What Jefferson and the Corps began so promisingly soon collapsed almost utterly, an indictment of a nation claiming to believe in progress and to revere building upon humane wisdom and informed and compassionate behavior.
Common among the aboriginal peoples of America is the vision quest, typically a ritual trek into a natural remoteness where isolation and deprivation lead the sojourner to a new perception of existence extending into the cosmos itself and to an increased recognition of harmony to give the seeker an enlarged purpose. Lewis and Clark, on behalf of America, set off up the great Missouri on a kind of national, if unrecognized, vision quest which following generations have had the chance to continue as we search for identity, purpose, and the fair sharing of an abundant country. How far we yet have to go, I see in this stick of cedar in my hand, this product of the once powerful Blackfeet, today a nation of pencil makers.
WHY WE DO IT SO OFTEN (AND IN SO MANY WAYS)
For this story, the editor wanted something about why travel was significant to Americans: Why we do it so often and in so many ways. By chance, at the time I was on the road in the western Texas openness I find conducive to speculating on just about any question. Moving through those broad and sere reaches of landscape, I thought an answer might lie in the very rationale behind my books, a whyfor also useful to help evaluate the merits of the plethora of American road-books that had begun appearing about thirty years earlier. In short, I decided the editor’s question was actually two: What’s the purpose of the travel? And, does it effectively embrace the grand questions?
The Classic American Road Trip
It’s good to have a chance at last to put down the rumor that I’ve been advocating changing the design of Old Glory by turning the stars into spoked wheels and the stripes into yellow center lines. In spite of the appropriateness of wheels and highways to the rise of the United States—ignoring the issue of desecration—what would we do about the national anthem? “The Wheel-Spangled Banner”? Nonetheless, American history has more to do, at least at the subcelestial level, with wheels than stars. Ever since the early nineteenth century, while Americans might go forth by following a star, we have accomplished the travel more often with wheels than with feet, hooves, or hulls.
That we are the most mobile nation the planet has yet seen is the result of several things, especially all of us being descendants of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere. Further, we inhabit a landform where openness outreaches encumbering forests, a great interior is largely unvexed by mountains, a country where on the plains the transcontinental passage of the sun itself seems symbolically evident. To be sure, while we also travel longitudinally, preeminently, our routes, like our history, are ones of westering (or, in the case of the aboriginal peoples, significant eastering).
Even our tectonic plates, destinations unknown, are moving west. Sit in a lawn chair for an hour in Parsippany or Laramie and, when you get up, you and your chair—along with the Washington Monument, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Alleghenies, the Colorado River—all will have moved ever so infinitesimally toward the setting sun. The orbiting moon—its cartoonish face suggesting it too is a traveler—also appears to make a jaunt as if heading for the open spaces beyond the ninety-eighth meridian. I can almost believe that Americans, our bodies two-thirds water, are impelled by a lunar-asserted gravitational pull toward Pismo Beach or Tillamook Bay. To get up and go is in our blood genetically, cosmically.
I think there is no other nation in which movement—not simply change but onward movement, especially when linked to “progress,” aka “growth”—is so practiced and revered. In our economic thinking, to speak of a “steady state” gets one branded a reactionary or a fool or unpatriotic despite the inescapable logic that infinite growth on a finite planet is, sooner or later, impossible and, worse, deadly.
The movement we as a people believe in and practice most often is linear rather than anything circular. We urge ourselves “onward and upward” and try to avoid “going in circles,” never mind the whirling atoms in our bodies or in the great cosmic rotations and spiralings. Black Elk, the Lakota holy man of the last century, said, “Everything tries to be round,” but perhaps he was out of step with American thought, and maybe I am too because I think in circles and cycles and circuits, rotations and revolvings and roundness. You can see that inclination right here as I circle my topic, the classic American road trip.
