Sophia’s Story

Growing up in New York City, I was deeply indoctrinated in a view of the world that Saul Steinberg’s summed up in his famous 1976 New Yorker magazine cover. There was 10th Ave. and there was New Jersey (which you avoided as much as possible) and then there was a whole bunch of nothing worth mentioning until you hit the Pacific Ocean.

When I was 19 years old, I tagged along with a friend on a cross-country drive to deliver a baby blue Plymouth Duster to her brother in Los Angeles. On that trip, I saw my first cornfields. My first hay rolls. I saw Chicago. The Great Salt Lake. (Yuck.) Cows. The Rockies. We drove from New York to San Francisco and then down the jagged coastline to Los Angeles, where I dipped my toes in the Pacific Ocean and fell madly in love with America.

Over the next few years, I romanced the nation in a series of aimless month-long Greyhound bus trips using what was called an Ameripass—like a Eurrail Pass but less comfortable. (And seeing America by bus might be the exact opposite of flying over.) I zig-zagged around the country with a sketchy itinerary, stopping as the mood struck me, staying in cheap motels and rundown small-town hotels, surfing the couches of friends of friends and, on one occasion, resorting to a night on the floor of Billings, Montana bus depot for lack of an alternative. Those were grand trips. The scent of bus-restroom disinfectant still makes me nostalgic.

During one of those trips I first visited Texas, staying with friends of a friend in Fort Worth. I returned a couple of times in subsequent years before deciding, on little more than a whim, to move to Dallas in the 1980s. That’s been a long interesting ride in itself—I wrote about it in my first book, The Yankee Chick’s Survival Guide to Texas. I didn’t intend to stay but here I am and there you go. At this point, I’m as much Texan as New Yorker.

Since that first cross-country trip, I’ve traveled the world. But I’m not done with America and never will be. I haven’t seen all 50 states yet. Much of the north-central part of the country remains virgin territory for me, aside from glimpses through bus windows. I begin this blog with a mission in mind: North Dakota, here I come.

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