by Richard Stern

I write now from our Georgian "foot in the earth," where we arrived two days ago. For the last few years, after spending eight hours at O'Hare waiting first for a plane, then for a crew, we've driven here from Chicago. The route passes through six other states, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina. We usually overnight in eastern Tennessee on the edge of the Great Smokies whose winding roads we drive over the next morning. What never fails to strike us is the sheer wealth of the country, the ubiquity of comfort, hundreds and hundreds of motels whose rooms have cable television, microwave ovens, little fridges, ironing boards, clean sheets and towels. In winter, heat, in summer, air conditioning. The prices range from thirty to hundred or so dollars which include a breakfast, bagels, juice, coffee, sometimes a waffle--make it yourself--and cereal. Then the restaurants. A few stops can boast only a McDonalds or a Wendys but even these purveyors have a few tasty, well-prepared non-lethal dishes to offer, and their bathrooms are clean. In most stops, there are six or eight restaurants, staffed by amiable, often charming waitresses (only a few have waiters, equally pleasant) and hostesses. Sometimes the food is very good, not up to Charley Trotter's or Lutece, but after ten driving hours, delicious, cheap and of course, plentiful. (If you seek obesity samples, come to any of them.) Another thing that strikes us is the ease of fast travel, the general competence of drivers which involves knowledge of the rules of the road, some unwritten, and even courtesy. On this trip, we were held up once, on Indiana's I-65 near Indianapolis. A "semi turned over, the wrecker's lifting it," a young, professorial-looking truck driver who'd listened to the traffic report station told me when I rolled down the window to ask if he could see what was going on. The two traffic lanes were immobilised for 20 minutes, loosened a bit for another twenty and then dissolved into freedom. Driving the autobahns--which used to have no speed limits posted--I used to think that the only reason they weren't rivers of blood was the restraint that poured in over the radios in cantatas of Bach and sonatas of Haydn. Though one can occasionally find such music fountains here or, of course, play CDs or tapes, my guess is that what comes over the radios of most of the voyagers is not Bach and Haydn. Whatever, though, it seems to do the civilizing trick. I won't talk of landscape except to say there are lovely patches of barn-and-silo studded fields in southern Indiana and Ohio, the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee are often spectacular, the Smokies are beautiful in the morning with mist rising mystically toward the sun. As for the buildings, there is no visible master plan, and one doesn't feel that the builders were inspired by F. L. Wright or Senor Calatrava. Place names: always interesting. Our puzzling favorite: Stinking Creek, Tennessee. Anyway, here we are in our little nest, 30 miles east of Savannah, where the Savannah River debouches into the Atlantic Ocean. We've been to the Tybee market (the town's only grocery), we've cleaned the pigeon droppings from the porch, and seen the first tankers heading for the port. The a/c and ice-maker are performing as they should, it's in the 90s but at nine a.m. and seven p.m. it's a delight to swim in one of the pools. The few people we know here seem as glad to have us back as we are to see them. The knowledgeable postal clerk with the mustache says he's glad we're back, the fine, intelligent black woman, founder and chief of Relax First, renews our friendship as we make my first massage appointment. Changes: a surf shop has replaced the take-out Chinese restaurant, Cap'n Chris's restaurant is now the first floor of what will be a six flat condominium, the Surf Motel has expanded and grown pink as a baby's bottom, but at least on this first glance, our place is still our place, and things are more or less okay. Tonight I'll read the surprisingly good Goethe novella, Elective Affinities, and tomorrow morning watch the fierce little Belgian, Justine Henin, dismantle the smiling Serbian teenager, Ana Ivanovic. Given the fragility of flesh and the vicissitudes of fate and fortune, we American burghers can live wonderfully comfortable lives, given, that is, that we have the normal human ability to avoid for any protracted time immersion in the endless brutality which gifted journalists and photographers report to the gifted editors who package it in assimilable narrative segments.