I
There are certain experiences so deeply-engrained in American myth—if one accepts Jung’s definition of myth as “collective memory”—that you feel as if having had one or more of these experiences is almost a prerequisite for qualifying as an American. Stepping into a voting booth on election day. Hearing an umpire shout “Play ball” on a mild summer evening. Coping with melting ice cream during a Fourth of July fireworks display. DX’ing on your car radio somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and picking up nothing but country music.
Or taking the long, long drive that got you out into that middle of nowhere in the first place.
In fact, that last should be near the top of any such list, and I would hope that at some time in his or her life every American would have the opportunity to cross the United States. Not in an airplane, either, but in one of the slower, perhaps even a bit less comfortable ways. Train? Okay, but even that’s a little “touristy.” Bus, or better yet, because more personal, car. (Who but we Americans have ever been so affectively attached to their cars? And don’t take my word for it, just break out any one of Bruce Springsteen’s early albums.)
Of all American myths, none is more pervasive, deeply-rooted or powerful than that of the open road. How much of our literature and even our popular culture have had their roots in the notion of the road as metaphor for spiritual quest? Walt Whitman’s name comes to mind right away, then more names: Steinbeck, Kerouac.
Then of course come songs, movies and classic television shows. Route 66 was a hit for Nat King Cole and later, a TV series in which Martin Milner and George Maharis rode boldly in search of self-enlightenment in their Chevy Corvette. Americans of a certain age (over 45) will remember Michael Parks meandering about the country on a motorcycle for two television seasons in a Route 66 retread on NBC called Then Came Bronson. A treacly song popular when I was in high school, Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, celebrated a couple of happy hippies “Travelin’ and a-livin’ off the land.” The late Roger Miller’s biggest hit record, King of The Road, was a ditty about a footloose “man of means by no means” knocking around the highways and byways.
Then there are Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider; Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow; Lee Marvin's virtuoso hobo in Emperor of the North. The prose of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is almost uniformly dreadful, but books don’t have to be well-written to sell well, (think John Grisham) and there was a good reason why Zen became a runaway bestseller when it was first published in 1974. It, too, tapped into the subconscious yearning of America (in this case, collegiate America, fond of both Zen and motorcycles) for the road, with its freedom of open spaces and the unlimited possibilities of Whitman’s great democratic vista. So did Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s 1983 paean to the back roads of the republic, those thin blue veins that crisscross the spaces between the interstate highways in almost any road atlas.
I have driven across the United States twice, most recently just a few weeks ago. And on both occasions I realized that, their external circumstances notwithstanding, the two journeys represented the fulfillment of a kind of fantasy, and an archetypically American one at that. Many years ago in Mexicali, when I first attended a bullfight, or years after that, when I was in Paris and treated myself to lunch in a good cafe on the Place San Michel, I chided myself with a half-grin, “You’re fulfilling a ‘Hemingway’ fantasy, doing this.” Crossing America in a car was just as clearly, for me anyway, the fulfillment of a “Kerouac” fantasy, although the adventures he chronicled in On The Road and its follow-up volume, The Dharma Bums, were certainly wilder and more colorful than anything I experienced. Doesn’t really matter, though. On stage, the play’s the thing. On the road, the trip’s the thing, and trips are as individual as the people who make them. None is exactly like another. In Bitter Lemons of Cyprus Lawrence Durrell wrote that journeys, like artists, are born and not made. As the Germans say, Genau.
My first crossing of America by car, in 2003, was neither a relaxed vacation nor a self-indulgent voyage of self-discovery fraught with earnest notebook-scribbling and photographing of forests, rivers and canyons (although I did, at the request of some friends, take a few snapshots along the way.) It was a mad dash for safe haven. My luck and my money had both run out and so had my list of places to go. I had been living in suburban Washington, D.C. and had lost my job a few months earlier. Unable to find work anywhere, (in 2002 the economy was still in its post-9/11 slump) by that winter I had run out of options. I could no longer pay the rent on my apartment in Wheaton, MD. My sister in Reno, NV invited me to come stay with her and look for work there.
