The Geography of Somewhere
Discovering the American past, present and future on the road
This week, my partner Leslie and I will have embarked on the longest and most ambitious road trip we have taken so far in Next Chapter, the camper van we acquired in 2020. It will last 26 days and lead us more than 5,300 miles across 10 states as we retrace the routes of two National Historic Trails.
On the eastbound leg we are driving to New Mexico to pick up the Santa Fe Trail, a trading route that once connected the northernmost outpost of first Spain and then Mexico to the farms and factories of the American Midwest. After we follow it to its eastern terminus in Independence, Mo., we will turn to the west (after two nights in St. Louis) and pick up the path of the Oregon Trail, a route first blazed by fur trappers and traders that later led hundreds of thousands of American settlers into the Pacific Northwest — many of them arriving while that part of North America was still claimed by Great Britain.
As always, I’ll be collecting stories and photographs as we travel, and I’ll write about the trip after we return. As a sort of literary sendoff, however, I’m reprinting the following essay, first published in the Ventura County Star in December 2003. It ran as an op-ed piece, presented as an epilogue to the year-long series of front-page feature stories I’d written for the newspaper about my first truly epic road trip: Following the path of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark when they and their Corps of Discovery traveled from St. Louis to the Pacific and back between 1804 and 1806. My 2001 adventure took three months, during which I traveled 15,000 miles back and forth across the continent.
As this epilogue did not make it into the book based on the series, and I no longer have digital copies of the original newspaper stories, I actually had forgotten that I wrote it. But I stumbled across it recently while going down the rabbit hole of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which enabled me to revisit pages of the dedicated website the Star built for the project but long ago abandoned to digital oblivion.
When I read it again for the first time in more than two decades, I found that the piece articulates (in a way I don’t think I can much improve upon today) some of the reasons I am so powerfully drawn to the open road. It also explains what Leslie and I are seeking — besides the beauty and magic of wild landscapes — as we pursue our mobile retirement project. As such, it seems an appropriate addition to Next Chapter Notes.
I hope you enjoy it.
Voyage of Rediscovery: Epilogue
Head out into the Mojave on a June day, the summer wind blowing hot and dry as dragon’s breath, and dogleg your way north and east to the old railroad town of Barstow. There you can pick up Interstate 40 and follow it 2,000 miles across the southern tier of states, through old cities and towns whose names roll off the tongue like lyrics to a song: Albuquerque and Amarillo, Little Rock and Memphis, Nashville and Knoxville.
For much of the way, you will be following the approximate path of old Route 66, what John Steinbeck described in The Grapes of Wrath as the Mother Road — “the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield” — that led countless Dust Bowl migrants from hard times in the heartland to the imagined paradise of California.
Construction of Interstate 40 killed Route 66, which persists now as little more than a nostalgic idea, a flickering flame of romantic memory kept alive mainly by books, museums and driving clubs. Weather-blasted signs guide inquisitive motorists off I-40 to the tattered remnants of towns that died when the migrant road, which once knit them together, was unraveled by the clawing hand of 20th century haste.
Route 66 led through real communities, the concrete path interrupted by stop signs flanked by family-owned diners and grocery stores and filling stations. But Interstate 40, like most interstate highways in the United States, for the most part bypasses actual towns. Instead, it follows a virgin course carefully engineered to avoid distraction and detour, allowing motorists to hum along at 70 mph without pausing except to empty their bladders and fill their stomachs or fuel tanks.
By siphoning off the automobile traffic from Route 66 and a thousand other local roads in the interest of speed and efficiency, the majestically aloof interstates sapped the old towns of vitality, setting the stage for their replacement by a parallel retail geography of chain gas stations, chain motels and franchised fast-food restaurants clumped around exit and entrance ramps.
It is possible to drive a thousand miles across America in this way and never have the sense of having left anywhere or arrived anywhere. The interstate system is a vivid example of what author James Kuntsler dubbed the “Geography of Nowhere,” an invented landscape constructed on the premise that travel should enable travelers to avoid the unexpected. It is the culture of homogeneity, all distinctiveness, idiosyncrasy and identity bulldozed away, regionality obliterated. It proffers travel sapped of its salient characteristics: surprise, discomfort and serendipity. And it has spread well beyond the interstate system, this placeless, faceless parody of community, metastasizing through suburb after suburb.
