It has been 42 years since I started out on my first trip around the country, filled with equal measures of excitement, apprehension and longing for new adventures after some major setbacks in my life. That trip opened up the country to me, from the spring-fed rivers of the Arkansas and Missouri Ozarks, the sandhills of Nebraska, and the Powder River valley of Wyoming to the immense grasslands of eastern Montana, the Yellowstone River and the Palouse hill country of eastern Idaho and Washington.
I started in May 1984, got to Seattle and worked there that summer, and returned in August. It was my first big open road quest, the trip that altered my life as any grand new experience will.
The following spring I did it again, in the months before I was to start graduate school. I had saved up money from a dead-end job, was reaching another low point, and couldn’t wait to have miles of open, two-lane “blue highways” up ahead of me to the horizon. I couldn’t think of much else for weeks prior to the start of the trip.
Each night during those road trip adventures from 1984-86, I filled my journal with entries chronicling the day’s experiences visiting national parks, historic sites, small out-of-the way towns, scenic river drives, museums, state capitols, and colleges and university campuses. That’s just a small sampling.
By late afternoon I was so brim-full of exuberance and the ecstatic joy of packing each day full of new experiences, that when I stopped for the night, I fell into a kind of exhaustive reverie, reliving the days events. It was like it could go on and on and never end.
By about the fifth or sixth day, I had settled into a kind of back-roads explorer role so thoroughly that I could neither contemplate the end of the adventure or imagine doing anything else. Surely this must have been what William Least Heat Moon felt as he made his way across the country in his van, “Ghost Dancing”, and began the great saga that led to the classic road book Blue Highways, the inspiration for my travels.
When I think back on those journeys today, or read journal entries about them, there’s a slightly unreal quality about it all.
Here is my story in a nutshell: Once upon a time there was this young man, me, who had as his major responsibility getting a job and settling down somewhere, but who blundered into and out of one disastrous job and school situation after another, through no fault of his own, and who sought the open road to escape from the downward spirals of life. The road opened him up, infused new life into his tired 30-something-year-old psyche, and gave him hope and courage to try new things.
It’s been 35 years since my last trip across the country. I am securely settled and retired in Charleston, S.C., with a nice place to live and projects, hobbies and the Internet to keep me stimulated and my mind active.
It’s all so completely different now. I am a different person today, living a totally different life, compared to the young man setting out for Seattle on a perfect Spring morning in 1984. When traveling and jobless, all I could focus on each day was novelty, change, and the immensely liberating feeling of never knowing what each day was going to bring forth.
When you are firmly attached to a place, it’s as if you have somewhere to always call “home” even though you weren’t born there. My ancestors were born and raised in Charleston, so it’s where my deepest roots are. I never realized this, or thought about it much, when I was younger. I think this is why I feel so comfortable here. I can’t imagine why I never thought living here many years ago. Thirty-five years have passed, but it feels like I have never lived anywhere else.
This area on the coast of South Carolina has the natural beauty I seek and treasure, the ocean, the salt air, the marshlands and maritime forests, and the seabirds I always delight in watching. I was born and raised in the lowlands of Louisiana. Now I’m in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Full circle.
Today I can put my restless travels in the context of a quest that we often embark upon in our youth. I saw beautiful places and gained wisdom I’d never have had otherwise. In Cody, Wyoming on May 3, 1985, I wrote these words in my journal. I had just traveled the Wapiti Canyon Highway from Yellowstone National Park to Cody through a landscape so striking and unusual as to seem otherworldly, and I was transfixed, floating on air:
…Yesterday, in the midst of natural beauty everywhere, I had the very peaceful feeling of knowing this world of ours has greater gifts to bestow than we can comprehend, but which we are meant to know and experience. I felt harmony within myself and within my surroundings, a feeling that here everything was in right order, in balance and perfectly capable of enduring as long as the earth endured. This gave me great hope. Also, people are so friendly. They, too, share this bond with a great and open country…
That was then, this is now. The realities of aging, and a country in political, economic and social turmoil, have made my youthful wanderlust seem pure and naive, as if I was searching for a Utopia or Shangri-la that never existed or even could have, but which might serendipitously reveal itself to me if I got on the road and met people, saw new towns and beautiful countryside, explored numerous national parks and history sites, and in general, saw the country for the first time.
I might do it again if I was younger, because there’s still a lot of good to be found everywhere in this country, but I’m tired and my heart is not in it.
My heart is at rest at home. I’ve seen enough.
Posing in front of an ancient Sitka spruce tree, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, 1984
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