But I had to get there, and that involved a logistic nightmare. I couldn’t just walk away from a stuffed apartment. I owned about 10,000 lbs. worth of...well, the usual things people accumulate. Furniture, clothes. Pots & pans; forks & knives; plates & cups. Books, records, CDs, TV set, computer, stereo, pictures, VHS tapes, sheets and blankets. Those souvenir beer steins from Munich. Those Russian lacquer boxes from Moscow. The matryoshka dolls. The golf clubs. The snorkeling gear. I truly came to an understanding that winter of what a burden possessions are. I longed to just shuck my clothes like St. Francis and wander off into the woods. But you can’t do that anymore, nor would I ever have had the courage to. And there was no way I could store all of that stuff. Ultimately I gave away almost all of it. The furniture, clothes and kitchen things went to the Salvation Army, while my library, my precious, lovingly-assembled collection of books and music that had been my ongoing project for 30 years, was donated to the Friends of the Wheaton Library. They came and carted it all away for sale, including books and vinyl LPs that I’d had since high school. I wept.
But not for long. “Pack up your peaches and get out here,” my sister in Reno had exhorted me on the phone. My car, a 1990 Geo Storm which already had more than 130,000 miles on it, became a lifeboat. A few things did go into storage in Wheaton; the rest went into the car. I dropped off the key to my apartment and spent one last night in the nation’s capital, or more accurately, with a friend in Arlington, VA. She served me a delicious supper of baked salmon. We drank wine. I played Trivial Pursuit with her son. The next morning, early, I was on my way.
This was no sightseeing trip. 2,267 miles separate Arlington from Reno. And I had to wonder if my car was going to make it. Yes, I’d had it serviced before leaving, but it was 13 years old and had already seen much at my hands, including two years of tearing up and down the Autobahn in Germany. I crossed my fingers and tried to keep my speed under 70. A colleague had once dubbed my Geo “the Blue Shoe.” If we made it to Nevada, this would be the Blue Shoe’s finest hour.
II
That first day I drove for ten hours and got as far as Indianapolis, where I arrived in a cold rain. I had a friend there who had offered to put me up for the night, saving the cost of one motel anyway, but once I got there I had to wait for her to finish her shift working the front desk at a local Holiday Inn. Her relief, scheduled to come on at midnight, was late of course. I sat in the hotel lobby, my eyes drooping from the long day on the road, watching an old Golden Girls rerun on the Lifetime Channel and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to just check into the Super-8 and forget about trying to save $39.95
At 12:25 a.m. my friend’s relief showed up. We drove back to her place, where I was dismayed to discover that she had a TV set in the bedroom and, at that late hour, wanted to watch a country-music awards show. I got about four hours’ sleep that first night. She had to turn right around and go back to work in the morning, and at 6:10 a.m. her kitschy drug store alarm clock started approximating the sound of a rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo. We had coffee together at a nearby McDonald’s and then I was back on the interstate, on my way out of Indiana.
I crossed into Illinois about 90 minutes later, heeding the sign that reminded me I was now on Central Standard Time. Driving across southern Illinois that morning I realized the limits of terrestrial radio once you get outside the major urban areas. There was little on the dial at all, and what little there was would have provided the late Mike Royko with ample gunpowder for one of his old Chicago Sun-Times columns about the hicks and rubes who lived downstate. One station was even broadcasting local obituaries, something I had never heard before, and I had worked in small-town radio myself.
Continuing to follow Interstate 70, I traversed the length of Missouri that morning and early afternoon, crossing the Mississippi River and passing the famous St. Louis “Gateway to the West” arch in a long haul that had me in Kansas City by 1:30 p.m. Kansas City had been my target stopping-place for Day Two, but 1:30 p.m. seemed a bit early to be pulling off the road, so I kept going. But a few minutes later, after crossing into Kansas, the fatigue burning my eyeballs reminded me that I had only slept four hours or so the night before. So I pulled off the road in Kansas City, Kansas, the lesser twin of the “real” Kansas City where the football Chiefs and baseball Royals are to be found, and checked into a motel, where an afternoon nap preceded a genuine night’s sleep.
By the next afternoon I had made it as far as Denver, after covering Kansas in what was up until that time the most boring drive I could remember. In an old episode of the Barney Miller series on TV, a federal witness-protection subject who keeps coming back to New York and getting into trouble is finally threatened with, “Do you know what there is in Kansas? WHEAT!” I’ve got news for one and all: there’s even less than that. Kansas is so vast and barren, at least along the I-70 corridor, that I was terrified of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere; any time I saw a gas station, I would “stop and top” whether I needed to or not. At some point that afternoon I crossed into Colorado, where I found that John Denver’s song Rocky Mountain High had no relevance whatever. Eastern Colorado is essentially a continuation of Kansas; only a climb in elevation so gradual that you don’t even notice it distinguishes the one state from the other. About an hour and a half out of Denver, still looking at topography that reminded me of Kansas, I was surprised to see a sign that said I was now at an elevation of nearly 5,000 feet. When did that happen? No, Colorado doesn’t start to look like postcard Colorado (think Coors beer trucks) until you’re west of Denver, a fact I learned after spending the night in yet another motel, this one near the railroad tracks, unfortunately, which meant I was listening to trains all night, and then making my way through Denver’s ghastly Monday-morning commute traffic, eventually finding my way out of town and on up into the Rocky Mountains.
