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Yeddanapudi Radhika

My American friends tell me a coast to coast road trip across America is something one does once in a lifetime at least, like swimming, riding a bicycle, getting carried away with an idea, being a fool in love...

If you don't see the breadth of this land, it's like you don't see the range of experiences you can have and so you have less to choose from in life.

Or so I was told.

So when Vanamma, my mother's best friend, who lives in Pittsburgh, invited me to join her and Ujju, her older daughter in their cross continental drive to safely leave Mooli, her younger daughter at Berkeley, I jumped at the opportunity.

Vanamma and my parents have known each other since 1975. My earliest memories of her are of a slim young woman in white jeans and a swinging pony tail driving a white Volkswagon Beetle around Delhi's dusty roads. Not very long after, some how she made the transition into white/neutral colour cotton sarees in my memory and adopted a thick boyish crop of curls.

My mother was actually a friend of her sister but somehow Vanamma and her ended up being better friends. And they stayed friends through a lot of changes: when Vanamma and her family went to Canada, when they came back, when Vanamma's quiet, brilliant husband died after coming out of teaching a class, when she moved to Kodaikkanal to recoup and bring up her daughters and even now when she lives in the United States.

My father being in the Air Force and moving several places, meant that such enduring friendship was rare and in no other instance maintained into the next generation. Such was the friendship of my mother and Vanamma, that her two girls and my brother and I, although very different in upbringing, outlook, and temperament, have always regarded each other with a great deal of affection.

My desire for new experiences led to this tumult. It began with fumbling attempts to put together a carrier on the top of our rented car. The object came unassembled, with a less than rudimentary picture, which was the only aide to the engineering skills of Mooli and I. So, there we were, the two of us, she on the inside of a suitcase-like object trying to fit in the right screws, while I sat on the outside trying to tighten the screws. Three hours and much gasping later, we had a carrier installed on our car! A full seven hours late, and too many pounds heavier, well stocked with curd rice, baingan bharta and avakkai, we left in the late afternoon driving towards Indiana.

Wah thodti patthar Allahabad ke path par -- although because of my South Indian heritage, my knowledge of Hindi poetry is scant -- this poem from my ninth grade text remained and I recited while driving away from Pittsburgh, the Allahabad of the US by virtue of being on the confluence of the Monangahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers.

"What do you want to do with the rest of your life?? Vanamma asked Ujju. Ujju quite happily announced her intention to be invited by universities all over to speak on her mysterious thesis in the field of comparative literature and live in Greece.

"Greece. Sounds beautiful but what will you do there for a living?? I asked amazed.

"Whatever I do will be better because right now I am breaking stones for $ 30,000," she said cheekily comparing herself with the heroine of Nirala's poem!

"Well, since Mooli will live in Morocco and Radhika will have her winter residence in the Indian Ocean islands I will have several choices," said Vanamma happily reflecting on these possibilities.

Turning to me, Vanamma continued with her mock inquisition, asking me with whom I saw myself. Vanamma has rights over me similar to those of my mother and also has an audacity that my mother doesn't. Now, if it were anyone else, I would have laughed it off, made fun of the person and in short attempted to avoid the question.

Good question, I thought, not daring to say that I didn't see an Indian man who could share my dreams, thereby dooming me to spinsterhood since that was a preliminary screening level, beyond which other qualities such as solvency, tolerance and patience, consistency, sensuousness, love of the arts, courtesy, willingness to share, intelligence would weed out those left!

The Badlands, South Dakota

Early French settlers and explorers called these strange undulating, twisting, contorting, land forms in South Dakota, as Les Mauvaises Terres. Earlier Lakota Indians also called it mako sica meaning land bad.

Once I turned to look behind me at these immense rocks, white in the moonlight, and sitting like enormous ghosts, their age laughing at me and their power defying me. And although these forms did notfill me with dread, they inspired respect for nature and her power.

Are those mountains, ravines, valleys, shikharas or gopurams that we see? It's hard to say precisely what one is seeing, almost as though a giant hand seized the land in a frenzy of compression, depression, shoving and pushing, squeezing upwards and then let go suddenly so that the fingerprints of this enormous force is still visible. Milky pools of water collect everywhere; the liquid so thick that I saw cracks in it which reminded of the cream on top of my daily glass of milk in my childhood (luckily I liked these pools far more than the dreaded malai!).