Yet, the older version of America — the one that possesses regional flavor, character, a soul — lives on. So does the opportunity to find adventure on the road. You must leave the interstates to find it, which means you must be willing to sacrifice speed and surrender time in exchange for authenticity.
It is a worthwhile trade-off.
Time to meander
More than a year ago, as I drove 15,000 miles back and forth across America researching my yearlong series of stories about the legacy of 19th century explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, I did most of my traveling off the interstates. Sometimes this was by necessity, as the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition travels through parts of the country largely untouched by the federal highway system. But even when I had a choice, I generally sought out less-traveled roads paralleling the interstates. Like the Missouri River, whose course I followed for more than half my journey, I meandered.
This style of travel required more ingenuity, more frequent consultations of my stack of tattered maps, more time. But in return I saw the homes people live in, the cemeteries where their ancestors and spouses and children are buried, and the stores, banks, restaurants, hotels and insurance offices where they work. Between towns, the blacktop rolled through fields of wheat and corn, past barns and silos, past men driving tractors and women hanging wash on lines in their yards.
I stopped in a Missouri town to stare at a huge snapping turtle basking motionless in the middle of the street, and slowed in Tennessee for a flock of wild turkeys. In Illinois, I drove through decaying old Mississippi River towns, the red brick mansions built by the cotton traders and shipping magnates of another century in disrepair now that riverboat traffic has been supplanted by barges that never pause. In the Montana hamlet of Arlee, I drove past a bar where a saddled horse was hitched out front between the pickup trucks in the gravel lot, and a few miles farther passed a billboard advertising the “Testicle Festival” at the local lodge, which apparently still serves authentic Rocky Mountain oysters.
In Kentucky, I ate lunch in a rural cemetery, always a great place for a picnic — usually there are trees to provide shade, and the old headstones offer plenty of text for those (like me) who enjoy reading while they eat. In North Dakota, I crept along in low gear down a small prairie town’s main street, following a Fourth of July parade featuring horse-drawn wagons and decorated tractors. In Idaho, I paused to enjoy the sight of a vast barn collapsing under the infirmities of age, the corrugated steel panels of its roof and siding having been twisted, bent and crumpled by gravity and weather into a startling architectural echo of Frank Gehry’s curvaceous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
In South Dakota, I stopped for lunch on a knoll in Fort Pierre National Grassland, one of the West’s great monuments to failure. The national grasslands scattered across the Great Plains comprise prairie allotments the federal government bought back from homesteaders during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, when tens of thousands of settlers from the East and Midwest learned the harsh truth about the semi-arid West: It could not sustain the kind of intensive farming practiced in more well-watered regions. Family after family packed up and fled, their homes then torched by the Works Progress Administration and their fields replanted in grass to feed cattle and heal the ruined soil.
Interstates allow you to move quickly and anonymously from one part of the country to anther. Secondary roads teach you about the character of the country itself. They lead you through history and traverse the geography of somewhere.
The greatest road trip
Americans are famously peripatetic, as restless and migratory a people as have ever wandered the Earth. There is perhaps something genetic to account for this trait, some wanderlust coded into the patterns of North American DNA, for nearly everyone inhabiting this continent either overcame remarkable barriers to get here or is descended, however distantly, from someone who did.
And perhaps therein lie the roots of the fascination the Lewis and Clark expedition still holds for many Americans today.
During my journey in the footsteps of the explorers, I spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of the Corps of Discovery’s pioneering journey across the West, why it was important to the young nation and why it remains relevant and fascinating to millions of Americans today. During my reading and interviewing, I came across several compelling ideas: that Lewis and Clark created and satisfied the desire of a westering nation, that they transformed the unknown into the known and described a landscape of new economic possibilities, that they helped turn the young nation’s gaze from the Atlantic and Europe toward the West of its destiny, that they helped link the oceans and made the United States a continental nation, that in their journey from East to West they presaged the country’s future expansion and settlement.
But in the course of my three-month trip, which took me to 22 states outside California and involved the use of both ancient and modern forms of transportation — from horse and canoe to jet aircraft — I came to realize that the Lewis and Clark story holds for Americans a much simpler and more visceral affinity: Americans are born travelers, and the members of the Corps of Discovery undertook the first and perhaps the greatest of all American road trips.
