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The most beautiful thing in North Dakota is the blue lightning, which, because of the flatness of the terrain, can be seen from hundreds of miles in any direction. It sutures together the clouds and the ground, and in this way it reminds people of the compromises they make between the part of them that wants to stay but flies away, and the part of them that wants to fly away but crouches on the ground, blinking its eyes and licking the air.

After you have seen enough of this marvelous spectacle, continue heading west until you reach Montana.

MONTANA

From space, Montana looks like a supine lion covered in its golden fur. In fact, if you put your hand on the earth in certain places in this state, the ground does omit warmth like the side of a cat flopped down in a square of sunlight. If you see the earth shuddering very gently in and out or hear the deep thrumming noise that might be the hills purring, this is only an illusion—though it is an extremely convincing one.

Montana is known for its vast rangelands that have supported herds of cattle since the state was first settled by Europeans, and its culture centers on cows. People pursue a number of pastimes involving these versatile animals, including cow-racing, cow-vaulting, and the cow-toss. A recent attempt to bring these sports to a wider audience through television has not diminished the specifically local flavor of the contests, and many Montana natives consider these pursuits integral to their way of life.

Montana is one of the few female states in the Union. While there are many states that take the “-a” ending, usually considered feminine, only Georgia and Montana and Maine are actually female. Many people find this information surprising. They are shocked to discover both the scarcity of female states and the fact that Montana—with its pioneer culture valorizing physical strength and emotional reserve—should in fact be one of this small number. This reflects more on our contemporary expectations of male and female than on the state of Montana, which, after all, cannot help how it was made.

HITCHHIKERS

As you continue westward, you will see many people hitchhiking along the roadside and you may wish to pick them up. Usually you can do this without problems: they are mostly young people for whom this is an inexpensive way to see the country. However, there are a few things to be careful of when picking up hitchhikers. Some of them may smell. Some of them may have bad taste in music. Some of them may tell untruths. Several accounts have come back to us about a hitchhiker who is often seen just outside of Billings, a man in a long, midnight-blue coat. According to the rumors, if you pick him up, this man will seem perfectly friendly and benign at first. But eventually he will try to convince you that you must, absolutely, without fail, go and see the state of Louisiana right away. He is persuasive on this subject, extolling the beauties and interests of the place, its history, its unique culture, in an almost mesmerizing tone that makes you feel you cannot miss it, that you must go there immediately.

More than a few travelers have followed his advice. But we must warn you: Do not become one of them. Do not listen to this man. It will lead only to frustration, unnecessary expense and wasted time.

The reason for this is explained below.

LOUISIANA

There is no state of Louisiana. The fact that the myth of its existence persists so powerfully to this day can be attributed to the deep-seated desire we all share for a place between the water and the land that is simultaneously both and neither. In this place we are free to drift over a surface still and dark like glass, which parts before the painted prow of our small wooden boat. It is important that the boat is wooden so we can hear the creaking sound it makes as it eases through channels the color of licorice and among tangled vines trailing luminous moss. Our destination is a small lonely building, a house or sometimes an old general store or even a cantina hoisted above the water by broad stilts under each corner. What we find there differs from person to person. Sometimes the house is empty. Sometimes it is filled with people having a party and dancing. Sometimes there is only a single person waiting on the dock that extends out in front of the building, sitting as though they would have remained exactly in that spot for however long it took us to find them.

The other reason that the state of Louisiana continues to loom so large in our collective imagination is the Great Hoax of 1782. The hoax was orchestrated by a group of planters from the French West Indies who intended to entice capital investment in their enterprises from bankers in Paris and other European cities. They began to spread information about great and growing port cities along the southern coast of the North American mainland, which, they claimed, would soon precipitously increase the trade between the United States, then a recently formed nation, and the islands of the Caribbean. They named these cities after cities in France and even went so far as to have woodcuts and etchings made illustrating the various street scenes and public works then supposedly taking place in them. The artists they hired were talented and they evoked from nothing but their imaginations bustling, vibrant towns inhabited by people from all the nations of the world, mixing and living freely together—a spectacle that at the time had never been witnessed before. Soon it became
au courant
in the French capital to pepper one's speech with slang purported to originate in the Gulf cities. Where this slang truly came from, no one knows, though it shows similarities to the Basque language and also to Welsh.

The campaign was a success. The investors in Europe were moved to open their purses, and money flowed to the French island colonies. But another unforeseen effect also resulted from the machinations of the conspirators, which was the increased interest on the part of the United States in acquiring this rich territory adjacent to its own. As we all know, the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 took place a mere twenty years after the planters first gathered together over port and cigars to devise their plan. Once this purchase was made, of course, the Americans soon discovered their error: there were no Gulf cities. Louisiana was a pure fabrication. But so many among the new revolutionary elite had staked their reputations on the purchase of this territory, including of course Thomas Jefferson himself, that they could hardly admit this publicly. To protect the president's dignity, the fiction was maintained. As it is to this very day.

If, despite our warnings, you travel to the place where Louisiana is supposed to be, you will find nothing but a few placards and signs and a Quonset hut containing an exhibition about the myth. This will doubtless be disappointing and upsetting. One way that Americans sometimes express their negative emotions is by assaulting inanimate objects; for this reason, you might want to kick one of the signs and shout an expletive at the top of your lungs to make yourself feel better. Don't worry if a group of tourists nearby look over at you disapprovingly; glaring silently is also part of the culture.

