Again driving by night. But this time for a longer distance. And again, the same music that fills the interior of your car. But this time, you are not gliding down a main road in Pittsburgh, but you are forcing your car up and down the mountainous Appalachians. Towards Raleigh. The capital of North Carolina and hometown of your co-student. He is taking your roommates and you with him on a trip to visit friends and family.
An extended weekend lies ahead of you. Thanks to Labor Day. To get two days off for the “Holiday of the Workers” within a year is one of the bizarre things that you encounter during your stay in the US. The fact that the American Labor Day is not celebrated on the first of May goes back to a paranoid president. He was afraid of encouraging a communist revolution and so he opted for the less political September date back in the 1880s.
Thursday evening the four of you get started, with a setting sun and a relaxed tiredness of a short week of school. Because you are skipping Friday’s recitation sessions. Participation is voluntary and therefore you thankfully circumvent the dull and boring process of going through homework problems. Due to that and the holiday, the weekend grows into a four-day mini-vacation.
The first few hours of the drive, the car is filled with laughter and chatter, it feels almost like a school excursion. But the conversations fade away like the evening light. One after another the three non-drivers slide into an uneasy sleep of dubious quality. You get your part of it, too. And thus you miss out on the sparsely populated, wooded hills of West Virginia. The existence of this small, misshaped state that school kids, cartographers and politicians stumble upon, goes back to the days of the Civil War. As long as you have a stake in a political entity, its integrity is sacrosanct. When it comes to gaining influence, separatism comes in handy. And this way, some stubborn, poor hillbillies were encouraged by Washington, D.C., to split off slave-owning Virginia back in the early 1860s. West Virginia was created, becoming part of the North while the rest of the old state sided with the ill-fated Confederacy. The rest is history.
Shortly before crossing into the old, history-laden Commonwealth of Virginia you wake up. You switch drivers, steering the “MBA sleeping car” for the next few hours. You have driven a lot in the States. But mostly in the plains of the Midwest with its gently rolling hills. The home of the cruise control, so to speak. But the curvy Interstate with its steep grades curling through the westernmost portion of Virginia renders the cruise control useless. Due to the weak motor, also typically American.
Despite the unfamiliar landscape, you are reminded of past trips when you steered a car at night on the highways of this county. Especially driving at night has something calm, concentrated about it, that encourages contemplating and reflecting. No other cars bother you, no roadside advertisements distract attention. Just the asphalt passing beneath your headlights, being surrounded by stars and moonlight. You think of the people that you accompanied on those trips. The music, the atmosphere. All that seems to be distant and yet unbelievably close.
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