Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 19

"What are those plywood shacks I keep seeing out there?" I ask the stubble-faced man behind the counter. "With the tarps."

The man gives me a squinty look. "You don't want to go near those," he says. "There's dawgs in 'em."

"Dogs?" I say. "Are they mean?"

"No, but their owners might be."

"What kind of dogs are they?"

"Virginia c.o.o.nhounds," he says. "Gentlest animals there is, 'less you're a c.o.o.n."

IN 1856, following the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her second novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. In it, Nina Gordon inherits the family plantation, which through soil depletion and runoff has become all but worthless. The plantation is run by her slave, Harry, who of course turns out to be her half-brother.

The t.i.tle character is another slave, Dred, who has succ.u.mbed to the mental disease of "drapetomania," the unreasonable yearning of a slave for freedom, and is living in the Great Dismal Swamp, where he preaches his abolitionist doctrine. Dred, it seems, was based on Dred Scott, the most controversial slave of the time. Scott was born in 1799 in Virginia, the property of Peter Blow, who moved to Missouri in 1830 and sold Scott to John Emerson. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott filed suit for his freedom, claiming that since Missouri was a free state, he ought to have been freed in 1830. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1857 that Scott actually had no case, since "according to the Declaration of Independence, any person descended from black Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States."

Runaways and freedmen-including the swamp dwellers, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred, and my great-grandfather-were not and could not become American citizens. It took an amendment to the Const.i.tution to overturn the Dred Scott decision; my great-grandfather was eighteen before he was allowed to become a citizen of the country in which he was born. Until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, he and his family were citizens of nowhere. Their nationality was "Colored." They lived in what James Baldwin called "another country."

Here in Virginia, we are in the very mother state of that country. The first slave s.h.i.+p to land in America sailed into Chesapeake Bay, up the James River to Jamestown, in 1615. George Was.h.i.+ngton was the son of a slave owner. Thomas Jefferson owned 187 slaves. Slavery persisted in Virginia almost until living memory. The novelist William Styron, a Virginian, could recall his grandmother telling him about the days after the Civil War, when her slaves were taken from her. While I was in Alabama and Georgia, I was in such emotional turmoil that I was tempted to compare myself to a Jew visiting Auschwitz, but Styron corrects me: "Slavery," he wrote, "was not remotely like the Jewish Holocaust-of brief duration and intensely focused destruction." Slavery persisted for 250 years and represents what Styron called "the collective anguish from which white Americans have always averted their eyes."

That sense of longing for redemption in the heart of American literature, and therefore of the American psyche, must spring, at least in part, from this collective anguish, for it is clear to me now that black Americans may have forgiven white America for slavery, but they have not forgotten, and neither have white Americans recovered from having imposed it. "The drama," Styron wrote, "has never ended." Slavery is still "a world that may be dead but has not really been laid to rest."

MARYLAND stretches ahead of us, Chesapeake Bay under our feet. We're driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a twenty-three-mile double ribbon of highway that curves elegantly across Chesapeake Bay like a partially straightened strand of DNA.

My father used to sail this bay every September with his best friend, Jim, a Virginian he got to know in Brazil. They'd take a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter and a loaf of bread and sail off together in Jim's boat. My father would never have stood for such a meal served by my mother, but he ate it ten days straight on the boat and told us about it, laughing. We could hardly imagine him out there on the James River, leaning into the breeze, dining on peanut b.u.t.ter sandwiches instead of roast beef. That couldn't possibly be our father. I understand now. That's what America offered him: the chance to be something he never knew he could be.

We've seen it throughout this trip: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia, Powell on the Colorado, Huck Finn and Jim on the Mississippi. No wonder my father loved the United States. It was where he was touched by that powerful American baptism: an ordinary man transformed as he is carried by a great river to the sea.

