Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I drove on through the low, marshy flatlands, much taken with the simple beauty of the
Chesapeake peninsula, with its high skies and scattered farms and forgotten little towns.
Late in the morning I crossed into Delaware, en route to Philadelphia. Delaware may well
be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and
couldn't think of a single thing to say to her. I said, “So you come from Delaware? Gosh.
Wow.” And she moved quickly on to someone more verbally dextrous, and also better-
looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the
benefitofanexpensiveeducationandnotknowanythingatallaboutoneofthefiftystates.
I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or
seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they'd say, “You
know, I don't think I ever have,” and then they'd look kind of troubled too.
I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there
I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could
findalmostnothingwrittenaboutDelawareanywhere.EventheentryintheEncyclopaedia
Britannica was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence,
as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it
vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children's drawing slates on which you
erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted
upbehindmeasIdrove,expungingtheexperienceasitunfolded.Lookingbacknow,Ican
just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.
And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stal-
lone and Legionnaires' disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the dis-
turbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.