Here was where I actually saw the Blue Shoe’s “finest hour.” Loaded up like the Joads’ jalopy in The Grapes of Wrath, the Shoe got me through the Rockies, which were still largely snow-covered in late March. She slowed to 35 and would go no faster on some steep climbs, but made up for it going downhill. The descent out of the Rockies was as tortured as the climb into them, but I lunched that afternoon in end-of-the-world Grand Junction knowing that the toughest part of the drive was behind me. I was in the great west now, land of (mostly) flat spaces.
I pushed on into eastern Utah. Did I think Kansas had been desolate? Eastern Utah looks like the moon. Literally. As I drove through, and gazed upon, mile after mile of trackless waste, I thought of Neil Armstrong’s description of the lunar surface in 1969, “magnificent desolation.” Closer to home, you saw the movie Stagecoach, right? Imagine yourself on the set of Stagecoach, whose climactic scenes were in fact filmed in Monument Valley, Utah, not far from where I was that day. The plucky Shoe bravely soldiered on, but when I saw a sign that read, “Next services 100 miles,” my blood damn near froze. My car only held 10 gallons of gas, and if I got stuck out here, I’d really be stuck. To save fuel, I hugged the right lane and kept my speed under 60. I didn’t have to worry about being cursed by other drivers; it seemed as though I had the entire highway for 100 miles in both directions to myself. I could worry about that instead.
Utah is as varied as Colorado. At Salina I got off I-70 and turned north toward Provo and Salt Lake City, gradually leaving the moon behind and entering countryside that looked more like Switzerland: green valleys surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Lovely country, the Utah that Utah wants you to come visit, and bring your skis. I almost overshot Salt Lake City. Staying on the interstate while I looked for a motel along the frontage roads, I drove and drove...and when I came to the airport, (and saw a sign directing me to Interstate 80 which also said “Reno 385”) I knew that I had driven too far. I turned around and went back, spending my last night on the road in a Motel 6 in the Salt Lake suburb of Midvale. Here an urban legend was exploded, by the way. No, I found out, motel rooms in Utah do not offer guests the Book of Mormon instead of the Gideon Bible, as I had heard or read somewhere. I opened the drawer beside the bed and there was the familiar Gideon Bible in its usual place along with the Yellow Pages and the takeout pizza menus.
The next day was the final lap of my 2,200-mile dash for sanctuary—I could be in Reno by midafternoon if I didn’t let myself get distracted.
In fact, a major distraction promptly intruded itself: after traversing western Utah’s vast expanse of the closest thing to nothing earth has to offer, including the unearthly spectacle of the white and endless Bonneville Salt Flats, where Craig Breedlove set the world land speed record in 1964, racing across the sand at 600 mph in the Spirit of America, (essentially a jet aircraft with no wings) I crossed into Nevada and, stopping for gas, discovered that the Blue Shoe, no Spirit of America despite her spunk, was leaking transmission fluid. For the last 300-or-so miles of my trip I was sweating proverbial bullets, pulling off the road every time I came to a town to replenish the Blue Shoe’s transmission fluid, including a stop in Battle Mountain, NV, immortalized by the travel pages of the Washington Post in 2001 as “The Armpit of America” in an article I remembered reading, and giggling at, as I sat at my desk in a comfortable corporate office just outside Baltimore, never imagining for a moment that Battle Mountain would be anywhere in my own future. But here, just as the article had said, on a mountain overlooking the town, there stood the giant white letters “BM,” a detail the Post could not resist pointing out with an appropriate snigger. I was tempted to stop and have lunch in Battle Mountain, if only to be able to tell people I had, but it’s not the kind of place that encourages lingering, and anyway I still had 170 miles to go. Onward, leaking.
