Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...urge to get out and be real, I had hoped driving across country would bring me back to the genuine article, Tom Wolfe's Right Stuff, the American Dream. Instead I found myself trapped in Freddy Silverman's fantasy, riding I-70 out of the mountains into the Utah desert...
...hundred other western towns, stretched like rags on a clothesline down five or six miles of four-lane mainstreet, motels and chain store steak restaurants dangling off the side, was the journey's nadir. Planted in the middle of nowhere--away from the mountains, on the edge of the desert--its only excuse was the conflation of the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers. Like my automobile, the town itself is an escape hatch. Nothing strange penetrates past the jacked-up cars in which everyone cruises...
...break came shortly thereafter. Even from within the car the world pressed in. There was nothing around me. No towns, no houses, no power lines--nothing blocked out the desert and sky but the edge of the road, the broken glass in the run-offs. It wasn't the American Dream, but it was an acceptable substitute: the random and the strange. Driving down 70 could not fit anymore into my easy categories--the images flowing past my windshield demanded my attention. The television mode with its comforting torpor collapsed in the face of scenes no screen could capture...
...carried water to the injured, and in moments of respite, watched the skilled hover about the wounded. As the land had done on the road up to this point, the world of men crashed through the insulation. Away from the car, I walked up and down in the noonday desert heat, sickening at the sounds of pain, and straining as I joined the crowd cleaning up the refuse...
...this time the network control couldn't reestablish itself. It may not have been the American Dream, but what I had seen was definitely the genuine article. When I left the car in the desert, the moving picture screen lost its hold over me. Even the sight of Reno couldn't stifle my lately restored ability to see what passes for the real world...