The American Road Trip is an experience that I think every American should have. It helps you to understand where you come from.
For our honeymoon my wife and I drove to from Marceline Missouri to Estes Park, Colorado, and then to our new home in Columbia Missouri. We drove through Nebraska on our way there, stayed in Estes 3 nights, and then drove through Kansas on our way back.
The trip was good in all respects. Company, weather, length, and planning were all ideal.
On our wedding night we stayed in a motel in Marceline. Marceline was the boyhood home of Walt Disney and they are very proud of that fact. It has become a tourist spot for adult Disney fans. Some of the streets in Disneyland are modeled after the downtown of Marceline. It's a unique place, feels sometimes podunk and sometimes very cutesy.
I like motels. They're functional and cozy. Everything is taken care of, and you feel more important than you do in a big motel.
We got up early. It was Sunday and we tried to get some breakfast food at a gas station, but their ovens were broken. Then we tried a local diner, but it was closed until that afternoon, after church. So we did what we could and got ham sandwich material from the dollar store and coffee and donuts from a shop across from the motel. We were both hungover and needed the good food and coffee.
After church we hit the road, in this case Hwy 36. You can take it all the way to the Rockies but it's faster to take I-80 once you hit the west end of Missouri. Northern Missouri is beautiful landscape, all the hills and plains and fields and trees merge together in all the right ways.
Nebraska was fantastically windy. A gust would hit a semi and it would veer halfway into the other lane. It was dark and cloudy. There was no scenery in Nebraska, just an ocean of crop extending into the horizon. There is no civilization between major cities. The cities themselves are full of "stroads", totally inhospitable to walking or hanging outside in a leisurely fashion. You are either supposed to be in a hotel, restaurant, or on the road. It's a place made for the automobile and the interstate, all businesses revolve around travellers passing through.
We stopped in North Platte, and it fit the pattern described. Any local joints we could find to eat were novelty branded and next to hotels. The rest is franchise food. Our motel was local, though, and the room was cozy and the staff was friendly and seemed sincere.
At first Nebraska made me feel uneasy but I think my understanding now is that flyover country has an important part of the American ecosystem. Like the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings. It's supposed to be a stop at on the Hero's Journey. Nothing is supposed to happen there; no one wants anything to happen there. The land is not hospitable, so the people have to be. They exist to make you feel comfortable and at home and then send you on your way. A noble place.
In the morning we stopped at a local diner for breakfast. It was good, an old style one made of stainless steel. The food was filling and energizing and hit like manna from Heaven. The coffee hit like the Elixir of Life.
The mountains come quite suddenly. There is little transition from plains to hill country, and little from hill country to the Rockies. They appear in fog in the distance and then you are driving through a valley.
Estes Park sits at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park and has another Disneyland type downtown. Most of the place is fake and feels like a plastic Barbie town. But the mountains are honest and constantly there. They feel like they are hiding something, but then again they don't say anything with words so what are they supposed to do.
The mountains have a strange spirituality. They are massive and mostly useless. Literally, they are largely ornamental. And there is no end. The thing that shocked me the most is how much they just keep going. You can spend a week, maybe a lifetime wandering there, and never see the end of them.
We saw a helicopter flying around the park, apparently delivering supplies around, and I thought about how much I would prefer to be in it. Then the place would stop being something I was in, and start being something I could observe. Something I could analyze, act in, and know. Instead I was on equal footing with an elk or a marmot or a snake. Really they had better footing than me.
The mountains never made me feel comfortable. They felt uncivilized. And the city felt disengenuous. The highlight of the trip was when Rhéa and I went to a bookstore in Estes (Cliffhanger), and then went to another bookstore in a little Colorado town on the way back home. In total we bought 50-odd books for about $200, and the old ladies who worked at both of them were pleased to see a young couple doing such a thing.
On the way home we also stopped at the Cathedral of the Plains in Victoria, Kansas, AKA St. Fidelis Basilica. It's quite beautiful and the town is very homey. The landscape in Kansas is excellent and the church fits it well. As it should, a local outside the church informed me that all the limestone of the place was taken just 8 miles south of town. When the place was built all the parishoners were required to transport at least a few wagonfulls.
The whole trip I felt a deep sense of Americanism. A sense of possibility, of home, and of authenticity. When Rhéa and I were towards the top of one of the trails, I thought about old eastern tropes where a sage sits at the top of a mountain and dispenses wisdom that you could've had all along, had you just pondered it at the bottom of the hill. And I thought it'd be suiting if at the top of the Rockies, there was an old-style stainless steel diner like the one we ate at in Nebraska. Just a place that makes you feel comfortable in an intimidating landscape. No matter who you are and at any hour of the day, they will serve you pancakes and bacon and eggs and refill your coffee a dozen times at no extra cost. And you spend your proper time there until there's nothing else for you to do so you go back down to work and family and civilization.
I don't like travelling much. At least not the way most do it. I don't like the downtowns and I don't particularly like the mountains. There's nothing to do but look at "gawk", as the locals in the Ozarks say. And anything you do for recreation can be done somewhere else, roughly speaking. But I like the sense of bigness it gave me, the sense that there's a lot of America out there, and everywhere they're all doing their job and playing their part in a big act.
I don't like nostalgia and I don't like yearning, though I do it a lot. It's a vice of mine. Instead of yearning, it's a lot better to put yourself to action and do something in the day to day, and enrich the lives of people you love. That's the American Way. And so there's something kind of beautiful about there being a tourist trap town in this deeply intimidating, spiritual place. There's a McDonald's in Estes. If I wanted to I could've had a Big Mac in the mountains. Why not? We had pizza in the mountains: "replenish the earth, and subdue it."
Anyway, that's what I want to do with my life: build something that people can count on to get them out of their heads, something that displays truth and unpretentiousness (an easier way to pursue humility), something that gives people comfort and makes them feel like they're in civilization.
He sat at the counter with the others,
He ordered, and the food arrived.
The meal was particularly good,
And the coffee.
The waitress was unlike the women he had known.
She was unaffected; there was a natural humor which came from her.
The fry cook said crazy things, the diswasher in the back
Laughed, a good, clean, pleasant laugh.
The young man watched the snow through the windows.
He wanted to stay in that cafe forever
The curious feeling swam through him
That everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful there.
- Charles Bukowski, Nirvana