Around 4:00 that afternoon I pulled into my sister’s driveway in Reno. The frenzied trek was over. Of course my luck would be no different there, and two months later I would be pushing on to my final destination, the old family homestead in southern California, where fate had been busy, it seemed, setting me up to join my younger sister in caregiving for our father, who was 89 at the time and on the verge of dementia. I would find a job there at last, working on the local newspaper, and the Blue Shoe would be replaced by a 1995 Saturn SL. A year after that my younger sister would die and I would become my father’s sole caregiver for the final year of his own life. But all of that was in the future. For the moment I was in Reno, many, many miles from where I had begun, looking for work when I wasn’t sticking aluminum trays from Pep Boys under my car in a doomed effort to protect my brother-in-law’s driveway from the drippings of the Blue Shoe’s incontinent transmission. If this particular experience with the romance of the road had taught me anything, it was that satellite radio would probably be a damn good investment. You’d be amazed at how little there is to listen to between Indianapolis and Reno, and somewhere around the middle of Kansas I sure was getting sick of the sound of my own voice.
Oh, yes, and I learned one other thing on this trek as well: Burger King is the only fast-food chain anywhere that serves decent coffee.
III
Four years later I crossed America again, this time in the other direction, and this time, not alone. Between the five-day dash for sanctuary in 2003 and my return to Washington, D.C. in 2007, much had happened and the contours of life had been considerably altered. By 2005 my younger sister and my father were both gone, and by the fall of that year I had gotten married for a second time, to a woman, moreover, who lived and enjoyed her own version of the gypsy life. Valerie, my second wife, is a real estate broker with an expensive hobby. She’s what you might call a frustrated interior decorator, in the same sense that her husband is a frustrated poet. She likes to buy a house, flip it, sell it and then move on to the next one. I haven’t checked, but this might be some kind of record: by the time Valerie and I had been married for 18 months, we were moving into our third house. Valerie has boasted on her own blog (http://valerrealestate.blogspot.com) of having moved 40 times in her life. Well, I’m up there too: in addition to the moving around I did as a young journalist years ago, I also spent 14 years in the foreign service, so I’m not far behind Valerie: 35 lifetime moves. But three moves together in 19 months of marriage? If we were a couple of romantic young kids, pursuing nascent careers while schlepping from apartment to apartment after a cheap honeymoon at the Disneyland Motel, maybe. But Valerie and I are both past 50. These are single-family homes we’re hopping around to, and each one gets furnished with real stuff, not orange-crate bookshelves and plastic end tables from IKEA.
Before we got married, Valerie relocated from Washington, D.C. to southern California, bought and remodeled a house there for us to live in (Move #1). After a few months, we decided to seek a business opportunity. Valerie had always wanted to try running a bed-and-breakfast. We found a beautiful one in Spokane, WA, bought it and relocated to Spokane to try our hands at being innkeepers (Move #2.) But after just a few months in the B&B business, Valerie decided she was bored to tears. Running a B&B just wasn’t enough of a business challenge for her, and there was also the fact that we were going broke, so she decided it was time to return to her home turf and get back into the real estate business. She bought a house in Washington, D.C. and we sold the bed-and-breakfast (Move #3.)
Valerie went to Washington ahead of me to look for a home and get started up in her old business again. I stayed behind in Spokane to run the bed-and-breakfast while it was up for sale and take care of our menagerie of three miniature schnauzer dogs and three mostly-contentious cats. The B&B sold remarkably quickly, (one month) which presented yet another logistical challenge: getting everything we owned, which aside from the menagerie also included a 2006 Chrysler PT Cruiser, from Spokane to the District of Columbia.
Yes, it was time to make that journey again. Only this time it would be Interstate 90 rather than 70. A more northerly route, a whole new panorama of states to see, a whole new set of impressions to garner, another plunge into what Kerouac called the Great American Night, although in our case it could be more accurately termed the Great American Afternoon. Valerie doesn’t like to drive after sunset and, while I don’t mind it as much as she does, at 51 I’m a bit set in my ways. (Actually, I was a bit set in my ways at 25, but of that another time.) The truth is, whether I’m at home in my own living room or checking out the local weather forecast on cable TV in some motel room in Sheboygan, evening means cocktails, a light meal and an early bedtime. It doesn’t mean pushing the center line until midnight, trying to set mileage records. To heck with that. Ask any trucker: 500 miles is a good day’s work. I’ve been known to do 600, but only if I get started by 8 a.m. After that, hang up the keys. And for me, that usually means by 7 p.m.
