1000 miles, just to eat you...
A return to our regular schedule
There was that Vanessa Carlton song, “Cause you know I'd walk a thousand miles. If I could just see you…”
I’d never walked 1,000 miles. Matthew Perdie has, many times over, back in 2009 to raise awareness of the national debt. He made a film about it, Perdie Across America.
I now know what being driven 1,002 miles in one day feels like, though. (From Texas to Arizona.)
I wanted to help, but the point was an exciting test of endurance! Triumph over the western wilderness! And one must sometimes allow such exuberant explorations without such interruptions as ‘equitable shares of labor’!
From muh driver: “One of the most fun parts of driving 1,000 miles in 1 day is hearing the GPS instruction, ‘in 582 miles, keep left.”
I have returned from escapades in Denver, Austin, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, for a string of conferences and events, driving between each city and spending about a week in each.
This amounted to about 2360 miles. It was fun — this is about the distance from Las Vegas to Releigh, North Carolina.
My efforts to make posts during that time did not go well (zero new posts :O).
However, I did think about a potential desire and a potential need to explain more of what Mutually Assured Seduction, is. That is — what my vision is around how these eclectic posts about philosophy, psychology, media, and travel relate to each other — and what I hope to accomplish by having them in a collection. How do these add up to something that amounts to a philosophy of seduction?
I have a large backlog of travel posts, that I will start trying to write up in the coming months, so I will start there.
One of my ambitions with the travel posts is to reignite in myself, and in others, a certain tradition of Bill Bryson-esque travel writing. There is a saturated economy of travel photographs and videos. I want to log in words the sorts of things that you wouldn’t easily get from an Instagram photo that still feel like important or inspiring things to communicate.
When I was a kid, I did not travel much, but always heard that “travel is going to change you.” I had met many people who had traveled a lot and yet did not change very much. Given how expensive travel was, not knowing what made the difference bothered me, and I wanted to understand what the “transformational” kind of travel was, versus what seemed like the non-transformational travel.
If this sounds very idealized — this is the way that people around me talked about travel! It seemed like people really believed that travel had the power to “change people” in a way that changed their world.
With my writing I hope to keep records of things that I had really noticed or that really affected me — that did feel new and unexpected and changed my models of either how the world worked or what existed in the world — moments that felt more like exploring versus visiting.
What does it mean to genuinely look and explore when I’m in a new place? If I’m in a new place, I want the placeness of the place to affect me.
One of the reasons I love road trips as much as I do, is that the format really defaults to an impossibility to just “hit the main highlights” and leave. By driving, you really can’t skip the middle, and drives would be much more boring if you weren’t paying attention to transitions in your surroundings.
This was my third time traversing the Southwest, and the third unique route. I love it so much every time. The sun hits different down there.
My love of the Southwest will be in another post, as will my explanation of why I don’t believe that one can fully understand America without at least one road trip through the American Southwest.
While I get back into the groove of writing, I thought I’d write about a place few people know about, that I was sad to skip on this trip, but that had been a cemented and lindy highlight from the roadtrips in my life.
This place is Dateland.
A date with the Dateland dates is worth driving 1,000 miles, but if we had made a detour towards Dateland, we would have ended up in San Diego.
But several years ago, I did stop by Dateland, Arizona.
This is a tiny town with date trees, an elementary school, a Pizza Hut, and a rest stop selling all sorts of date-objects.
This is also the home of the famous Date milkshake, made of sweet, perfectly grown Medjool dates.
What you have to understand about Dateland is that these dates are no joke.
Medjool dates were once grown only for royalty in Morocco, and these are a specialty at Dateland.
These are world-class dates in Arizona that compete with the finest dates of the sultans.
You can order them online if you want to.
“The Dateland Date Bakery features homemade date pies, date cookies, date muffins, date squares, and of course date bread.”
“There are tales about our Dateland date shakes that stretch from the Hoover Dam to the depths of the Grand Canyon and around the globe. Although we have customers placing orders from all over the world through our website for our dates, there’s nothing quite like coming to our oasis in the Arizona desert and enjoying a truly unique and remarkable milkshake.”
You can learn all about their date trees on their website, dateland.com. The town is not shy about what they do.
I personally love dates a whole lot. I also love oases in deserts, and I love when a thing exists for a long time, existing right where it should (the “should” being granted by virtue of the environment allowing it to exist right there for a very long time), even though nobody would guess it is there (unless somebody crossed it in person, and then gave a tip).
And so I am giving you this tip, the same way that I got this tip, years ago, when I searched what was worth seeing on that specific highway.
That these dates are growing so well in Arizona, and have an impressive community tending the trees, harvesting the fruits, and excitedly promoting them, means that Dateland is exactly where it should be. Near a highway in the middle of Arizona.
And the community is aware of the surprise they spring on travelers:
“The date trees here often surprise passing travelers who had grown accustomed to the vast stretches of desert with little to no green life to be found. Then, all of a sudden, there is a huge grove of date trees!”
The town has military history, and it is collecting historical letters and photos for its archives. It makes me happy to think about Dateland, and so I do.
I have a fond memory of walking behind the main shop in the trees, and of talking to the friendly people in the shop.
The sheer scale of the United States and the diversity of its landscape means that I have had many surreal moments within it, where unless I know where I am, it can be hard to tell where I am. The closest memory I have that is texturally similar to standing among the date trees in Dateland is being on a spice farm in Belize.
(The surest way I know a memory is from America is that there are Americans in it!)
By this point, Dateland is both a beautiful place and a beautiful meme for me. I have a few “Datelands” around the world that really surprised me. Some of these are the wonders of the world, (the giant Jesus in Brazil is…bigger than. you think…and awesome), and some of these are less documented than Dateland is.
Paying attention to surprise, on all scales, is something I try to practice.
Practicing triangulation between moments of surprise, in a way that drives interpolation (what must be true about the world such that this surprise happened, or such that two surprises both happened), rather than projection of past experience (this surprise isn’t really real — my old model was right) is one of my goals for epistemic hygiene, and one of the goals of this project.
I write about Dateland in part because I am very curious to hear about everyone’s “Datelands.” I would also be interested in holding a relaxed writing group together about some of this, to pilot a travel writing workshop later, and potentially discuss troubleshooting for people who are struggling writing or talking about their own Datelands.
Meanwhile, one last assorted goodie is the Russian Sax Quartet playing Bach:
Interested in the writing group :)