You Are Nowhere
A road trip in search for belonging
Whenever I read about expats and their impressions of Italy, I nod my head in understanding at the quirkiness of adjusting to another culture and language – a sympathetic trait I acquired being raised in the Midwest with immigrant parents and then becoming one myself. But cultural differences don’t necessarily have to occur leaving the country. Moving from where I was born and raised in inner city Detroit to a small town about 100 miles west of the city took quite a bit of adjusting. And you can imagine all the changes I went through when attending a two-year art conservation program in Florence, Italy, and ended up living there for most of my adult life.
Even after a decade of living in the tourist infested, over-crowded historical Florence, I encountered another enormous cultural difference when I moved my two sons and husband to an isolated hillside just 25 kilometers outside the city center. That slow and natural way of life felt very new to us, and our distant neighbors, Tuscan farmers cultivating family wine and olive oil for generations, didn’t know what to make of a family that owned a house (the renovated barn the farmer’s got rid of) with a little yard in the middle of nowhere.
It took a while for me to break the cultural barriers accumulating when I noticed the neighbors’ suspicious glances and guarded salutations when I tried to talk friendly talk, Michigan style. One day, while the farmers were picking olives in their trees by our house, I overheard one say “the mother there, the American, she has the worst accent…”. The irony slapped me hard I knew I would always be l’Americana in Italy, while back in the U.S. I would be considered Italian. Now it was my turn to feel my parents’ dilemma: their Italian accent speaking English, and my American accent speaking Italian. I remembered my old neighbor back in Michigan, how he would flick the rim of his cap if our paths crossed and say “Heyya doin”, but whenever my mom would try to say something to him he would look at her sweetly and without trying say, “Can’t understand a word yer sayin honey”.
My never-ending identity crisis and search for belonging hit its peak on a road trip I took with my best friend from college a few years back. We’ve been keeping touch since the day we departed on graduation day from U of Michigan, and finally, on our 30th year of keeping that promised road trip through hand-written snail-mail letters, costly transatlantic phone calls, the first emails, and then through that amazing invention that came along called Skype, I was able to see Becky’s unusually serious expression on one of those first video calls when she said, “Lil, we gotta do that trip now!”.
Because we both were teachers, we got our itinerary planned out to travel the great wide American west that summer: indeed, a gal’s dream when you are in middle age and know you’ve got to hit the road before all that shit happens that I kept hearing about aging (especially from the Tuscan farmer’s wife who, although my age, would venture out to tell me about every pain that we women would be getting from elbow to big toe and everything in between before hitting the grave. I would thank her for the reminder).
Finally the day came when I flew into Chicago from Florence and landed in the good ole US of A. Homeland! We packed Becky’s car with the bare necessities along with vegetables she picked from her garden (I couldn’t believe how beautiful her zucchini, tomatoes and lettuce had grown) and her cooler was ready with all the necessary ingredients to make pancakes on a fire and drink beer at night. We hit the road singing in loud monotone notes “… Teach – your children well – your father’s hell – will slowly go by…” .
Our trip was planned out: 3,240 miles from Chicago to New Mexico to then whip around and drive back up. We had our slew of music all lined up on cd’s and ipads, anything we could find from Crosby Stills Nash and Young, John Prine, Beatles & Stones, the Dead, and suggestions from our kids (which we tended to skip over to get to those more nostalgic tunes). 3,240 miles of desolate and majestic beauty, sometimes stopping through exits with civilization, places with the same gas stations, motels, hotels, Super 8’s, Taco Bells, Wendy’s or equivalents, and if the town was any bigger, there would be a CVS, a Walmart, and an oil change place. I tried to ignore the industrial wasteland of processed foods we’d see in these stops, the chains of junk offered within the confines of this grand nation because we knew there were plenty of delicacies hidden in the more “quaint” spots where we were heading. It is, after all, I kept telling myself, a beautiful land.
I also kept in mind that other place so far away – the “other” country that I inhabited for most of my adult life, the one that led me to infinite comparisons and cultural experiences on both ends of the Atlantic. While riding for miles on our American road trip I had to take it all in, every scene and every stop. All of it. I held onto the vastness of that darkened night sky in New Mexico, the gushing of the Taylor River after that thunderous rain storm, the similar smell of wet earth like on those early mornings on our Tuscan hillside taking the boys to their bus stop to get to their liceo. Sometimes it all comes together and I have a sudden sense of belonging – but in constant motion. As Jung says, it’s like “a deeply graven riverbed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing along as before in a broad but shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river”.
We had quieted down after days of riding through all those states, cutting through Wyoming and back through Nebraska, like a slow turning down of the volume and euphoria into a deeper contemplative state. It was after we had driven through miles and miles of corn, we stopped to get gas in the only bit of civilization that we had seen for at least the past hour driving when suddenly, as I was walking into the station shop, I looked up and there, above the sliding doors, under a huge sign that said “FAT DOGS”, hung another sign in giant letters that said “YOU ARE NOWHERE”.
I stood there while the doors kept banging impatiently telling me to either get in, you’re letting the air out, or read the f-ing sign and get lost. You are nowhere. I looked back beyond Becky pumping gas, then to both sides of the station, and saw nothing but corn. The letters were staring me down and the door kept pounding the words in my head: You – Are – No – Where.
So that’s when it hit me. I was really nowhere. I was in Limbo. Purgatory. Neither here nor there with no solid identity. Not Americana. Not Italiana. Absolutely nowhere.
I stepped into the freezing store in the middle of July, bought a bottle of water, and scrambled for the outdoors. Ennio Moricone’s music from the Good, the Bad and the Ugly stuck to me in the hot wind as the corn rustled and swished a droning universal note, just to keep my mind off that desolate feeling of being nowhere.
The sensation weighed on me for miles after that gas stop: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois; hours and hours of cornfields and prairies, nothing-but-fields sliding past the windshield with an occasional farmhouse looking like a drowning weed. I wondered what the people in those rare houses were doing, if the farmers that plowed those fields had any sort of social life, or how far they had to go to get groceries or take their kids to school. I thought of my home in Italy far from the center of Florence, far from other villages or historical centers. It was enough to keep me on the look out for people, or some other farm house with those steel silos sticking out beside them stuffed with the grains of all those miles and miles of field corn.
When we finally made it back full circle, we unpacked the car and Beck went straight to her little garden, picked the vegetables that had not fallen, cooked and dressed them in the olive oil I had brought her from our neighbor’s olive trees in Italy. We were listening to our music again with new memories tacked on to the old. We sang “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” and the song stuck to me flying back to Florence. I looked down from my window seat into the dark night abyss and said to myself “You are nowhere”, neither here nor there, with an identity that is in constant motion, like that mighty river that keeps swelling and splitting, feeding into infinite estuaries that flow into the great Atlantic.
When I finally made it back to Italy and up our decrepit Tuscan dirt road, I ventured over to our neighbors, just to say “Heyya doin” in Italian. The farmer’s wife was walking behind the slow-moving tractor using her hoe as a walking stick. She seemed genuinely pleased to see me, back alive after going to that mysterious land that she surely will never see, or ever want to see. I asked her what I could plant for a winter garden, and though she looked at me perplexed, she eventually told me which phase of the moon was the right time to plant certain seeds. I looked at the vineyards that enveloped our hill like a soft blanket as she handed me her hoe and said “Start with this”. I felt like laughing but I thanked her and, using it as a walking stick, I made my way back to my little spot in the universe
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So lovely and thoughtful, Lily. Love your art, your writing, all of you! Agree with Ingrid’s comment: grateful for being on the periphery of your life’s journey.
So enjoyable. Thanks so much.