This time I was pleased to notice myself anticipating the journey with something other than panic. After all, this was a completely different equation. This, if still neither meandering summer holiday nor Route 66-style quest for the answers to life’s questions that, according to the myth anyway, only the highway can provide, neither was it throwing a leg over the gunwale of the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic, a feeling that had unquestionably attended my solitary departure from Maryland in 2003.
We vacated the old mansion in Spokane on Monday, May 14. Once the moving van had pulled away, there was nothing left but for the auctioneer to come over, inventory and cart away what was to be auctioned off. As a living space, the house was empty.
I had already arranged to board our six animals at a local kennel for our last night in town. Valerie and I would stay at another B&B, around the corner from our own, operated by a friend who was now, suddenly, merely our hostess and no longer a colleague in the hospitality business. We were set to meet some friends at O’Doherty’s Irish Grill, a popular downtown watering hole, for a few farewell drinks.
Just before piling the dogs into the PT Cruiser to take them off to the kennel, I let them out into the backyard one last time from what had been their home (and ours) in the mansion’s attic. We would be leaving one family member behind, my abyssinian cat Amadeus, who had died the previous September and whose grave was beneath the blue spruce tree in the back yard. There was a wicker rocking chair there where I would sometimes sit beside his grave, on which I had placed a homemade marker, and smoke a cigar. Born in Germany in 1987, where my first wife Chris and I had gotten him from a cat breeder outside Frankfurt, Amadeus had lived to be 19 and had traveled all over the world before coming to his final resting place in America’s inland northwest. I had already removed his little gravestone and had the movers pack it up. Meanwhile, the puppy among our three schnauzers, Stanley, gave me a poignant moment in those last few minutes that we would occupy the Fotheringham House. Not understanding that this was it, and that after doing his business in the yard he would be taken to a kennel and not return for the evening as usual to the cozy attic where he had grown up, when he was finished romping in the yard Stanley slipped through the open kitchen door and dashed back up the three flights of stairs, thinking no doubt that he was being a good boy in returning to the attic without having to be told. I had to go up and retrieve him. As I climbed the stairs to the attic for the last time, I could see his little face peering out from the top of the stairs. “You don’t understand, Stanley,” I said as I carried him down to the car. “You don’t live here anymore.”
Remember the I Love Lucy episode in which the Ricardos and Mertzes are getting ready to leave for California, where Ricky is to appear in a Hollywood movie? They, too, are crossing America by car, and Ricky wants to get going at 6 a.m. on departure day. But with all of the rowdydow involved in packing and repacking the car, they don’t get on the road out of New York City until 6 p.m. Well, our departure from Spokane wasn’t quite that bogged down in delay, but on the morning we were to hit the highway we still had a short list of chores we had to do first: fetch the animals from the kennel (which was in the wrong direction of course) pick up a prescription at the drug store and drop off our cable TV box at Comcast. Finally we got on to Interstate 90 East. I glanced at the clock in the car as we cruised through the city of Spokane Valley, just east of Spokane proper. It was 10:15 a.m. Two people, six animals and 2,094 miles of road in front of us, west to east this time. The cats were in pet carriers. The dogs weren’t, but that was okay. Dogs get bored easily, especially in the car, and when dogs get bored, they sleep, which is exactly what we wanted them to do.
The state line between Washington and Idaho is about 20 minutes east of Spokane. (I had been in the habit for the past year of buying my liquor in Post Falls, booze being slightly cheaper on the Idaho side.) It takes just about an hour and a half to cross the Idaho panhandle on I-90, and at 11:55 a.m. we were crossing into Montana, just in time to set the clock in the car ahead one hour as we entered Mountain Time. Lunch was Burger King fare in Missoula, a lovely university town in the Bitterroot Valley which we had visited for our first wedding anniversary the previous October.
Somewhere in the mountains and valleys between Missoula and Bozeman we passed the Continental Divide, a tourist surprise I had not anticipated, never having driven across Montana any further than Missoula before. By 5:30 p.m. we were pulling into Bozeman, where I remembered that Valerie Hemingway, Papa’s erstwhile daughter-in-law and the author of Running With The Bulls: My Years With The Hemingways, which I had reviewed for a Hemingway website, still lived. (A couple of months earlier I had tried to look her up as a favor for a young journalist in New York who was seeking some information about Hemingway that she hoped Valerie Hemingway might provide, but Bozeman directory assistance wouldn’t give me her phone number.) My Valerie, meanwhile, had a yellow pages-type guide to pet-friendly motels across the USA, and she promptly found a Comfort Inn in Bozeman that would welcome our pooches and kitties (for an extra fee.) Supper that night was crackers, cheese, salami and grapes from a Wal-Mart Super Center just behind the motel (so much has changed since frontier days, or for that matter since Kerouac). Bozeman, surrounded by mountains, reminded me somewhat of Reno. Given my memories of Reno, I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not.
