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Dancing Inside the Box | Issue 49 | n+1 | Dawn Lundy Martin

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ON A CLEAR, traffic-free day, it takes seven and a half hours to drive from Pittsburgh to midtown Manhattan, and that’s if you only stop once for gas. But there’s always traffic. And somewhere between Scranton and Elk County, down below the Allegheny National Forest or thereabouts, clouds will often roll in no matter how fine the weather when the drive began, and rain will come, moody and gloomy. Giant trucks zoom by, blinding the windshield with wake water. I know all this because in 2007 I was offered and accepted my first academic job, in Pittsburgh, a city I’d never thought about. Since then I have driven from Pittsburgh to New York and back more times than I can count. I drove in all types of weather, from blizzarding snow that sent my VW Beetle skidding off the highway to smoldering heat with broken air-conditioning and the windows down. I drove in the endless dead of night, downing 5-hour Energy shots, my brain vibrating. I drove throughout the first year of Trump’s presidency,

ON A CLEAR, traffic-free day, it takes seven and a half hours to drive from Pittsburgh to midtown Manhattan, and that’s if you only stop once for gas. But there’s always traffic. And somewhere between Scranton and Elk County, down below the Allegheny National Forest or thereabouts, clouds will often roll in no matter how fine the weather when the drive began, and rain will come, moody and gloomy. Giant trucks zoom by, blinding the windshield with wake water. I know all this because in 2007 I was offered and accepted my first academic job, in Pittsburgh, a city I’d never thought about. Since th

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