some of this is true

I am in the Safeway exactly five blocks away from my second-floor apartment, just home from work, and in my black plastic shopping basket I have the following, which is few enough for the express lane:

1 jar reduced-fat smooth peanut butter
1 can corn niblets
2 salmon steaks
1 can frozen orange concentrate
1 carton strawberries

I am standing in a short line with my headphones on when an old man with grey hair and a beard that was perfectly shaped as if moulded out of clay hurries past me and places a large green watermelon on the conveyor belt.

He must be in a hurry, I think, and what does it matter anyway on this pleasant nearly-fall evening, so I let him past without saying anything.

He then turns towards me with the wrinkles on his face swirling about in confusion, and in a thick Greek accent says, “Go ahead! You were first, I just didn’t want to carry it,” while motioning with crude sign language, which, if I couldn’t hear him, I’d think meant he was pregnant.

“Well, either way . . .” I say, trailing off.

“No, no,” he says, “you can’t let everyone past, because then another goes past, and then another and another,” and now his hands are flicking up and down like he’s trying to shake off a bee, “and then people think you’re a loser.”

“Well, I’m in no hurry,” is all I can think to say, and then out of obedience more than to assert myself, I take back my place in line and empty out the basket, keeping the cans together because I’ll want those double bagged.

“You should always be in a hurry, life is a hurry,” he says. “It’s all a hurry.”

And then the cashier interrupts and rings up my total and I hand her my credit card and my frequent shopper card, and the old man is now talking to the woman behind him, giving her another piece of wisdom no doubt, so I pick up my bags and carry them on my bike to my apartment to broil the salmon until it’s too dry and the rice is undercooked and I think about all that I’ve learned today.

We are in a small wooden building, Christa and I, that smells of sawdust on the rolling farmland in western Idaho, where they grow wheat and canola and barley and hay, but not potatoes, which I know is what you were thinking. It is hot, nearly 40 degrees, and that’s what it’s been like since we left Canada. That was a week ago.

That’s when we hear it: “Real America.” It’s how the woman here describes this place we’re standing in, a chainsaw carving studio and giftshop on the side of a highway next to the world’s largest beagle, which doubles as a bed and breakfast and you can sleep in the dog’s head. The small black wooden dog carving outside the front door — they’re going to put that in the Lewis and Clark exhibit in some museum. Apparently they took a dog.

Real America. The woman who runs this place with her husband — he’s the one that carved the world’s largest beagle, and I imagine the smaller dog next to it, and the fire hydrant, which of course is a washroom — is telling us about a British comedian who came through a while back making a documentary about non-corporate America. He visited places like this, and that’s what he called it: The Real America. And here we are.

She seemed to agree that the places we were seeing qualified as The Real America as we travelled along the Washington-Oregon border, with a small taste of Idaho, although I’m not sure exactly what that would look like.

On the first night, we ended up drinking at the Oasis Tavern in a town called Castle Rock, where the churches work out to about one for every 200 people. The bar is decorated in a Caribbean theme, which might be for Jake’s 21st birthday party (for which we are each handed a Jell-O shot), or it might just be the way it is here every night. There is a wall of knives on one end of the bar. You can pay a quarter to try winning one of them. In a bar. While drinking beer.

We went to Portland and saw burlesque and fire dancers and bought late-night donuts from a guy with death-metal hair who seemed genuinely sad we didn’t know that you can’t fill a cake donut with cream.

In Pendleton there was a tour of the underground, which are effectively dark basements built by Chinese workers who were forced to live in them next to a few businesses and speakeasies, and they have mannequins because they wanted it to look authentic, and then we stayed in a hotel converted from a brothel that closed down 50 years ago.

In 1929, someone decided to build a war memorial in Maryhill, and building a replica of Stonehenge sounded like a good idea, except not the falling apart version of Stonehenge but what the original might have looked like.

There were the wineries of Walla Walla, and a museum filled with a retiree’s own surreal and dadaist art. An actual piece of the Oregon trail, and probably a fake wagon sitting in the worn-down lines in the grass. A collection of old highway memorabilia in Pomeroy, which actually turned out to be in this guy’s house, but he invited us in for a look anyway.

In Pullman there was the one-room anthropology museum and, oddly enough, sushi that would give a lot of Vancouver’s restaurants a run for their money, and the old printing presses and Linotype machines at the newspaper museum in nearby Palouse.

In Garfield we had dinner with a real American family, who operated the bed and breakfast we were staying in (sharing a bathroom with her 95-year-old father, Willard) because the only restaurant in Garfield is closed on Mondays. The next day we looked at the hundreds of cars rotting on Willard’s property just outside of town.

There was the petrified forest in Ellensburg, which is effectively a desert where there were rattlesnakes and lizards and at least one cactus.

A few decades ago, the lumber town of Leavenworth, Wash., was dying as the forestry industry collapsed, so someone decided to turn it into a Bavarian-style tourist trap with a nutcracker museum and many terrible tourists shops, but the food was some of the best we had, even in a town so bizarre.

And there were other things, too. Exploring volcanoes and waterfalls, small-town museums that compared Obama to Lincoln, drunk Americans looking for a fight, a wool mill, a working monastery, the pub where the waitress “could tell by looking at you that you’re not from here,” a bacon donut, lots of swimming in rivers and streams.

I don’t know if it was The Real America, or how we’d know even if it was, but the woman at the Dog Bark Park seemed to think we were on the right track as we saw this small slice of just three states, just a sliver of the country, and I suppose that’s as good a gauge as any.

We went to America. Click on the big flag to see some photos. Words still to follow . . .

Also, for a fun photo map, click here