Ode to the Road
I love to get out on the road. Why? The simple answer is I sometimes need to escape, even from places that resemble home. I wrote a short story entitled The Captain of the Crystal Coast, in which the main character identified with the character in Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. As Wolfe put it:
“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”
That paragraph describes me at times. As an adult, I like to get out on the road because I have lived in some places where I just didn’t fit; I felt like a fish out of water, or a stranger in a strange land. I live in one of those places right now, and no matter how hard I try, I know deep down I will never fit in. As such, I identify with the main character in another of my short stories, The Freedom of Escaping, who leaves a fictional town where he attended college and tried to put down roots because, as Thomas Wolfe noted, “Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.” When I am in one of these places, all I can think of sometimes is hatching a plan to leave. If only for a weekend.
So getting out on the road allows me to escape. It allows me to go places I have never been to or seen before. If I have been to these places before, there’s something about them that keeps enticing me to return, something not present in those places I am escaping from. It’s new. And I don’t have any life-baggage at those places that wears down upon me when I am there. I am anonymous there; what people see, they get. I don’t come to their town wrapped up in or bogged down by the boxes people want to put me in or the definitions or labels they have placed on me.
I can explain this affliction, though I do not view it as such. I grew up in Texas, and for about my first 18 years or so, the only road trip I ever took was with my folks up U.S. 59 from Houston through east Texas, across a piece of northwestern Louisiana, to their hometown of El Dorado, Arkansas, to visit my grandparents. I loved that trip, no doubt, but I never got to venture beyond that well-worn path through Livingston, Lufkin, Nacodoches, Carthage, Shreveport, and Junction City. I always wondered what else was out there.
I was a pretty good student with a keen interest in geography and history. I would look at maps of the U.S. and wonder what it was like in states as far flung as Washington, Maine, and Florida. What was North Carolina like, or California? How about the Dakotas or Virginia? And what would it be like to drive through real mountains like they had in Colorado?
Unfortunately, these questions lingered for years as I initially went to college for two years in my hometown of Houston, a scant ten miles from my parents’ house, and then as I finished up after transferring to my father’s alma mater in Arkansas. It wasn’t until the summer of 1988 that I gained a measure of independence when I played summer league college baseball in the Jayhawk League of Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa, and my father allowed me to drive one of his cars up to Hutchinson, Kansas. Once I was beyond the Texas border into Oklahoma, I was in uncharted territory as I made my way to Hutchinson on Interstate 35. The scene was pretty desolate as I went through Oklahoma. It didn’t change much when I crossed into southern Kansas and drove through Wichita. But I did start to marvel at the unending grain fields of Kansas that shimmered and swayed in the hot, dry early summer wind.
After that Jayhawk summer of 1988, I again was constrained to the I-45/US-69 corridor that ran from Houston to northwest Arkansas, via Dallas and eastern Oklahoma. That path became familiar and worn as I learned to drive without guidance through places like Sherman and Denison, Texas, and on through Durant, Atoka, McAlester and Eufala, Oklahoma. These were not so much joyful, free road trips as they were mandatory, obligatory treks to school and back home.
Years later, it was only the Marine Corps that finally unleashed me. That calling required me to move about the country every two or three years. The wonderful thing about it was the Marine Corps paid for these long trips. This allowed me to cover lots of unexplored territory. Initially, I made the trip from Quantico, Virgina, to Newport, Rhode Island, crossing from west to east through Manhattan during a New York Yankees’ playoff game in 1998, through Connecticut and finally across the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge, at night no less.
A few months later, I made the odyssey to my first duty station from Houston to San Diego, California, driving west from my parents’ home in Houston, and once past San Antonio I was in new territory I had never seen. The landscape changed abruptly and stopping points became scarce. I felt like I was driving through a Cormac McCarthy novel. In fact I was, but seven years before McCarthy had the killer Anton Chigurh kill a sheriff’s deputy in Sonora in No Country for Old Men.
That never-ending day took me through Sonora, Fort Stockton, Van Horn and Sierra Blanca. I finally saw the lights of El Paso on the black horizon and had to stop for the night. The next day took me across the stark beauty of the southwestern deserts and through places like Las Cruces, Tucson, Yuma and El Centro. Finally over the bleak Sawtooth mountain range, I dropped into San Diego for the first time.
But perhaps the best the road has ever gifted me was a two week drive across the country with my wife, as we moved from Virginia back to San Diego for a second time. We had never seen the north central part of the country, so we resolved to do so. We visited West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Chicago. We walked through Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. We watched a Cubs game at Wrigley Field on a brilliantly sunny Friday afternoon. We went through Wisconsin and saw lakes and rivers the likes of which we had never seen before. We went to South Dakota and were at Mount Rushmore on July 4th. We watched an awesome fireworks display that lit up the monument like it was the middle of the day. We went through Montana and visited Little Big Horn National Battlefield. We stayed a few days in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. We sat on the back deck of the Jackson Lake Lodge sipping drinks as our gaze rested upon the knife-like peaks of the Teton Range. We took a white water rafting trip down the Snake River in Wyoming. We continued west through Idaho and stopped over in Elko, Nevada, and enjoyed Basque food for the first time. Finally, we stopped for a few days in Yosemite National Park, and were witness to what John Muir called God’s Cathedral on earth.
More recently, the road has taken me up the Crystal Coast from Morehead City, North Carolina, on two ferry-rides across Pamlico Sound, through Ocracoke island, along the Outer Banks, and on to Williamsburg. It has taken me countless times along Foothills Parkway, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Skyline Drive, through the Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia.
Indeed, the road has taken me to and through 45 states, and only Alaska, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and North Dakota remain unventured. But it will not be long until I cross them off my list.
The road provides me an escape, but even more, as noted by Jack Kerouac, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