When we visited Missoula in the autumn of 2006, I was seeing Montana for the first time. That was the reason, actually, I had chosen Missoula for Valerie’s and my first-anniversary trip. I had never seen Montana and wanted to. I was not disappointed. Looking around at the seemingly-endless vista of the Bitterroot Valley (not for nothing does Montana call itself “Big Sky Country”) I thought, honestly, “This is where I want to die.” With that thought in mind, as we crossed the northern tier of states on Interstate 90 in flawless spring weather, (I don’t think we saw a cloudy day all the way from eastern Washington to the District of Columbia) I had my eye out for such places, places that might just grab me and say, as the countryside around Missoula did, that this is where you would stay if you could.
And I actually saw such a place. I don’t know if I could find it again, but somewhere between Bozeman and Billings, Montana, about 40 miles west of Billings and about two miles or so west of a tiny hamlet called Columbus, I glanced out the window of the car, looking beyond the south side of the interstate, and saw a little valley surrounded by pine forest, with the snow-covered peaks of the Rockies in the distance behind it. It was so stunningly beautiful in the morning sunlight that I thought, “Forget Missoula. If I were to hit the Powerball Lottery tomorrow, I’d build a house somewhere in the middle of that valley and never set foot out of that valley again.”
I kept these sentiments to myself, by the way. My wife does not share my fondness for the great northwest or for the outdoors generally. An east coast, urban girl, she has little use for scenery of any kind unless it augments the view from the verandah of some blue-chip property she’s trying to sell. I learned some time ago that an afternoon drive through breathtaking countryside is not her idea of a good time. While I ooh-and-ah over the landscape, she’ll be sitting there in the passenger seat reading an interior-decorating magazine. She was in a big hurry to get back to Washington, D.C. and business. In fact she was already fretting that if we didn’t get a move on, we wouldn’t make it to the east coast by Saturday and she might miss out on a listing. We were still nearly 2,000 miles from Maryland, but in her mind she was already there, talking about wanting to pull off the road in Rockville so she could pick up some pillows she had ordered at the La-Z-Boy store. Well, I reminded myself, this was one of the many reasons I married Valerie. She’s good at all the things I’m not good at, like making money. And keeping track of details. I never in my life met such a meticulous record-keeper or maker of lists. She was born to be in charge, as I was not. Back in the days when we were both government employees, (Valerie was with INS and I was with the State Department) she was supervising 800 people while I was pushing buttons and shredding paper in a room with no windows, damned glad that I didn’t have to supervise anybody. Yes, it was a good thing that I kept my fantasy about that secret valley in a corner of Montana to myself.
IV
We refueled in Billings, and from there Interstate 90 took us southward into Sheridan, Wyoming, whence it hooks east and, after traversing a northeastern slice of that state, passes into South Dakota. The mountains ended and gradually the plains began. We stopped for lunch in a little Wyoming town called Buffalo, where the food was awful and the coffee worse (where was Burger King when I needed it?)
Did I say that eastern Utah looked like the moon? Northeastern Wyoming, once you get beyond Buffalo, looks pretty much as I would like to imagine the surface of Mars must look: flat and barren, with mysterious hilly formations that look like they might have been created by the giant ants in the movie Them. Once you cross into South Dakota, which we did around 2 p.m. that day, the countryside becomes friendly again; Spearfish, SD looked like a pleasant enough place, though I was disappointed by Rapid City. Flat and spread out all over the place, it reminded me a little too much of California’s Imperial Valley, where I had done hard (and hot) time while trying to break into the newspaper business back when I was about 24. Nondescript, in other words.
But about 100 miles out of a town with the unlikely name of Wall, we began seeing signs that invited us to visit some sort of eighth-wonder-of-the-world called Wall Drug. If you’re old enough to remember the legendary Burma Shave advertising campaigns (I’m not) which featured rhyming rows of signs along the old highways of pre-interstate America, you’ll have some idea of what the owners of Wall Drug are up to in west-central South Dakota. As the miles click by, so do the signs, promising that this Wall Drug is a truly marvelous place offering everything from amusements for the kids to free coffee and doughnuts for veterans. A restaurant. A saloon. A museum. Gift shops. Wall Drug, in short, is South Dakota’s answer to Knott’s Berry Farm, and yes, by the time we reached Wall the signs had done their duty: we were so curious that we just had to stop there. Besides, the dogs needed to be walked. They walked in Wall, (and did other things too) and I walked out with a souvenir coffee mug.