THE BRIDGE slides us onto the Delmarva Peninsula, named for the states that share it-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. The Delmarva is a plump uvula of land that dangles down into the Atlantic, creating Delaware Bay on one side, Chesapeake Bay on the other. We're in Virginia for a few miles, then we're in Maryland, which claims the western half of the peninsula, known as the Eastern Sh.o.r.e, which, from the perspective of the state, I suppose it is, since it wraps the east side of Chesapeake Bay.

The Delmarva Peninsula doesn't have a sh.o.r.eline so much as a lacy edge penetrated by rivers with names like Sa.s.safras, Wicomico, and Choptank. The land itself is flat and sandy, as if it has only just risen above the level of the sea. Not all of the state is like this. Closer to the bay, bald cypress grows in marshlands, and in the north there are rolling hills of oak forest, with pine groves in the mountains to the west. Maryland's culture s.h.i.+fts with its geography: it's Appalachian on the west, more like the Northeast in the middle, while the part we're driving through is indistinguishable from the South we've been traversing since Georgia. No wonder the state calls itself "America in Miniature." The only thing it lacks is lakes.

"Did you know there isn't a single lake in Maryland?"

"Glaciers never made it this far south," Wayne says, and I look at him in wonder. His friend the novelist Matt Cohen once said that if Wayne's brain had a yard sale, it would take up a lot of sidewalk. Several blocks, I would think.

The part of Maryland we see through the winds.h.i.+eld is fis.h.i.+ng and farm country. Small towns dot the landscape: Eden, Greensboro, Locust Grove. The bulk of Maryland's population is cl.u.s.tered in Baltimore, the capital, and around Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., which absorbs a chunk of the state. Intent on avoiding cities as long as we can, we head north up through Delaware, known as the First State, since it was the first, in 1787, to ratify the Const.i.tution of the new United States of America.

We're crossing state lines every few hours now: North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware. No two of them, it seems, can agree on how fast we should be travelling. On our way to El Paso it was eighty. In Arizona, New Mexico, and deer-infested Utah, it was seventy-five. Through the southern states it was seventy, and now, it seems, the powers that be have deemed speeds above sixty-five miles an hour suicidal. When we move to a two-lane highway, the legal speed drops again, to fifty-five.

"I wish they'd make up their minds," Wayne says, glancing at the rear-view mirror. Delaware is on a level plain, the lowest mean elevation of any state in the nation. There seems no good reason not to breeze along.

Before we know it, we're in Wilmington, slipping onto the I-95 and into Pennsylvania. No state signs here on the interstate, no cameos of William Penn, no prettily painted panels with Enjoy Your Visit or Welcome! or even the simple and direct State Line. Even the sign painters know it is hopeless to try to distinguish one blur of this throughway from another. We're in another megalopolis, the mirror image of the one we drove through at the beginning of this journey.

We skirt close to the Mason-Dixon Line, the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania that was defined as the line of lat.i.tude fifteen miles south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when, exactly, we cross from the Rebel South into the Yankee North. The view outside the window is relentlessly urban, but on the map, I spot a note of elegance: the shapely arc of the Delaware border with Pennsylvania, drawn at a twelve-mile radius from the cupola on the courthouse in New Castle. It is the only circular state boundary in the United States. In fact, I can't think of anything else like it on any map I've ever seen. It's nothing we'd be able to see as we drive, but Delawarians must surely be aware of this curve, like a rose window at the top of their state.

All this time we have resisted what Steinbeck called "these ribbons of concrete and tar" that slash through the landscape, stopping for nothing, but we're road-weary, we're overstuffed with impressions. The d.a.m.ned throughways are almost soothing now.

It is dark by the time we take the exit for Princeton and pick up Route 1, the most easterly in the country. We stop for gas, and the attendant is terse, not unfriendly exactly, but not open either, held back in that northeastern way, waiting for us to speak first. Not like Bay Bridge Betty, not like Mary in Jefferson, and not at all like the man in Jackson who led us to the parade. In moments, we will be with our friends, with Canadians, but already I feel an ache for those places where strangers speak to us without reserve, where a man we've known for five minutes spreads his arms wide and grins, "Well, then, we're all of us connected."

