Sic Semper Tyrannis

Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode IV: A New Hope

After seeing Colorado, I had to see more. I knew there was a whole country out there for me to see. The Great American Southwest. Whenever I thought of “road trips,” or traveling, for some reason I always got the image in my head of mountains, deserts, canyons and the like. And after driving home myself from Colorado, I thought it was time to do a whole weeklong road trip by myself.

So, the next destination was California. I had always wanted to see California and the West Coast, but surely you know that these kinds of solo trips are not all about the arriving. The experience of the in-between is just as important to me. You can take I-40 straight out west for what seems like days, but I took a jaunt north to see the Grand Canyon. I won’t try to elucidate its grandeur, but two things did surprise me there at the edge of the hole in the ground: 1) there were a bunch of different languages being spoken all around me. I was not prepared for that, but it kind of made sense to me—from a foreign country and want to see “America?” Why not see its’ biggest hole? 2) Looking down into the bottom and seeing that tiny silent, white stream and knowing that if I was standing right on its’ shore, it would be loud, roaring rapids. That was a good indicator of the distance.

Anyway, on that trip I did fit in a couple days to meet up with my parents in Sedona, Arizona since they were living in Phoenix at the time. Sedona is embedded in the middle of a valley with mountains all around, but it was nothing short of a tourist trap. While it was called an “Artists’ colony,” I very quickly realized that what is produced there winds up being decorations for vacationing rich people’s houses, not art. That was actually a revelation to me as I walked around these opulent, air-conditioned stores. “Art” is not produced in such environments. There was no suffering in the creation of these cowboy sculptures and pleasant landscapes. These people were way too well off to be what I consider “artists.” I had heard the argument before, that art was merely a record of the suffering and woe of its’ creators over the ages and it had never really meant much to me, until wandering around these huge shops of well-dressed, middle-aged people with their new-agey music. It all felt so empty to me. I’m certainly no art expert, but I know this. “Art” is not empty. (Of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell my parents about this new aesthetic epiphany.)

I think that discovery was worth the trip, but it was really only the start of things. As Arizona was farther out than I had ever been, I had no clue what to expect. On I-40, Needles, right on the border of Cali and Arizona, seems like the last bastion of civilization. In fact, the next city requires a drive through the Mojave Desert and I came upon this reality at exactly the loneliest time of day when traveling by yourself-around 6:00 in the evening, when the sun starts going down and you begin to reflect on a whole day worth of driving and wonder where you’ll lay your head that night. It’s a pretty lonely image, my friends, being the only one on the road at dusk, with only the mountains on the horizon to your right and left and the gray-white sand dunes to keep you company. When it gets to be that time while driving, I imagine a whole nation of people safe at home with their families and TV trays and watching the nightly news after a long day of work. And I wonder why I force myself into these types of nomadic feelings…

Well, after creeping through the wasteland, with the music of No Doubt and The Living End to keep me awake, and finally arriving in Barstow, California began to look up after another full day of driving. That’s when you see the wonderful rolling straw-yellow hills and windmill farms outside of Bakersfield and a handful of hours of driving deliver you to the end of the continent. Something about the sounds and smells of the vast ocean bring me a strange calm. If you subscribe to evolution, the ocean is our ultimate home, where we all came from millions of years ago. Remember the end of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, where the principal character drowns herself in the ocean at the end? Or in Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, where the main character comes this close to doing the same? Anyway, all of that to say that the ocean has a strange draw for me, not in a suicidal way, but in a peaceful way.

Since this is becoming an epic post, let me skip over a couple days and relate the cleansing loneliness of driving back on the official “Loneliest Road in America”—highway 50 in Nevada. I honestly don’t know why I insist on subjecting myself to such forced exile like that. And every time I would tell people about these “what does it all mean?”-trips, they would always look at me kind of funny. And I don’t blame them. Who chooses that for themselves? Surely no one in their right mind, right?

I think that first solo trip to California was the best I have taken. There was so much that was new about it. New terrain. New levels of isolation and yes, new levels of loneliness. But it all helps to get life in perspective.

Maybe some more on this trip later.

posted by Mike @ 3:13 PM