Oh, how I needed a road trip.
I’ve just returned from an epic 3-week, 11-state, 3000+ mile road trip across the land of my forefathers, from Texas to Mississippi to Kansas to California. It’s the furthest I’ve travelled in America for years, and it was a much-needed anecdote to the boiling chaos of the endless news cycle.
The road and the sky, the lines on the pavement and the clouds on the horizon – strip life back to the basics, for a few days, and hit the road, jack. You won’t regret it.
The thing about New Zealand is, you really can’t drive 8 hours straight in any one direction without running into the ocean eventually. It can sometimes get a wee bit claustrophobic. America goes on forever, and so much that you pass through are empty vast panoramas and blindingly blue skies.
There’s something primal about the American road trip that has stirred song and poetry from everyone from Woody Guthrie to Kerouac. You can ride along the freeways, the backroads and byways until the sun sets and still only make it a few inches on the map.
It was a pleasure to be reminded America is far more than the dipshits currently in power, that while the country is going through a very lousy time at the moment, it is possible to put away your phone and spend several hours hurtling along the interstate with fields and mountains and endless landscapes rippling by and not think of Washington, D.C. once.
The last serious solo road trip I took in America was, dear god, nearly 30 years ago, back in 1997 when I loaded up my Toyota Camry with supplies and CDs and rode away from my life in Mississippi to discover strange new worlds back in California. It was a weird, lonesome trip for much of the time – pre-internet, pre-Google Maps, following along on my floppy road atlas as I unwrapped the country over the miles. No mobile phone, and there were hours at a time where nobody on Earth knew where I was.
These days, Apple Music, Google Maps and diligent application of cruise control made the roads a little less empty, although I really could’ve done without my fancy-pants Kia rental car talking to me sometimes and letting me know I needed to take a rest break. A steady soundtrack of Americana kept me company, all the old favourites rolled out – a little Wilco, a little BB King, a little John Mellencamp, a little Dolly Parton. Hurtling along the interstate at 82 miles an hour, every song feels like an anthem, somehow.
I made it through Kansas for the first time, and while I’d never want to live there, especially with some of the current political atrocities going on, Kansas is still a powerfully evocative piece in the American jigsaw. Superman came from there, after all, and the Wizard of Oz, and Dwight Eisenhower and Amelia Earhart and my “imaginary friend” the great underrated musician Freedy Johnston. I marvelled at the infinite fields and the thousands of towering windmills lining the land, spinning across the prairie.
America is, at its heart, still the land of wide spaces, of final frontiers, and the landscape of my home country is something I’ve longed for at times despite how much I love New Zealand. I rolled through Utah’s endless geology, and I thought, “at last.” I bopped along Louisiana’s alligator-filled bayous, Missouri’s rippling Ozarks, Colorado’s steep jagged canyons and Nevada’s sturdy laconic cowboy country and even the places I’d never been felt familiar to me, somehow.
A landscape tells its own stories, separate from all our chattering human concerns. Americans grow up steeped in their landscape’s mythology and legends, for better and for worse, and while there’s an awful lot of things that vastly disappoint me about what’s going on back home, I can still never let it go entirely. I’m always ready to get back on the road again, and see where it takes me.
Maybe I’ll learn something, maybe I’ll be different at the end, and maybe you will, too.
