America is a Trip

A Road Trip

Last week, I drove Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia and North Carolina, and then the portion of US 129 in Tennessee known as the Tail of the Dragon. I’ve wanted to drive these roads for a long time; about fifteen years ago, I bought a Mini Cooper turbo because the woman I was dating lived in New York, and I wanted a car that was fun to drive and easy to park. That’s when I learned about the Tail of the Dragon, which has 318 curves in 11 miles of paved and banked road.

The Blue Ridge Parkway entry sign

We never took long road trips as kids. Mom drove us down the shore with the family once a year, paid for by my Uncle Paul. We’d go crabbing and my grandmother would cook them up, crack them in half, and toss them in pasta marinara. A few times, my mom found a family resort in the Poconos, or we’d stay at my great-uncle’s hunting chalet up there, but we never drove more than a few hours. Then in college, I found a copy of Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, and Roadfood by Jane and Michael Stern. I got the bug. The first long trip I took was after graduating college. I saved up overtime hours at the drug store where I worked, took a month off, and drove to New Orleans via Disneyland in my Mustang. A few years later, me and some friends rented a small RV and took it from Minneapolis to Burning Man, and because it only got 250 miles on a tank of gas, we made stops in some interesting places. One was a cafe in Echo, Utah, where the cashier rode a bicycle down the road to the town’s only gas station when you needed a fill-up.

But I never took the Mini to the Dragon. I had a lot of fun driving that car up and down Lookout Mountain in Georgia when friends got married up there. They used my Cooper as their getaway car, and by the time I got around to thinking about the Dragon again, I was married and we were going on trips together around the world. I wasn’t into driving in rallies, and the Mini was a bit of a lemon, so the idea of a road trip to put it through its paces seemed like a bad idea. I traded it in for a used Acura sedan, which took us to Savannah, and Sarah’s Honda took us all the way up to Prince Edward Island.

Harper’s Ferry as viewed from Jefferson Rock

I didn’t take the blue highways. Driving for pleasure was not in my blood. Most of the time, it still isn’t. But I’ve been trying to enjoy the journey. On our trips to Europe, I rented cars and drove all over Scotland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I rented a Jeep in Hawai’i and explored. Before the pandemic, we drove from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco for a wedding, and stopped at many places along the way. In Alaska, we piled into a cousin’s truck as they drove us from Anchorage to Seward and Denali.

Apps like Google Maps and Waze make it difficult to take the scenic route. You can set them to avoid highways, tolls, and ferries, but you can’t tell it to take the Blue Ridge Parkway. My reliance on these apps has made me forget that I keep a recent copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas in the car, and that I could pull over and find my way without the use of GPS. I kept them as a backup for this trip, but didn’t use them. My employer has a generous time-off policy, but unlike William Least Heat-Moon, I couldn’t take a sabbatical. Instead, I marked a lot of waypoints in Google Maps and decided to stop at as many as I felt like.

We took our time, and saw a lot of beautiful vistas, ate a lot of good food, and met a lot of nice people. I’ll be sharing those journeys over the next few weeks. We began in Harper’s Ferry, took that to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah, and then on to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We drove most of it, except during a thunderstorm where we switched to the highway from Floyd, Virginia—where I bought gas from the friendly folks at the G.J. Ingram & Sons country store—to Boone, North Carolina, a nice college town. Someday I’ll go back and drive the stretch of the Parkway we had to skip.

Standing Rock, on the Blue Ridge Parkway

The American obsession with cars has been on my mind lately, mostly thanks to

Antonia Malchik

and her book A Walking Life, which tells the tale of how we were sold the idea that cars mean freedom. In a land where so much property is private and we have no “freedom to roam” as they do in Scotland and Scandinavia, Antonia tells how the common land was taken from us in the name of freedom; how roads where children played, sellers hawked from carts, and people walked freely, were turned into high speed car lanes where humans are now “jaywalkers” who meet their deserved death if they step foot outside a crosswalk, and plenty of times when they don’t. I highly recommend her substack

On the Commons

for excellent reading on this subject and many others.

I’m also reading Car by Harry Crews, which takes on the American love of the automobile in his brilliant grand guignol fashion. As someone who enjoys driving his Subaru on and off-road—often to the chagrin and disbelief of my fellow nature lovers—I’m perfectly aware that I’ve bought into the American car myth. What kind of future do I think the car has, if we are to stop climate change? I wouldn’t mind riding fast trains, and renting electric cars or e-bikes to get around, instead of flying everywhere. The only thing that’s kept me from buying a cargo e-bike is the fact that riding one on the streets is too dangerous with all the cars here. People in beach towns get around with little electric golf carts when it’s nice out.

My favorite vista, at Wiseman’s View.

That being said, I have a bigger road trip planned this fall. One of the things we did in Harper’s Ferry was purchase an America the Beautiful annual National Parks pass, and pick up a Passport book. I’m not going to try to get as many park stamps as I can, but I’ve never visited Yellowstone, Crater Lake, the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite. And I’ll be passing by each of those parks… so I guess I’ll be seeing them, and sharing it with you.