WALKING with us up Witherspoon Street, in downtown Princeton, our friend Lauren is recounting history. The street is history. The very air in Princeton is historical.

"The street is named for John Witherspoon," she says, "one of three Princetonians who signed the Declaration of Independence. The other two were Richard Stockton and Joseph Hewes."

Here in the East, I can't help feeling that history has weight, that the streets teem with the ghosts of the distant dead. New England has become Old America. There was history in the West, of course, but most of it was geological: four-thousand-year-old trees, four-billion-year-old canyons, ancient volcanoes, ageless deserts, timeless rivers. The land was old; the people were new. Here in Princeton, history seems to have galloped at a furious pace; the land recedes into the background, a backdrop to the human parade.

"On your way into Princeton, you came along Stockton Street, named for Richard Stockton," Lauren continues. "Hewes moved to Wilmington, I think."

Here is the parsonage where Paul Robeson was born. Here is Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church, where Robeson attended the Witherspoon School for Colored Children, which was started in 1858 by Betsey Stockton, one of Robert Stockton's freed slaves. Here is Lahiere's, the restaurant where Albert Einstein often ate lunch. We can see his favourite table through the window. Einstein lived in Princeton from 1933, when he came to work at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study, until his death in 1955, by which time the inst.i.tute was being run by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Lahiere's was owned by Joseph and Mary Louise Christen, who were from Zurich. For Einstein, eating there must have felt as though he were reliving his happiest years, which were spent in Zurich. Time collapsing and expanding, memories merging with contemporary events, faces dissolving and reappearing with altered features. No wonder he came to believe that there were aspects of reality that quantum mechanics, based as it was on mathematical probability rather than observation, couldn't explain. Life was improbable, and yet there it was.

Lauren and her husband Ron are expat Canadians, she from Montreal and Ron from Quebec City. Ron is the executive vice-president of customer management with Zurich Insurance, and Lauren is a novelist. They like the United States and have been welcomed into the Princeton community. Lauren is involved in a number of volunteer organizations and is the writer-in-residence at Trinity Church, where she teaches creative writing.

We walk past Princeton Cemetery, which occupies a huge portion of the town at the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins. Merilyn, of course, has a brochure.

"President Grover Cleveland is buried here," she says.

"And Paul Robeson's parents," Lauren adds.

"Oh," Merilyn exclaims, "and Sara Agnes Pryor-founder of the Daughters of the American Revolution. And here's one for you, Wayne: John O'Hara, the novelist."

"b.u.t.terfield 8," I say. "But you two are the novelists."

"He wrote his own epitaph. Haven't you always wanted to do that?"

"What did he say about himself?"

"'Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional, he wrote honestly and well.'"

"I should start working on mine," I say. "I'm Canadian, so I can't say 'better than anyone else.' How about, 'As well as he could, under the circ.u.mstances, and given his limitations, he told what he knew of the truth about his time'?"

"You're too modest," says Merilyn. "And it's way too long."

This exchange brings us to Na.s.sau Street, Princeton's main drag. On one side is the university; along the other, where we are walking, is a series of shops, including a bookstore.

"Why don't you two go on," I say to Lauren and Merilyn. "I'll just pop in here and meet you after lunch."

Micawber's is having a going-out-of-business sale. I feel like a vulture at a roadkill, sidling up to its half-price tables, but a bargain is a bargain. I gorge.

"Why are you closing?" I ask the young woman at the cash as she starts going through the pile.

"The university bookstore is expanding to two floors," she says. "We can't compete."

"You needn't worry," I say, thinking of the university bookstore in Athens. "The first floor will be all sweats.h.i.+rts, coffee mugs, and backpacks. You'll need a tracking device to find the books."

