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Open road still drives American spirit

By Timothy O'Grady
THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
Wednesday, Sep 19, 2007, Page 13

A 1962 photo of Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac. Nearly 40 years after his death, and 50 years after the release of his most famous novel, On the Road, pictured here, Kerouac remains an author who inspires both young and old. Photo: NY Times News Service

Family holidays in the 1960s took me out of Chicago in the back seat of an Oldsmobile past endless silos and fields of corn. The road was a prison, the time to be served in it passed with sandwiches, quiz games and naps. "There's the birthplace of [former US president] Rutherford Hayes," my mother could call out from the front, and I'd roll over again, hoping for sleep.

Around the time I started setting out on my own journeys in the US, I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road and thereafter the road looked different, the once so solid and inert farms, small towns, cheap hotels and wanderers of the roadsides becoming radiant under the onslaught of Kerouac's elegiac and ecstatic jazz-driven prose. The road came to mean freedom and discovery.

The American's psyche finds itself in the road as the Spanish find themselves in meals. Mobility made the country and mobility has not ceased to be less necessary or less seductive since it's been settled. "Go west, young man," it was once said and people still do it. They set out in melancholy, anticipation or on the run from debt or the law, in search of knowledge, gain, obscurity, revelation, the meaning of the US or of themselves. The road in the US is mythical in a way that roads in no other place can be. You are out under the open sky, lost to the world, breezes blowing through the open window, music giving a richness to each land- and cityscape - driving accordions in the Louisiana swamps, Willie Nelson for a Texas sunset, a big band in Manhattan and merengue in Miami.

The Manhattan skyline is seen from Arthur Ashe Stadium, in Queens, during sunset early this month. PHOT: AP

A stretch of highway near the beach in Gulfport, Mississippi. PHOTO: EPA

I left the US in 1973 and have since lived in Europe. In that time, I've missed certain foods, and sports. I've missed people I'd known and how we talked. But when I thought of the US what I most yearned for was the open road. I'd think of striking out on it into the red earth and mesas of the West, the air shimmering in the heat, stopping when I wanted to in small-town bars and neon-lit hotels, no one knowing who I was or where I would be. But I never did it.

US Route 66, opened in 1926, stretches from Chicago to Los Angeles. The road became a western migration route for people looking for work during the great depression of the 1930s. Later, it offered vacation getaways and driving adventures until 1985 when it was decommissioned as a federal highway. PHOTO: EPA

After Sept. 11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the whole world began to look at the US, wondering what had become of it, where it would go and on whom it would fall. I wondered too. Finally, 30 years after I'd left, I came back and went out onto the road as I had so often longed to do, making a 24,000km, 35-state, three-month journey by car from New York to San Francisco through the north, and then back from San Francisco to New York through the south. "They've all gone to look for the US," as the song said. I joined them.

Michael Hendricks, of Yarmouthport, Massachusetts pauses at the grave of author Jack Kerouac. PHOTO:AP

Before I left New York, I went into a bar on Eighth Avenue. A young man, luminous in the eyes and a little jumpy from the beer, asked me what I was doing there. I told him I was about to drive across the country.

"Haven't you ever heard of airplanes?" he asked.

"I'd like to have a closer look at the place," I said. "I've been away a long time."

He looked at me like he'd rarely ever heard anything so foolish.

"But there's nothing between here and California except gas stations," he said.

With the Chicago skyline as a backdrop, a Chicago Transit Authority bus approaches a West Side bus stop in Chicago. PHOTO: AP

As it happened, some of the most memorable parts of the journey happened in places most people see from planes at 56,000km looking down at the beige and green agricultural rectangles as they stir in their seats and breathe the reconditioned air - places like western New York state, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Wyoming, Idaho and the Mississippi delta. To acquire any intimacy with the country you have to stay on the back roads and off the interstates - wide cuts in the earth with massive directional signage, roaring trucks lit up like fairgrounds and long ramps at the exits with clusters of gas station, fast food and chain hotel signs mounted on large poles like bloated storks. From a car on an interstate, Utah can look not so very different from Pennsylvania.

I took a commuter train up to New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, and picked up a rental car behind a diner called Louis' Lunch, where the hamburger was invented for a man in a hurry in 1900. "The road is life," wrote Kerouac. I was about to hit it. I drove up through the leafy green hills of Connecticut and western Massachusetts, where Melville wrote Moby-Dick in a house he couldn't afford in Arrowhead, then down along the Hudson River from Albany, New York into the Catskills, a place of log cabin motels, bait and tackle shops, stands on the roadside selling apple cider and honey. I had thought such places long gone the way of the soda counter and the town square, but here it still was, the pretty, tranquil and unfranchised, the US I had known as a child. You can still see it if you stay off the interstates.

