I've written about this project before. But from now, once a week, the essays which are written will be posted here and, as soon as I have a suitable space worked out, I'll be recording the essays.
Anyone who has any input on the essays, either corrections or additional information, add a note and I'll look to include it.
Please, enjoy.
The longest Interstate Highway runs for three-thousand-and-twenty-one miles between Seattle, Washington State and Boston, Massachusetts. The road is the I-90 and, at Homestake Pass in Montana, it reaches a maximum elevation of six-thousand-three-hundred-and-twenty-nine feet; it passes through thirteen states; crosses a floating bridge; and spends time along the shores of Lakes Michigan and Eire.
It would be easy to spend the whole episode chatting about things to see along the way, but there are plenty of websites and blogs to flesh out the details if you’re suddenly inspired. The idea of renting a Winnebago and taking a month-long road-trip certainly has appeal.
The road-trip is something which looms large in US culture. Any number of films fall into the category: Easy Rider; National Lampoon’s Vacation; Too Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar. The list is long enough to easily fill the next fourteen or fifteen minutes. And then there’s books: Fitzgerald, Kerouac & Thompson all wrote on the subject and again the list could get long and involved. It even features in songs, and everyone will have their own favorite.
What is it that makes Americans, mainly European-Americans, come over all misty-eyed about the idea of long hours crammed into hot station-wagons, eating greasy diner food, and sleeping in motels with cardboard walls, poor water pressure, and barely comfortable mattresses?
The first Europeans to arrive on the North American continent and create settlements which lead to the USA existing today, departed from home in ships about a hundred feet in length, with crews of forty or fifty and fifteen to twenty passengers.
The journey could take two or three months with no guarantee of landing where intended. They began with still living livestock and poultry requiring open fires, on a small wooden vessel, to turn into edible food. By journey’s end, food could be reduced to rancid meat, wrinkled apples, biscuits now riddled with weevils, and rain water caught in barrels as it fell from the sky.
These were journeys of beliefs, sojourns to places unknown for the purpose of beginning life anew, forging a future with freedoms unencumbered by the rules and strictures of a world hemmed in by the beliefs of kings, clerics, and restrictive class systems.
Ships became bigger and faster, but still reliant on the winds and currents. In the years of colonial America, it didn’t stop about half-a-million people making the journey. From independence in seventeen-seventy-six to the early nineteenth century, another three-quarters of a million arrived, many now seeking adventure, riches, or both.
With the advent of the steam engine still larger ships, carrying more passengers, crossed the Atlantic quicker than ever. From a journey of two to three months, crossing speeds tumbled to weeks, and then days. Over the hundred years between eighteen-twenty and nineteen-twenty about forty million people chose to come to the USA from all over Europe.
There were other immigrants to America. From across the Pacific Chinese and Japanese immigrants also came in large numbers but racists laws and taxes denied them the rights of full citizenship.
And, shamefully for all willingly involved, slaves were brought from Africa to the shores of America. The first known arrival was in fifteen-twenty-six, the last known was eighteen-fifty-eight. And that’s a thing to ponder. Slavery transportation to the continental America lasted three-hundred-and-thirty-two years. It will be twenty-one-hundred-and-eight before the Republic reaches that age. The last known African born slave in America, Matilda McCrear, died in nineteen-forty.
These are things to discuss another time.
Now the young nation saw a second kind of migration. This was not to the Americas, but across them. The main form of travel was nick-named Prairie Schooners, hearkening back to the ocean going vessels. These transported people and their equipment in canvas covered wagons, pulled by oxen, mules, or horses. Through the middle years of the nineteenth century nearly half-a-million people traversed the Oregon Trail, or parts of it. Over sixty-thousand died on the way, succumbing to dysentery, starvation, frostbite, drowning, snakebite, childbirth, and any other number of maladies and calamities. There may not have been a million ways to die, but there were definitely plenty of them.
While the oceans bear no memory or mark of the millions who crossed them, landscapes are not so quick to forget. In small, scattered, grave-yards testimony is born to those who fell. Other places carry the marks of those who survived, either through the names they scratched into granite at major waypoints, or via the grooves carved into rock by wagon-after-wagon being hauled up steep inclines by teams of sturdy oxen.
After departing Independence, Missouri, in May arrival in Oregon’s Willamette Valley sometime in November was not journey’s end for most, but the place to make the decision on turning north or south.
These long, arduous, journeys made by succeeding generations across sea and land, were not yet enough to make the road-trip what we know but were the substrate on which it would sprout.
A century after prairie schooners flowed westwards, creating trails and scoring the land with tracks, America created a network of roads connecting forty-eight states from north-to-south, east-to-west.
In the early years of the twentieth century ox-drawn wagons and horse-drawn carts were being replaced by the automobile and a structured way of letting people use this method of transportation to travel about the country.
One of these became known as America’s Main Street, running from Chicago, Illinois all the way to Santa Monica, California.
