Day 1: An Inauspicious Beginning

The day was saved by Walmart.  It was a day polished by much anticipation but instead dawned with a grey whimper.  Upon reflection, it was more appropriate than the explosive yellows and orange rays shooting through crispy air that we like to believe heralds the beginning of a new enterprise like this one.  The brilliance of my imaginings of standing on the cusp of this new start were beaten to a dull sheen by two days at the DMV and INS and a week of over-consumption.  New York City, my home of recent years; the city of unbridled sucess and ambition, excitement and glorious excess had become cluttered and overgrown; the time had come for me to depart and discover other horizons. The long savoured ambition of the American black top, symbol of individual freedom, had come to the fore.

As we made our final preparations for departure, it now seems right that we hadn't even got into our ride to the rental car shop before the first of our brand new boxes had smashed and spread its pharmaceutical contents across the road.  New York City was getting the final word in the separation, and had expelled us, not in a shooting arc towards a bright future, but with an indifferent, soft "plop" at the gates of Hertz of North White Plains.  I reacted as The City has taught me, by shuffling our possessions into the inoffensive rental vehicle and quietly moving off through the pre-selected automatic gears down the Merruit Parkway.  The torrential downpour scuttled our plans for camping at Black Rock State Park, Connecticut, and shifted us instead to the beige-ness of a Days Inn, Windsor Lock. 

There was no grandiose speech with which I exposed the flickering spirit that I had kept hidden from the roving eye of the City; just a sense of relief wrought by the picturesque boughs of late-summer trees overlapping ahead and above.  The relief that we have indeed escaped; maybe not on our own terms, but nonetheless with a chance to rediscover the outrageous expectation that drew me there in the first place.  If there is a flickering spirit down there, this journey will be for me to find where it hides, amongst the discarded skins that are the remnants of prior suppressions, impulse restraints, knee injuries, fourth-round mark-ups, holidays dreaded, all masks against the incessant blinking red eye of The City. 

So imagine my surprise when that spirit came alive at the glimpse of a Walmart sign.  For foreign or New York readers, the sign is plain - a blue, standard font against a white rectangular background.  No secondary motto promising the world.  It simply states "Walmart," knowing that it stands for itself, allowing the viewer to interpose their own splendid visions of what's inside.  For me, today, it was camping equipment.  A double burner camping stove that caused a delicious agony of decision between propane and liquid fuel, a pair of camping shorts marked down from $14 to $11 and then - inexplicably - again at the register to $3, and a Miley Cryus faux-denim shirt.  All of Hartford was there too, judging from the carpark.  There was "back to value," fridges full of gallon bottles of milk, aisles of blankets and towels, clay-trap launchers and chips ahoy by the container-load.  It's one of those places where the only limitation is your own imagination, and accordingly, it runs by itself.  I didn't speak to a single employee the whole time we were there.  In fact, the whole store was overseen by a handful of teens in bright new uniforms that suggested they'd just completed their first week.  It was an uplifting experience that confirmed I was out of The City and welcomed, as a new type of tourist, into the open hospitality of abundant, bountiful America.