What My Danish Husband Learned About America from a Cross-Country Trip
A foreigner on the road during the pandemic
Three-something years ago, our family arrived from the safe heaven of Denmark to New York, high on American sitcoms and false advertisements. A naturalized American citizen myself, I was hoping my husband and his two daughters, then 10 and 12, would broaden their horizons and have the time of their lives.
Three months later COVID hit.
Whatever life we managed to create for ourselves in those first three months was falling into pieces. After a few more months of madness, we packed up and moved to California, via a three-week-long cross-country road trip.
We were Europeans lost in pandemic America, with two adolescents and a baby on the way. We saw the Black Lives Matter protests in DC, visited Florida during the lockdown, and stayed in New Orleans when a hurricane hit. America never felt more like a war zone.
Here are a few things my husband took away from that trip.
The “united” states are as divided as it gets
My husband’s biggest takeaway from driving across America is that there is no such thing as America.
“What you have here is not a country but a bunch of different countries,” he noted.
As we drove from state to state, not only the political views changed but so did the climates, landscapes, driving styles, cuisines, fashions, prices, portion sizes, architecture, and vegetation. From mountains to palm trees, from deserts to beaches, from drag racing in New Jersey to the art shops in Santa Fe, and from the elegance of Charleston to the tackiness of Las Vegas — we have seen it all in one trip.
“This is also America?” my husband asked upon our arrival in South Carolina, after a long stretch of New Jersey and Virginia.
Palm trees, crocodiles, and large plantations made him feel like he was on vacation. So did the mosquitoes and friendly people and prices that stretched all the way into Florida. By the time we got to Texas, the East Coast ways seemed like a distant memory from our past lives.
We went from a country of liberals and strict mask mandates to truck-driving folks with relaxed attitudes toward just about everything, COVID included.
Pleasantly surprised by our trip, my husband still wondered if our country’s size was not the strength they said it was, but its weakness.
“America would be a much easier place to manage if it wasn’t so damn huge,” he pointed out.
Indeed, my husband’s home country of Denmark is one of the smallest countries in the world, but it’s also the second happiest on Earth. Managing a small homogenous society leaves space and energy for significant improvements in the quality of life, rather than just surviving.
And that is what modern-day America is for a lot of its citizens — survival.
Grocery prices in America are a joke
Surely, in European countries, you wouldn’t expect a tomato to cost the same in the capital and in the middle of nowhere. Supermarket prices anywhere vary from one store chain to another, and from city to city. But only in America, as far as my husband is concerned, the same tomato can cost five dollars in New York and twenty cents in Texas. He’s now convinced that supermarket prices in America are an absolute joke.
“Only in America, a tomato can cost more than a burger!” he exclaimed.
Getting affordable and quality produce in New York was a never-ending struggle, so when we hit the road, my husband was delighted to see that grocery prices kept dropping the farther we got away from Brooklyn. But by the time we reached Texas, he was beyond himself: “Food is almost free!”
For the first time since leaving Denmark, my husband entered a grocery store and didn’t get scared. Yet, as we pushed through toward Los Angeles, the prices crept up. We knew we arrived when we saw our first three-dollar tomato.
“Grocery prices in America are a scam,” my husband announced, pointing out that government subsidies for supermarket food, so common in Europe, barely go beyond corn in America, leaving Americans with cheap low-quality products and unaffordable healthy foods.
“A five-dollar tomato shouldn’t exist,” he concluded, pointing out that people shouldn’t have to work harder to afford a healthier diet.
But in America, they do.
“It’s basically a shithole with a lot of very nice places”
When, at the end of our cross-country trip, I asked my husband what he thought of America so far, he replied:
“It’s basically a shithole with a lot of very nice places.”
He said that never one country disappointed and delighted him so much, all at the same time. It took a while for both my husband and his daughters to shake off any expectations they had of the U.S. That’s when the process of getting to know real America began.
After two years of discoveries and one long road trip, the verdict was in.
On the road, and in everyday life, the country surprised my husband with its delightful diversity and awful bureaucracy, its beautiful landscapes and its inner-city streets, its most progressive views, and most conservative thinking. Above all, it surprised him with its extremes.
“You can’t say America is a nice place, or Americans are nice. You can say it has a lot of nice places and a lot of nice people, despite being a difficult place to live in,” my husband concluded.
Whatever TV-based expectations of America my Danish family had, they all but vanished by now, replaced by unexpected discoveries that took place, both good and bad.
Getting to know America on the road may be one of the best ways of learning about the country that is just too vast and too diverse to be seen through TV snippets.
Yet even after three weeks of traveling, followed by many mini-trips, my husband knows he’s only seen the tip of the iceberg.
What you witnessed in your cross-country trip is some of the profound changes in the US. Fifty years ago we had a strong manufacturing economy, and it was possible to earn a middle-class living in most places. When the large corporations started moving production offshore, the jobs went as well. The result is a declining standard of living except for the financial firms on the east coast and the tech and entertainment firms on the west coast. The center of the country is now regarded by the coasts as “flyover” country where no one would want to go. As you might imagine, those of use who live here are not real happy with that label. The resentment sparked by the disparity between rich and poor is part of what got Donald Trump elected in 2016.