"I feel like I am driving through a sea bed!" exclaimed Ujju, as we drove to the campsite in the Badlands National Park where we had reserved a site for the night.

Camping is an integral part of the American experience or so I have been led to believe in the six years that I have lived in the US. Well, this was my first shot at it.

Ujju and Mooli, the more experienced campers, led the charge to raise a tent. They held it on one side while I held the other and we all tried to pin it, give it a spine and help it stand. After much creeping inside the tent, adjusting and finally looking at the hapless hut, Vanamma sighed and said, "Well, of all the tents here ours is the most in harmony." Noticing that indeed the beige colour of the tent echoed the beige of the surrounding rocks, we brightened up and deemed our project to be a great success!

Vanamma and I set off for a walk in the evening with a young guide, a sophomore from Northwestern University. Grasses are what grows here, we are told. The Badlands is one of the last places on the North American continent that still has some of the original prairie land and the grasses that the European settlers of the United States decimated and in its place encouraged pasture and agriculture.

"This is what made this country so rich and powerful," said Vanamma picking up a stalk of grass, and smiling down at it. "After they cleared the grass, the settlers who came to America grew wheat and corn which are also grasses and grew very well on these soils -- so they could feed everyone and produce huge amounts for the rest of the world even," she added.

On our way back, we saw a strange sight: Green pasture on one side and more badlands on the other side of the road. "This is what it will be like in a few years. Well, maybe a few hundred years!" said Vanamma, adding, "Do you see those shrubs on the rocks? Right now, there are only a few of them but they are scattered everywhere and that means they are getting a hold on the rocks. The potential for the pasture today is in the badlands. The badlands yesterday just gently eroded and covered up with vegetation? Is it possible to draw inspiration from nature whose enormous, unselfconscious force could turn a desolate barren rock into lush green meadows?"

From the Badlands, we moved toward Rapid City from, the last city in South Dakota where we stopped and shopped at a local Safeway for groceries that we stored in our cooler. Rapid City was dubbed by us as the city of bad clichés. The city's entire commercial establishment appeared to be in cahoots to cash in on a 'Rapid' experience: Rapid Care, Rapid Wash, Rush Mart were some of the signs around the city!

As we left Rapid City behind we came across a street called Disk Drive and this rather personal message from McDonald’s – check out the photograph on the left -- that had us in splits about the corniness of Middle America. Rapidly Over was our final verdict on this city in South Dakota! I recalled that one of my uncles had studied at the South Dakota School of Mines and shuddered with pity thinking of him having to go toRapid City for entertainment!

Ambuva ki chaav mein... In exactly four lines of verse and infinite variation, Shobha Mudgal stole our hearts, leaving us anxiously awaiting the arrival of the beloved, moving from Middle America to the legendary west: Montana, Idaho and Wyoming! Driving in Wyoming, my intrepid aunt, suffered an episode of anxiety from as she says the miles of bad land around. I was mystified, since my response was primarily one of boredom looking at the pasture land and feeling my sore backside.

However, when Vanamma, who until that point had been driving at 100 miles per hour, began to fidget and grow pale, we decided to stop and find out what the matter was.

"It's like, I am getting a bad feeling from the land," she said, trying to articulate her unease but being unable to fully explain it.

"This land here was taken from the American Indians and people were killed here -- a lot of bad things happened here," said Mooli, who like us was trying to find a possible explanation to quell Vanamma's uncertainty.

Ujju began to drive and as though Vanamma's words were a omen, we were flagged down by a cop who promptly gave Ujju a ticket for $ 50 with an injunction to drive safely (or better, perhaps?). Now, poor Ujju had been driving at 72 miles per hour, a perfectly respectable, and common speed on the highway but who wants to argue with the notorious cops of the Midwest where we had heard that traffic tickets are a major source of revenue on the interstate highways!

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

On an earlier visit to Yellowstone in 1984, my father brought my family through the southern route into the park which I recommend over any other route for a first visit. Northern Utah with skies, fiery and peaceful at the same time, was the first place I discovered where it is impossible to see the horizon.

Then as we entered Wyoming, the playful, wilful Snake river followed and dodged, ducked and doggedly pursued some unknown destination along with us. A silvery slip of a river, the Snake is also the scene of some of the fiercest whitewater rafting in the United States. This time, we entered the Yellowstone national park through the east entrance. Our journey into Yellowstone began when the flat fields of Wyoming were abruptly punctuated by a high mountain.

