When visiting Los Angeles, they tell you, start at Venice Beach. I agree, the Pacific Ocean is as good a place as any to begin your tour. Or, better yet, to start a memorable journey. You never know where those westerlies will move you once you have turned your face away from their caress and feel them press like a firm hand upon your back.
Let go. You might just wind up anywhere.
Many a panorama glimpsed will make you gasp, especially those met unexpectedly as you round a bend in the road: mountains (sandstone, granite or cloaked in woods) rising impossibly high before you, valleys (desert or fertile) sweeping seemingly from sky to sky, relying on the mountains on either side to tell them where to stop.
You’ll wind your way through grimacing canyons, towering walls made grotesquely beautiful by the scars they still bear from the greater will of passing glaciers from long ago. You’ll encounter monuments in rock-strewn hills, some of them left behind by purposeless process, others hewn out of solid rock by the stronger will of human imagination. And in the cities, towns, farms and pastures met along the way one can see testament to human conquering, dreams and destiny — or at least fruitful occupation.
Flying to California from Toronto (via Cleveland), our epic cross-America road trip began at Venice Beach in Los Angeles.
If you are fortunate, as was I, you might come upon long-lost relatives on some high-desert plateau neither of you knew existed when you knew each other last, and find in this neutral place a looking glass with much sharper focus than would be found at home. You might find yourself longing to linger, but the traveler must be moving on.
This is where Offspring and I found ourselves a couple of weeks ago — father and son, celebrating a milestone birthday with a road trip across America: 4,210 miles in a silver Chevy Captiva, from sea to shining sea. Bonding time. Somewhere.
For all the giants-for-the-moment, the glitter and panache L.A. teases with, I cannot say we were unhappy to feel the hand of wind spread upon our backs, pushing us out of the valley where angels sheepishly tread to places the veil of smoldering smog cannot go.
Captivating desert land in California.
We traversed the deadly desert in a single day, the hot breath of wind upon our napes announcing its desire to keep moving — a strong will, yes, but not quite enough to convince us to complete the trek to Las Vegas in less than three times the average duration of such a crossing. We arrived just in time for a long-awaited magic show, the illusory allure of the desert just experienced a satisfactory consolation should this one bomb.
It didn’t. Penn and Teller puzzle, but never disappoint.
A night of fleeting opulence was followed by a new day of blistering heat, the near due-North course belied by enduring triple-digit temperatures. Crossing a craggy corner of Arizona we climbed the spine of Utah, more idly curious perhaps than were the westbound pilgrims of an earlier time, whose endurance defined these desert places. They should not have been surprised to find their Promised Land would be thus, I was moved to think, nor were we to discover the opulence in St. George and Salt Lake City dedicated to loftier ideals than that found in Vegas, now grown distant.
The Grand Tetons were a major attraction for the photographer in us.
We then climbed up onto Idaho, the present desert all but fully fallen away, and negotiated successfully a rendezvous with relatives, where the years, in turn, soon fell away. We gathered ourselves up well after midnight, not having noticed until then the light and heat had also vanished with the hours. Reluctantly, I say for both of us, we stacked the pieces of our selves that would be continuing on into the jalopy for a ride through darkness into some enchanted forest in Wyoming.
Morning came: a new day, with new worlds in tow. Beneath mountains clad in evergreens, the two of us trembled in short pants and hoped for summer heat restored as we fired away with cameras to capture untamed mountains, and to freeze the roiled Snake River’s journey in this moment for all time. (I might add, the California license plate on our Captiva did wonders to excuse the out-of-place shorts in 60s mountain air for any locals who thought us foolish.)
Mount Rushmore was a richly satisfying experience.
Soon we would be sweeping across the plains, hastened as much by empty roads as by wind or purpose of destination. And herds of cows would gain the attention of our lenses — because they were there, grazing in an immense pasture underneath an even bigger sky, more so than because we had the perfect frame in mind, or the perfect wall on which to hang it.
