Donn's Depot, Austin

Maybe if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't have gone. After all, a place called "Donn's Depot", hardly sounds like my new favorite bar. But I do not yet have any friends in Austin, and the women from my department who I sat next to during Orientation has invited me to her birthday, and it's a Saturday night, so I find directions on how to get there, and I go.

The bus drops me off a half-mile away from where I'm supposed to end up: Austin does have mass transit, but it can barely cover the large spread out city-scape. I begin to walk the lengthy trek to Donn's Depot. After a quarter of a mile, the side-walk ends: Just a wide four lane, no parking, major thorough-fare lined with private property. Sometimes the private properties are stretches of strip malls with large parking lots, sometimes they are fenced in residential lots: the city planning here is haphazzard; the landscape is not fabulous. Coming for fabulous Toronto, which privileges the pedestrian and transit user, over the automobile, I realize again that I am not where I used to be.

After a very treacherous negotiation of private property and on-coming traffic, I arrive at Donns Depot. The friend who invited me is not there yet. I grab a beer at the bar and take a moment to soak the place in: Geriatrics and middle-age straight couples partner dance to a mediocre band that plays the hits of rock and country from the 60's, 70's, and early 80's. An old fashion popcorn machines serves free, not-quite-fresh move popcorn. Twenty something girls are dressed up like as if they expected Donn's Depot to be some cosmopolitan "Sex and the City"esque night club, rather than a country saloon. To send the message home, the band begins to play "American Pie": "Drovy my chevy to the levy but the levy was dry, the good old boys were drinking whisky and rye" the drunkenly groan and mumble along with the singer-pianist.

I hang around for an hour, thinking my friend ended up too drunk from birthday festivities to remember to show up. She arrives eventually, but I do not regreat a minute of that time I spent at Donn's Depot alone. Donn's Depot may not be cosmopolitan, fabulous, or even clean (popcorn remnants dot the floors and tables), but this place is authentic: It is what it is and does not try to be anything else.

I am not where I used to be. I may not like where I find myself better than where I came from. But there is something authentic about this place - and that is enough to make me stay for a while longer.

Austin, Texas: August

I've arrived. The temperature outside is 105 degrees faranheit; the same temperature they set for the room during those hot yoga classes. I think they call it Bikram yoga...

Yes. It is that hot.

Kansas, Oklahoma

I am sent to a small grocer down the highway to get change for the car wash. It’s scorchingly hot outside, but in the car the air conditioning is cool, so the jeans I’m wearing have been rolled up into three-quarter length shorts. Kansas, or Oklahoma (I can’t remember if this town is on one side of the state line or the other) feels like the desert.

“Fag!”, young guy yells from the window of his out of place low-end sports car.

The bigotry and hate that is stereotypically associated with the ‘redneck’ states of Kansas and Oklahoma proves accurately placed.

I tell my friends about this episode when I return with the change for the car wash.

“How dare they insult you!”

“It’s not really an insult,” I respond (cause after all – I am a fag), “but it’s full of hate.”

Back in the car driving down the highway, the local radio station plays an ad for a healthcare provider. “The enemy wants you to be weak”, it says, but such-and-such healthcare provided will keep you strong.

The ads are followed by a twangy country tune, with inane, but ironically apt lyrics: “God is great. Beer is good. People are crazy.”

Denver, Colorado

Laramie, Wyoming

There is no monument, or any evidence at all, concerning the brutal murder of Matthew Shepphard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard

South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming

Grand. Vast. Monumental.

America moulds nature for the purposes of Civilization

From the Great Plains that stretch across North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, all the way through Kansas and Oklahoma - vast stretches of natural land tilled by large threshing machines harvesting crop - to an immense sculpture etched out of the side of a mountain...

The natural landscape is dotted with monuments marking the site of historical battles and figures. From Mt. Rushmore, to the Homestead National Monument in Nebraska, the landscape and history meet to build a great civilization.

The land itself, the shere size of a country that stretches sea to sea, is embedded in the national consciousness:

America is a great geography. America is a great civilzation.

From America's National Park Services webstie commerorating the Homestead National Monument in Nebraska:

The cry was FREE LAND!! The Homestead Act of 1862 was one of the most significant and enduring events in the westward expansion of the United States. By granting 160 acres (0.65 km2) of free land to claimants, it allowed nearly any man or woman a chance to live the "American dream". The park helps visitors gain an understanding on how the Act changed the lives of all Americans and the land.

North and South Dakota

Empty. An immense space so large and beautiful only nature could make it possible.

Here space itself is not an absence but a presence. Space has features, characteristics, adjectives: large, beautiful, profound, meaningful, almost even philosophical. Nothing is missing here, because everything is space.

Being in such space, so huge and limitless, I feel so small and finite. I am more my body, and my mind and thoughts somehow carried within, now than I ever have been. The car I sit in as I hurtle through space at 65 miles an hour feels like such a foreign and concrete object, a bubble with hard and solid edges, as it travels through something that is seemingly infinite and vast.

We drive. And drive and drive. Hurtling through space. For hours.

We travel through the geographic center of North America: Butte County. There is nothing here, but space. The heart of America: both empty and full at the same time. America: void pregnant with meaning.

Night falls. We pull over in the dark to watch a meteor shower. Heated rock pieces from space do as we do, millions of miles overhead: Penetrate space travelling to something, somewhere new.

I am, and can only be, the physical. It has taken space, larger than anything I can possibly know, to divert my attention from a busy city-life, to me, to myself, to my body

The Great American Adventure Begins

She hardly seems a guard; more like a host with administrative duties.

She calmly attends to my immigration paperwork. Her pleasant, almost unofficial demeanour contrasts the sense of urgency and anxiety that accompanies the fear I feel. I am constantly haunted by previous bureaucratic mishaps which resulted in administrative nightmares and inconvenient delays. But after a moment of silence, which was probably serene for the border agent as she habitually fills out forms and photocopies passports, but was cold and nervous as I imagine being denied entrance to the United States under my student visa, she approached the long reception counter where I have been standing, waiting, biting my nails.

She politely instructs me regarding the proceedures required when leaving and returning to the United States under my student visa. The she sends me on my way with an earnest "Good Luck!".

Unlike being one of thousands who cross the border from Canada into the United States at the various crossings in Ontario, I feel like a person, not a threat, as I enter from Saskatchewan into North Dakota.

She welcomes me with sincere warmth into the heartland of America.

America!

First, I travel from Regina, Saskatchewan, through the heart of America to Austin, Texas.

Then, I attend the University of Texas at Austin purusing my PhD in Performance as Public Practice.

A Canadian in America.

Stephen in Texas.

The Great Work Begins...