I Am In

 

Hilltop Hostel by Me

A fter thirty hours of a bus rumbling across the roads of America I have arrived in Washington D.C. It is a city of burglar bars, graveyards and monuments to the dead. My first view of the city was of a cemetery filled with thousands of small government issued white tombstones, this land of the scared and last home of the dead.

The road passes beneath us, across one thousand miles littered with chain stores and sterile corporate fast food outlets. As we passed through Chicago at rush hour I was struck by how little this city ever really changes. It is a city of brownstones and of small alleyways, of gritty skylines filled with smokestacks and Catholic church steeples.

We rolled into Cleveland at midnight, a city that is better seen at night, illuminated with skyscrapers advertising major banking concerns. The bus station was huge and impressive structure built in a 1930's Art Deco style of permanent materials and conscientious care. A tall ceiling with drop lights, with a massive double stairway dominating a
room punctuated with large lighted clocks located on either end of the room to remind the passengers that we are prisoners of this building and trapped here. I was fortunate enough to have good friends who braved the bus station's neighborhood to visit with me in the middle of a long, long night.

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http://www.leftistreview.com/2011/10/05/i-am-in/davidcox/