So, to bring things back around: We’re a mobile nation because of where we are from, where we are, what we are, and what we hope to become. On the very backs of our hands, just under the skin, lie veins looking ever so much like little road maps, and as we age, those charts grow more pronounced as if to jog a memory of the journey we unceasingly undertake in our decision to continue to live. On my left hand, the bluish veins have matured to depict for me the crossing of U.S. Highway 40 (the old National Road) with the almost border-to-border U.S. 71, a crux where I was born, my hand now a continuing reminder where I come from and, let me say, a handy contour map and psychic compass useful when entering unknown territory of mind or spirit. It’s a memo of one of our oldest metaphors (or clichés): Life is a journey.
Arizona Highway 186, Cochise County
The American landscape, so providently formed for long-distance wandering that a dedicated motorist can between a midsummer sunrise and sunset cover the ground between, say, St. Louis and Denver, almost nine-hundred miles, an expanse roughly commensurate to a crossing of France and back again. If, by comparison with a European or Asian nation, our written history is more shallow, our landscape is at least equally deep, and that’s one reason American ramblers so cherish space, penetrating it as Italian or English or Transylvanian wayfarers in their native land do time.
But in one of our recent linear movements that might be called the classic American road trip (appropriate acronym, CART), are we merely hyperkinetic or are we engaging in a more conscious search we could term hyper-excursive or meta-nomadic? Beyond ancestries and geographies, why do we take to the road whether we thumb a ride or ride in a forty-foot land-yacht? Why do we, for a spell, trade the security and comfort of a familiar place for the liberty offered by an unfamiliar space, a swap of domestic fixity for freedom of the open road? Even if we go as tourists, where there and then dominate the peregrination—rather than going like travelers, who each moment try to embrace the challenge of the here and now—don’t we usually set out motivated by curiosity of one degree or another? (A tourist, of course, may grow into a deeper traveler just as a journeyman sawyer becomes a master wheelwright; and further, all travelers, even the most awakened, are at times forced into mere tourism.) When we go on a visit (related to the word view), what may we hope to see (related to seek)? And what happens within us when seeing develops into seeking that encourages further seeing? Is such questing not among the highest orders of human inquiry?
For the past three decades, travel—especially when it gets written down—often has at its center a defining solipsism: the self in search of itself in strange places promising to cast a different and edifying light on the quest even if perception often seems to reach only the traveler. In an era of self-absorption and self-gratification, where one period has become known as the Me Decade, such should be expected. On a stretch of open road, drivers can roll along with their window reflections of self laid over the landscape ahead so that one sees the territory through oneself, a kind of windshield therapy. And why not? It’s probably as effective as couch counseling and certainly cheaper and more accessible, no appointment necessary. But stare into that reflectivated landscape long enough, and a catharsis can happen. On the road where no one knows your name or your history, the miles can efface personal identity and make a traveler ready for receptions instead of reflections and, when the going gets good, communion.
Yet for drivers who never see past their own glassy simulacra and on into the landscape beyond, into the otherness of existence, any road and any place is as good as another. But for a traveler who arrives s
omewhere not simply bodily but also emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, and who then seeks out the somewhere and a chance for escape from the isolation of selfhood and its concomitant alienation from otherness, those blessed travelers may find themselves landed not just in a different place on the map but in an enlarged elsewhere beyond their own earlier comprehensions. They will have reached an unknown shore and, in a sense, come into America for the first time, and it’s then they can receive a temporary inheritance of territory due a temporal inhabitant. If exploratory travel is not about connection, then it’s not worth the carbon expended to arrive, and if democracy isn’t founded upon conjunctions, it’s a driftwood temple built upon loose sand.
In a secular age—recent exudations of religious fundamentalism notwithstanding—the classic American road trip yet remains a timeless metaphor of passage through life, a chance to move from me to thee and from thee to us and on beyond to all. Going forth can be a form of religion-free prayer, an entreaty for reawakening, reanimating, rekindling, rebalancing, and reharmonizing a pilgrim. In America, our prayer wheels are pneumatic tires with vulcanized, nonskid treads.
