July 27, 2008
Looking back at my notes a half year later, it’s hard to construct my final statement of the trip. I had grand ideas in place for this article, about defining American’s biggest attributes as its natural land and beauty, its people’s determination and work ethic, and the interaction of those against capitalism’s questionable snuggling with greed. Looking back, I’m not sure if that captures the full story of my journey.
My trip started off with a drive through a landscape unlike anything on the East coast. The mountains looked so exaggerated that they reminded me of fake foam rocks, with vibrant and contrasting colors painted from graffiti and super-sized spray paint cans. Yet the mountains, the colors, and the rolling hills like those on childhood drawings are all real, all reflecting a blessing American has when it comes to the vast beauty of this country’s landscape.
I made sure to stop at as many local outlets as I could, whether it was a surprise visit to a chicken breeder, dining on eggs in front of heavily bearded truck drivers, or eating fried chicken with locals discussing politics. The constant class and job elevation pressures of the Northeast weren’t present on my stops — people worked hard, but they defined themselves less by their jobs and more by their character, their friendliness, and their attitudes to life. Hard work, yes, but not once did I hear any complaints.
It’s suitable that my trip ended in Las Vegas. America was too perfect on my trip, hitting Vegas reminded me of one of America’s lasting charactieristics: the thirst for the mighty dollar. I remember stepping into my hotel room and seeing casino skyscrapers plunge out of the desert. As I mourned the loss of the spotless nature scenes of my drive, I caught a building-sized advertisement for a Beatles show in town. I grabbed a hold of my desk as I lost my balance: buldings, a fragmented desert, commercial Beatles – it was all too much to handle after seeing the innocence and power of the Grand Canyon. There was nothing representing the Grand Canyon there. An hour later and $100 down in Blackjack, I returned to my room and slept, hoping to wake up outside of a city where every job doesn’t exist solely to pluck from one’s wallet, and every traveler’s aspiration is more than just thickening one’s own wallet.
Before writing this entry I knew I couldn’t end it on that. My grand statement shouldn’t be about the balance of powers inside America, but more about the people I met.
The night I spent in the Grand Canyon felt like a carnival. As a lone traveler, I set a goal to visit every bar in the national park, each with its own flavor, age, and crowd’s mindset. At one bar I sat down with a glass of wine and reflected on my trip, while wealthy couples stared blankly at others for a visual escape. In another I was surrounded by Japanese tourists as we talked about New York, music, and who would win in a game of pool. A pool victory later, I knew little more about the Japanese tourists, other than that they loved America and were pleased to have shared a conversation with a native (they also loved Budweiser). In another bar I wrote post cards to others at home, and I still remember concentrating on my handwriting while a singer/guitarist played original tunes only twenty feet away. A bartender and I talked about the area, and he shared that he knew nothing about the Grand Canyon; he only answered a job ad from his home town hundreds of miles away. Fate brought him here and he had no intentions to leave.
Earlier that day I grabbed a pint at the bar closest to my cabin room. I sat next to an older man and shared intentions on the trip. This man was finally retired, and once a year he took a bus out to the Grand Canyon to hike down its seemingly limitless cliff. A lone traveler, his retirement focused on trips like these, and the country’s landscapes kept him traveling. While some people might throw in the towel on life, he set his own path, and clearly his road trip is an ongoing venture. Maybe that’s what my trip was about. We’re all free to forge our own path.
Or maybe it was about finding innocence again: discovering that it’s alright to be yourself, to trust your intentions, and to accept and take in the beauty around you. Having an open mind and open eyes allowed me to take in all of the landscape, and giving every bit of the trip a chance is the only way I saw see every bar in the Grand Canyon, went to church in a living room of a snowed-in house and spend a night speaking with Budweiser-fueled Japanese tourists.
Or perhaps, more suitably, I’ll end with my last unedited notes written about my trip, reflecting the innocence and awe regained on this trip:
• Cliffs diving in diagonal directions
• Rainbows in the distance
• Mountains with the texture of rough oil paintings
• A ground full of spots of coal – looking like the world’s biggest barbecue just took place
• Round bushes ready to roll!
• Patches in the distance of sun, fog, rain, all visible in the same view
• A&W Cream Soda Ice Cream Float
Cheers.
February 25, 2008
Half the magic of a road trip is the soundtrack. With the right choices, music written years ago can seem like it was written solely for one trip.
