The Road

Location:
United States

By Michael O'Connor

The Road

By Michael O’Connor

Americans love The Road. Not a road, or some road. Not that predictable course past the familiar and mundane that takes us to work or school, to the grocery store or dentist’s office. I’m talking about that long empty stretch of blacktop that leads to uncertainty. I’m talking about Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck, every car commercial or road trip movie ever produced, and nearly every song of rebellion or escape. The Road is that quintessential American setting, as romantic and elusive as The Old West, revered by millions but witnessed by only the lucky few. It is pavement personified, fraught with dangers and thrills, mysteries and freedom.

But could such a mythical place actually exist in a driving culture accustomed to soulless interstate highways connected to cookie cutter suburbs? I had thought The Road was dead and buried, if it ever even existed at all, when I began planning my 6,000 mile drive across the country. I was moving from the East Coast to the West to exercise my cramped New York City muscles. After spending six years there without a car, I wasn’t feeling so much like the proverbial rat in the polluted maze, but rather like the cheese placed in the heart of that labyrinth: stuck in one place, just waiting for that furry rodent to finish me off. After enduring 9/11, the blackout, the transit strike, and my Brooklyn neighborhood of grimy hair salons and run-down laundromats, I had a drive to drive, and watch my past disappear in the rearview mirror.

Fortunately, The Road was not the cultural illusion I’d feared. Rather, it was hidden in plain sight, away from I-This or I-That, stretched out along the Carolina coast, across the backwoods and swamps of Georgia and Alabama, hugging the mighty Mississippi River as it traversed catfish farms and endless flat fields of cotton and soybeans, and even when it disappeared, as in Tennessee and Missouri, there were pockets here and there; in western Kentucky, it led up winding hills and around curvaceous villages, and in southern Illinois, it revealed large empty meadows followed by small busy towns devoted to Popeye and Superman.

But it really blossomed in the Southwest. Starting along Route 66 in Oklahoma, the terrain changed almost instantaneously. The land spread out like a massive pancake pulled taut in every direction, flat and treeless, and the sky appeared from behind its usual hiding nook, broad and majestic. I was unprepared for its scope. I tried taking photos, but no shot could capture the sky’s sheer immensity nor the gratifying sensation of open land and free space. I thought back to the $1400 closets they call apartments in Manhattan, to the cramped subway cars, the city parks where every bench and table and chair is occupied, and busy streets where “rubbing elbows” is not just a figure of speech, but an awkward reality that has nothing to do with friendly relations. When I climbed out of my car on the side of The Road, I watched the land extend to infinity in both directions and when I reached out as far as I could, my hands touched nothing except empty, virgin air.

From that point on, the Road was my personal gateway to the dusty plains of the Panhandle, across the extraterrestrial landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona, and to the most isolating, deserted tracts of Nevada. I kept the windows rolled all the way down and the music loud at times when I needed a friend. With my cruise control activated, I watched worlds pass around me.

The Road became my trip more than any stop along the way. It wasn’t the course to reach destinations; it was the destination. It was wind in the hair, sun in the face, and speed, movement, escape. It was seeing towns I did not want to live in and then watching them disappear behind me. And it was that rare thrill of an unpredictable route, alien territory, and the fear of a wrong turn, of being lost on an empty road a hundred miles from civilization without a cell phone signal.

Some people would call that masochism.

They can stick to their interstate.