I’m reading a book right now–The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert–that explores the concept of American masculinity and frontier culture (perfect for me, right?). Right or not, it ascribes much of American culture to the existence of that frontier–and to its ultimate disappearance. That seems to be a common impulse: linking our culture to our geography.  But in an article about the American impulse to murder, Jill Lepore references a more novel explanation of our American idiosyncracies:

By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

Today I finally installed my Mississippi license plate to my car. (It’s been sitting in my living room for two weeks. Which is probably illegal.)  It’s with a strange pride that I become an official Mississippian. Which is a great word.

There are eight–eight–little frogs that have suctioned themselves to the exterior of my window. One of them’s not even that little.  One of them is peering through the glass with his little orange eyes, his gullet vibrating furiously. I’ve never seen anything like it.

October’s not so dry anymore, either.

In September it rained for days on end. Rain came down in sheets, flooding the road to the house. Once a week a storm would pass through town with rain so thick that cars couldn’t drive.

The rain broke with the changing of the month–it came like spring in reverse, the unbearable heat and humidity of late summer giving way to cool, dry sunshine. Weather to be spent outside. I have friends back north talking about going out for runs in long-sleeves and gloves, but an October spring isn’t so bad–if only I didn’t have a bum leg.

Back when I lived in South Dakota, a few of my friends and I looked at a night sky map to determine the darkest spot in America, and determined it was somewhere up in the northwest corner of the state.  So we planned to drive up there, park on the side of some county highway, and see what the sky really looks like.

We never did it, but here’s another map that shows why northwestern South Dakota may be one of the most beautiful spots in America: there’s a spot up there that’s as far as you can get from a McDonalds.

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid.  East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.  There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Two weeks ago I got hit by a car.

It’s part my fault.  I live about two miles out of town, on a road just off the state highway.  It’s out in the country, beautiful for running except the dogs.  But out on the other side of the highway there are dirt roads running through catfish ponds and plantations and bayous. No dogs, no cars. Perfect running.

It was the third day of my committed half-marathon training. I got past the house by the highway with two dogs–they started to come out into the road before leaving me alone–and then turned my attention to the highway. There was a car coming, pretty close.  But after 10 years of running, I’ve got the calculus of road crossing down.  I can eyeball a car, estimate it’s speed, and decide what speed I need to go to be sure we don’t cross paths.

That, of course, is assuming that the car doesn’t do something crazy. Like change lanes.

I knew this one was going to be close. Out here the speed limit is 55, faster than I’m used to. But I’ve cut it this close before. Like always, after I made my decision–all those mental calculations and estimates in a quarter of a second–and then looked straight ahead, looking where I was running, not at the car. I picked up the pace to get through the lane and to safety.

So when the driver started honking I assumed she was angry that I cut it close. By then I was already in the second lane. Safe. Then the front of the car cut into my field of vision. I bounced a few times off the side of the car and then hit the pavement.

Some people, seeing my cast, ask me if my leg was run over. I’m not sure. The sensation of being hit is the one thing I don’t really remember. There wasn’t much pain; I remember dusting myself off, seeing a cut on my hand and on my knee, and thinking that getting hit by a car turned out not to be so bad; I remember looking up and seeing the car that hit me, brakes slammed, spinning out on the other side of the road, lucky no cars were coming, and then out of my field of vision. I have no idea what sequence those two memories go in. The more dominating memory comes from looking down at my left leg. The bone of above my ankle was still under the skin, but pointing the wrong direction–the technical term is angulation–and that’s when I decided I hadn’t fared so well.

By the time I crawled to the median, two guys had already pulled over to call an ambulance, and I’d already decided that with a leg like that I’d probably never walk again. So I might as well enjoy the situation. I was cracking jokes as I waited for the ambulance. I called my mom and my boss and let them know, “Hey, I’m okay, but I wanted to let you know I was just hit by the car.”