We spent that night in Kadoka, a town so small it didn’t even have a grocery store open after sunset, so to get something for supper I had to go across the highway from the motel where we were flopped and order some greasy take-out food from a bar and grill that looked precisely as you might imagine a bar-and-grill in a town called Kadoka, South Dakota would look: a handful of old people polishing off plates of burgers and fries at rickety-looking tables; one or two wannabe cowboys with large belt buckles drinking Coors or maybe it was Bud under a hand-lettered sign announcing that a local country-western band would be performing there live on Saturday. I sat at the bar and ordered a scotch-and-water while I waited for the food. It was more water than scotch and I didn’t finish it.
The next morning I discovered that the motel didn’t even have the convenience of a dumpster. I wound up emptying the cats’ litter box into the outdoor wastebasket between the rooms. We got out of Kadoka in a hurry.
On Thursday, our third day out of Spokane, we crossed two major American rivers in one day: The Missouri, which we encountered at midmorning somewhere between Kadoka and Sioux Falls, and then later the Mississippi, which forms the boundary between southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, which we crossed around 5:30 that afternoon. This was a 600-mile day. We left Kadoka at 7:45 a.m. Mountain Time and were pulling into Wisconsin Dells, about 50 miles west of Madison, shortly before sunset. We pulled off the road in Wisconsin Dells only because pushing on to Madison would have involved another 40 minutes of driving and we both felt like we’d driven far enough that day. But Wisconsin Dells is not the sort of place I would have chosen to stop for the night if I had known anything about it. It seems to be southern Wisconsin’s playground. The main drag consists of little but amusement parks, theme parks and water parks. Plenty of motels, though, and that was a plus, although the one we checked into had a policy of accepting only one of each kind of pet, whereas we had three of each. The cats were no problem; we just sneaked them into the room and they remained indoors. But the dogs had to be walked, so we walked them one at a time, taking turns so that anyone who saw us might assume that we were different guests with different dogs.
Friday was our last full day on the road, and it was another marathon. Leaving Wisconsin Dells around 8 a.m., we stayed on Interstate 90, crossing into Illinois roughly two hours later. Our route skirted the northeast corner of that state in much the same way we had skirted Wyoming two days earlier, but this time that meant driving right through the middle of downtown Chicago at 11 O’clock in the morning. Anyone out there who knows otherwise is free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect that Chicago, whose downtown I was seeing for the first time, is like Los Angeles in this respect: there’s no rush hour, it’s just congested all the time. Our experience of being stuck in traffic was accompanied by a seemingly-endless discussion of illegal immigration on the Glenn Beck radio program on XM. (yes, I had gotten this welcome thingamajig installed in my car several months in advance of this trip.) It took us close to an hour to get through the center of Chicago, and it was a tremendous relief to find ourselves on the other side of it, but even more of a relief to get past the city of Gary, Indiana, which smells awful, at least from the turnpike. Lunch was McDonald’s fare in mid-turnpike, where we pulled off to put gas in the car and I shared my outrage with another motorist, a man with Nevada tags on his car, as we both got gouged $3.49 a gallon for regular unleaded. “It’s a toll road, and they know they have a captive audience,” I said.
We passed into Ohio at 2:40 p.m., pushing our watches ahead an hour when we suddenly realized that, being out of Indiana, we were now on Eastern Time. But the afternoon was far from over. At 7 p.m. we were entering Pennsylvania, where we made our last overnight stop in a town called Cranberry, where we had somewhat cramped motel accommodations at a Red Roof Inn, but I was delighted to find that just two blocks to the north was a huge shopping mall where I could get everything we needed that night: cat litter for our cats, deli salads for our supper and yet another 12-pack of Diet Coke for my wife, who may or may not hold stock in the Coca-Cola Bottling Company but is nevertheless doing her best to keep it afloat: 8-10 cans of Diet Coke every day of her life.
By early the following afternoon we were at our new home in northeast Washington, D.C. and yes, we did make that stop in Rockville, coming down I-270, to pick up those pillows at La-Z-Boy. The area wasted no time in gigging me with bad memories: driving down Route 355 in Rockville, for example, was a return to personal ignominy—I spent a lot of time cruising up and down 355 four winters earlier as I went back and forth from Wheaton to Rockville, firing off one fax after another in response to one job ad after another. Wheaton had no Kinko’s in those days; I had to drive over to Rockville to get to a fax machine.
