Driving Across America

There were only a few years between of age of the man with the car and the two younger women who had attached themselves to him.

But their clothes, the expressions they used and the things they had been taught to believe were fundamentally different — their country was doubting its fundamental values.

What the three did share was the new Interstate Highway System. It was being constructed in the name of national defense but was available to anyone who needed to find or escape from something.

They spent 42 hours in a Chevy Vega designed to get to the laundromat and back. They tried every combination of open windows to avoid being strafed by 102-degree temperatures at 80 mph.

To filter out the sounds of passing rigs they cranked up the AM radio, picking up distant 500-kilowatt stations after sundown, flipping around the dial to avoid “I Shot The Sheriff” (who was gunned down on every Top-Forty station that August).

It was in the farm belt with its mechanical fields that the man noticed his thoughts drifting to the string of missteps he had endured during his twenties. Each “welcome-to-our-state” sign seemed to suggest a different character flaw.

The man was modest and hard working. Had been a soldier. You could lend him money and recommend him for a job. But things had gone wrong.

He drove over the Continental Divide, crossed various desert landscapes and reached the Pacific. He visited the Sequoias and waded in the Russian River with naked adolescent girls at the invitation of parents who were among the last hippie holdouts. He pitied them.

The man was exhausted as he retraced the interstates back toward the east. He’d been carrying too much baggage for too long and decided he would unload things along the highway. Every approaching cloverleaf started to look like an option; he imagined better times over the next hill.

For the first time in a long time, it was okay to be alone.

He keeps an igneous rock picked up in Nebraska as a memento of that trip. From time to time he looks at the photo that Holly, the more pleasant of his traveling companions, had taken from behind at a turnoff in Joshua Tree. The black and white snapshot shows a developing bald spot no one had told him was there.