Escaping Artist

Rode in on the Greyhound but I’ll be walkin’ out if I go
I was just passin’ through must be seven months or more

There are a number of song lyrics that lament about being stuck somewhere, someplace, that you just can’t leave. It is never really the circumstances that are to blame, though a lack of money, purpose, and motivation might factor in, but place itself that catches hold and never lets go. We all can commiserate. I remember being stranded temporarily in the Spanish desert, and feeling that rising desperation as a lack of sleep muddled my comprehension, and as a successful departure seemed more and more impossible to negotiate. Picturing the type of places described in such songs, I see movies concerning small towns, deserted and unlucky in their abandonment—High Noon, Don’t Come Knocking, Northfork—where people kill the town, or the town slowly kills the people. None of these songs or films, however, really describe why certain places are seen as inescapable. Birthplaces and hometowns can be understood this way, as even when you leave them they come uninvited behind you, but not many places can exert this same kind of influence. Wandering Richmond—this past weekend as well as during my visit in April—I wondered if the past, so strongly creeping over the present in this southern capital, lulling you back into a time already lived, could be an explanation for certain place’s sleepy addiction.

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“I’m sitting in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination…”

Other than an old steamer crossing the Atlantic, trains, being much older than the road, might be the most romantic form of travel, and one that remains completely overlooked in this country, romantically and practically. European trains, with stations older than our historic buildings, live up to their myth, and each kind—overnight sleepers, cheap locals chugging through the Spanish desert, efficient bullets whipping between Berlin and Munich, excessively expensive rides through the Channel—exudes a certain stereotype of travel, each appeals to a certain class of passenger. I cling to the notion that traveling poor is the best way to see the underside of travel, as wealth is too warm and insulating. A French flight attendant, walking me through a snoring first class on a flight to Paris, laughingly told me, “it’s a different world up here!” When he brought a first class meal with silver wear and dessert, I had to admit it was. Trains, like buses, are more affordable (or ought to be), and therefore attract a different kind of traveler; most people do not pick the slowest way to their destination because they harbor romantic ideas about trains and passing scenery, but because of price.
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The moment people arrive in town they demand to see “the south.” Granted Richmond provokes this sort of the response, it clings to its history with a vigor that California lacks. Monument Ave. is a lovely tree lined street boasting statues of southern heroes, in stark contrast to the rest of America. I have gotten so oddly used to seeing Stonewall and Lee that it seemed strange that M, at a distance, guessed that the statue in front the of the capital building was Grant. Grant, I thought, now what is he doing there? But it is hard, I have found, to really get a sense of “the south”, usually referring to pre-civil war northern notions of what the south was, because if those notions even existed at all they are cloudy and hidden now. Susan, who has lived in Richmond for over twenty years, often says the people here cherish their origins and family tree, something I have never seen proof of. Even going to Monticello is tempered by the man Jefferson was, an inventor, an intellectual, and despite his contradictions and flaws, he was pretty interesting if only for the “stuff” he collected in his house.

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