Liminal spaces being a horror thing about weird backrooms haunted by monsters has always been disappointing to me. I think liminal spaces should also include the brightly lit hallways of an airport filled with travelers, or a long highway under a blue sky. They hold a different type of suspense, serve a different type of transition.
Working at Mozilla afforded me a few work flights a year around the US, and every once in a while internationally to Canada or London or, once, Brussels. We also drove from Florida to San Francisco, and again from Florida to Oregon, for moves. I've spent a fair amount of time working through the process of going from one place to another.
Within the US, different regions and cities have their own distinct character, food, culture, vibes, etc. Yet so much is the same. Starbucks, McDonalds, Denny's, that big stroad on one side of town with all the car dealerships and big box stores, a supermarket that, by 2024, will very likely be owned by Kroger, apartments, suburbs, and so on.
When I think of the US, the image that pops into my head isn't a particular city or place. What pops into my head is an image of a highway. Of an airport terminal. Of movement. The US is gigantic. It takes a lot of time to make your way through it from one place to the next. Car culture is a scourge—but it didn't come out of nowhere.
Can you guess where the highway pictured above is located? Try commenting with a guess before looking at the answer.
Hawaii. Taken from Google maps street view on the big island.
I didn't end up finding much time to explore around during my brief trip to Hawaii for a Mozilla All Hands, but on the return drive to the airport I realized, had I not known I was in Hawaii already, the view out of the bus window could've been anywhere. Obviously this depends a lot on where in particular you are and what landmarks / mountains are visible, but the fact that it was even possible to feel like I was on I-95 in Florida a fifth of the planet away was striking.
It isn't romantic in these liminal spaces, at least not always. Mostly it's boring. I am not one of those people who can stare at the landscape passing by for hours and hours.
Sometimes it's calming. If you're used to it, you can find a lot of peace among the throng of people in airports, flitting to and fro trying to be anywhere else besides where they are right now.
Occasionally, it's beautiful. The parts you see in road trip movies. The hills and valleys that the highways of the pacific northwest cut through are an experience unto themselves. The mountains in New Hampshire, or the absurd flatness of Florida swampland.
I tend to think of a place as big as the United States not as an amalgamation of the individual cities or places, nor a particular representative place, but as the space between places. The internet can make the world feel small, but if you travel a bit, boy there is a ton of room out there!
You can feel trapped by the endless urban sprawl that surrounds you, but zoom out far enough, and you will find that we are still a loose net, thrown over the land and connected by thin strings of transit. And we spend a significant amount of our lives moving across those strands towards the "real life" that happens wherever those strands cross.