"You're sweet," she says, smiling. "Do you need help carrying these to your car?"

"No, thanks. I've got my walker parked outside."

I stagger with my load up to a restaurant called the Alchemist & Barrister and find a table in a quiet corner. After ordering a plate of Irish stew and a half-litre of Cotes-du-Rhone, I take out my books. One of them is a biography of George Was.h.i.+ngton. By some fluke, I open it at a page describing Was.h.i.+ngton's expertise at breeding hunting dogs, one of which he called "the Virginian hound." He also bred bluetick c.o.o.nhounds from a set of five English foxhounds given to him by the French general Lafayette in 1770. Was.h.i.+ngton was an avid fox hunting man; while serving in Congress in Philadelphia, he regularly crossed and recrossed the Delaware River to ride with the Gloucester Foxhunting Club. His favourite hounds had names like Sweet Lips, Venus, and Truelove. His less-favoured dogs were called Taster, Tippler, and Drunkard.

"Let's Face the Music and Dance" is playing softly on a speaker above my head, followed by "Come Fly with Me," and for once I don't bridle at the intrusion. I'm nearly alone in my section of the restaurant. Two tables away, a young man wearing a beret and dark gla.s.ses is sitting with three women, one about his age and two much younger. He smiles at me and says, "Sinatra," and I smile back. As a young crooner during the war, my father is said to have looked uncannily like Frank Sinatra; whenever a Sinatra song came on the radio, his eyes would crinkle and he would slip into a deep, happy reverie.

The four at the other table must have driven in from somewhere north of here, because I hear the older woman say something about black ice. Not wife and daughters, I think; maybe a professor and his seminar. "Where's everyone else?" he asks, looking over at me again. I take out my notebook and go back to George Was.h.i.+ngton.

Was.h.i.+ngton crossed the Delaware three times in five days during the winter of 177677, not to go fox hunting but to attack the British position at Trenton, New Jersey. After a surprising victory on Christmas Day, he retreated to Pennsylvania, then crossed back on December 29, when he heard that British troops under Lord Cornwallis were marching from Princeton to retake Trenton.

A few days before, Thomas Paine had published "The Crisis," the first in a series of patriotic pamphlets that provided the philosophical basis for American independence. "These are the times that try men's souls," it began. Paine exhorted all American men to volunteer and push the red-coated "devils" back to England. "Britain . . . has declared, that she has a right (not only to tax) but 'to bind us in all cases whatsoever,' and if being bound in that manner is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth." Who, he asked, would willingly be a slave?

Americans heeded the call. On January 2, when Was.h.i.+ngton slipped his troops past Cornwallis and moved on to Princeton, he had 5,200 men under his command. The British had left only about 2,000 foot soldiers in Princeton.

Was.h.i.+ngton's general, Hugh Mercer, leading a brigade to destroy a bridge over Princeton's Stony Brook, ran into the British troops on their way to join Cornwallis. In their shared confusion, both American and British soldiers ran for high ground on the same side of the brook: the Americans got there first, and the British charged them, firing their muskets. Was.h.i.+ngton, hearing gunfire, leaped onto his white charger and galloped up the road. Mercer had been killed, stabbed to death by seven bayonets, and the Americans were fleeing from the charge. Was.h.i.+ngton waved his hat to the retreating men, shouting that they must stand their ground. He galloped past them to within thirty feet of the pursuing British soldiers and halted. The stunned British fired a volley at him, but when the smoke cleared he was still in his saddle, untouched. Inspired by Was.h.i.+ngton's bravery, the Americans rallied and fired at the British. Two American field pieces fired grapeshot into the British lines. The British returned fire. All this time, Was.h.i.+ngton remained on his horse, directly in the line of fire between the two opposing armies. Not a single bullet hit him.