Neither of the pioneering journalists was much of a literary stylist, but in the million or so words they wrote about the people and landscape of the previously undescribed West they crafted a classic of the travel-writing genre. From the moment they set off up the Missouri River in what is today central North Dakota, having spent the winter of 1804-05 near the Mandan Indian villages that marked the western limit of European and American geographic knowledge, they were traversing territory unknown to them. Each turning of the river unveiled a new vista; each hilltop they surmounted revealed to them a sight never before described in print. They faithfully reported what they saw, attempted to record the customs and languages of the people they met, and described their own reactions to places and events. Long before Steinbeck (Travels with Charley), Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and William Least Heat-Moon (whose Blue Highways and River-Horse helped inspire my own dreams of back-roads travel), Lewis and Clark penned the quintessential American travel story, one that has never been equaled.
And they were travelers in the purest sense, setting out across unfamiliar terrain, lured toward the setting sun by a sense of duty and a burning curiosity about what lay beyond the horizon. Each morning, they hit the road; each night they slept in a new place. “We proceeded on” is perhaps the most common phrase in their journals, used so frequently that it serves as the title of the quarterly magazine published by the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.
It could serve equally well as a national slogan.
On the road
Americans have always displayed a strong streak of restlessness that drives their remarkable mobility. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler whose Democracy in America remains a classic of 19th century social and political observation, noticed this about the inhabitants of the young United States during his extended visit in the 1830s.
“In the United States, a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and sells it before the roof is on,” de Tocqueville wrote. “He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere ... if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his unhappiness.”
Not much has changed in 170 years. Americans logged more than 1 billion domestic trips of 50 miles or more each way in 2001, according to the Travel Industry Association of America. More than three-quarters of those trips were classified as “leisure” travel, and the majority were road trips — undertaken by car, truck or recreational vehicle.
And more than 43 million Americans move to a new home each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s about 16 percent of the population. People give Census workers many reasons when asked why they have moved: a job change, a search for better or cheaper housing, leaving their parents’ home to strike out on their own. The Census Bureau does not include “wanderlust” as one of the multiple-choice categories on its questionnaire, although perhaps it should.
And what a remarkable land we have to wander. Those of us who live in Southern California may be excused if we do not much enjoy driving the open road any longer, for it is seldom open and the road itself has been pounded into a potholed mess that our crippled public finances cannot keep in good repair. But if you head east across the Mojave, past the old railroad town of Barstow, you soon leave behind the congestion and the rutted asphalt. East of the Nevada and Arizona lines, the country opens up, the traffic falls away and driving becomes again the pleasure it was when freeways were new.
With the exception of a few large cities and their sprawling suburbs, the vast terrain of the West beckons to you open and uncrowded: from Mexico to Canada, from the Sierra Nevada to the Mississippi, a landscape of prairies and forests, of red-rock basins carved from ancient seabeds and mountains pushed from the heart of the Earth into the cold cobalt sky. Cutting across it are the great rivers, the Missouri and Colorado and Platte, the Snake and Columbia and the Rio Grande, ribbons of water that still conjure dreams and longing despite the dams and levees that straitjacket so many of them.
And scattered across that great space are the old towns, many of them mere ghosts of a fast-fading past, where real people still lead real lives. They are towns that still convey a sense of place, each the locus of a local society shaped by the unique plot of ground upon which it germinated. They persist although they are badly endangered by the homogenizing forces of corporatized mass culture, epitomized by the bland sameness of life along the interstates, which grinds away at regional individuality the way continental glaciers bulldozed flat the Northern Plains during the last ice age.
It is not considered environmentally or socially responsible these days to advocate long, rather pointless trips by automobile, but it is a guilty pleasure more people ought to indulge in at least once in a while. See the country. Meet its people. Be reminded that the America portrayed by movies, television shows, Washington politicians and national news media does not really exist, or at best is but a tiny sliver of the whole, one flawed facet of a precious stone that reveals much more to the close observer.
Visit the geography of somewhere. Before it vanishes.
How I remember this line: Americans are born travelers, and the members of the Corps of Discovery undertook the first and perhaps the greatest of all American road trips.
Wow, John, that’s such a great piece, timely and timeless. A joy to read, and be inspired by.
-Jason