Road Movies

Description

ROAD MOVIES Volume 1 by Alice Starmore

One woman’s adventures on the highways and byways of America.

Published by Windfall Press, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 2008.

Alice Starmore is a Scottish artist, designer and author who spent twelve years travelling the USA on the lecture and book promotion circuit. She crossed the continent many times; lived a gypsy life out on the great American highway and took with her a keen eye for an image and a sharp ear for dialogue. ROAD MOVIES Volume 1 is a witty and fast-moving account of some of her journeys into the heart of America.

Story

From the Thunderbird I took a box that had been stowed there since Alabama, and which had made it’s way over from Scotland in a corner of my suitcase. It was a plain cardboard box containing a tiny part of the Hebrides – a piece of Lewissian gneiss, silvery grey with flecks of white quartz and a vein of delicate pink. I selected it from the summit of a hill called Roineval, which is not the highest point of my island home, but which for me is its spiritual centre. I removed the stone from the box and took it down to the Atlantic shore where little waves flopped onto the rocky beach beside the New Haven Harbor Light. I walked down to greet them and dabbled my stone in the surf. I intended to take it with me across the entire width of the continent and dip it in the Pacific on the other side: it would be my own small ceremony to celebrate my safe passage. Turning the stone over in my hand, I bade farewell to the Atlantic and walked back towards the White Bird. With those steps, my overland coast-to-coast journey had begun.