July 14th, 2008 by Hoopleton
It’s taken me some time to decompress. To let all the sights and sounds reorder themselves in my head. On the last night of my trip I had a dream that I was being attacked by rattlesnakes. They would jump out of the ground and along the highway. I didn’t know what the dream meant except that it kept me from writing.
In less than a week my father and I crossed some four thousand miles of open road. From the flooded counties of Wisconsin to the summit of the Rockies in Montana. We had few companions on the road, as gas prices kept most of America at home. There were trucks now and then, sometimes a hybrid, but for the greater part of the journey it was just us and an endless blue sky.
On the night we started off, the New York Times declared the American road trip dead. In a front page story the paper of record happily relegated the car vacation to the dust bin of history along with Tupperware parties and Red Scares. But we were going to a part of the world that still had Tupperware parties, and nuclear missile silos dotted the landscape.
On the first day there was nothing but flat empty farmland and the hypnosis of four-lane blacktop. The pitch and thud of the road was our constant companion, blaring even louder than the taxed engine or the hum of wind along the window frames.
Moving along at a constant seventy-five it was easy enough to get lost in the passing voids of tilted soil and corn. It was a place that everyone drove through, remarking on the emptiness, commenting on the flatness, but never stopping long enough to grasp why anyone would stay. It was a place that even the exurban revivalists feared. Too far from the holy light of their megachurches and corporate shrines. Too close to the realities of poverty that they hoped to cleanse from consciousness if not from the world.
The Midwest is often called flyover country, boring and monotonous there’s little to stimulate the mind outside of the occasional windmill farm, but it’s still enchanting somehow. It’s not the forests of Ohio Valley or the deserts of the Border States. It’s history unraveling. The last of what America was. Promises never kept. Traditions bought and sold. The legacy of toiling masses. Our enchanted agrarian past.
On the road among the crumbling farmhouses and rusted silos were the diners no one ever visited. The motels that only truckers stayed in. The small dying towns that rooted for the high school team. And like everyone else we didn’t stop. We just kept on driving, the pitch and thud our constant companion.
In South Dakota, as farms gave way to the prairie and rolling grazing land, we stumbled first upon the Badlands and then the Black Hills. We visited old western mining towns and climbed Boot Hill to pay our respects to Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane.
I won’t bother recounting the beauty of the land. There aren’t words enough to do it justice. But it’s easy to see why Native Americans consider these places sacred and why the United States government would never give it back. In the sunlight the peaks of iron and rock almost glisten. It’s hard not to look into the mouth of the landscape and not feel the presence of God. Above it all stands Mount Rushmore, partly a patriotic standard and partly an insult to the people who once owned this land. Promises never kept. Traditions bought and sold. The legacy of toiling masses.
We saw Crazy Horse, still in progress and crossed the border into Wyoming to hike near Devil’s Tower, which rises like giant out of near completely flat surroundings. But our thoughts were always on the highway and the long journey ahead of us.
As big sky country rolled outside of our windows and in the distance the snow covered peaks of the Rockies grew deceptively closer, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen to the small towns along the highway if gas prices continued to rise. I was struck by the restaurants, motels and out of the way tourist attractions that no one would come to patronize. I considered how much life in America would change without tourists driving in to keep the already poor economies of the Western states afloat. In another year would anyone still come to see the site of Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn? Or would this chapter of American history be forgotten and unseen?
It wouldn’t be the same, I don’t think. Seeing pictures of a place isn’t at all the same as being there. An old battlefield may just be empty grassland today, but the ground has stories to tell. There’s an energy left by those who died there. There’s a story in the massacre of American soldiers who themselves had the blood of innocent people on their hands.
There are places along the interstate where long barricades can close off towns for weeks at a time when snow can’t be cleared off the road. In Deadwood, South Dakota there are Old West shootouts every hour on the hour along the streets. If you want to, you can gamble in gas stations in Wyoming. At a rest stop in North Dakota, you can climb out of your car and watch as the sun sets on a section of the Badlands where Theodore Roosevelt used to hunt. If you look hard enough, you might see one of the few remaining herds of Buffalo, chewing on tall grass, unconcerned by their brush with extinction.
If the American road trip is dead, will anyone other than truck drivers get to see these places? Will anyone again truly experience what America is?
We rode on, not speaking for hours at a time. Father and son and the pitch and thud of the road as our constant companion.