I went through Saugerties and entered woodland after a brief rain. The leaves were as orange as pumpkins, as red as embers. Beads of rainwater moved over their veins and then fell, shafts of sunlight catching them. The road ran on before me like a body uncoiling from sleep, there was the whoosh of a bird's wings, a flash of blue as it flew beneath the branches, vines twisting around fence posts. All around the woodland floor, moss-covered boulders and tree trunks lay around like drunks after a party.

I went into Woodstock, one of the national centers of bohemianism since the William Morris-inspired Byrdcliffe arts and crafts commune was established here at the beginning of the 20th century. Isadora Duncan danced on lawns in the middle of the night. More than half a century later, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin all lived here for a time. Bob Dylan recorded The Basement Tapes with the Band and went flying off his motorbike. Because of its artists, musicians and experiments in living it was already a brand name before the legendary festival, which actually took place 97km away at Bethel. Bethel Nation didn't resonate.

The US is unimaginably vast and empty and various. Though I had traveled in it before I had forgotten how extreme it is in this. The National Park Service alone administrates around 34,074,531 million hectares of land. Indian reservation land comprises 22.4 million hectares. Only 15 percent of the state of Arizona is privately owned. As I moved west, the low Appalachian mountains gave way to Midwestern farms, the lake lands of Wisconsin and Minnesota to the Great Plains, a pale green and beige flatland with barely a tree in it which stretches from the boreal pine forests of the north to the deserts of the south and from the Missouri river in the east to the Rocky mountains in the west. I entered them at the Cheyenne River Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota and exited into the Colorado Rockies.

In the longitudes ahead of me between the inland and coastal plains were red mesa deserts, geyser basins, the US' highest peaks, lava flows, virgin forest and gigantic sand dunes, a land of strange and colossal shapes where "Nature has gone gaga and dada," as Henry Miller said in his vituperative road book, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. It is here that the US road comes into its own as a place of anonymity and freedom in a vastness, astounding natural spectacles constantly passing your window. Here are the hydrothermal wonderland of bubbling mud, sulphurous fumaroles and geysers in Yellowstone, the singing sands and joshua trees of the Mojave, the Painted Desert, giant Californian redwoods seeming more like gods than trees as they soared out of the mist, and Monument Valley in the land of the Navajo, which I had the fortune to see in low, rich evening light after a desert rain and which for me was more apprehendable than the overwhelming Grand Canyon.

The drive along Highway One through Big Sur would on its own have been worth making the trip for. It could be enhanced by a stay at the Post Ranch Inn, one of the US' great hotel experiences for those who can afford it. I couldn't, but as I made my way back east I could afford the Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff, one of the "three best towns in the US" according to a young man I met in the hotel bar there, the others being Austin, Texas and Ashville, North Carolina. The Hotel San Juan, just across the street from the Continental Bar, where you can hear some of the best music in a great music town, the aforementioned Austin; the Rue Royal Inn, which has old-world, high-style apartments over a 6am bar in the Faubourg Marigny in New Orleans; the Indian Creek Hotel in the pastel art deco region of South Beach in Miami, and finally the Chelsea in New York, variously home to Mark Twain, Brendan Behan, Bob Dylan and Sid Vicious, where the lobby and stairwell are hung with paintings given by artists in lieu of rent. These were the best and most interesting hotels I stayed in along the way.

People figure more prominently in a trip around the US than perhaps in any other place. Night after night I went into bars in small towns and cities and was in conversation, unsolicited, before I got to my seat. Most of it was open, free-ranging and immediately gregarious, and some of it was spectacularly entertaining. Many the US' were born far from the places where you meet them. They haven't the structure of highly defined cultures or large families to sustain them. They have a need to connect with those they find. This often gives them a willingness to reveal and a curiosity that is without guile. It's perhaps what is also behind a generosity towards strangers. There was a belief in Greece, at least until mass tourism, that any passing stranger could be Jesus come back to earth and that he therefore deserved the hospitality of everyone's house.

I was offered meals and beds by people I'd never met and once on Highway Seven by the Rocky Mountain national park in Colorado, after I'd got out of my car in a cold wind to take a photograph and come back to find the door locked, the keys in the ignition and the engine running, an out-of-work trucker and his lady friend spent three hours with me driving around until a locksmith could be found, then refused my offer of money.

The US is still beautifully fertile and fascinating and full of people who treat you like a cousin. The road that takes you around in it is still full of surprises and a unique feeling of freedom. It is coming into its own once again.
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