It’s 06:30 in the morning and I’m driving to the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles. I’ve been trying to sleep after an exhausting week at CES, but I’m too excited for this hike and can’t wait to depart the Airbnb we’re in.
Every visit to the United States is an adventure. The most mundane things are special to me; all the traffic and shop signs are designed so neatly, the typography done so well. It’s a joy to enter a supermarket with huge racks of colorful packaging, chocolate and soda in a hundred varieties, or to see the big cars and even bigger trucks.
The US feels like a picture taken in HDR. Even if it captures colors on a wider range, I’m not sure if it’s realistic. People here are so happy and overly enthusiastic, even if they use it to hide their true feelings. When asking for directions, a lady asks me where I’m from, and when I tell her I’m from the Netherlands, she is so amazed that I wonder if she’s joking with me, or genuinely excited. Part of me wants to give in, to also act so exuberantly as if everybody is my best friend. I want to drink Monster Energy Ultra Punk Punch, have Reese’s Red Velvet Flavored Creme Peanut Butter Cups, and drive a loud 5-liter Ford Mustang. Go to a shooting range and act as if using guns is normal. If I could just pretend.
But I’m here, driving up the twisty mountain road. There’s not much traffic on the road, and the vehicles I do see are made for fun. There’s a McLaren supercar coming down, and a little later, a loud, bright yellow Ducati passes me, and later a green Kawasaki, an Ariel Atom, and a Porsche convertible. To experience reality in this way must be incredible. If I can just put rationality aside for a bit, maybe that could be me; wearing jeans and a Quartararo helmet, going past cars at a superbike revving 15,000 RPM.
A friend introduced the concept of ‘Hyperreality’ to me, and although I am not confident enough to say exactly where it ends or begins, once you can grasp a phenomenon with a word you can see it everywhere.
At Camp Williams, I order some coffee, and the lady asks where I’m from and whether I’ve seen the ICE protests. I am not sure which side she is on, so I’ll just play it safe and say that I just want to leave the city and get into nature, not to be involved in politics. And she’s happy with that answer.
I park at the trailhead to hike a famous trail. There’s a beautiful valley that I get a full panoramic view of. Online, I had read many jubilous comments about how amazing the trail is, to see blooming flowers, mountain sheep, and at the end; an unused bridge. But I get none of those today. At the parking lot, a guy already warned me that the water is too high. And he’s right, after three kilometers there’s a swirling river, and I’ve got nowhere to go. I could risk getting wet feet to get across, but I can hear rocks tumbling in the water, and with no phone signal here, I don’t want to try anything dangerous.
But it’s alright. I’m alone here in the mountains, alone with my mind. And that’s all I want after a busy ten days. And I think about hyperreality.
I think there are two parts to this; one is that slowly the copy or stimulated version of a thing becomes better than the original, whether it’s soda or the pictures we post of ourselves on social media — and that we forget what that original was like (if there even was one). The second part is that we get so numbed to our senses that we must always have some stimulance in order to stay satisfied with how boring reality actually is.
I’m here among trees and rocks and a river that does not play along according to my plan. There’s a relief of not being completely in control, in this not being entirely a curated experience. I miss my family members. On the flat and smooth sand of a riverbank, I write our names in the sand as if it’s a magic spell.
