The Road Trip: Falling in love with America’s highways
In his introduction to the 1959 edition of Robert Frank’s seminal photobook The Americans Jack Kerouac, beat writer of On the Road fame, provided an introduction as lyrical and expansive as Frank’s work. Word and image are perfectly matched. Turning one of the pages, to see a lone car driving into the distance, the road slick and wet with light, contracting, funnel-like, into the horizon, as if to the edge of the earth, with everything so vast and yet so empty (Frank’s U.S. 285, New Mexico) I am reminded of Kerouac’s earlier description, of the “long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America” (1).
Nearly one hundred years earlier, in the late 19th century, the foundations were laid for a national road system. In the years prior, road construction had been neglected in favour of ambitious and largescale railway projects. From 1860–1910 total track mileage in the United States grew from 30,000 to approximately 240,000 miles. The dominance of both the railway and the large canal network in the East meant roads were mainly local, poorly maintained and often impassable. Instead of road trips many travelled to destinations pre-determined by the rail network, to see and experience, for example, the vast countryside of the newly protected national parks such as Yellowstone, established in 1872. Travelling for pleasure was a local and often urban affair, through the establishment of town boulevards or parkways (themselves influenced by the Romantic landscaping of cemeteries), mainly designed for horse and carriage (2).
The road, in contrast, provided a resurgence of the pioneering spirit that had, arguably, been lying dormant in the individual American. As David Campany points out, America’s newcomers had made long trips to arrive there (3). The impulse to travel, to explore (and, unfortunately, to conquer) was part of a shared psyche that would inform generations to come. The automobile, as a vehicle for independent, uninhibited travel, seemed to herald a return to the journeys of magnitude that were undertaken by settlers. The road trip became a means to not only see the country, but to see it as an individual. The world framed through the lens of a car window, internalised, made personal and private, like a snapshot.
And yet, concurrent to this budding of individualism, the road trip was also very much framed within a wider homogeneity and national identity. The ‘See America’ campaign in the mid-1900s by the U.S. Travel bureau promoted domestic rather than international travel and was quickly embraced by the motoring public. In 1934 James Agee would write in Fortune magazine that ‘roadside life’ would overtake provincial differences, remarking that these were being “subsumed by the first American popular culture that could truly call itself national. It was not production that had united the country but consumption, propelled by the millions of motorists” (4).
The immensities of impossible-to-believe America were something I was introduced to in July when I cycled from Burlington, Vermont to Beacon, New York over the course of a week. Although not in a car, this was a road-trip of sorts, following in the pedals of The League of American Wheelmen, a bicycle organisation who lobbied for a national network of hard-surface all weather roads for cycling in the 1890s. Much of the ride was on roads. They unfurled, tongue-like, with an algae bloom of trees rising up on either side. The hills were short and undulating, meaning that there were times when I couldn’t see over the top of them, as if the road was about to disappear altogether, as it does briefly in Frank’s photograph, an almost imperceptible dip into darkness, before rising up again towards the horizon.
So too, would I be introduced to the roadside life that was described by Agee as consisting of “ice cream parlours, hot dog stands, quick stop cafes, and cheap holiday cabins” and doesn’t seem to have changed too much since. There were trailers surrounded by chain-link fencing, the dusty yards containing barbecues and dogs and small children paddling in water-filled bright plastic basins in the sun. I stopped at a food truck with a collection of table and chairs outside under awning and watched the trees bristle with the first signs of an oncoming thunderstorm. I slept in a state park campsite that felt like a drive-through, each tent nestled comfortably close to a still-warm engine. Some of the cheap road-side motels had small pools, also chain-linked, lined with empty plastic sun-loungers. I drank mint tea outside a food hut at a table on the verge of the road and watched as trucks swept past, the people inside them high above me, small as figurines.
Although he lived in the USA Frank was an outsider, a Swiss national, intrigued by the un-glamourous but also the iconic (the car and the road, but also the juke box and the diner). In this way, his viewpoint built on photographic projects undertaken by others such as Felix Moeschlin and Dr. Kurt Richter (America from the Car, 1930) or Ilya Illf and Evengy Petrov (American Photographs, 1935). The road trip was always visual as much as it was physical. The difference, with Frank’s work, is that he is not attempting to convey a fixed narrative to his audience. Instead, like the beat poets, he reacted intuitively and with immediacy. His vision of America is deeply personal, whilst still being one that many recognised, but usually ignored.
There is a romantic concept that the road trip is also a psychological venture. The idea that, once you reach your destination, you have somehow changed. It came as a surprise that the road, with the dust and the roar of trucks, and the gas stations and dead animals, caught my imagination more than the gravel tracks of the Green Mountains. Unfairly, perhaps, I recognised it as something all-American and yet it was, at the same time, utterly banal. As a homogenous road network was constructed across the country the road trip was democratised. “As neither luxury nor necessity the automobile would simply be a matter of fact, as integral to the life of the American as walking. Or perhaps more so.” (Campany) Going beyond independent adventure, the road trip became something integral to a collective understanding of nationhood. That’s what I felt, cycling along stretches of highway, that matter-of-fact-ness, some kind of inevitability, just as I knew, deep down, that the road would continue over the top of each hill.
REFERENCES
(1) Robert Frank, The Americans, Grove Press, New York, 1959
(2) Paul Daniel Marriott, Roads Designed for Pleasure, in Journal for America’s Byways, 1:2, October 2011, pp. 28–50
(3) David Campany, The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip, Aperture, New York, 2014
(4) James Agee, The Great American Roadside, in Fortune Magazine, September 1934