The British soldiers gaped. Then, realizing they were greatly outnumbered, they abandoned their position and fled toward Princeton. To do so, they had to charge directly through the American lines. When the British had broken through, Was.h.i.+ngton, the old fox hunter, still on his horse, led his men in pursuit of the redcoats, crying, "It's a fine fox chase, my boys!"

Nothing is more improbable than that George Was.h.i.+ngton survived volley after volley of enemy fire, point blank, a stone's throw from the British line. Had he been hit, Princeton would have fallen to the British and the American Revolutionary War would have been all but over. In other words, the very existence of the United States as an independent nation is an astounding improbability. If Albert Einstein wanted to mull over the problem of probability theory's inadequacy in explaining the mechanical function of the universe, he could hardly have come to a better place than Princeton.

The song above my head is now "From This Moment On." When I look up from my notebook, the man in the beret is looking vaguely in my direction. I smile at him and say, "Bobby Darin," but he doesn't smile back. He starts gathering papers, and the three women begin putting on their coats. As they brush past my table, I hear the man say something about "surveillance."

My G.o.d, I wonder, do they think I'm with Homeland Security?

"Doubtful," Lauren says when I tell her about the incident. "Princeton is full of eccentric people who sit in restaurants writing in their notebooks. No one would think for a minute you were spying on them."

Of course she's right; this is a university town. Then it must be me who is paranoid. This realization hits me with the force of a major revelation. Has my fear and distrust of America been the result of my own paranoia all along? The implications of this possibility loom so large that I have to take a gla.s.s of wine out onto Lauren and Ron's back deck and think about it for a while. They have a large yard, with benches and trees and an artificial pond that isn't running now because it's January. Could it be that my nervousness at crossing the border was unfounded? No one has turned me in to Homeland Security for having uncharitable thoughts about George Bush. This isn't Stalinist Russia. Everyone we've met has been friendly and helpful. And yet I feel this grand unease at being here-not here in Princeton, but here in America. I quite like being in Princeton. I liked being in Seattle, and Fairhaven, and Eureka. I really liked being in Santa Fe, and I didn't even mind being in Selma. And all those places were America. Why do I feel uneasy about being in places that I like?

My mind wanders back to Kafka's Amerika. It is a picaresque novel, which requires that its hero, Karl Rossmann, be entirely innocent, without volition, swept along by the vagaries of events. Every chapter in the novel is a change in Rossmann's fortunes; he rises and falls and rises, from disgraced son to wealthy nephew to penniless vagabond. America in Amerika is a nightmare on a vast scale. On a highway, he sees trucks laden with food bound for New York and hears "the cries of the carefree animals going to the abattoirs." Rossmann's uncle is at first a senator, then later is revealed to own "a sort of commissionary and forwarding business of a kind Karl thought probably didn't exist in Europe." In the end, we see Karl on his way "to the great Theatre of Oklahoma."

Kafka had never been to America. His dystopic view of the nation, like mine before this trip, was based on supposition and hearsay: he couldn't dislike the real America, so he disliked the idea of America. He was a great admirer of Charles d.i.c.kens (and in fact thought of Amerika as his d.i.c.kensian novel). He had read d.i.c.kens's American Notes, compiled during the British novelist's tour of North America in 1842. d.i.c.kens had found Americans to be "frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm." But he also regretted "one great blemish in the popular mind of America," which he referred to as "Universal Distrust." This blemish overshadowed the idea of America in d.i.c.kens's mind. "Any man who attains a high office among you," he writes, "from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals to your distrust, and is believed."

Have I, too, fallen into the same trap as Kafka, basing my a.s.sumptions of America on other writers' experiences? d.i.c.kens chided that "it would be well . . . if [Americans] loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more." But perhaps I should stop thinking about the idea of America, and begin liking the Real somewhat more. Perhaps I've been so blinded by the sizzle that I couldn't see the steak.

