52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 3: America

In Which I Get To Live Out The Dreams Of My Childhood, And Wonder About Where It’s All Headed

“I knew you were going to have trouble making friends, so I needed to get you to like sports.”

That was the start of the story my mom liked to tell, about trying to get an awkward and precociously nerdy 7-year-old with a speech impediment a little more comfortable around people.

In her mind, it would be easier for me to make friends if I was into sports as much as I was into reciting facts from the 1993 World Almanac to strangers (fact check: true), but she needed to find a spark to light that interest.

“You loved numbers, so I decided to put the statistics page from the newspaper’s sports section in front of you at breakfast.”

It seems horribly old-fashioned now, but 30 years ago every newspaper was a) physically delivered to a household, b) had an entire page devoted to a statistical breakdown of every major North American sport that was played the night before.

It was a puzzle for me to sort out, and the greatest puzzle to sort out was baseball: the box score, the stat lines for hitters and pitchers, and standings page; all with their own patterns to figure out, all revealing different facets of the game.

Baseball was the first sport I loved and the first sport I played. Reading those box scores in the newspaper was probably the first step in the career I have today.

In America this trip, I got to watch two Major League Baseball games and step on the hallowed grounds of Wrigley Field.

Travelling to the United States of America was fundamentally different than every other place  I’ll be visiting in this journey.

To start with, it’s the first foreign leg of my adventure, in a portion of the trip where I’m still getting my travel legs, both figuratively and literally.

More importantly, it’s a place I deeply know already.

Part of that comes from visiting it probably 10-15 times over the years (which is 10-15 times more than any other country in this trip), from weekend explorations of the Pacific Northwest to larger vacations to bigger cities.

But part of it comes from the ties Canada and the United States have — culturally, economically, geographically — that imprint deeply into our bones, while leaving only a tiny scratch mark on Americans.

All of which is to say that my purpose for this leg of the trip was unique, especially when you consider the logistical challenges of trying to fit such a massive country into 17 days.

I could have tried to get a different experience from previous trips, seeing new things and trying to have new insights. In that scenario (which I did consider for a bit!), I would have gone to Atlanta and Austin, New Orleans and Nashville, travelling through the southern heartland and having Big Americana thoughts about a divided country.

That’s not what happened.   

Instead, it was a pilgrimage to places and people and experiences that have deeply shaped me.

Here are some of them.

“You swing a golf club like Opa.”

From baseball, my love for sports exploded. Baseball led to hockey, hockey led to basketball, and basketball led whatever was on TSN at 8am on a Saturday morning when I could wrest control of the TV from my brother.

I played plenty of sports and enjoyed them, but it’s not as though I was, you know, good: nimble hand-eye coordination and quickly picking up non-verbal cues of teammates and opponents in real time are not exactly strengths.

Golf was different.

Coordination was a challenge, yet in golf I could work on repeating the same type of movement again and again, modifying it one way or another depending on the shot. There were no friends or foes, or wins or losses, just me and the ball, and trying to play the course in front of me.

While my parents didn’t have much money, they could afford the $200 for a pass at the local municipal course, and it’s been a passion ever since.

My swing, as mentioned by one of my cousins when I was 14, looked like that of a senior citizen, though that partly came from the fact that I was often a single golfer playing with three retirees, and I learned through imitation.

Over time, it became a point of pride and a deeper metaphor, particularly if I played with strangers: they might make a joke about my “weird” swing, and while they were bombing it into the woods and struggling to score, I would plod away with my weirdness, knowing myself and my swing, playing my own game against the course.

In America this trip, through what is essentially a random draw for last-minute players, I got to golf Pebble Beach.

I went to the five most populated metropolitan areas in the United States on a cross-continental train journey: New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, before wrapping up in San Diego.

Like with a lot of America, from what I saw, you could easily craft two narratives.

I was struck as always by the bigness of everything compared to Canada. The meals are larger, the towers are taller, the billboards are in your face, and the cities stretch out for kilometres and kilometres (or miles and miles, if you want to be technical). When you travel by train, you also get the beauty and the vastness of it all.

And it’s also a country that wants to impress upon you all the impressive things it has said and done. There are monuments and statues everywhere, inspirational quotes about The Nature Of Society etched on the side of grand buildings, tiny American flags on every third porch.

On first blush, the biggest cities in America hummed along as well as I remembered, just with more apps for all the transit systems and hostels and tourist attractions.

Specifically, I loved New York’s endless energy, Washington’s free museums, Chicago architecture and compact core, San Francisco’s distinct parks and neighbourhoods, and San Diego’s amazing Petco Field ball park that’s fully integrated into downtown.

(And then there was Los Angeles, which had wonderful experiences — the Getty Museum, Griffith Park, Disneyland, comedy shows and baseball games — yet was less of a city and more of a collection of places bound together by sunshine and freeways, without much in the way of vibrant streets or transit. Alas!)

Whatever your tastes, it’s America. There’s something for everyone. Pop in for a few days, stay in a nice hotel and eat at their fancy restaurants, rent a car and ignore the local headlines, and you could imagine the United States as the same glistening beacon of beaconness as it has been for decades and decades.

That’s not quite what I did. I like exploring a city by foot or by transit. And having that experience in America opens up a host of other questions.

“I just don’t see why you won’t even apply to the University of Victoria, in case you change your mind and want to stay here.”

