🇩🇰 Originally published in Danish — automatically translated to English
Here is the thing. There is simply so much to tell. I haven't shared a blog post since Prague in the spring. I am overwhelmed by experiences and keep thinking about starting fresh. And then something happens. And then something more happens. I wrote one about landing in America that hasn't been published yet, and I started another on September 11 that was supposed to be about Fresno, and now, a week later, here I am, lying on my bed in Las Vegas under the fan, trying again. It's late. It's half past nine in the evening; we have planned a road trip via Salt Lake City and Yellowstone to Vancouver and back down along the Pacific coast, through Redwood National Park, via Sacramento back to Vegas. I'm tired and dreaming of emptying my camera and getting some order into all the impressions.
(The photo below is a random one from The Strip in Las Vegas, totally overwhelming — exactly how I felt the day I wrote this blog story.)
When we travel, it is always for the people. This time, a family we met a year and a half ago at an event in Vienna, and with whom we have since spent a lot of time online, because the father has offered one delicious course after another: cosmology, relativity, black holes and, most recently, a new area: the geopolitical background of the present, from the Second World War onwards. Nice. Candy for the brain, honestly.
It's a special dynamic, to know each other enormously well because you spend five hours a week together online, and yet not know each other very well at all, because ordinary habits like coffee and bedtimes, temperaments, rhythms and moods haven't been part of the equation, which has mostly been the fellowship of hungry brains.
On our way to our friends in Las Vegas, we visited friends in Fresno; I tried to tell the story I started on September 11, when I was interrupted mid-sentence: "I would so love to tell…". Something always gets in the way.
(Illustrated here with one more picture of The Strip, big roads, too many ads — Vegas is naturally the most extreme version of it all. Photogenic. And over the top.)
America is overwhelming. The roads are wide, the cars are big, everything is new. Poverty confronts you right in the face, and the habitual abundance, for those who haven't fallen through the cracks, is wild to a perfectly ordinary European brain.
Everything is bigger in America. Except the birds. Every single time I see a hummingbird, I stop and hold my breath. Beautiful, beautiful phenomena, wild little creatures, lightning-fast and at the same time still, glossy and precise, light and intense. The hummingbirds are simply a kind of crystal, a small shining gift in the middle of it all.
But otherwise, everything is bigger. The cartons of oat milk, the cars, most people, the houses, the stores, the roads, and the distances are enormous. You are constantly surprised. On the way from Fresno, in the middle of California, we stopped right at the edge of the desert as we left Bakersfield.
A motel that looks exactly like the ones in the movies, because they didn't invent motels for the movies; they just filmed what was there. Some homeless people with shopping carts, a gas station, and a Starbucks, where we bought an enormous iced coffee—the largest size is apparently called "venti," —but when you are four coffee drinkers, you can get through even the biggest size. We have fun with Starbucks; it's quintessentially American, over-the-top, and crazy. You have to step into the culture to some extent, and their brown sugar oat shaken latte or whatever it's called isn't full of crap, so we drink it now and then. With pleasure and a sarcastic smile on our lips.
The heat in California in September is intense, and the AC is really cold. In and out and in and out. Hot-cold-hot. Driving, driving.
We drove onward through the mountains and out into the desert. Wildfires leave dark patches. Our ears pop. We take turns sleeping a little. Exiting Fresno was very stressful because in the US you can only rent a car with a credit card, not a debit card, and yes—we only have debit cards with us. Several times, friends drove out to the airport to try to help, during the night before our departure and again in the morning when we were leaving, and just as we were about to give up, there was suddenly a rental agent who had an ordinary card reader in front of the counter and didn't see which card we put in — so we paid and drove off in a hurry. But it was quite a thriller, and we didn't sleep much. You simply can't get around in the US without a car, and we had to move on. That same day we ordered a credit card, to have one ready for next time.
Anti-communism
Out in the desert, which is gravel, stones, Joshua trees, cliffs and mountains, not a sand desert, there is a large anti-communist exhibition I had found during my usual Google exploring. It was pretty wild.
