Mountains and the Plains in Between: On Road Trips

Zack was talking, but I don’t remember what he was saying. He inhaled deeply, then allowed a cloud of carbon monoxide and other assorted toxic compounds to slip from his lips. Most got sucked out into the cold darkness. The remainder drifted over to the passenger side of the car, where I was fiddling with the radio. Without thinking, my lungs automatically closed, just as they did when my dad smoked while driving me around town as a child. I thought, for a second, that maybe if I held my breath for a second longer, I could stop time. I drooped my head to the right and gazed out the window at the towering, lighted bridge that crossed the Narrows and led to Dartmouth. The Bedford Basin was lying silent, its creaking, immense cargo ships tucked away to bed along the shoreline. We’d just eaten at the Henry House near downtown Halifax and there was a warm fire going and people chatting at small, wooden tables. I was quite full and quite drowsy. The air on the outside was cold and grazed my face as the heat from under the car’s dashboard warmed my feet.  If I’d cared to think hard enough, I would have thought to that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote about how he was riding in a taxi and looking out at the sky and buildings and he started to cry because he had everything he wanted and knew he would never be so happy again. I could feel it in the damp Canadian atmosphere: this moment of softened peace belied the terror of everything suddenly ending, lurking just beneath the surface. Reality was setting in to my obstinate brain: this might be the last road trip I ever take.

I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to travel, some people are ‘get in, get out’ types who usually fly to their destination of choice, take a hired vehicle to a hotel, do some sightseeing around town/spend a few days on a beach, and then get carried by metal wings back where they came from.  Other people are more taken with the concept of a road trip, of forcibly navigating an automobile across terrain to get from one place to another.  While I come from a family decidedly in the former group, I most assuredly belong in the latter. The same would be said of Zack, whom I have road tripped with throughout the Southeast (2004), to the Pacific Northwest (2008), to Ontario (2010), and, on our latest trip, to the Maritime Provinces of Canada. I have also taken several other Zack-less road trips to Boston (2008), Maine/Northeast (2009), and Minnesota/Great Lakes (2010). These last few years, I have lived for them. Though the phrase ‘half the fun is in getting there’ is a tired cliché, there is some truth in it—though I’d argue it’s more like three-quarters of the fun.  I would gladly trade the conveniences of not having to meander through the complex roadway systems of the American Northeast for the freedom of being able to actually see what exists in the spaces between point A and B.  I’ve found traveling this way creates a different perspective of the place you end up in; you can more easily conceptualize the interconnectedness of dots on a map when you physically pass through the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the deserts of eastern Washington to get to Seattle, instead of being magically transplanted from the East Coast to the wet metropolis surrounding the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.  I understand I am usually in the minority in having this travel preference, so I’ve learned I must jump at the chance to take a road trip whenever the opportunity arises. 

There are few undertakings as American as a road trip (NOTE: it may also be as much a part of the Canadian experience, seeing as four of my road trips have taken place at least partially in that country—so it may be best to call it a ‘North American thing’).  Though it can sometimes feel overstuffed with humanity and fast food restaurants, ours is a nation with copious amounts of space. And like a restless people, we feel we must traverse every inch of it. From Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley to National Lampoon’s Vacation, our popular culture is littered with commonplace tales of traveling across the country by automobile. By the time Henry Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, the nation finally had the mechanism it needed for traveling long distances, though it took a long time until the process of driving from the East Coast to California was practically plausible. A big step towards that end occurred when the U.S. Highway System was developed in 1925 thanks to the Federal Aid Highway Act, which took the administration of interstate roads from private entities and gave it to the states. (It also began the all-too-logical standardization of highways being identified by numbers rather than proper names.)  In the ensuing years, technology proliferated and car travel became an inextricable part of the American experience. By the middle of the 20th century, a new system was needed to accommodate the influx of so many automobiles, so in 1956 the Interstate System was created by way of the Federal Aid Highway Act. Today, that road system covers some 47,182 miles.