Because they strapped me to a backboard and put me in a neck brace, from here on out my memory is just looking at ceilings: first the ceiling of the ambulance as they drove me into town, then the ceiling of the helicopter as they flew me 45 minutes to Jackson, the nearest hospital with an orthopedic surgery department. I remember the paramedic leaning into my face, shouting over the roar of the copter blades: Fifteen minutes to Jackson! I wanted to tell him I was fine.

I’m still waiting for the bill on that one.

Once they decided my spine wasn’t broken, I got a lot less attention at the hospital. A couple x-rays, a lot of sitting around and a little bit of morphine. Eventually the doctors decided the leg was too swollen to operate that day. They gave me an extra dose of morphine, then prodded the bones closer to their correct positions, wrapped me in a splint, and sent me home. So a couple hours after my helicopter flight, my friend Matty was driving me the two hours back to Indianola.

Getting hit by a car really isn’t so bad; what hurts more is the surgery. Five days after the accident I was back in Jackson again. It took six hours of waiting–not so fun when you can’t eat, drink, or take any pain medications–before they got me into surgery, and then it took five hours of surgery. I emerged with scars on both sides of my ankle, a big metal rod holding together my shattered tibia and a batch of screws to repair my torn ankle. The hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. were the most painful of my life.  I writhed in my bed, watching late night recaps of the weekend’s football games and checked the time every five minutes to see how much closer I was to pain meds.

That’s about all to the story. There’s not much pain now, but I’ll be on crutches until at least November. When I go to restaurants I have to request an extra chair for my leg. Sometimes when I’m watching bad television–I’ve done a lot of that since the accident–I’ll feel a strange flood of emotion. Maybe I’m secretly, subconsciously overwhelmed with the pure fact of being alive.  One day I’ll run again.

I was slow to leave D.C.  The upcoming drive wasn’t so bad–sixteen hours over the next two days–and no matter how many minutes I lingered in my apartment, I was rushing out of the city, leaving just six months after I’d arrived. Still, I ate breakfast slowly and carried my few remaining possessions piece by piece downstairs to the car, and then just sat in the apartment for a few minutes before dropping my keys in an empty bedroom and walking downstairs one last time.

A song I loved but hadn’t heard in months–Califone’s version of “The Orchids”–came on my iPod, warm and familiar, the kind of song that might play over the closing credits of a quirky indie-ish romantic comedy. And as I shifted into drive, the windshield, free still of its current patina of Mississippi insects, formed a movie screen. In time with the music, a pair of men walked out of the streetcorner church, and then a morning jogger chugged rhythmically down the street, and I could imagine a camera panning away above the rooftops, revealing the city waking up to a beautiful morning as the film comes to its close.

I’m a sucker for a well-timed pop song, the way the right song can burn an ordinary moment into memory. But even as I admired the morning, I had to admit the fit wasn’t quite right. My six months in the city had not tied together with the kind of tight narrative resolution that that image implies. I’m not sure I still believed in narrative resolutions, not in real life. I’ve never quite known what to do with my life–still don’t–but for most of it I plugged along with an unyielding faith in myself, a belief that by luck and grit and a few good genes I would end up stumbling on greatness. A year ago I ended my short career as a teacher, the first endeavor in my life to end so clearly in failure. I didn’t realize then how much that shoke me.  I left South Dakota for Philly–for friends and family and a normal life–and cast about for a year. When I would sit home alone in the apartment after work or on an unscheduled Saturday, something unusual would gnaw at my gut, a feeling I couldn’t quite place: fear of the future, dark and yawning, maybe, or some kind of instability–a lack of confidence.

So whatever my soundtrack implied, my gut knew this was just another cast of the dice.

I had only been in town for a few hours–most of my stuff was already down in Mississippi, but I had flown back to the city the night before, landing after midnight, to retrieve my car. Instead of going straight home, I stopped by a party of strangers in a part of the city I hardly knew, to say good-bye to a friend. I sat out on a stranger’s stoop, looking at the city at 1 a.m.–the loud and well-lit cars and the garage across the street, closed for the night–and she kissed me, because I hadn’t had the guts to kiss her. Then I went home to sleep fitfully on the couch, wondering when and how a moment like that would recur in the rural south.

