rachel and matt’s excellent adventure

i’m back from nebraska! after spending over 20 hours in the car by myself, i pulled into hub-bub, stiff and bleary-eyed, just after 8 p.m. yesterday. the trip was a whirlwind tour of a few of america’s plain states - a lot happened along the way, but here’s the quick and dirty version:

matt and i left south carolina just after 6 a.m. on thursday.

we tried to get pictures of every state line along the way:
north carolina.

tennessee.

in a tunnel, somewhere under tennessee.

kentucky, birthplace of lincoln.

illinois, land of lincoln.

the gateway arch.

missouri.

matt driving a manual transmission after only two days of practice.
.

iowa? (it was too dark to see the signs!)

nebraska?

matt and i finally pulled into nebraska city around 10 p.m. central time.
we i were super exhausted, but relieved to be done driving.

i was able to have a proper reunion with meghan, my best friend,
over breakfast the next morning.

i was also really glad to have an opportunity to see more of meghan’s current work,
which is based in the study of period rooms.

this painting of an ornate covered chair was my favorite.

we went to visit a historical home called ‘wildwood manor,’
the place where meghan had been gathering photos for source material.

meghan with marcella, the 83-year old curator of wildwood manor
who gave us a wonderful and incredibly detailed tour.

she let me play the antique steinway grand piano in the parlor.

and let matt look into a stereopticon.

the next day we went to an awesome nature museum
that depicted most of nebraska’s wildlife in its natural habitat.

the exhibits were amazing.

a weasel perched on a sparkly rock (for you, derya).

we were given another amazing tour of the museum by a man named joe vosges.
not only was joe the founder and curator of the museum
but he had done most of the taxidermy for the exhibits.

Joe is 96 years old but still going like he’s 60!

we met quite a few elderly people while in nebraska city who amazed us with their vitality and mental acuity, traits that can indubitably be attributed to their dedication to the maintenance of various historical projects and foundations.

this was joe’s pet skunk, now a permanent fixture in his museum.

nebraska city was a very small town that i found to be quite endearing in its simplicity.
pretty much everything there was found within a few blocks on central avenue.

the main drag at dusk:

saturday night we went bar hopping, first to a divey joint called ‘the wagon wheel’:

matt sang ‘bad moon rising’ at karaoke.

meghan and i posed by a mural of a woman pickpocket outside of the bar.

then we went down the street to ‘ron’s lunch & drinks,’
an awesome bar with pool and the friendliest bartender i’ve ever met.

i beat matt and he got mad.

we stayed in nebraska city until around 4 p.m. on sunday
and then matt and i drove to his parent’s house in kansas city where i dropped him off.

with the prospect of at least fifteen hours of driving alone ahead of me,
i picked up a headset microphone at best buy and recorded the whole trip on my laptop.

highlights of the audio footage include my first experience at a drive-in restaurant, finding a hole in my pants, sleeping in the backseat of my car at a rest area in illinois and waking up to realize that i was less than one mile from metropolis, the town with the giant superman statue that sufjan stevens sings about on “come on feel the illinoise.”

i ate my mcdonald’s breakfast under the statue.
*note the available telephone booth nearby

as soon as i mail in my fulbright application on thursday, i plan to start editing the 15 hours of audio footage i’ve compiled into a 30-minute piece about me driving halfway across the country alone. you’ll get to hear me yelling impatiently at other drivers, rocking out to all sorts of music, having late-night telephone conversations with friends, expounding on friendship and family, and also a surprising and completely unstaged bit of melodrama that occurred while on the phone with my mother. i’m not at liberty to divulge details just yet, but let’s just say that all those years of wishing for an older sibling might not have been in vain….

anyway, the trip was fast and fun.
i even made it back with a couple of nebraska thrift store souvenirs:

hot damn.

this week i’ve been reading peter streckfus’ book of poetry the cuckoo (gift from meghan), kenneth rexroth’s one hundred more poems from the chinese love and the turning year (gift from matt), as well as mystery and manners, a collection of the prose writings of flannery o’connor. i’ve been listening to elliott smith’s posthumous new moon, talk talk, bedhead, and m. ward.

in other news, one of my poems has been accepted for publication in the portland review! high-fives from anyone in the greater spartanburg area would be much appreciated . . .