Robert Sullivan - Cross Country: Fifteen Years and 90,000 Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark

Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles

on the Roads and Interstates of America

with Lewis and Clark,

a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van,

Emily Post, Jack Kerouac,

My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids,

and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant

Robert Sullivan

for Louise and Sam

WERE OFF. Were off across America. Were in the car and were driving and were not turning around, even though we usually do, even though we probably have forgotten something. Were crossing the country. Were not the first people to do it, not by a long shot, obviously. Theres Lewis and Clark, though they certainly werent first, even if people think they wereeven if they thought they were. There are the pioneers in their covered wagons, the wagons that in river crossings were used as boats, the wagons that were stuffed with belongings, just like our car is today. There are the very first people to cross the country in the automobile: the people who, in the early 1900s, thought of driving as a kind of daredevil adventure, as something more akin to camping or hiking or hang gliding, as opposed to what we think of it today (i.e., just getting in the car). And then there are the great underground cross-country racers of the 1970s: the drivers who fought to prevent driving from becoming rote, the otherwise pretty conservative automobile anarchists who, when the price of gas went through the roof, were slowed but not halted, who had to contend with lower and lower speed limits, with cops, with angry truckers. (Truckers, of course, are the subset of cross-country drivers who cross the country all the time, every day.) Yes, we are just the latest in the long list of transcontinentalists. We are gasoline-powered footnotes in the travel- and adventure-related annals of a nation that has as its greatest public works project an ever-expanding system of roads, a crisscross and circling of roads that keeps it from ever sitting still.

Were packed in, the kids in the back, the parents in front, our stuff filling the trunk, piled up around our knees. In our hearts, were excited. Were excited in the part of our hearts that knows three thousand miles is doable, a snap, three or four or, longest-case scenario, five days, which is about as much time as we havelike many Americans, we have stuff to do, stuff to deal withand about as much time as we can stand. In our hearts, were also weary. Were weary in the part that has done this before, that knows three thousand miles is a long, long way, that has been out late at night on a dark road when our eyes have been trying to stay awake and our eyes only wish like all the rest of our tired bodies that they were not driving anymore. We are about to, first, drive on some of Americas less-laned roads, some of the not-so-super highways, but we are mostly going to drive on its many many-laned interstates, on the main roads, along with everybody else.

I know that this seems, to many Americans, like the wrong way to go. In our time driving across the country, we have met Americans who posed the following question: Dont you want to see the real America?

THE REAL AMERICA IS ALSO SOMETIMES known as back-roads America or the heart of America or Americas heartland or, in shorthand, America. This is the America that is calculatedly heartwarming, represented by people who are purported to symbolize Americapeople who are Platonic ideals of Americans: a lobsterman from Maine, a logger from Oregon, a rancher from Texas, the last small farmer living in Missouri.

That America still exists, to some extent: I have seen a pie on the counter of a diner in Wisconsin that caused the phrase real America to ring in my head and that also made me hungry. I have driven on roads in Missouri where, instead of giant, commercially produced signs advertising chain restaurants and chain motels, there were homemade signs advertising organic cattle and wildflowers and signs praising coroners hoping to be reelected, to be allowed one more term to investigate the local dead. You can see that America, without too much extra effort, but it is a kind of antique-shop America. Its an America that appears in magazines alongside recipes; its the America where presidential candidates are televised.

But the real America is also the America that Americans generally think they are not seeing on the roads they use to cross the countryor for that matter, on the roads they use to commute to work in Chicago or while leaving Saint Louis to visit their in-laws in Omaha or while driving on I-70, formerly Route 66. It seems to me that the real America is the farthest thing from peoples minds when they are stopping for some fast food on I-5 in between Los Angeles and San Diego, much less driving from the East Coast to the West. But there it is, the real America, right there. For my part, I have seen America on the superhighways all through my years on the road, traveled its present and looked into its past, and today, grandparents waving good-bye at the window and the kids waving back, were setting off to see it again.

IN THE ROADS OF AMERICA is the history of America. See the nation grow from an unmapped, just-purchased spread of western land to a wagon-train-crossed compilation of territories, to states bound by a few muddy highways, to the modern United States wired with interstates. In the interstates are traces of our first explorations, our impenetrable mountain passes, our old Santa Fe Trail, our pioneers path to Oregon, our race to Californias gold, our first car-happy and nation-spanning private highways. And in the interstates are the paths toward the next America, the one that is always under construction.

See those first roads through young America, those tentative explorations into the unknown, as soldiers and surveyors, trappers and miners push into a West unexplored by white Americans. Then, America breaks away from its eastern beginnings, its coastal fringe: wagon trains lead herds of people to settle the prairies and the plains, to mine the mountains, to farm the fields and work the ranches-to-be. With its national maturation, America champions what it then called Good Roads, the first highways, the aesthetically pleasing parkways that were pleasant to drive, that were the automotive equivalent of a Sunday-afternoon stroll. Then, in the 1950s, America begins its interstate highway system, which itself in turn becomes America, its central arteries, its suburb-expanding and city-smashing nervous system. The interstate system is the centrally calculated roadway of empire, of inland empire, that spawned and fed the military-industrial complex so feared by the interstates instigator, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and which also spawned and fed the consumption of fast food, not to mention the automobile industry. Out of this middle age rose the beat poets, who were the midlife crisis of America, who rebelled against the road by taking to it, who did not know that one day their anticorporate Americanism would be taken up by American corporations in roadside ads for mass-produced consumer products that sometimes even featured beat poets. In the fifties and sixties and seventies, interstates destroyed cities and nourished the suburbs, which began expanding forever and ever into what was once the countryside, and then America woke up one day to find that crossing the countrythat epic accomplishment that was a dream of Americas founders, that was a death-defying feat for the earliest trappers and settlers and explorers, that later was a kick, the thing to do just for the sake of doing it, for a generation of hipsters and, subsequently, hippieswas simple, a snap.