My carefully selected playlist of albums for my drive:
The Verve – Urban Hymns (A Favorite Album)
Oasis – The Masterplan (A Favorite Album)
Arctic Monkeys – Your Favorite Worst Nightmare
The Kooks – Inside In / Inside Out
Ryan Adams – Cold Roses (Disc 2)
U2 – How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker
Mix CD – This Year (2006)
Fiona Apple – When the Pawn…
Kasabian – (Self Titled)
Dashboard Confessional – A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, a Scar (A Favorite Album)
Weezer – Pinkerton (I found a Pinkerton badge for sale on Route 66)
Zwan – Mary, Star of the Sea (A Favorite Album)
 The memories of the trip roll by like a slide show. I remember the childhood laughter I produced as I first drove out of the cities of the west. The hills rolled like our crayon-filled drawings of our youth. The great road trip imagery of classic movies all came true: hippies in rusting cars, 60s vans blanketed in stickers, and even an orange Volkswagon Beetle.
I remember driving past abandoned farms and homes, and thinking how alone I was on this trip. If my car broke down, I’d be alone, and that would be OK.
 Not all is as innocent as our youth though. I remember spotting an Indian smoke stack on a reservation, and after driving closer for twenty minutes I realized it was really smog stemming from a power plant.
Still, driving in the East isn’t conductive to taking in the scenery. Unlike at home, my road trip west was full of straight roads, little traffic, few stops, and more varied backdrops. For this drive, the activity of driving was less about shifting gears and turning the steering wheel, instead it was about how much one could spot from the windows.
 I’ll end with a set of phrases written on the signs of Route 66:
Green sign, red sign
‘Twould be more fun
To go by air
If we could put
These signs up There
Just this once (red exit at end)
And just for fun
We’ll let you finish
What we’ve begun
????
Number of times I spotted a bouncing and rolling bush on my road trip: 19.
February 24, 2008
To my surprise, a lot of what goes through one’s mind while driving on a highway is based on expectations. How much traffic will there be? Will the weather be good? When is the next road stop? These expectations let the driver prepare for the trip and pace him or her through the road trip.
On my trip from the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas I was shocked when I saw a sign for the Hoover Dam. What I expected to be a non-eventful drive to Vegas turned into a mammoth route across the giant purple gorilla laughing in the corner of the room. My fear of heights, traffic, and a long congested drive suddenly emerged. Expectations of a smooth drive quickly vanished; whether I liked it or not, I had to confront the great Hoover to reach my destination.
The sign was completely unexpected, but so was what I eventually saw.
I expected a drive over an elevated road with water on one side, and a valley on the other. With my limited knowledge, I imagined a bridge-like structure with water only on one end.
Instead, I saw a marvel in engineering. If the Grand Canyon shows the scale of transformation that God can create, the Hoover Dam is a symbol of what human ingenuity can accomplish.
Fear quickly passed as I pulled my car to the side to view the dam. The twisting dam road looked more like the curving walls outside of a medieval castle than the dull straight structures of bridges. The road itself dropped sharply to equally spring back up to high elevation. Tourists walked the area in awe, and I stood against the calm water looking at the mass of land and water that humans managed to tame.
The constant hiss of the damn was clearly audible, but gears and mechanizations of the dam were out of view. Concrete and steel beams were all that obscured this artificial presentation of nature.
My strongest memory is a view of the dam wall fading into the curves of the river. I imagined what was beyond the river curve, and wondered what I’d find on the nearby land or swimming in the just-too-far waves. I wanted to take a canoe and find out.
After I passed the damn I drove up to the top of a nearby mountain to view the landscape. Water, land, the sun, and an army of clouds rested in peace above me. Despite three or four other cars full of tourists snapping their photos, I felt alone and in peace with the backdrop.
The weather took a wild turn as I drove from the Grand Canyon, with flooding rain and harsh winds slamming my car as it crawled through the highway’s slippery trail.
Semi-trucks, heavy enough to handle the storm, weaved around my car’s right lane position, while my wipers tried failingly to weave a viewable windshield through the never ending splashes of rain.
For ten minutes I braved the storm on the highway because it was still the quickest route west, but in time I grew frustrated at the hopelessness of the situation. Why was I fighting through a storm? Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?
As these thoughts dripped through my mind I realized things didn’t have to be this way. An upcoming exit sign showed Route 66 was a few miles away. The slower road wouldn’t get me to my destination any faster, but it would certainly provide a less stressful route. Within a few miles I pulled off of the raging highway and emerged onto a quiet road that welcomed me with the gentle echo of rain drops. While the rain didn’t actually weaken, its impact diminished when it no longer had the highway’s traffic splashing water onto my car. The rain soon transformed into a managable piece of scenery.
The switch to Route 66 marked a turning point on my trip that reestablished the journey’s dominance over the trip’s final destination. While I ended up driving 25 miles per hour through a tourist loop dedicated to the American legacy route, I was still emotionally conquering the highway that was full of snow, rain, ice, and aggressive trucks. When I later returned to the highway to get to another area of Route 66, all of the weather issues were gone.
