Breezewood

In his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, French anthropologist Marc Augé explores the proliferation in contemporary society of spaces such as airports, supermarkets, hotel rooms -- the sort of transient regions that fail to impress upon us a sense of individual or local identity. I have to admit that I have always found non-places sort of fascinating. I was never any good at my first job as a chambermaid; at age fifteen I would already linger too long in each hotel room, seeking out the tiny traces of uniqueness left behind by the previous night's guests. If I were anything of a photographer, I'd love to hang around non-places and photograph everyday life there.

Not long ago, I had occasion to visit one non-place that, it occured to me while I was there, has figured relatively prominently in the last several years of my life: Breezewood, Pennsylvania. I say relatively prominently, because as a girl from the Midwest I seldom have reason to end up in Breezewood -- I don't even know anyone from Pennsylvania -- yet I realized that I've been there four times in the past decade, and that my joy in arriving there each time has been surpassed only by my joy of leaving. The reason I have visited Breezewood so many times is that it is almost exactly halfway between Kalamazoo, Michigan and Williamsburg, Virginia. It was only on my last trip through Breezewood that I began to reflect on exactly how often I have made this drive.

I am not the only one who stops in Breezewood. In fact, people flock to it. As near as I can tell, the entire town's identity coalesces around the fact that it is halfway between everything, and possesses the most diverse array of gas/food/lodging for miles in any direction. This non-town is full of non-places where travelers can fulfill basic needs at a staggering number of franchises. Or, if they prefer, they can dine on the traditional local cuisine, scrapple: après hot-dogs, a dispirited blob of gray non-meat served with eggs and choice of toast or grits. Here's the thing: although everything in Breezewood is characterized by that numbing mediocrity that makes me ill at ease wherever I encounter it, I am nonetheless grateful for the chance to empty my bladder, stretch my legs, fill my gas tank, rehydrate and choose from a greater variety of unwholesome road food options, knowing that I am either slightly less than halfway there or slightly more than halfway home. And somehow, it's my memories of Breezewood that contextualize all my other memories of trips southeastward.

I've never been to Breezewood alone. The first three times I was there, I was with my ex and had no way of knowing when I would be there again or to what end. This last time I was with the neighbs, who had come down to Virginia to apartment-hunt with me, to look for a job, and to see if he could get his mind around being there with me indefinitely. As the two of us sat across from one another in a booth at the travel plaza, munching on overpriced submarine sandwiches and regarding one another with dazed highway eyes, it hit me: while Breezewood already figured disproportionately in my imagination, it was about to figure even more prominently as the place I pass through on my way back to Michigan for Christmases, Thanksgivings, graduations, weddings and funerals for years to come; my own, anonymous geographical and emotional way-station between the old life and the new one.

I wondered aloud to the neighbs what it must be like to live in Breezewood, to work at a franchise restaurant, to watch people come and go. It must feel a little like being suspended in midair, I guessed. You'd never really want to talk to anyone over long; you wouldn't want to get attached. All around you, people are on their way somewhere, and after a while their faces run together and they all seem the same: frowsy, grouchy and a bit detestable and self-important. I imagine you'd get defensive if you were from Breezewood and heard somebody like me running it down; you'd feel compelled to show that it isn't a non-place at all, that there's life and vibrance and direction. You'd try to make yourself believe that existence in this in-between had meaning and purpose, and you might even succeed, but you'd always ask yourself: where do they all come from, and where are they all going?

He has made up his mind to come with me. I think he has made up his own mind, and no one has forced him to it. I don't have to wonder what it's like to spend too long in Breezewood: it's Hell.