Day 1: Into the (Violent?) Unknown

   It's 7:14am on the day Tim and I begin our cross-country drive en route to settling in central Florida, where Tim's attending a graduate-school program. He's on our sofa, tapping away at his laptop, and here I am on mine. It struck me that it might be a nice idea to keep a blog of the trip, though I don't know if I can commit to daily entries--or any at all, after this one.  

   The day outside is chilly, the sky pewter. We're due to leave in an hour or so, and so I'll just offer a couple of thoughts before we depart...

   I've been harboring some fear about the mad country we’re about to wade into. To the media-saturated, America appears to be shredded by violence, polarization, political insanity. Some of the states we’ll pass through have lax gun laws; in Florida itself, properly-licensed people can openly tote pistols in holsters. 

   Don't get me wrong: I grew up shooting a .22 rifle with my brother and my father. I've enjoyed target practice at shooting ranges. If you box me as "anti-gun," you'll miss the point. I'm not anti-gun. I'm anti-people-hurting-Tim-and/or-me. Some parts of the country continue to be violently homophobic;  I fear we'll face the kinds of nastiness one reads about but largely has avoided, living in the blessedly open-minded Bay Area. 

   The country currently seems to be in such cultural and civic tatters that I even fear driving with a California license plate--likely a silly fear, but perhaps not entirely. There are enough mentally unhinged people, some of them armed with firepower and dim ideas about humanity and love, that it’s not entirely out of the question to be concerned, at the least.

   It is strange to feel this way at all. It’s been ages since I’ve taken car trips around the country, and maybe it was mere naivete that kept me, back then, from fearing the armed and unstable. It's possible that I simply understand the world differently now than I did then. 

   Perhaps, however, it's something more than that. Tim and I are asailing out into Trump-roiled waters. The President has given tacit and explicit permission, for those who hear the dog-whistle (and the audible shouting after the whistle stops sounding), to attack the “other.” Violence appears to be on the rise across the land, though that may be a mere dystopian mirage. We’re about to drive into a country far more divided than it was twenty-five years ago, when I'd take two-week vacation drives around the back roads of the South.

   That said, I also know that for every person who makes the news for shooting someone, there are three hundred-plus million people in this country not shooting anyone. There are loads of so-called “silent”—read: decent—people going about their daily business without attacking each other. It’s those people we’re mostly going to see, I suspect. Americans are by nature cheerful and optimistic, and even the current Age of Rage can’t wholly wipe that out. 

   Anyway, the truth of travel lies in the spirit of adventure, and part of that spirit lives in the joys--and fears--of anticipation. Tim and are leaving what we've known and where we've lived; it's natural we'd be, in some ways at least, circumspect about what we'll encounter.
   But we begin this trip with eyes and hearts open, willing to let the adventure teach us what it will.

   With that--off we go...