You turn off the highway and go down a gravel road, past burnt-out houses and abandoned this and that, other inhabited Klondike-like places, until you reach "Liberty Sculpture Park," where no communists are allowed. The exhibition is big, enormous monuments to the brutal oppression of people by totalitarian states, harsh signs for young people to read under the relentless sun in the great, great heat of the desert. It was an overwhelming and big experience that we are still digesting.
A great deal of anger, a great deal of message. The creator is of Chinese descent. I haven't taken the time to read about him yet, but it was certainly overwhelming. One for the art account, a bit more to think about. For example, lumping Karl Marx in with both Stalin and Hitler isn't quite how I see the world, and I also always get a bit of the creeps when books are being shamed. Here they are shoveled away with an excavator, not burned on a bonfire, but the message is the same, isn't it? On the other hand, it's hard to argue against something that is mostly anger, and in a sense, righteous anger.
I stood for a long time in front of the Covid-19 sculpture, thinking. It is a recreation of the first sculpture, which, according to the artist, was burned by agents of the Chinese government. Out in the middle of the California desert. Maybe. The sculpture is about the denial of, and the brutality in, a constructed virus, and I DO NOT WANT to talk about COVID. We HAVE DONE THAT, guys. What fascinates me is the fervor, the devotion, the complete conviction, the cry that the artwork is, especially in its second round. The burnt-out fiberglass model stands right next to the sculpture, now recreated in steel, that represents COVID-19.
See for yourself. It's pretty wild.
The work is called CCP VIRUS, and the recreation, quite simply, CCP VIRUS II. You give it one more thought anyway. There in the desert heat.
The artist's name is Chen Weiming. Worth looking up. Pretty wild. Have I said wild? But I mustn't get lost in it; I have to move on with the story, which has now gone from being overwhelmed to actually telling something, so there is progress. Maybe it will be long. But it will be good for me.
Onward through the desert, the sun sank, and I had to photograph through the window, because the day was running out and we had to get there too. The colors grew more and more beautiful until the sun disappeared completely, and the long straight road through the desert was lit up and made visible by all the lights. It looked absolutely wild.
Impossible to photograph. You have to imagine it yourself: a string of red lights on one side and white on the other, straight ahead and over the mountain, as far as the eye can see. Farther than you would think.
Finally, after hours of nothingness, we reached the Nevada border, where the lights suddenly spread out and everything went wild. You can gamble from the second you're in Nevada: lots of entertainment and flashing lights in the border town, and then more desert, lots of desert, but now in the dark, until we reached Las Vegas and our friends, who live in a gated community with armed guards. For someone from Copenhagen, it is extreme, but here in the US things look different.
As I write, we have been here in Vegas, in a gated community, for about ten days, and as with everything else you don't understand at first, there is a chance to grow wiser. Behind what at first seems completely strange or crazy is coherence and a story.
So, past the guards with us in our rental car with a tightly packed trunk and hungry stomachs, a lovely hello, a walk with the dogs, a dinner, and then crashing out completely and sleeping in soft beds in the home of people who had simply gone to endless trouble to make us feel welcome and at ease. And they did.
And here I am, lying in a soft bed in an air-conditioned room ten days later with a sea of wonder, a sea of insight and a sea of experiences, sailing around in my feelings while the relationship grows and the next road trip is in the works, and I feel rich, tired and happy. Overwhelmed and humbled. Need to cut my nails, go for a run, visit an art museum, and empty the cameras.
So many things surprise you in America, so many things are different and unfold and share their secrets with us, if only we stand still long enough to listen, if only we are curious, present, and open. America is hard to understand, and we like a good challenge.
So stay tuned, because now it's happening. Admittedly, I blog to understand the world around me, because writing is a very special form of thinking. Slowly it unfolds anyway: the travel universe, the experiences on the road. Big and small. And it looks like now is when it happens: I am actually writing, uploading, translating, digging out pictures — the whole shebang. Good thing, too.
Ending with a picture of my son Storm, overwhelmed and happy, the first time we visited one of the casinos. But that's a story for another day.
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