AUGUST 20, SUNDAY

MONTEVIDEO DREAM

I know I am in Montevideo, but how or why is a mystery to me. It isn’t that I don’t know how I got here. I was looking for a month long trip in the summer when Europe is too expensive and too crowded. Last year I made a 7800 mile trip around the United States by Amtrak and it was great fun. It occurred to me that if I went south to South America it would be winter and not tourist season. Scott’s Cheap Flights (now GOING) offered a cheap flight to Santiago. But I had read in the New York Times that Uruguay was an interesting European country and environmentally green. It was a short article and not reason enough to spend a month in Montevideo. Yet with only that to go on when a half price ticket to Montevideo appeared I, on a whim, clicked the button and bought a ticket. I had a day with free cancellation to decide, I didn’t decide, I just let the deadline pass.

So here I am. But my visit seems almost surreal or at least unreal. Last night there was intense thunder and lighting and the rain roared on the metal roofs of the buildings close by. I really was in Montevideo. I couldn’t believe it. Nothing is quite what I expected because I really didn’t expect anything. I didn’t read up on Montevideo, I still haven’t read up on Montevideo. And what I did read doesn’t seem connected to an actual place where people are living out their lives. Montevideo is at almost the same latitude in the southern hemisphere that Asheville is in the north. It may be winter here, I know it is because the days are much shorter, but there are palm trees in the street and no hint of snow and the temperature on most days is in the high 60’s. I tried the steak which I had heard so much about and it was delicious but very expensive by my standards. I tried the Asada, a choice of roast meats roasted over an open fire and the signature dish in Montevideo, and it was tough as boot leather. I tried a grocery store chicken empanada and it was tasteless. I tried to buy a jacket since mine had vanished on the plane and the largest one in the store, Benson and Thomas,

$100, left a six in gap over my belly. And of course I got Covid and was knocked out for a week and still am aching and slow.

So what am I to make of all of this? It not only seems unreal, almost like living in a dream, it seems surreal, as if I am a space alien on a visit. How could I be in Montevideo? To the people of Montevideo I am sure everything appears not only normal but the only really solid place on earth. Even the numerous pan handlers on the street seem to know their way around and take things as they come. But I feel as if I am just floating along.

How could I be in Montevideo? How can Montevideo feel so unreal? I know it is entirely in my head and that anything I feel about Montevideo is skewed by my own ignorance and has nothing to do with the real Montevideo. But that is the problem. The real Montevideo doesn’t seem real, even the rain rattling the tin roofs doesn’t seem real. And worse than that, the place that used to seem real, Asheville, doesn’t seem real anymore. After only two weeks away Asheville feels like a dream, as unreal with its green mountains and hot days and pioneer history and hordes of tourists, as any other place on earth. A person dropping into Asheville from Montevideo would feel just as much floating in a dream as I feel here.

The key to feeling that a place is absolutely real is to never step outside what seems most real because stepping outside and realizing how illusory another place is suddenly dislocates you to the point that you see your own very real place begin to vaporize, to become a dream, a place where all the conventions seem dreamed up, where things are real only because it is the only reality you know.

If you want to believe in American exceptionalism, that America is the greatest country on earth, that America is the greatest force for good, for peace and justice in the world, that America is the standard by which the rest of the world measures itself, you better stay in Swannanoa and shop at Ingles grocery store, and eat at Okie Dokie’s barbecue and get your haircut at the Swannanoa barber shop. As long as you attend Owen High School and cheer for the Owen football team and watch the NFL on Sundays and attend the local missionary Baptist church you will feel as if you are in the most real place on earth, the only real place on earth.

But if you even wander down the road to beer city Asheville with its flourishing tourist industry crowding out the locals and its gay friendly ways you will start to feel a little shaky and your identity will begin to be threatened. That is where the United States is right now. You don’t have to go to Montevideo to feel as if you are living in a dream, you can be living in a bad dream just down the road and you had better band with your MAGA brothers and do something right now, stop the threat of change, before the deluge comes. Already from a MAGA perspective the United States seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.

Or maybe you can let go and realize that life in Asheville or Montevideo is a dream that we are dropped into in which nothing is absolutely real and we have to float along as best we can for the brief period that we are here.