Eighteen In Cross-country Odyssey
Author
Benjamin Anderson
Author Bio
Benjamin Anderson lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Born in 1985, he grew up there, and except for one sojourn after college where he worked as a textbook editor for Larson Texts, Inc, he has always lived there. One other exception exists to this rule. After graduating from high school, he undertook a journey across the United States by van, which is chronicled in Eighteen In Cross-country Odyssey. By observing this cross-section of the United States, he got a taste for what the well-being as an adult was like at large in this country before his college days. He holds a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Mathematics from Shippensburg University. He has known three generations of his family to live in central Pennsylvania, although his relatives are scattered throughout the United States. From an early age of fourteen, he began his writing, and he had finished a preliminary draft of his first novel Sirens of Morning Light by the age of seventeen, although he would not publish it until 2011. He garnered local awards for his writing throughout this youth. Recently, he commits to writing poetry on a daily basis. In Eighteen In Cross-country Odyssey Benjamin explores the United States of America.
Description
Entering his final four years of formal schooling, Benjamin Anderson decides on taking a journey across the United States after completion of high school. He follows through in a 1989 Plymouth Voyager in 2003, and after his brief attendance at a family wedding in West Virginia where he wonders at the difference in himself not to be tied down, he endeavors south, all of the way west, and back again. His uncle prepares him with his story of traveling across the country at the age of nineteen, and his father further prepares him before setting out a week after high school graduation. First through the Appalachian Mountains Benjamin tests the mobility of his van, and he soon encounters a man from Texas whose years of experience are beyond him. He finds that many of the people in different locales and traveling are middle-aged adults. In Bell Buckle, Tennessee, he enjoys the company of one such man, who despite being the garbage collector seems to know his way around the town. His journey is not without meeting with youth as he visits a friend he made over the internet once he is in the central part of Louisiana. This friend is not as he expected him to be, although he discovers that a friendship on-line has some indicator over being amicable in person. The youngest people he meets are in the last time zone in the contiguous United States, which includes two boys who despite their age have already amassed for themselves a world of trouble. Benjamin later wonders how he is different from them, for he must uphold a permanent record and a world of newfound responsibilities. There are benchmarks to his journey where he meets other people he formerly knew, including a high school friend with family in Illinois, a home with farmers in eastern Iowa, and another uncle in California. His conversations cover life, duty, and subsistence with clergymen, travelers, and domestic civilians. When his van acts up on the exit to Stanford University and gives out on his return to his California uncle from the National Steinbeck Center, new responsibility becomes apparent with his age, and Benjamin ventures home cross-country one more time by train.
Book excerpt
When I separated from the human-built enclosures into the cloudy sky of central Pennsylvania, the humidity hung like a must since it had been raining throughout summer, and looking beside me, I could relate the differences between this climate and a dry one for the first time due to my summer-long travels. And my mother was smiling. While whisking past downtown Mechanicsburg, the buildings took new face, layered in brick, a testimonial to the antiquities of the eastern United States. The houses, no less themselves with one or two stories, wood and/or brick, and concrete driveways or blacktop driveways or driveways made of limestone rocks, all on the same street, individualized themselves and as a whole contrasted themselves from the new housing developments, built under one mold by the same architects. Into my room at my father’s house with the ceiling, floor, and walls inside which I have immured myself through eighteen years of my life, I discovered the most astonishing feature of this episode, what I came back to observe, which was how I left it.
The room was left a shambles. School newspapers laid atop a school yearbook that rested upon my school binder with the Uno cards and graphing calculator secured within, despite how many times I had withdrawn that gear on school time. Seven books, needed for studying to pass the final in the only class that still required passing for me to graduate, English, which I later assumed (so far as I cared) that I did, were an arm’s length away from the end of school year pranks: the water guns, water balloons, and a tennis ball I bounced upon the draping acoustic panels in the new orchestra room. The video games, unplugged and pulled away from the TV, occupied their separate sphere of the room as one enormous clot. Over the jade-carpeted floor a dozen plastic bags, all containing stuff, distributed themselves like white blood cells trying to digest some sort of bacterial infection. As for my desk, only an archeologist would know. The room portrayed the abandonment of things rather than a conclusive arrangement before I left, but this sense pervaded.
Little had changed here. I had merely been gone. In returning from my journey cross-country, the United States felt like a grid, and I could not understand how the minute speck of it that was mine remained intact with my responsibility to it.
These visions are the end of my journey. I, the author, leave you with questions. Yes! There is an ending. Life is one big question. That cliché reads that way, does it not? It is what I had in the beginning, questions, enticing me to go.
Author Website
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