Reading 101 in the car

Dears,

It's been a hectic week since I left Berkeley. Seven hours on the road, twelve hours in flight, and more than seven thousand miles later, I'm desperately sleepless but writing from a lovely, little flower box of a hotel room in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. But you and this blog, unformed as it yet is, have been in my mind since the day I left Berkeley-- really.

I guess I'll kick off these readings in (of, through, [insert applicable preposition of choice here?]) various locations with a semi-delirious small confession: every word I've read in the last seven days has been on either a road sign, street map, or guide book page. And menus. So many menus. Yum... Anyway, in embarking on a summer of travel reading with you all, I didn't think I'd take to the task quite so literally. But as I sat bleary-eyed and alone in my car Sunday morning, watching vast swaths of looming greens shrink to bristling yellows (and grow back again), yellows rolling out into dimpled blues (and back again), until the blues get shut out by walls of shopping development stucco-peach, I found myself obsessively taking in any bit of text along the way. After a while, the green mile markers and exit names, yellow driving instructions, blue call box postings didn't simply mar or echo the surrounding landscape in its various forms-- they named, characterized, and bound it. They began to narrate the 101.

A boring stretch of drought-stricken grass was thrown into relief by an even uglier call box, a handmade billboard for fresh raspberries at the next exit, and a 297-mile count from San Luis Obispo. Without getting out of my car or even getting off the highway, I glimpsed the red paint-stained hands of the earnest fruit seller, the obsessive grandeur of Hearst Castle, the cookies and clogs of Solvang, the death of a memorialized officer on that stretch of road-- all through mundane words on mundane signs that don't usually even form mundane sentences.

And somehow, for the first time, I found it all incredibly reassuring and exciting. Besides my state of exhausted loneliness-- why? The signs made my transit feel knowable while actually only ever offering partial information. And then traveling down the road from sign to sign, driving provided my own narrative links...

Heading down the California coast perhaps isn't novel to most of us anymore, but a day into wandering the streets of Paris with my Lonely Planet in hand, it's become all that much clearer to me how reading on the road-- or failing to-- how the simplest sign posts-- can change an experience of a place entirely. But now to read things longer than a guidebook paragraph this summer...

From Paris with sleepy love,
Irene