I’ll finish this post with a phrase written on a series of signs sprawled through a quiet section of Route 66:
You can drive
A Mile a Minute
But there is
No future in it
Pause! Avoid That
Rundown Feeling
P.S. On my excursion from the snow I stopped at the Route 66 Brewery. It was closed, but the staff inside (playing pool) let me in and I picked up some souvenirs.
Do you remember the dreams you had as a child, where suddenly you were with your cartoon character friend, walking through their homes and catching up on old times like you were friends forever? For some, those dreams include skipping through the woods with the Gummy Bears, to others, their nightly thoughts rest on dodging laser bullets with the cast of G.I. Joe. (Seriously, how do you dodge bullets traveling at the speed of light?)
Others, for decades, dreamt of playing with the Flinstones.
As I got off the highway and drove a local road to the Grand Canyon’s park entrance, I silently took note of the street’s predictable storefronts of fast food restaurants and budget hotel chains. Yet in between yawns and disgust for the loss of America’s regional uniqueness, I caught a glimpse of the oddest moment of my trip.
To my left, surrounded by muddy puddles and a multi-colored fence, stood the great land of Fred Flinstone.
The Flinstones themed park was built with rock-like structures, some representing a souvenir shop, others forming the bathrooms, and some just playing the part of randomly scattered boulders of a time when “Flinstones Land” could be real. Fake dinosaurs, replicas of the cartoon’s homes, and play rides for children lied behind the park’s entrance.
Being too old to pay for the park’s tour, but young enough to get excited enough to explore, I stepped out of my car and entered one of the stone structures. Stepping inside the door I noticed a massive tourist shop, full of Native American creations, Grand Canyon souvenirs, and Flinstones-themed merchandise. Behind the desk was the shop’s owner, an energetic and spontaneous speaking woman who watched over the site. Her energy led me to the back of the store, where a Flinstones diner hid, separated by the tourist shop via a real working fireplace. As I blocked out the sound of ceiling water dripping into flood buckets, I picked out my lunch and rested in a booth against a fictional stone wall.
***
The fictional Flinstones stop was a spontaneous occurrence on a dull road – one I may have driven past if I was in a rush and less wide-eyed towards the scenery. Later, while climbing through the Grand Canyon, I forgot all about this “dream land”, but the second I said goodbye to the park and drove by the canyon’s exit, I felt a longing to dream the dream again.
That new morning, refreshed from a good night’s sleep and clear of any anxiousness of locating the park, I returned to the shop, this time with a familiar welcome from Fred and Wilma’s real-world owner. When I asked her for egg whites she said she never heard of them, but luckily the chef knew how to cook the yolk-free concoction, and even volunteered to add milk to the eggs if desired. I was surprised again that morning when I noticed the coffee in the diner was only five cents (and self service). In addition, the diner had apple cinnamon jelly, a combination that makes so much sense that I wondered where it was all my life, and I enjoyed the new flavor as I spread it over my whole wheat toast.
Full from hunger and appreciative of my new jelly flavor, I rested in my seat and took in the heat from the Stone Age fireplace. Finally my surroundings were no longer a surprise, instead they were clues from a past dream floating by my eyes. As I sat I heard the owner ask a customer to name the cartoon’s pet saber-tooth tiger for a food discount. Neither he nor I knew the answer. In the corner of my eye I saw a grin from the saber-tooth tiger painted on the wall. I watched as the men sitting across from me rolled cigarettes on the table, with the light of the fireplace ricocheting off their heavy beards. I noticed the now dormant buckets lining the floor, no longer needed from capturing the rain the day before.
The lesson is to slow down and look around. There are surprises anywhere (even between two budget hotels), and not discovering surprises is almost as bad as not giving them a shot.
February 23, 2008
The progression on this trip is clearly worth noting. Journeys are generally meant to be linear, and this trip is no different. Yet linear usually implies heading towards one direction, in my case, this trip is heading in two opposite directions.
The speed limit on the highways inches up as I drive East. What started out as a 40 mph local road in Burbank hiked up to a 55 mph highway speed limit on the highway. The limit increased again to 65, then to 70, and finally in an apparently lawless land of the Wild West, the speed limit peaks at 75. 75 miles per hour is rarely considered a legal speed in my usual part of the country.
Yet as I drive East, the temperature falls just as drastically in the opposite direction. As I ventured out of California’s jurisdiction, LA’s casual temperature of 65 soon dropped to 40. My car’s thermometer later hit 36, and at that point I started to worry about snow.
I’m now in the Grand Canyon leaning against a fireplace in one of the Canyon’s lounges. The outdoors here are covered in ice, and I dare not look at the thermometer. As someone who tries to over-prepare for any event, I feel naked even with three sweaters on.
What goes up clearly comes down.
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