Before I decided to move to Mississippi, it had never quite occured to me how far away it is from the northeast. South as it is, it’s still on the close side of the river that bears its name, and therefore a part of the long-conquered east.  I spent my sixteen hour drive from D.C.–already three hours from all my friends in Philly, another five from my family in Connecticut–realizing just how far away I’d be from friends and family again, from all the places people my age like to spend a Friday night. I arrived on the Memphis beltway, a four-lane concrete highway, under cloudy skies and scattered showers. No song could hide the gnawing now.

I got a little lost driving south out of Memphis, and ended up in small-town in the Mississippi hills. I drove out onto a scenic highway–the scene seemed to be the kudzu that draped everything, trees and fences and powerlines, in leaves like green liquid–and hoped that soon I’d hit the famous Highway 61. The rain had cleared for now, and I drove through unfamiliar country with the windows, the car sliding up and down through hills and forest.

Then the trees ended, and one last hill slid down, and there it was: the Delta. It was an unmistakable entrance into a wholly different landscape, two-thirds sky–filled half again with rainclouds still–and the earth beneath flat and planted with cotton as far as the eye could. Fat raindrops began to split against the windshield, so I rolled up the windows to re-enter the downpour.

I don’t remember what song was playing then. I was probably scanning the radio for blues or gospel, something to fit the blues highway. What I do remember is another sense of a camera pulling back, as if I was standing back on that last wooded hill still, watching my Subaru cross that horizon of flat and wet fields, kicking up a trail of mist behind. And this image was not of an ending but an entrance, an arrival. Maybe even a return.

I’d forgotten what Virginia really looks like. For five months, I’ve worked there every day–I’ll have to pay taxes there–but that’s caused me just to think of the state as a mass of office towers and condos. It’s no wonder Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of agrarian individuals: fields look perfect in the Virgina foothills, trimmed and neat and tucked away below the larger mountains. I kept wanting to stop and set up and camp and just stick it out in those hills.

My moving truck comes equipped with a meter that helps you know when you’re heading into even worse-than-usual miles-per-gallon territory. I was fairly entranced with that, so I missed too much of the mountains, out a few miles from the interstate. It would’ve been nice to have gotten off to drive on local roads–but I was waddling up the highway hills at 45 miles an hour as it was, so anything more rugged would have been a struggle.

I’ve now made it to Tennesee, a state which upon first entry seemed over-developed and over-highwayed relative to Virginia. But when I got off the highway to find a hotel, the roads quickly trickled off to quiet country and more mountains. I went for a run over the hills, my best run in weeks, and considered settling down here. Then I found out it’s a dry county (though they’ll still sell me a tallboy at the gas station). To the Delta it is!

The best songs culled from 10 hours of dial surfing:

• “You Belong to Me” – Taylor Swift: Though I listened to it in its entirety three or four times. Then watched the video online. And heard another three or four Taylor Swift songs on the radio.
• “21 Guns” – Green Day: Really I just like the falsetto when Billie Joe Armstrong sings the word “guns.”
• “I Can’t Get Next to You” – The Temptations: This came on just as I started out down 14th Ave. I opened the windows and cranked up the radio. I love being on the road.
• “Magic Carpet Ride” – Steppenwolf: The perfect driving song. Not as effective when you are driving a truck that is maxing out at 50 mph, though.
• “Lousiana Woman, Mississippi Man” – Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty: The highlight of a county oldies lunch-hour special I caught. Here’s to finding a Louisana woman.

I now find it physically possible–sometimes even enjoyable–to watch C-SPAN.

From “The Elusive Green Economy,” in this month’s Atlantic:

[In 1977] Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House. “A generation from now,” Carter declared, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken—or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” . . . .

[I]n one of the great acts of humiliating political symbolism, Ronald Reagan tore down the solar panels, which spent many years in purgatory before eventually finding their way to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta.