A few weeks ago, Ryan (Pagliaro) had a good idea. He reminded me of that time I drove across America and kept a blog with updates, thoughts, and photos. He asked me if I'd be doing that for my Dakota trip, and I said I hadn't thought of it, but that it's a good idea. So partly because it's a good idea, and mostly because my Squarespace subscription auto-renewed without consent, I'm repurposing my M1 curiosity cabinet website so I can provide daily updates, thoughts, and photos.

That first blog was a failure, resulting in one good post and several tired, cynical post. The good post was written during our first stay at a seedy motel in Ohio. The cynical posts were written everywhere else. There were some thoughts about being a tourist and hating tourists and only recently have I had that contradiction articulated to me by a footnote in an article about the Main Lobster Fest written by David Foster Wallace:

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

So here we are, and here I am, off to spoil some remote stretches of North Dakota. For those of you just now joining me, the trip in questions involves the tallest structure in America, and the longest, straightest road in America. The fact that these extremes happen to be found in arguably the flattest place in America (flattest if you ignore Florida¹, which I wouldn't be alone in trying my very best to do)too serendipitous to ignore. I've spent weeks now testing cameras and mounting gear and trying my best to nail this in one go, but the reality is that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, and I'm just hoping something good will come of this. 

Which leads me to a thought about what I've been up to all these months, something that occurred to me as I read that article on the Main Lobster Fest. The places I go to - the places I'm drawn to, the places I document and write about - are basically spoil-proof because I'm the only one who seems to care about them. Those 5 radio towers in Cambridge. That 50km drive to nowhere. The vast nothing between Toronto and Montreal. I'm either trying to spoil the last few unspoiled swaths of land, or I'm trying to find beauty where there isn't any, because people have fucking ruined it most everywhere else.

I hope you'll join me as I figure out which it is.


Marco Chimienti
19.11.17

1. It's come to my attention that I was wrong about ND being the second flattest state. It's actually third flattest, behind Illinois, but that kind of ruins my quip about Florida so I'm not changing it.

Dobson, J. E. and Campbell, J. S. (2014), The Flatness of U.S. States. Geographical Review, 104: 1–9. doi: 10.1111/j.1931-0846.2014.12001.x