Injuns and Covered Wagons
22:28 on Saturday, May 15, 2004 • Comment
One of the few distractions I’ve allowed myself these past few weeks is the casual planning of my summer roadtrip, which will start sometime during the first week of June (assuming seppuku isn’t in order after my exams). Poog and I both want the dogs at the wedding, and we don’t send them anywhere on planes, so in the car we go. Poog, unfortunately, has to stick around Santa Cruz a little longer, so it’ll just be me and the dogs wasting fossil fuels in our cross-country commute.
Longtime etherfarm fans know I love roadtrips, and that for the most part I do them exclusively on two-lane highways. I’ve driven up and down both coasts, across on US-2, US-50, US-80, and parts of Route 66. This time I’m cutting across on the orange line in the map above, the old Oregon Trail, which starts in Portland, Oregon as Hwy-20, then takes me straight to Chicago (and would take me to Boston had I the time).
My love for the amblin’ roadtrip stems from my bicycle touring days, when I’d load up my old Bianchi with camping gear and just leave for a few days, no destination in mind. When leaving Maine for graduate school in California, I had these grand designs for a summer cross-country cycle trip to Alaska, but that didn’t work out because Santa Cruz is such a crappy place to find housing and I consumed my summer trying to find a place to stay. I still have hopes for making the Maine->Alaska bicycle commute someday in the future, though I find as I get older that life tends to foil such grandiose schemes.
Those bicycle trips, however, made me realize that I hate the interstate highway system, which is designed primarily for commerce and not for travel or culture. Charles Kuralt once said, “Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” I can’t begin to describe the amazing things I’ve come across just wandering around the country on two-lane highways, but to the extent that small-town culture is still alive, the two-lane highway is in many ways the only means for accessing it. I doubt that kind of culture will survive for long, and I very much feel a sense of urgency about seeing these places before they’re swallowed up by Wal-Marts and Starbucks.
Anyway, I begin take my exams in a little over 48 hours and thought I’d daydream a bit by writing this entry. More in a week or so.
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