And we filed into memory banks glimpses of the barren wasteland and the badlands too, just as surely as we were leaving pieces of ourselves behind — imprints left on each moment and place where we’d crouched behind cameras in Death Valley, sweltered on the strip in Vegas, gazed across a reflecting pool in Salt Lake City, sat around a welcoming table in Idaho Falls and hunched over sandwiches at Tammy’s Coffee Haus in the old west town of Dubois in Wyoming. Even Nebraska cows got up to watch each time we stopped and set up photography gear — some even coming over for a closer look — and thus the imprint was again exchanged.
We made friends on the road in South Dakota — or were at least tolerated! Cows, especially those we found in Utah and in the vast pastures of Nebraska, were far more accommodating.
Snaking around purposeful rivers onto places where the buffalo still roam, a rugged curtain of maturing mountains slicing frigid air on the left, we let ourselves be lost for a season or two in the timeless wonder of someone else’s picture puzzle, or someone else’s legacy. And once the Grand Tetons and Devil’s Tower and Mount Rushmore (and Crazy Horse, too) had passed safely through our lenses, we were ready then for corn and wheat and interstates, and cities like Topeka, Kansas City and St. Louis, the latter with its gleaming Gateway Arch. Ready too for the reverent solace of a pioneer graveyard at the duly enshrined site of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home in Indiana. (His mother is buried here.)
Evening falls on downtown St. Louis, viewed through a window atop the Gateway Arch.
Moving east, across the deceptively mighty Mississippi and through the gateway to places where population exists in earnest — but still in the heartland — we came upon a farmer (or he upon us) as we were taking photographs in his cornfields. Startled perhaps, and defensive too, we nevertheless reported for confession when he stopped his pickup truck on the gravel road and wondered from the open window what we were taking pictures of. A corny joke and a little grin as he nodded toward our California license plate followed, and his good humor brought a measurable degree of relief. We all waved so long as he drove off up the road, the relationship having satisfied itself with a single, pleasant exchange.
A ruggedly rural Baptist church on a a hillside in Hilton Village, West Virginia.
East of the heartland is the America we know from experience; west the one we know from legend. Experience has supplanted legend in the east, and so we found ourselves embracing the familiar wooded Appalachian hills that already owned so many of our footsteps, as Indiana rolled into Kentucky and then West Virginia reached out to fold itself around us. Virginia’s sweeping Shenandoah Valley, we agreed, was not unlike some valleys we’d beheld in Utah, except the hills that frame it are clothed in pine — and in familiarity.
On the eighth day we made it to Maryland’s shores, to see the morning sun shimmer in welcome dance upon the Atlantic waters tucked inside Chesapeake Bay, and to make good on our commitment: Pacific to Atlantic.
Heading back to Washington, where we’d spent the final night, we agreed the city is deserving of a second look.
Our journey came to an end when we stepped into Atlantic waters in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.
There we would watch the sun dance upon another water: the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, the U.S. Capitol spread out before it. A wind had come up, scuttling best-laid photo plans. It was not a strong wind, as in the kind that prods you onward. Instead, it moved gentle across your face, the kind that gives you a chance to pause and … well … reflect, when you might have otherwise scurried off in search of shade.
Obvious and raw politics aside, Washington has its own allure, the way it fences off from vulgar footfall the nation’s highest monuments and muniments, and too succeeds in owning the aura of personhood for every other national monument and symbol lifted up across the land. (The National Mall itself was designed to be a dignified and symbolic setting for the governmental structures, museums and national memorials surrounding it.)
One final moment to reflect, near the U.S. Capitol.
The lyrics of the anthem that holds a nation together through thick and thin make literal sense not far from here, and yet the song resounds off every canyon wall we’d passed through. Sung it is as well, and with conviction, across that great west plain, and by the thousands when they gather for baseball and hockey in the stadia we looked down upon from the Gateway Arch. Just as surely, it rests readily on the lips of the jolly farmer from Illinois and the woman at the Golden Corral in Harrisonburg, Va., who told us on the afternoon of July 4 how she was counting down the hours to the fireworks show.
I found myself realizing, as I sat beside the Reflecting Pool (in spite of choppy waters that would not mirror), that it is not the vestiges of power one finds here that will be held in vivid memory beyond the day. It is, instead, the wonders near and far that this city oversees.
And here it was our epic road trip ended: from sea to sea — to see.