BIPEDAL KALEIDOSCOPES
Perhaps because I began as a photojournalist, I write pictorially, or maybe the term should be kaleidoscopically: I gather pieces, try to add some reflectivity, then give them a shake to see what unpredictable pattern they fall into. Some structural connections may be minimal, with much reliance placed on a reader’s wit and willingness to participate in making reconnections. After all, a human life itself proceeds kaleidoscopically: We accumulate memories often deliberately and always ineluctably, and over time see them form the pieces of who we are. Who remembers his life in wholeness or in its entirety? Shaped by fragments, we are bipedal kaleidoscopes of endlessly shifting arrangements more random than we may wish to admit.
Pictures from the West Country
GROCKLES IN BEER. I was a few miles from Beer—not the beverage but the English village in Devonshire. The day before a fellow solemnly advised me, “Beer’s a good place for cider. The West Country, you see, there’s where good cider be. A fine pint of perry too.” I was potting along the lanes in a little rental auto at about ten-miles-an-hour. With six-foot-high hedgerows and even taller coppice fences on each side of the lane, I had only the narrow, winding byroad to look at and not a single sign to verify my course, a concern since for a good many miles there was no turning around. In my mind jingled a piece of English verse about a hedged lane:
When once you’re caught in it,
It holds you as a cage does a linnet.
I had escaped the congestion of London to follow the coast road of southwestern England through the open country of Devon and Cornwall, but that morning, a closer look at my Super-Scale Ordinance Survey Atlas revealed there was no road along the indented coast of hundreds of smugglers’ coverts. I was entangled, sometimes literally, because I had relied on an antique pocket-guidebook I esteemed for its lore and archaic turns of phrase as if it were a fellow traveler from another time.
Ahead were miles untold of narrow lanes—crooked and circuitous, deviating and devious—each giving off onto a slew of lesser ambages leading to unnamed places, none lying anywhere near my destination. In 1939 a top tune here went like this:
There’ll always be an England
While there’s a country lane.
Turn the reasoning around, and the lyrics could be prophecy. For anybody wanting to take time to get nowhere, the passage was ideal, but that day I was spending hours in a hunt for various routes (to name one, from Tolpuddle, across the River Piddle, into greater Puddletown), when what I wanted was the serrated coast. Had I come in the second century after Caesar’s conquest, I could have used the marvelously straight Roman road, now a grassy strip I unnecessarily crossed four times en route to the very place it once directly led. The single lanes carried two-way traffic that forced drivers to edge their left side-mirrors into hedges while reaching out to pull back the right ones, usually executed somewhere between good humor and muttered vexation. To wend one’s way toward and along the coast requires popping into and out of clipped whitethorn, so that scrapes on passenger-side fenders, like odometers, reveal one’s mileage along living fences. My antiquated guide put it blithely: “There’s no place like England for motoring.” Excluding the road to Hell.
I must say, though, the byroads at least gave the feel of Olde England, and that was good because the hedgerows blocked any view of the land beyond. For an American, there’s another merit to traveling those often veritable vegetative tunnels: Of necessity, moving slowly and unable to see how far you’ve gone or how far you haven’t, a small island-nation spreads out as if a continent: Twenty miles of English lanes left me with a sense of an accomplishment commensurate to, say, driving across Montana.
Perhaps because of their notion that everything in America is gigantic, the English often asked whether I found things small in their country. Well, yes—roads, shops, lawns (and once upon a time autos and lorries)—but that relative diminution enlarges England where one can never be more than about seventy miles from a piece of the Atlantic Ocean while still feeling snugly inland even though traveling along a half-hour from a coast.
When the sign for Beer finally hove into view, I turned toward the sea. At last! The sea! Or at least a bay of the Channel. The village name (once Berewood) has nothing to do with malt-and-hops potations, but rather comes from an Old English word, bearu, meaning “grove”; after leagues of thorn and bramble fences, a more fitting name would be hard to come up with.
