tapmag

For the past 2 hours I’ve been dwelling mid-air above a calm, bright sea of white, cotton candy clouds.

Vivid images of casualties of cross-Atlantic crusades are safely tugged away in the books of history, and the hunger for the land of milk and honey has been staved off by a club soda, a chicken breast with risotto and season salad, a complementary cracker and cheese, and a chocolate chip cookie.

120 years ago, the people now 30,000ft below me, securely screened underneath the friendly skies, would have risked their life to cross the very same waters for the mere dream of a fresh potato. This goes to prove, like anything else, there’s a past and there’s a future – a prologue and an epilogue. First come the prologue…

I’m 25, and I’ve planned this for the past 15+ years. Ever since I can remember, the U.S. was my one big dream. Age 12, I envisioned an older me – not much, about 10 years – living abroad with my wife, my kids, our two cars minimum, and maybe a dog if the kids were on their best behavior (which, of course, they always were, while attending school, basketball practice, and played baseball on Sundays in the park – the stuff regular non-Americans picture all-Americans doing). New York state, but not New York City – after all, we had just left the city, which had not only framed our perfect life for the past three years, it was also where I had met my beautiful wife.

I guess you could say, I’m an “American Studies All Star,” studying American studies for the third time in 4 years – once in Copenhagen, and twice in Berlin (so far, three’s the charm) – yet, oddly enough, I’ve been strangely unprepared. Maybe it was the subconscious angst of that around which you’ve build your visions of your future life is but a mirage. Maybe the milk had gone sour and the honey begun to crystallize? To illustrate my point, I bought extra travel insurance to serve as a kind of “dream buffer”, just in case someone, or something, would trip me up on my way there – not because it’s simply the rational thing to do, when you book months in advance.

Still, I know my history well enough to know that this is a risk anyone crossing the Atlantic a 120 years ago was running – no insurance, no “dream buffer.” So, I’ve decided to use the words of J. Hector St. John de Crevecouer’s Letters From an American Farmer from 1782 as my beacon of light to fight the gloom of angst: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced,” wrote.

Good for me, I’m still relatively young and unspoiled, which should make it easier for me to do just that: leave behind me all my ancient prejudices and manners, and thus eradicate my angst. For if I am no one, how can I be afraid of failure? To ensure a speedy and efficient reconstruction, I shall walk the path with the truest of true Americans, Benjamin Franklin, by using a slightly updated version of his schedule. Now, all I have to do is determine, what constitutes an American today? I just need to dive through the cotton candy below, and I’ll know. Just a couple of more hours…

By Peter Dahl