MY computer is b.u.t.ting up against Wayne's. We're sitting opposite each other at Lauren's kitchen table, transcribing our notes from the past few days. Wayne types so fast that his screen hops toward mine, tap-tapping it companionably. We've never worked like this, in the same room, at the same desk. I like it.

Between us on the table lies the Was.h.i.+ngton Post we picked up when we stopped for lunch in Delaware. I open it with trepidation.

It is the tail end of January 2007, but already the headlines scream election. In the United States, there is only one election that seems to matter: the choosing of the president. (I wish Canadians knew with such certainty when they'd get the chance to oust a leader.) Bush has served his two terms and cannot serve a third. With the exception of that Texan in the bar of the Camino Real, no one we've met or overheard as we travelled across the country is inclined to regret that limitation. The beauty of the United States is: twice up to the plate and you're out.

Wayne and I are not political people. Neither of us has ever joined a party. But we always vote. We care about who makes the decisions (even though our candidate of choice rarely wins an election). It's been a long time since we've felt Canada has had a real leader and a long time, too, since the United States has had one to admire. But there's a voice I've been hearing, even in our media-starved state. A young Democrat whose background is a lot like Wayne's: the mixed-blood son of a black father and a white mother. And he's a writer. We like that. His books are good, not ghostwritten, like the works of so many politicians, and not written solely with votes in mind. His words come from the heart, stirred with a pa.s.sion that hasn't been heard in America since Kennedy and King. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream came out this fall, but I first heard him talk about hope in a speech he gave to the Democratic National Convention before the last presidential vote: I'm not talking about blind optimism here-the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant sh.o.r.es; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope.

He is an American: he holds to the usual imperialist line that began with Lewis and Clark and found its mantra in Manifest Destiny, the idea that America has not only the right but the obligation to spread its brand of democracy throughout the world, whether the world wants it or not. But when this man speaks, I hear something else. He uses words like "we" and "us." He extols Americans to work together. To help each other out. "For alongside our famous individualism," he says, "there's another ingredient in the American saga: a belief that we are connected as one people."

I hold up the headline for Wayne to see: "Obama Jumps into Presidential Fray."

"Who's Obama?" he says.

"Looks like he just might be the first black president of the United States."

Wayne looks dubious. I expect him to say something like, "Not a chance; he'll be shot first." But he doesn't.

"America," he says, "would be another country."

14 / THE EXIT CAFE.

MY watch says seven, but it feels much earlier, the sun not yet discernible in the snow-blue sky. Lauren offers eggs and toast and coffee, but it's our last day as travellers in America: we'll have breakfast on the road.

We take the 206 up to the interstate and head north. The temperature has plummeted. The shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts people were wearing here over Christmas have finally gone into storage; children waiting for their school buses are all mittened and scarved and puffy-coated. Rock cuts cascade with flash-frozen waterfalls. A skiff of snow skitters across the highway.

"Looks like Utah," Wayne says, and I scan the ditches for deer.

Over the past week, waves of freezing rain have washed up from Texas into New England, dousing the lights and depositing a crystal sh.e.l.l of ice up to four inches thick. Eighty-five people have died. Oklahoma and Missouri have been declared disaster areas. After the rain has come the cold and the weather bombs: local storms that released explosions of snow over the Northeast, thirty-two inches in twelve hours in Quebec.

"More snow in the forecast," says the radio announcer. For the first time since Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton, we're close enough to the border to pick up the CBC. "Major lake-effect snow is expected in the Great Lakes region over the next several days, with heavy local acc.u.mulations south of the lake, in some areas up to three hundred centimetres."

"That's almost ten feet!"

"We'll have to tunnel into the house," Wayne says.

"What's going on? I feel like Typhoon Mary. Everywhere we go, storms erupt."

"Get used to it, the climate's changing."

Change, when you're on the road, comes to seem like a way of life.