Route Sixty-Six became an artery down which flowed people fleeing the dust bowl of the thirties or flocking to armament factories in the forties.
One year in the thirties saw eighty-six thousand people seek new opportunities in California as successive years of drought and dust storms wracked an area which incorporated parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. That’s nearly as many as arrived in California in eighteen-forty-nine, the peak of the great Californian Gold Rush.
Traveling huge distances bound into a single country is not unusual. Russia and China are examples of similar. The difference is the United States was founded on a concept of liberty and seeks to maintain that in ways the others just don’t consider appropriate for their inhabitants. The right to freely travel between the states is enshrined in the constitution.
For about four-hundred-and-fifty years people travelled to America, they travelled across America, they sought freedom, adventure, safety, opportunity. There’s something which is either a natural predisposition to travel, to be an adventurer, a pioneer; or a change enforced by circumstances, which makes people move the distances those travelling to, and across, America have.
Those instincts, or even epigenetic changes caused by the trauma of enforced moves, can be quelled or reversed. But they can also be tapped into, vibrated like a guitar string, until they resonate in a way which resembles the harmonics of the original urges or motivations. Resembles, but not replicates.
By the fifties the original highway network was struggling to cope with the massive increase in people and cars seeking to move about the country. The straining system was, in the main, replaced by new Interstates. These double-lane or more highways divided by a center meridian made driving longer distances easier. They took you to major cities but, instead of having to drive through them with the long hours in traffic that could entail, allowed you to by-pass them if you were headed somewhere else.
The impact of these new roads were massive. Suburban towns sprang up a short drive away from big cities, interstate commerce was boosted as big-rigs could move produce and goods faster and cheaper. Fresher food arrived in supermarkets, costs of materials fell. A burgeoning, mainly European-American, middle class reaped the rewards.
The effect of Interstate construction on predominantly African-American communities in cities is a topic we’ll come to in a later episode.
With rising wages there was more money to spend on leisure, and these roads, and the old highways which many of them tied to, offered easier opportunities to go visit distant family for Thanksgiving, to take the kids on that education trip to see the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, etc. or you could drop the kids at the grandparents or cousins, and head off for a weekend with the wife to see a Broadway show in NYC, or for a show and some poker and slots in Las Vegas.
To help you get there motels sprung up in increasing numbers. While the first was opened in nine-teen-twenty-five at Obispo, California, the high point came in the fifties and sixties, with a massive sixty-four-thousand being open in nineteen-sixty-four. With motels the requirements to feed and entertain guests came as well, and were catered for.
The antecedents of adventurers who crossed an ocean to escape persecution or find riches, the children of people who suffered the privations of the Great Depression of the thirties and travelled looking for work and opportunities, now sailed the Interstate in station wagons, vehicles big enough to fit the kids and the luggage.
The freedom of the open road was sold by men from Madison Avenue, and middle-class suburban America bought the dream, bought the cars, bought the two weeks camping in a national park or, from nineteen-seventy-one, Disneyland.
The magic kingdom wasn’t the only draw Florida had. Watching rockets lift of from Cape Canaveral became increasingly popular and, in nineteen-sixty-nine, Walter Cronkite was one of a million people to see Apollo Eleven launch from pad 39A. Most of those came down parts of the new I-95, or the old Route 1.
Books about road trips we may think of are generally about older road trips, taken with a measure of despair or necessity.
The films, they come from the wellspring of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. They extoll the freedom of the interstate, wide landscapes, cramped station wagons, crappy motels with beds which shake for a quarter, or have free ice-machines outside the main office.
Songs, they cover the range. From Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Our Land’ through Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, and there’s a good argument for putting the pop frothiness of something like The Monkees ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ in, on the basis that the idyll it pastiches arose from the suburbia Interstates made possible.
But, mainly, road trips are about memories. They are the cross-country trip heading to college, taken with parents sadly silent or unnaturally happy - almost a last holiday before setting out into adulthood. Before that they are the years spent with siblings, be they snotty younger ones, or aloof older, squeezed next to us on hot summer days, or leaning against us asleep after days at the lake or the beach. Hours spent holding towel wrapped casseroles, or tin packed cakes, heading for birthdays, Thanksgiving, and ballgame cookouts.
Today all roads seem full. Station wagons with faux wood panels are things we see on TV, mini-vans and SUV’s have taken their place. But to get to Disneyland, or Epcot, or a resurgent Atlantic city, it’s more likely a hop via Delta, Eastern, or Sprint, and a transfer to a resort which will cater to every whim.
The road trip is dying, becoming a fading memory, something done by parents, when they were still kids.
But, still, there are those memories, of journeys once made. They are baked in the bones, forged in the genes, sealed into cells, they’re what America means. Without travel, without sojourns, without places to go and have been, songs sung by our grandparents are stories unseen.
America became the USA because of the people who travelled its length, traversed its breadth, measured its heights, and plumbed its depths. and there’s still to discover, more of America, yet.
words by stuartcturnbull. Picture licenced from Kirsten Alana and worked in Canva