On the road (never) again
Cross-country trips have lost their romance and spirit of adventure.
By Robert Sullivanfrom the June 29, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
The summer driving trip – the pack the kids in the car and set out for the West or the East or possibly the Grand Canyon trip – is once again in jeopardy.
It's been endangered before, especially during the first energy crises in 1973 and 1979, when people spent good portions of their vacation lined up at the gas station. But this time, the death of the car-bound family vacation feels real to me. (It feels real to some tourist destinations, such as Aspen, Colo., where tourism officials are offering free parking, free bicycle rentals, and a voucher for $50 worth of free gas.) Thus, as a 17-year veteran of epic car trips, I'm officially hanging up my cross-country driving hat and looking back, like an obituary writer, on the cross-country summer vacation.
Though it is difficult to discern it through the clutter of portable DVD players and GPS devices that today accompanies the typical long- or even short-distance driver, the cross-country trip was born about the time the idea of America was born, mostly in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, who sponsored several failed crossings before Lewis and Clark finally made it all the way to the Pacific.
For Jefferson, the idea was this: He who mapped it and described it in journals would own it. Next came the stagecoach, described by Mark Twain in his travel adventure "Roughing It" this way: "How we suffered, suffered, suffered! We sat absorbed and motionless through four long hours. Hunger asserted itself, but there was nothing to eat. "
As soon as the railroad laid tracks across America, railroad owners employed public relations teams to plant articles about the restorative powers of the scenic viewpoints along the line. Montana was the new Switzerland and Santa Fe, N.M., the new Orient. "See America First" went the campaign line, hand in hand with the revolution in landscape painting that saw God in the American landscape; Manifest Destiny in the view from the dining car.
The automobile arrived as an antidote to the urban, factory-fueled culture that produced it; drive a car and you restored your soul, your city-weakened spirit. Touring the countryside, the first cars were towed out of mud by farmers; in the 1920s, cars camped anywhere, to the further ire of farmers; then car camps on the edge of town became car parks, then mo-tels, then motels. Roads were mostly for farmers to get vegetables to market; parkways were for tourists.
Problematically, people began to go everywhere and do everything with cars. We got more and faster roads, roads that quickly seemed too few and too slow.
By 1956, when construction began on the first interstates, these autobahn-inspired roads offered the promise of access to a cross-country system of cloverleafs and limited-access expressways. It meant freedom from traffic. It meant going anywhere at any time.
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