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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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