Rock houses with thatch or slate roofs lined the high street and a rill rolled along in a stone trough on one side, then shifted to the other, then back again, not so much indecisive as digressive—like a well-honed periodic sentence. On foot I followed the straggle of water down past pocket gardens of hollyhocks and roses and ivy, on past a tearoom, an inn, and finally to the shingled beach under high chalk-cliffs where the Channel lay quietly in a blueness natural only to a clear morning sky. Unlike the more famous nearby coastal villages of Lyme Regis and Polperro, Beer is a place less for strolling beside the sea than for getting onto it: You can hire a sloop or a motorboat or a kayak to go out for an idle, or to fish for mackerel, or to paddle into Channel caves once used by smugglers of spirituous beverage.
I arrived in early July, just before the great coming of the grockles, a Devonshire word for tourists. Because commercial fishing there has suffered from overharvesting and pollution, a grockle like me now provided much of what a mackerel once did, thereby turning the village, as with others along the coast, into more a historical diorama than a genuine fishing port.
Still, I liked Beer, especially for its high street running right to the sea, stopping only at the strand of surf-rounded cobbles one must cross to get to the water; conspicuously absent, though, was a pier for strollers. John Leland, the sixteenth-century librarian and antiquary, in his Itinerary explained why: “Ther was begon a fair Pere for Socour of Shippeletes at this Berewood, but there cam such a Tempest a 3 yeres sins as never in mynd of men had before beene sene in that shore and tare the Pere in Peaces.” When it comes to building a new Beer Pier, that storm has been a long discouragement.
I hoofed up to the Anchor Inn and sat by a sea-breezed window, and changed my plan from cider to a pint of bitter, a glass appropriate to the promontory outside called Beer Head. If Britons have yielded their empire, they have not lost capacity to produce a couple of things in uncommon excellence: actors and ale. Yet when I first began traveling here, in the mid-sixties, their great beers were disappearing fast because of the Americanization and conglomeration of their breweries. Then began a revolt called the Campaign for Real Ale—CAMRA—and its insistence on craft beers made with traditional methods using traditional ingredients and served in the traditional way in traditional public houses.
While industrialized, fizzed-up, watery semi-malt beverages might be passed off as beer in America (a nation that in the sixties y
ielded its own rich brewing heritage to corporate profits), CAMRA was not going to let that happen in England. Now, a quarter-century later, I could sit at the elbow-polished bar and drink a genuine ale containing but four ingredients—water, malted barley, hops, and yeast—hand-pumped from the cellar and brewed only a few miles distant. My pint gave a taste not of London or Birmingham but of Devon, a land of heathery moors and devilish whitehorn, both of which I imagined my tongue could detect.
BALLISTIC PRUNES. The next day, I had traveled only two miles farther down the lane, to Branscombe, a thatched-roof village scattered along the combe of the River Brans; the jumble of hills around it cut off any view of the sea, although I could hear it on the south wind. During a morning walk on one of my usual hunts for expressions of earlier lives, I went into the graveyard of the Norman church where an old inscription commemorates a farmer noted for wrestling prowess who died while shearing sheep:
Strong and at Labour
suddenly he reels.
Death came behind him
and stroke up his heels.
For lunch I went into the Mason’s Arms (arms in its heraldic sense, not corporeal one), drawn by an inscription on the worn gantry sign: NOW YE TOIL NOT. It’s only one traveler’s opinion, but I think in rural England few meals surpass a pub lunch; that noon, mine was a fresh-from-the-Channel picked-crab sandwich and a glass of scrumpy, the latter a big-bodied if rough-edged cider the barman told me—only after I drained it:“She’ll buzz through you like a ballistic prune.”
As go the public houses in country England, so goes a journey there because a village pub is oftentimes the only place serving a meal, and it’s predictably the most convivial spot for a wayfarer to find a conversation. But in the West Country, a traveler so inclined can also have a Devonshire or Cornish cream tea: a couple of buttery scones, a small pot of clotted cream, jam, and tea. A tearoom is an easier choice than just mainlining the cholesterol and getting it over with.