“Because I can’t see any scenario where I would want stay here.”

That was me, to my mom, in the middle of my high school graduation year, where I had applied to four different universities across Canada, none of which were in my hometown.

She didn’t talk to me for a couple days afterwards, which was reasonable. In my defense, I was going through the same motions as millions of teenagers: the desire to get to get off what in my case was a literal island, to move to the big city, to dream about a future I could taste and feel, even if I didn’t have the experience to know what it would be like.

And like a lot of teenagers, I felt that through the music of Bruce Springsteen.

A lot of his songs are fundamentally the same, rooted in a working-class aspiration to transcend the ordinary and get out of the place you’re in, while knowing all the risks of a last-chance powered drive. Or as he sings in Badlands:

“Talk about a dream, try and make it real

You wake up in the night with a fear so real

You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come

Well, don’t waste your time waiting”

And then, like a lot of his songs, there’s some shouting and a sax solo. But I digress.

There were other artists I loved earlier. Springsteen was the first one I felt I got. Which I know is a very basic take, but speaks to his ability to make the universal feel specific; that when he sings about making things real to 20,000 people, he’s actually singing it just for you.

In America this trip, I got to see A 74-year-old Bruce Springsteen perform for three hours.

You know what phrase I heard a lot in this trip?

“If you see something, say something.”

That robotic voice came up on trains and buses and subways, in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, in a way that I hadn’t heard nearly as much in previous trips.

The day before I arrived in America, the New York Times had a story on what random attacks on the subway were doing to the psyche of transit users. The article laid out a familiar dynamic: statistically speaking, the subway system was still very safe, and there hadn’t been a massive surge in attacks. There had been enough recent events through that, combined with social media, had created a sea change in perception.

“Even as the likelihood of being a crime victim remains remote for most riders, random attacks have shaken some commuters,” said the article.

In New York, the national guard is now deployed in subway stations, and twice I was delayed slightly because of a “police incident” on a car in front of me.

In Los Angeles — a city bound together by sunlight and freeways more than cohesive neighbourhoods — the warnings about criminals and and how to call for help on their ghost town of a transit system were omnipresent. It would have seemed liked overkill, if not for the fact that I was actively harassed off a subway for the first time in my life.

And in San Francisco, there were a couple blocks close to downtown where there were feces on the sidewalk and tents clustered together in a way that was not dissimilar to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (though not nearly as large in scope).

In a home city that I know intricately, it’s easy for me — and part of my job — to contextualize such incidents and balance different complex feelings. As a tourist experiencing things in a vacuum, it’s much easier for such incidents to play on the mind more.    

Then again, there are challenges a lot or big urban cities are facing in North America these days. A lot of them stem from the byproduct of affordable housing scarcity and a toxic drug crisis, revealing itself in different ways in different cities, local cultures being washed over by global forces.

So like I said, two narratives. But let’s go back to a fulfilled wish for a moment.

“How did you get to be here? What was the moment?”

That’s the climactic high point of the first song in Merrily We Roll Along, for decades a musical  known as Stephen Sondheim’s most infamous bomb.

Part of the reason it lasted for just 16 performances before closing is that it’s a hard plot to follow: it goes backwards, starting with three people in their 40s who used to be good friends and are now estranged and jaded, with every scene going backwards to a different pivotal moment in their shared lives, until they meet each other in college as young idealists.

(This is why you subscribed to this newsletter, to get detailed plot recaps of 43-year-old musicals)

Anyhow, that line primes the audience for the rest of the plot. It’s also the exact moment I had a teeny quarter-life crisis.

12 years ago, I was working for a local newspaper in Vancouver, which was the dream I had chased for many years.

The idea of being on TV seemed both terrifying and less journalistically interesting than purely writing about the news, and I was determined to make it work.

But the paper was run by Postmedia, and 2012 they were beginning cuts (then known as “optional buyouts”) that have slowly crippled or eliminated thousands of newspapers across the world in the years since. There were three other interns on staff at the paper, all with more experience than me, and with a month left in my contract, my supervising editor told me to look for other work.

“How does it happen? Where is the moment? How did you ever get there from here?”

A couple days later, in the middle of a Sondheim kick, I was listening to the musical for the first time. The first song hit. Something broke. I realized I had to leave newspapers and try something else.

In America this trip, I got to see a celebrated revival — the first one on Broadway since it bombed all those years ago — of Merrily We Roll Along.

I left America after a couple lazy days in San Diego satisfied and eager to move on.

By the end of the 17 days, I had gotten into a pretty good routine of packing and unpacking, planning out laundry stops, knowing when to explore hard and when to take a few hours to breathe.

At the same time, this was travel on easy mode: language the same, culture the same, cities I had all been to. It was wish fulfillment on a massive scale, while also being very much a different vibe than the next 49 weeks.

But it was also bittersweet. When I was in Washington D.C., the headlines were about the 38th or so debt limit crisis Congress was in the middle of dealing with. I was born in 1987, which means I became vaguely aware of “world events” sometime around 1993, which means that I grew up with the impression of living next to a politically stable country, with a culture I could look up to, from its sports to musicians.

How will it feel when I return?

It was one of many thoughts that passed through my mind as I passed through the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing, onto a new country, onto opening a new part of my world.

“Bending with the road, gliding through the countryside.

Merrily we roll along, roll along, catching at dreams.”