Close to the Maddening Crowd

Salta looked like it needed more trees - set in the northern Argentine hills, sunny, everything had a brown glow to it that wasn't quite golden but more like ... burnt toast. The plaza is quite lovely, surprisingly dense and colonial, with pedestrian streets radiating from its sides, but the sky and the hills, the amber glow made Salta seem like a Wild West Buenos Aires, a porteno with dust on his boots.

By chance or by fate, I checked into a hostel called "Backpacker's Soul" which was about everything you can imagine it would be. It had two sister hostels in Salta and there was always a BBQ or a salt flats tour or an empanada course going on - suffice to say, I wasn't pleased.

Maybe my mind had been altered a bit by being in Paraguay, but I couldn't stand backpackers, the backpacker scene, or even just knowing that there were other Americans around. Backpackers are a culture unto itself, and while there are plenty of interesting people to meet in hostels, there are a lot of pseudo-spiritual hippie wanderers, exiled frat boys looking to score, and gritty Ernest Hemingway wannabes with more pockets on their pants than talent in their writing.

Perhaps I'm being a bit hypocritical. I feel at times like all of these people, these stereotypes, while I'm on the road, in hostels, telling stories - maybe I just would like a bit of balance in my fellow travelers.

Oh, and to never hear Bob Marley "Legend" again.

For whatever reason, and I've said this before I believe, I never felt so lonely as I did when I met other Americans. When I've been by myself, truly and utterly isolated from everything comfortable and familiar, I feel comfortable and self-reliant because I know, no matter what, I have nothing else but myself. In Salta, hearing English on the street, or watching Americans pound pints at the bar, laughing and joking, it all just reminded me of what I miss in America, of being truly and utterly alone on my trip. The tastes of home were torture because they were not and could not be home; just simulacra, shades from my past.

But then you learn something new about home unexpectedly, in the cookie aisle: I was in the cookie aisle, buying cookies for my bus trip to Bolivia, when I noticed a couple, both about twenty, dressed as only tourists dress, debating cookie purchases themselves. They were a head taller than everyone else and had a easy way about their interaction that marked them as Americans. Indeed, they were Americans, tall Americans from Wheaton College, and we went and got coffee because that's what Americans do.

I was jittery for days at a time in Argentina.

Well, they were named Amy and Steve and they were sophomores - as if they could have been named anything else. If I were in the States, I would have written them off immediately as hearty religious Midwestern folk I had nothing in common with, but there, drinking my fifth coffee, speaking wildly and authoritatively, as with a speech practiced many times, I talked to them, and I listened in return.

They were about as sensible and decent as you could ask a couple to be. They had faith, tremendous faith, the faith that builds and helps and heals, and they bore it like a shield against the unsolvable problems of existence.

Well, I was a West Coast Ivy League Jew, and they were religious Midwestern folk, but if nothing else we were all Americans together. May our faith, our mutual faiths that transcend religion, our Union remain strong forever. Amen.

I boarded the midnight bus to Bolivia and ate my cookies.