We climbed 7,000 feet in the night on this unnamed mountain with a grade of 10 per cent uphill and downhill, looking at surreal skies suffused with the colours of both dawn and dusk. Stopping, almost at the top, we took turns getting out of the car, breathing in wafers of thin, cold, air. I looked at the mountainous wall in front of me, the desolation around and thought of how tightly controlled Ujju's driving had been all the way uphill and then downhill; nature's quiet show of strength inspiring respect.

Reaching the bottom of the mountain, we passed the Yellowstone lake -- a volcanic basin that millions of years ago, cooled and filled to the brim with water. Huge, deep and blue -- a deep purplish blue, like the stain of medicine over a bruise, still hinting at the turbulence and tearing at the surface of the earth. Entering the park from the east, we took the single road loop connecting all the geysers, sulphurous pools and other manifestations of the volcanic activity which form the park's natural ecosystem.

We planned to experience the explosion at the Old Faithful geyser, then go on to see some of the mineral pools, the subject of millions of postcards and pictures over the years.

Vacation is a time when we all relax... and sometimes it gives room for a deeper, intuitive intelligence to manifest itself. As we stood waiting for Old Faithful to explode, Vanamma closed her eyes and even observing her from behind, I felt some internal turbulence within her. Then she opened her eyes and told her daughters to learn everything they could from her soon.

Knowing my own mother to be somewhat telepathic especially in times of distress with my brother and I, I wondered if Vanamma had experienced some moment of clarity and decided to wait for an opportune moment before broaching the subject.

"Your mother sees things in her dreams; she is not awake. I stood in front of the geyser and felt something, so I closed my eyes, and saw , as though I were looking into a well, a small whirlwind at the bottom, a larger one on the outside of that, then another, and so on, until it comes rushing out. Why am I seeing this, as I am awake and in the very moment before explosion?" she said to me as we walked toward our park.

Trying to calm Vanamma, we moved to the mineral pools. Sapphire blue, emerald green, HB pencil black, charcoal, smoke, brick and coral are not just words in Yellowstone and if there is a place in the United States where the word kohra has meaning it is here. The mist rises and if you look at it through the gaps in the wooden railing you can see a cinemascope vision of serene beauty covering the turbulence underneath -- all these pools are violent and bubbling, if not at the surface then deeper inside, leaving the earth's crust scarred and almost liquid.

These mineral pools are everywhere, pools of almost pure sulphuric acid, the odour of rotten eggs wafting up into clear blue skies. From the ugly to the beautiful and vice versa, each carrying the potential for the other. That such beauty came at the cost of tremendous olfactory displeasure seemed fit!

Arches National Park, Utah

I once received a postcard on the Internet wishing me springtime's most delicate hopes from a German student visiting the Delicate Arch in Utah. Although my heart wasn't taken with the boy, my mind was delighted with the technology, the stone, the skies and the desolation sent a silent message of awaiting some undefined moment when we would be face to face.

Arches is in southern Utah near the south western part of Colorado and is a favourite with students because of the opportunities for hiking, cycling and camping. Here, its not volcanic lava or water (at least not in the present) but wind: wind is the immortal hand whose fearful symmetry echoes in the castles, penguins, Egyptian gods and goddesses, skyscrapers, caves, tunnels, windows, arches and whorls in the stone.

Every rock carries the footprint of the wind. The wind is strangely silent, no billowing skirts ruffle the air, no flowing manes, nothing to tell you that there is someone else here -- a giant sculpture being prepared stealthily in the rock without anyone noticing until there is a patch of sky visible when the arch forms.

We undertook a quick two hour driving tour of the park. Students and other tourists often spend days here hiking up to all the arches, in the hot desert sun. The sun is merciless here and an inhuman scale pervades all around. Had anyone ever lived here? I don't know.

Beautiful is not the word I would use for this place of destruction. The wind burrows, tunnels and finds the secret, soft heart of rock and lowly but steadily erodes it, until one day an arch is formed. The most famous arch in this park, the Delicate Arch, is so named because it can collapse any moment; so thin has it been worn over time.

And every moment, the other arches grow closer to resembling this arch. I closed my eyes and ran my fingers along an impossibly vertical slice of stone: stubble, prickly heat, ghostly eyes, nose and mouth, the imprint of waves of water? A veritable mural of nature's intentions. Even if I were blind here, in Arches National Park, I could tell a story of a million years ago but where is the end and where is the beginning?

Continued

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