It's the morning after the night before. I'm driving east – away from Portland, Oregon, where 76 per cent of voters chose Hillary Clinton for president – into another United States. I have yet to meet a single Donald Trump supporter – at least one who would admit to it – in the city where I live. Portland is a liberal stronghold. Democrats here voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, but they moved en masse for Clinton. I'm tuned into the local National Public Radio affiliate, listening to the presenters scramble to make sense of something none of them even imagined, let alone predicted.
Somehow the sun is still rising over the Cascade mountains, and it’s heart-achingly gorgeous as it finds a hazy path to the Columbia River. There are no zombies on the road, no mobs with guns, no crumbling edifices. Drivers signal, change lanes, observe the speed limits, proceed as normal. All this despite the fact that just hours earlier the United States elected a misogynist, racist, vainglorious, unscrupulous reality-TV star as president.
I left the house before my kids woke up, so I didn’t have to tell them just yet that what I said before wasn’t true. I told my son that Donald Trump would not be president and that the good guys always win. What will he say when he finds out the bad guy is in charge? And how do I tell my daughter, who turned six the day before her country turned the clock back, that the US rejected an experienced woman with a cogent platform for social change and instead elected a sexual predator to its highest office? That the man who calls women pigs and dogs and brags about grabbing them by their genitals has been chosen as their leader by more than 59 million people? And that he’s going to be president on January 20th?
The radio tells me that Clinton’s concession speech is imminent. Apparently, her victory speech was to take place under a literal glass ceiling at the Javits Center in Manhattan. Instead, they keep telling whoever else is still bothering to listen, she’s conceding in a nondescript room with a regular ceiling.
I think back to the night before, when we all descended on a friend’s house with bottles of bubbles at the ready for a night of celebratory vote counting. The host had stocked up on flutes – just so we could smash them when our woman got in. Instead the jubilant faces ready to watch history being made turned ashen as the night wore on. Nobody could crack a smile, let alone a glass.
I’m still waiting for Clinton’s speech, but the farther I travel from my safe city the weaker the signal becomes. Clinton, it seems, can’t be heard this far from Portland. I’m crossing into Wasco County, which Trump won with 51 per cent of the vote. I see my first Trump-Pence sign, in the middle of a tilled field beside the highway. I scour the vast, flat landscape for life. I want to see the half of the US that put him in office, but nobody’s around.
Finally, Clinton comes on stage to give her concession speech. I’m losing reception in Sherman County, which Trump won with 73 per cent of the vote. It’s the same story all over the country: urban centres voted for Clinton; rural counties came in big for Trump. I frantically scan the airwaves, through Christian rock stations and past a conservative host gloating about clueless liberals getting their comeuppance.
Finally, I can hear her, asking the United States to give Trump a chance to lead. My heart breaks for her. After a lifetime of public service she lost out to an infantile demagogue who brought up the size of his penis in a presidential debate. Then she addresses the little girls, my girl. “Never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.”
And I’m sobbing, loud and alone in my car as it hurtles on, because it feels right now that we are not powerful, that deserving something is still so far from receiving it. As I pull into Pendleton, and my phone finds a signal again, dozens of text messages arrive. Friends commiserating, many apologising to me, the immigrant. One friend tells me he’s going to Las Vegas this weekend, to marry his boyfriend while he still can. On Facebook another announces her plan to adopt her own daughter – born into a same-sex partnership – just in case. People are scared.
Pendleton, a rodeo town, has wide, dusty streets. It’s the county seat of Umatilla, where Clinton took a meagre 28 per cent of the vote. I drive to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, where I’ve come to interview the team at an institute for Native American art. We talk about the country in head-shaking tones.
On the drive back to Portland the sun is setting. My radio station is back on its familiar frequency, informing me that the city’s main highway is closed because of an anti-Trump protest. A friend tells me that a “hug it out”, where people are invited to embrace each other in solidarity, is planned for one of the city’s central parks. This is Portland. Nothing, and everything, has changed.