The road trips of my life began, as most things do, at the discretion and will of my parents. We would board our Suburban and get hauled to the beach or down to South Carolina to see my great grandmother. These early road trips didn’t do a lot for me. While the destinations themselves were fine, I found traveling by car to be simply a nausea-inducing nuisance. At that point, largely because it was so foreign to me, air travel was the more thrilling mode of transport. All that changed, however, when I was 15 and I took a bus trip over the course of several weeks across the entire span of the United States— from San Antonio to San Francisco to Colorado and Memphis. For me, it changed everything. Finally, I learned the red and yellow squares and misshapen polygons on classroom maps were actual places I could stand on. There was real territory west of the Appalachians after all. I knew that as soon as I returned home and got a car, I would hit the road and explore every nook and hiding place on the continent. My heady youthful enthusiasm got ahead of me, though: for a while the only car trips I took were to decidedly non-exotic places like Roanoke, Virginia and Myrtle Beach. Eventually, during my first spring break in college, I realized I finally had the opportunity to just get in the car and go. Zack, an aspiring road tripper himself, was game, so we loaded up our things, surveyed the snow-covered ground and decided that going ‘somewhere south’ was the best plan of attack. Over the course of that week, we traipsed through the southern wilds, from Savannah to St. Augustine, from Panama City to Baton Rouge, from Jackson to Memphis, then back to our starting point. We did nothing that resembled the MTV spring breaks I had long viewed with awe, but it was glorious.

No matter how enjoyable the other trips have been, none can compare to the summer I cajoled my aging metal machine from North Carolina to Baltimore (to get Zack), out to Seattle, up to Vancouver, down to San Francisco, through Nevada and Missouri, and back home again. This trip took place under the guise of attending the Sasquatch Music Festival in central Washington (which was excellent), but in truth, the trip itself was what I most cared about. It took three full weeks. Along the way, we saw the things you’re supposed to see—the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Mount Rushmore, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Space Needle. But it was all that space in between the places you’re supposed to see that stuck with me. They appear in my brain often: Driving through empty Kansas during a violent storm at night and my body growing rigid out of some fear that a twister would snatch us up and transport us to a land of witches and dancing scarecrows. Or winding our way around a twisty road in Northern California and noticing how the sun was hitting the dusty mountains in a peculiar way. Or plunging off course to find a town called Box Elder because of a stupid Pavement song. Or stopping in the middle of nowhere in Montana so we could touch real snow in late May. Or listening to that Band of Horses song while driving past the Great Salt Lake it was named after. All of this vast meandering is a type of freedom that I have been unable to replicate in any other undertaking in my life. It made me feel like an American and it made me feel free. 

The thing about road trips is they take a lot of time. As we grow older and the carefree days of spring breaks and summer vacations evaporate, our time is put at a premium, and the simplicity of flying becomes too difficult to pass up. Thus, as my twenties drag on, I know full well that the door is likely closing on the road trips of my life. Thanks to my journaling habits, which began on that first bus trip out west, I have meticulously documented the banal details of these trips, listing everything I ate, the names of roads we took, my best estimations of temperature and humidity, and the music that was playing when we crossed that one bridge into Jacksonville. These small bits don’t mean a lot by themselves, but taken together, they create a fuller picture of what these trips were like. I can now read what I wrote, listen to the same songs I was listening to, and look at the pictures I took to try to recreate what it felt like to actually be out there, on the open road, with new possibilities at every stoplight.

Road trips, at their philosophical ideal, should serve as a reminder of how big and how small the world really is. They should also give us hope that there are still spaces out there to explore, even on a planet that at this point has nearly every square inch mapped and surveyed and viewed with a just a swipe of the finger. But going there and seeing for yourself that these places exist, where you can collect tiny memories on back roads and keep them forever, is really what’s important. If I’m not again standing on the rocky point at Peggys Cove in Nova Scotia or gazing at the sun setting into the Pacific in Eureka, California sometime soon, with the wind whipping through my hair and the sun blinding my eyes, I feel pretty secure that the mental images of those places will stay with me for a long time to come. But even if they don’t last, at least I have pictures, which maybe will be able to create in me a glimmer of the things I was feeling when I took them. Until hopefully, one day soon, I’ll grab my trusty atlas and head out on the open road once again.