A place
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 1 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
Charleston, South Carolina. January 21, 1989.
As it heads north into Charleston, Route 17 narrows to a two-way highway and imposes a long series of traffic lights against motorists trying to hurry through the downtown area. I look around at drivers stopped on either side of me. Their faces are serious, anxious, frustrated. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t share their discomfort. I feel at home.
Later, parked for the night in a stand of jack pines near a small airport north of Charleston, I put the feeling into more words:
We all need a little place of our own. I have a place, and it is little, but I own it, and it seems to provide just about everything I require of a place. In fact, it provides more than any of the larger places I have owned. It can do this because it is adapted – in truth, over-adapted – to one of modern civilization’s more vulgar byproducts, a byproduct that in its vulgarity connects my place with just about every other place I have ever been or would ever want to be.
– Sid Leavitt
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