America and the Road to wherever...

Greetings Geekranters!

On all my travels that make up my sojourn through this, the land of my blessed exile, it is an invariable occurrence that somewhere along the myriad steps of every journey I will be struck by just how much the “Open Road” is an integral part of the American experience.

It might sound fanciful but it really can feel like somewhere, out there along that lonesome highway and the impossibly varied landscapes it runs through lies the soul of America, or a part of it at least.

Musicians, artists, poets, and other creative types of the first two centuries or so of the American experience have always found inspiration either in the road or in the nature that borders it.

Thus Springsteen in moments of longing speaks of “driving to the mansions of glory in the suicide machines” and Bob Dylan’s songs always seem to be mini-plays, distractions while journeying from place to another. Thoreau, Emerson and Muir need to lose themselves in the majestic enormity and verdant tranquility of the woods and wilderness.

 Jack Kerouac finds his true identity not in the cities of the East or West Coast but in the tarmacadamed expanse connecting them. Samuel Clemens earns a living as a young man on the mighty Mississippi, the aquatic highway of its day, years later, when he becomes a writer, he borrows the riverboat pilots depth reading of Mark Twain as a pen name.

Somewhere in a hidden valley, Laura Ingalls Wilder remembers the history of the pioneer days of the U.S.A and the rest of the nation falls in love with her memories. No one ever forgets that Little House on the Prairie. 

Lonesome roads apparently going nowhere, railroad goods yards still haunted by the ghosts of old prospectors heading out to the West to find their fortune and the footsteps of a thousand hobos who hung on to the boxcars and cabooses and slept beneath the stars. Secret valleys and one horse towns all lying hidden round the next corner of the trail and highway, river and railroad.

The hustle and bustle of the city might fill the pages of Superman comics but it is only in Kansas, in the centre of the great and unknowable vastness that is the North American continent, that Clark Kent is adopted and raised.

The silver screen might be full of stories of the naked city, bright lights and broken dreams; Hollywood selling a metropolis to the children of a million small towns from Waunakee, Wisconsin, to Wetwang, East Yorkshire but so much of America still seems to long for a empty road, leading to a log cabin by a lake in the middle of nowhere.

Tourists come from all across the globe, spending billions every year to have dinner with Beauty and Beast in Disneyland, to make marriage proposals atop the Empire State Building, to gaze upon the homes of the stars and put their hands in the palm prints of long dead film stars in some grubby pavement in southern California. Maybe America sells fantastical urban metropolises and purpose built funhouses stretching to the horizon under a subtropical sun, but it seems to me that so much of its people still long for the awe inspiring loneliness of the wilderness and the open road.

The backroads and far-flung corners of “America, the Beautiful” are intricate enough and contain more than a full measure of wonder to spend a lifetime getting lost in and many people have and still do, becoming ramblers along an ever more tranquil trail.

In my time here so far, I have seen and paddled in the Pacific Ocean, swum and got out of my depth in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, driven past buffalo in the dying half-light of dusk on the edge of the Badlands. I have seen bald eagles make their nests high above the meandering Mississippi and searched for the oily banana slug in the dense redwoods of California. Hiked with my wife and dog to hidden roaring waterfalls in the iron rich mountains of the Minnesotan North Shore.

There always seems to be something to find tucked around the next bend in the road. 

Maybe its one of the reasons that I feel driven to write the things that I do, to try to understand the natural beauty of this country and the way that humanity has chosen to put its stamp on it. Sometimes it also seems to be to ask whether there is a tension between the wilderness and the road, the country and the city, the bustling metropolis and the sleepy village. To consider whether this tension is at the heart of so many of America’s strengths and weaknesses.

Is America a lady of liberty whose soul is torn in two? Caught between the rural simplicity of its past and a dream of an urbanised future? Do these places represent two different sides to this nation, two ways towards tomorrow’s realities, two streams issuing from the same headwater, endlessly travelling more and more separately?

 Maybe that’s what makes living here so fascinating for this is, after all, the only nation on this earth built solely on a dream and an idea. Perhaps every citizen of this country sees that dream as something different personally and possibly their individual is what lies undiscovered down the next winding turn in the road.

    Perhaps its okay I ask the questions, its possible that I'm taking too much upon myself, but this nation still entices, still seems to demand questions be asked of it, like an unsolvable riddle or an untouchable beauty; so if you don’t mind my notebook will come to every hidden cove and mountain lake, diner apple pie and New York Cheesecake and I’ll try to understand. Its possible I'll find a dream or two out there too.