The good news is that our new home is in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, one part of the nation’s capital with which I have not been heretofore familiar, and therefore relatively uninfected with bad memories. We live on a quiet little side street, quiet, anyway, except for the police cars and fire department ambulances in the distance that you hear every five minutes in any big city. Our next-door neighbors, Ted and Myrt, are as nice as can be; they recently returned from a visit to relatives in North Carolina and shared with us some half-smokes they bought there. (Half-smokes are definitely an east coast pleasure; I never saw them in California.) Another neighbor, “Mr. Bowie,” is an old retired guy who mows everyone’s lawn. Somehow he has a monopoly on lawn-mowing in this neighborhood; I suspect the reason is that he charges next to nothing, undercutting (no pun intended) any lawn service I can think of.
There are things about being on the east coast again that I’m going to have to adjust to, most notably the horrible summers. I wouldn’t wish the mid-Atlantic region on my worst enemy between June and September. The heat and humidity are so bad that on some days it’s like living in the men’s locker room at Gold’s Gym during the evening rush. If you have to go outside, you move slowly, and you go outside as little as possible. Other than that, living on the east coast in the summertime makes it difficult for me to follow my hometown baseball team, the San Diego Padres. It’s one thing if they’re on a road a trip and are back here playing the Washington Nationals or the Atlanta Braves. But if they’re playing at home on the west coast, the games don’t come on TV or radio back here until 10:10 p.m. local time. There are certain things I’ll do for my team, (such as turn out at the ballpark here in D.C. and root for them against the hometown Nationals) but staying up until 1:30 a.m. in front of the tube is not one of them, not unless we’re talking about the World Series, to which they have been twice, and lost both times.
V
Now I have had each and every one of the experiences I listed at the beginning of this essay. I have stepped into a voting booth on election day (though on at least one occasion I had to be shown how to work the stupid levers); I have heard an umpire shout “Play ball” on a mild summer evening (last year it was at Avista Stadium, where Valerie and I had gone to see the single-A Spokane Indians play against the Tri-City Dust Devils, and I will always be grateful for it); I have coped with melting ice cream (and warm beer) on the Fourth of July; I have twisted the radio dial in my car around while driving through Nowhere, USA and found myself unable to find anything to listen to but some bogus cowpoke who probably wouldn’t know which end of a horse the shit comes out of, whining about how the woman he’d had wrapped around his finger just came unwound, so now he was whiskey-bound. Yee-hah.
And I’ve driven across the United States, twice. Okay, in and of itself it’s not such a big deal. Over-the-road truckers do it for a living. (By the way, I once attended a truck-driving school and it gave me a new and profound respect for truckers, if not for their reputed taste in music.) But as one who has lived all over the western hemisphere—and I’m not going to give you the “tarpaper shack in America” routine; it’s a big, beautiful world out there—I can honestly say that I feel more at home in my own country, having driven back and forth across it a couple of times than I ever did when my experience of the United States was confined to the two coasts. Just what does it mean to “feel at home?” I’m not 100 percent sure, but I do know that these long hauls felt like validations of a sort, and I think almost anyone who has made the race from coast to coast would tell you something similar. It’s like going to visit a relative whose existence you had previously known only from hearing your parents talk about him. You come away with a somewhat-strengthened sense of family. As America devolves into a culture of 500 cable channels, where none of the families on my street watch the same programs or recognize the same celebrities, (and I remember when, at 8:15 on a Saturday night, you’d hear All In The Family coming out of every window on the block) anything we do to remind ourselves of what we all have in common is, I think, to the good. When I was a child Chevrolet had a television commercial in which a chorus of voices urged one and all to “See the USA in your Chevrolet; America is asking you to call.” Nowadays that message sounds so ingenuous as to seem almost idiotic, but maybe it’s only the tone. Maybe it’s only because America was a more naive, innocent place in 1963, and our ears are no longer accustomed to hearing jingles. It’s not the same America out there, but it’s still out there, in fact I believe Kerouac’s Great American Night is still out there somewhere as well. I might not be inclined to stay up late enough to see it, but I’m already looking forward to making that crossing again one day.
Maybe the southern route, across Texas and New Mexico, next time. But I’m no fool; if I do that I’ll make sure to go no later than April, before it gets too hot down there.