It's fully light but not much warmer by the time we stop for breakfast. We choose a small diner close to the interstate. The Exit Cafe. Two huge American flags are draped over the doorway; smaller flags wave at every table. We've travelled in the Northeast before, through New England villages cl.u.s.tered around quaint squares, into the hills where the British who became the first Americans settled. We always notice the flags. Flag-waving is not a Canadian thing. Here, they unfurl not only from government buildings but from every grocery store and video outlet, on the houses, too, every one of which seems to have a flagpole on the lawn or jutting out by the door. I always thought this flag flying was widely American, but we've seen little of it elsewhere in the country. It seems defensive to me now, the tic of a former colonial. Defiant, too: the reflex of a country perpetually under attack, which it hasn't been, at least not until recent years.

"What can I get for you?" the waitress says, automatically upending our coffee cups and starting to pour. I put my hand over the rim.

"Decaf, please."

"Oh, sure. Sorry. I'll put on a pot."

She speaks like we do. With a certain sadness, I realize that we are truly out of that part of America where language is distinct. Even in 1961, Steinbeck noticed that regional inflections were disappearing. "Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact," he reasoned. "Communications must destroy localness by a slow inevitable process." Make that eighty-five years of radio, sixty-five years of television. Not much has survived the onslaught.

In the late 1890s, when Rudyard Kipling married an American and moved to Vermont (where he wrote The Jungle Book), he bridled at the accent he encountered. American English was "the language of thieves," he wrote. American publishers were distributing pirated editions of his books, just as Google is doing with ours. "Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee schoolmarm, the cider, and the salt codfish of the Eastern State are responsible for what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the water without paying for 'em and the snort of delight was fixed in their nostrils forever by a just Providence. That is why they talk a foreign tongue today."

The time is long gone when a person's birthplace is apparent the moment he opens his mouth, not just in the way he forms his consonants and vowels, but in his choice of words, the idioms and phrases that once marked geography and nation as surely as the flag he saluted. A few years ago, Wayne wrote a book called Chasing the Chinook, essays that explore uniquely Canadian words such as "pogey" and "caboose" and "tuque." It scarcely made a ripple because, really, who cares in this Internet age about the provenance of words? People are writing more than ever, but is it in their own voice, their own words? I think not. We're all swirling toward a linguistic melting pot-one that's uniformly understandable but as bland as a room at the Days Inn or a meal at McDonald's. Local accent, local idiom, local rhythms and cadence, the deep rich poetry of individual expression: I fear it is going the way of the wild buffalo. Language can't be held back any more than life itself, of course, but that doesn't mean I won't mourn the pa.s.sing of the particular, whether it's a swaggering Texas redneck or a tough pecan-picking Louisiana matriarch.

I quell the urge to answer the waitress in a borrowed Scottish brogue, and in tones indistinguishable from hers, I order my usual: hash brown potatoes and a single poached egg, medium. I have eaten this same breakfast all across the United States. As an antidote to my gloomy thoughts on the disappearance of distinctness, I recall how varied the response has been to my simple request. The eggs are sometimes golden, the colour of marguerites, and sometimes pale as cream. The potatoes may be grated, peeled or not, with onion or not, salted or not, peppered almost always, deep-fried or fried on a grill, with b.u.t.ter sometimes, or oil, many kinds of oil, or chopped up, deep-fried in tiny cubes or thin patties, occasionally parboiled, but usually fresh, and almost always straight from the fryer. Come to think of it, there has been little true local flavour to these variations, no hot peppers or okra, just the whimsy of countless cooks from Seattle through Sacramento and Needles and Taos to Jackson, Athens, Wilmington, and now a cafe I can't quite place, in northern Pennsylvania or maybe southern New York State.

The potatoes arrive in a mound, golden. They are leftover boiled potatoes, fried in a pan, with b.u.t.ter, I can taste it. The shreds of onion are translucent, the edges browned. The crisp exterior of the potato resists the fork, just enough, then the tines sink through the soft, moist flesh. Oh joy!