Empty and aching

Looking for America.

I wake up in the middle of the night with the Simon & Garfunkel song “America” in my head. “Let us be lovers / we’ll marry our fortunes together …”

More than any other song I know, this one captures the feeling of the road trip, that quintessentially American journey: crisscrossing the country from one end to the other, walking or hitchhiking or taking a Greyhound bus while searching for America, and for yourself. I took a trip like that one summer, mostly on my own, driving from Boston to D.C. to Austin and beyond as far as Las Vegas, following dirt roads and sleeping at campsites and getting lost in the desert.

Photo by Urlaubstracker on Unsplash

Was I looking for America? Not deliberately, but that’s what I found: an America of deserts and diners, canyons and trailers, park rangers and waitresses and people in no particular hurry. I went back to New York and started my first real job in publishing, but in my mind I was still driving down those highways, wondering what might lie just off the next exit.

I’m looking for America again now, lying awake at night. As the Simon & Garfunkel couple hitchhike from Saginaw, scenes from Minneapolis play on repeat in my mind. They share a pack of cigarettes and something called “Mrs. Wagner pies,” they make up stories about the other passengers on the bus, and eventually the moon rises “over an open field,” perhaps the most beautiful image in any pop song, ever. I can see it, from the windows of their bus.

And I see Renee Good through the window of my computer screen. Like me, she’s middle-aged, with an SUV and a partner and a dog and kids who she wants to raise in a better world. For that she is shot in the face while exercising an inalienable American right, the right to get in your car and drive away.

After his girlfriend falls asleep, Simon confessses that he’s lost: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.” Haven’t we always been? The cars on the New Jersey Turnpike have all come to look for America. Perhaps they are just as lost as he is. Perhaps they will find themselves.

But I’m not sure I want to find myself in this America, where masked thugs roam the streets of Minneapolis, where a synagogue was set on fire in Mississippi, where a doctor in California is in danger for providing abortion pills to a woman in Louisiana. I can’t stop reading the stories, and there are more of them every day. The fortysomething mother from Boston, born in Peru and a U.S. resident since age nine, who was separated from her family at Logan Airport and detained for two weeks over a marijuana charge from more than twenty years ago. The children—including two who have cancer—detained for weeks, with and without their parents. The Massachusetts teen picked up after volleyball practice.

If you haven’t listened to “America” in a while, I recommend this version, which I heard for the first time a few months ago via Mark Oppenheimer’s Substack. It’s a duet by two Swedish sisters, their voices songbird sweet, performing the song for Simon at a concert in 2012. The camera comes to rest a few times on his face. At first he seems to be impassive, as if frozen in disbelief at the beauty of his own creation, but the end tears are clearly visible in his eyes. Perhaps he’s weeping for his own lost former self, the 27-year-old hippie who wrote that song in 1968, confessing his secrets to someone who can’t hear, or isn’t listening.

Or perhaps he is weeping, as I too weep, at the gulf between the promise of America then and what it has become.

Photo by Branimir Balogović on Unsplash