After that, do not spend any more time in this place. It will only make your already-bad feelings worse. Instead, we advise you to get back in your car and drive away as quickly as you can within the posted speed limits.

NEVADA

If a garbage can was flat, it would be called Nevada. This is what people in surrounding states say when they wish to disparage the state known variously as the Radiation State, the Dust State, and the Slot Machine State (this last is used only by non-Nevadans seeking to provoke Nevadans to fight them in a bar).

While these names are clearly intended to be pejorative, it must be acknowledged that Nevada is the place to which many of America's worst nightmares are eventually consigned. It might be more accurately called the Nation's Unconscious: it is where the American people put the things that they don't want messing up their lawns. The most important of these are nuclear waste and the sex trade.

An odd confluence between these two domains has been remarked upon recently by a well-known pornographer. In both erotic arousal and radiation poisoning the subject undergoes an experience of melting, as internal boundaries and membranes give way allowing for the delirious loosening and mixing of the body's tissues and fluids at an ever-accelerating rate. The dermis separates into its many tenuous layers and peels away, shed like a lizard's scales. The soft tissue becomes tender and swollen as bruises. The limbs lose their rigidity and swim through the suddenly soft air, their motions freed of all consequence, closed off by darkness from any constraint or from the onerous weight of the future until finally the subject itself disperses in death or in “the little death.”

Our pornographer further submits that because Nevada is a desert, a place in which time does not appear to pass, we have reserved it as the place in which we collapse gently in on ourselves.

Most of the state is uninhabitable because it lacks water. Visitors slide through it in silver cars on the single great highway to traverse its northern expanse, and they get out to gaze with rapt horror at the emptiness, thinking:
If you wanted to die, all you would have to do is choose a direction and walk.
Numerous attempts to establish towns along this highway have failed, and their remains can be seen at the side of the road, where off-ramps lead to nothing but shuttered and derelict buildings, mostly convenience stores and gas stations. These buildings take several years to be covered by dust completely, and it is possible to judge the building's age by how far up the front door the sand has crept. On our most recent journey through Nevada we saw many buildings in this state of half-submersion, but we did not stop long enough to check their age. There is a slight risk when you do this that you will want to lie down inside one of them until you are covered up by drifts of pale gold earth. If you do this you will not reach the last and most amazing stop on your journey: California.

CALIFORNIA

The beauty of California is famous throughout the world. The sun shines almost every day. There are yellow and brown beaches where the glass-blue ocean shatters on the shore over and over and the sea-birds riot in the air above. The mountains are a gray spine shouldering through the center of the state, offering magnificent views. There is the dry, medicinal smell of eucalyptus and along the northern coast there are the great trees, large as cetaceans, with wood the color of bricks or blood and sharp needles all over to ward off predators. Scientists have recently discovered that these trees seem to be sending a gentle but persistent signal upward into the sky on a frequency that human beings can hardly detect even with our most advanced instruments, but what the signal says they cannot yet decipher.

In spite of all this beauty, there is another, darker side to California that lurks beneath the pleasant surface and occasionally pushes its way up into the light. If you go to the border in the south you will see an example of what we are referring to. For many years, there was a fence that ran along the border to keep people from coming into the country to look for work without the proper papers or permission. A few years ago, this fence was taken down and an invisible, electric barrier erected in its place. If a person tries to cross the border, in spite of the many warnings posted in a multitude of languages, he now receives a huge electric shock, strong enough to send him sailing backward through the air onto his own side of the line. For a while after El Oscuro (as the barrier is known on the Mexican side) first went up, there were protests. People suffered damage to their nerves because of the strong current; some young children who could not read the warning signs were hurt. But instead of taking down the barrier, the government put up a loudspeaker system so that those too young or not fortunate enough to be able to read could be warned to keep away. Since then there have been fewer injuries and the protests have died down as people have become distracted by other things supposedly more pressing.

We advise you to stay away from the border. Although it is not dangerous for you (you are not that kind of foreigner) the experience is upsetting and may ruin your impression of this otherwise bewitching place.

After you have spent some time in California, you may feel you would like to stay forever. This is common among travelers from our country, where the weather is gloomy and cold and where, in the winter, it gets dark early in the afternoon. We arrive in California and are whirled around by the ubiquity of light, the trees that the sea wind has twisted into dark green candle flames, the way the ocean stretches out ahead of you as if it might go on forever. We feel elated, weightless and amazed. We feel that everyone we meet is someone we loved when we were very young and have not seen for years.

This condition has come to be referred to as Golden Fever, and once it sets in it is difficult to shake. Our own researchers have sometimes fallen victim to it, and several of them have never returned home. To combat Golden Fever, there are now quite a few companies that make a business out of kidnapping foreign visitors whose families have become concerned about them. If your family hires one of these, masked men will come for you in the middle of the night and put a sack over your head, then drive you to the airport and put you on a plane that's flying east. Unfortunately, this sudden departure can lead to withdrawal symptoms in certain travelers. In the back of the book, we provide a list of hospitals that can help you recover if you find yourself deprived of California and unable to cope emotionally with the shock.

After several months of treatment, most of the afflicted are able to recover some sense of proportion and resume their ordinary lives. They will remember the feelings of mysterious elation they experienced as if they heard about them secondhand. Their memories of California will seem like photographs, static and arrested and somehow no longer their own. Eventually, they will be just the way they were before, as if they had never been away at all, except occasionally, when they will stare out the window at the heavy sky and early dark and start to cry.