IN FOURTH GRADE, I WAS ASSIGNED my first research paper. We could select the topic of our interest, go to the archaic library and pull together sentences that were as unplagiarized as was possible from a fourth grader, and type up several pages on the gargantuan PCs that bowed the desks they sat on. It was the assignment of the century.
My topic was—no questions asked—the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d never seen it, but loved the bright crimson arcs, it’s magnitude, the photos my grandparents had taken during their visit. I plugged away at the paper. I wanted to be a part of the paper.
At 10, as I recall, everything outside a 10-mile radius seemed miles away. Europe, Africa and Asia were on another planet. Sphinxes and Van Goghs and gondolas on Venetian canals were only images seen by 1960’s photographers, published in Little Flower School’s musty, crumbling library archives. The Golden Gate Bridge was somewhere, lain across a span of deep blue, cars sliding across it day by day. I’d never been on a plane. Back then, I never even imagined state lines.
Now that I’m 22, I grasp distance and the concept of velocity—that I can be somewhere, can go places with just time and patience (maybe a little money helps, too) and be far away. Now that I’ve been to every corner of the United States, and seen how the states are united from forest to forest, Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, Roswell to Orlando—I understand. There is an Interstate, a highway system, back roads patterned across every terrain that want to be driven on.
Come June, I will see Golden Gate when I finally visit—and for the summer, live in San Francisco. I’ve never been to California, but I’ve never met a state I didn’t like. And this 10-20 mile radius I’ve been circling for the past months will, for the while, lay by the wayside as Fourth Grade’s dreams transpire.
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