notes from the road

Late in January 1992, I set out alone on a month long journey from Seattle, Washington, where I had been in graduate school working on an architecture degree, to Charlottesville, Virginia, where I intended to complete it. Fleeing the site of a failed marriage, I loaded my old VW van, the "Haystack", and hoping that a few solitary weeks driving secondary roads would do me some good, I made my way across the country in a long counterclockwise loop. Many of the routes I drove were so sparsely traveled that I was able to write in my journal as I drove, balancing it on the wide flat steering wheel on stretches of straight empty highway.

As fate would have it, I never did finish that architecture degree. Just a year and a half after arriving in Charlottesville, I was the father of twin girls, relocated again and working full time in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania at what has evolved into an unexpected design career. I've stayed in one place, more or less, for an unprecedented twenty years.

Yet now, as my three children are fledging the nest, I find the road whispering to me across the years, beckoning me to follow. It seems unlikely that I will heed its tantalizing call. But for whatever the reason, the memory of that painful and beautiful journey is strong with me this morning. Forgive my nostalgic mood, but please indulge me as I share a few sketches, and selections from the journal notes of one memorable day on the road.

my 1974 VW in Portland, Oregon, January 1992

6:45AM, Tuesday 28 Jan ‘92

Ely (Nevada) – Showered, fresh jeans and black turtleneck, and I finally get an early start. Read myself to sleep – Least Heat Moon had a home to return to. It makes a journey different from this one.

6:57 on Rtes 6/50/93 – the ridge of mostly wooded peaks to my right is catching the first delicate pink of the sun, sliding in under a blue grey belly of blurred clouds. The landscape is dormant and waiting for the day to bloom.

I find that I enjoy this writing as I drive. I couldn’t do this on most roads in most places. A hawk cruises by, flying at telephone pole height, and a few hundred yards later, a crow, on the right. It’s cold this morning – precipitation will be snow. I want a cup of coffee, but I want it in a little mom & pop, not one of these big commercial truck stops. I’ll wait. A copper colored Ford pickup passes – in 40 miles, I’ve seen only 4 cars. I opted to go south on 93 to avoid the mountains. I don’t want to push the Haystack too hard. It is really cold in here – I have a coat covering my legs and I’m wearing gloves. This is all basin land – to the east, a shroud of haze hangs over Lake Valley, and I see irrigation equipment, tiny in the long shallow trough between the parallel mountain ranges. Pioche is now 26 miles ahead. My stomach rumbles.

9:30AM, 11 miles south of Pioche – Sitting on a padded stool at a polyurethaned particle board counter in the Skittles’n’Vittles restaurant, slurping black coffee and waiting for my heart attack plate – the woman back at the Chevron in Pioche steered me away from the Mexican café there and towards this place back out on the open highway. I’m the only customer, but the radio is playing country & western, the woman doing the cooking is quiet but friendly, and it’s warm in here.

It’s impossible to get a feel for a place on the road without stopping to spend a little time with the people who live there. I don’t at all begrudge the dollars that I spend in these roadside cafes – they make real milkshakes!

journal pages from a day on the road in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, January 28 1992

10:33AM – Full of eggs, sausage, pancakes, toast and black coffee, I pour a half quart of oil into the Haystack’s motor, fire it up and head south three miles before I realize that 319 to Cedar City was back just outside the café. Now a few miles east of Panaca, I pass a sign that tells me I’m traveling through wild horse country. We chug towards the hills under a pearl grey sky. – a long stack of hay bales interrupted by an old well drilling truck in a huge field –

Down the eastern slope from Panaca summit pass we coast on the rolling reddish grey pavement. Pinon and juniper outnumber, or at least dominate over the sagebrush now. We break out of the trees and a sign says “Welcome to Utah”, and reminds me to set the clocks for Mountain Standard Time. The highway parallels a railroad, and I yearn to see a freight train pass.

12:33PM, east of Modena, Utah – straight, flat road, a purple brown mountain barrier in the distance, the Gipsy Kings my companions as the Haystack and I roll towards Cedar City and the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau.

We wheel around past a brilliant burst of raw red dirt bank – broken columnar rock outcroppings begin to emerge, and now the mountains ahead show folded rustyfringe through the snow and trees. I draw a deep breath and feel something unlock in my chest. We are headed into the land that I love, the Haystack and I. The northwest and the tragic coastline fade to a distant memory. Four miles from Cedar City, a bald eagle flaps powerfully across the highway.

1:49PM – I gas up in Cedar City, cross I-15 onto Rte 14, and abruptly we are enfolded in a new landscape of broken cliffs and exposed rock strata.

2:26PM – Up and up, we are now in an alpine forest of spruce and aspen, the road winds along meekly where the canyon pushes it, and I catch only glimpses now of the snow mantled red cliffs.

The climb was hard on the car – we need a tuneup and an oil change. We stop on a downhill grade to refill the pen and listen to the wind.

3:50PM – Across a jumbled landscape, the Kaibab Plateau stretches endlessly in front of me along the horizon, beyond which lies the Grand Canyon.

5:12PM – The light is fading as the horizon nears the sun. We just dove out of the pines and plummeted into a broad plain with the stunning wall of Vermillion Cliffs stopping the grassy bowl like a bloody sword thrust cleanly, edge first, out of the crust. A quick stop on a muddy track to snap a photo of the haystack and its amazing backdrop. There is an unearthly glow reflecting off the bleached grass, the red dirt, even the gray green road, and I feel like I’m a traveler in an alien land. State road 67 was closed from Jacob Lake to the North Rim, but the disappointment was brief. I pass a boulder strewn cliff dwelling site – house sized boulders perched on eroded little necks. Marble Canyon is just a few miles ahead, and I still have light – wonderful, subtle, magical light –

6:00PM – The other side – driving – heart stopping – the color singing soulful, somber tunes, still at great volume, though now the details of the desert plain disappear and my headlights pool pale orange on the road ahead – the moment is enough – I weep tears of gratitude – clinging snow on the west facing wall goes bluish, dusky, like the sky, like the page that I write on that is full of the sky – signs glow up out of the roadside in my headlamps – out of the mysterious cloak – the sun ignites the distant clouds for a few minutes, then the color departs –

Comments

[jguss]

what a great adventure. i admire your ability to create and preserve a record like this for decades. i'm lucky if i can find my wallet or car keys twenty minutes after i enter my house.

there's nothing like a road trip to clear the mind; or at the least provide distraction, and if we're lucky, some perspective.

i like the reference to least heat moon, far and away my favorite of modern travel writers. theroux makes me feel claustrophobic, like i'm locked inside his skull; he sees everything exclusively from his own narrow viewpoint; he's rarely if ever involved with the people he meets; he's a voyeur. least heat moon engages in the world as he wanders through it; he doesn't lacquer everything he sees with a thick coating of his own bias (or if he does it's more subtly done). i still love blue highways and prairyerth.

[Scott A. Stultz]

Another author whose memoir of a long road trip whose writing left an indelible impression on me was John Steinbeck, in his Travels With Charlie. I read it in high school, and remember feeling the restlessness to venture forth that he so vividly described. It is a startling realization that I am now nearly the age he was when he made that journey and wrote that book. But my god I still feel so much like that round eyed adolescent boy, fantasizing about fitting out my own Rocinante, not knowing that in fact I would do my own version years later.