get hungry.
Then there was the time I stopped in Utah to get gas. I begged my car not to need gas in Utah. I was perfectly fine riding along, gaping at unaccustomed beauty--it was just when I had to deal with humankind that trouble began. So I pull into some little hamlet, some teeny dustbowl that had borrowed Elk City's tumbleweed for the day, and the gas station proprietor--after picking his jaw up from the pavement--told me to hold on for a minute and promptly got on the telephone.
What he was doing, kiddies, was calling the entire citizenry to "come down and look at it." Figures popped up in windows, pickup trucks idled by, tow-headed kids showed up armed with refreshments. I was the whole world's official minority, and I was in their town, for one day only!
This would have been utterly hilarious, if not for one thing. There was only one road leading out of this town--one of those isolated, white-lined escape routes you see in the movies, with wavy lines dancing up from the sizzling asphalt--and I was headed that way. If one of the mesmerized townfolk decided that it would be fun to take apart a black person to see what made it walk and talk, I was toast. I'd be followed into the sunset and promptly "disappeared."
Then there was Carlin, Nevada. The tumbleweed beat me there by about five minutes. Thirsty damn car needed gas again. Beneath one of those black starless nights was this little station in the middle of nowhere with one woman working inside. Over her head hung a wanted poster seeking information about the murderer of the woman who had worked there before her. The poster was yellowed and curling at the edges, indicating that the trail had gone cold long before. I imagined what it was like to be there, night after night, alone, with only that poster--complete with an eerie photo of the dead girl--to keep her company.
It was one of the saddest things I had ever seen.
So Carlin, Nevada, and that wanted poster, worked their way into a poem. I've got another poem about watching the Indy 500 on a little black and white television in a restaurant in Advance, Ind. But I wasn't officially a poet at the time of my travels--at least I hadn't yet realized that I'd been a poet all along--so I've lost lots of detail and any sense of immediacy. It's been years since my last trip, but even with a poet's eye, processing has been maddeningly slow. I was pretty disappointed in America. Like I said before, naivety.
In fact, I can't recall one kind word between coasts. Lots of curiosity, but no genuine friendliness. I would have loved to depend on the kindness of strangers, but the strangers I encountered weren't kind. They were just strange.
This too is how a poet collects images. I faced the extraordinary--the heartland I was warned about, the one I quietly suspected but didn't want to see--and desperately wished it ordinary, as I felt life should be. I wish I could do it all over again, the long hours of nothing but road punctuated by real, in-your-face humans. I wish I could arm myself with a notebook and shed expectations and confront this country as a writer and not a wide-eyed, clueless charter member of Up With People.
Maybe it's not too late. Anyone up for a road trip?