Another road trip

[kate_schaefer]

I'm back now.

Because I've had too many reminders of the shortness of life recently, I decided I'd say yes to everything that looked appealing to me for a while. Therefore I just drove cross-country with my friend Ellen and her two elderly cats (to which I am allergic) as they moved from Cleveland to San Francisco. It was as much fun as I thought it would be; it was much less physically challenging than I had feared. I took a lot more allergy drugs than usual. I am now an enthusiastic convert to NasalCrom and would cheerfully join Vonda in endorsing it any time.

Every road trip could be a story, a novel, a vignette. This one didn't have an obvious hook: two middle-aged women drive I-80, day after day. The car doesn't break down; the cats don't get sick; no hitchhikers are picked up or even encountered. We just talk or are silent, all day long, driving on a well-maintained freeway across America. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Iowa, Nebraska, Nebraska, Nebraska, forget about Colorado, Wyoming, Wyoming, Wyoming, Utaaaah, Nevada, Nevada, California.

Every road trip is essentially the same. This one will have stories about it eventually, but right now it's just road.

A month ago, I was on the train from Portland to Seattle with my Portland grandchildren, escorting them up here for a visit. Our seatmate was a young man on a month-long train trip around the US. He chatted with us pleasantly and encouraged the kids to keep working on their drawings. He was reading On the Road.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Welcome back!

[kateyule.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, Wyoming. I remember Wyoming. When we moved from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington -- five people, a dog, and a guinea pig, in a station wagon -- Wyoming was my day to be in the back back. Aaaall day. Staring out at Wyoming. I was underwhelmed.

Glad to hear you survived the cats OK.

[tamiam.livejournal.com]

Yay, road trip! Welcome back. Glad you got to go, and the cats weren't too bad.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It would be a real nostalgia trip for me to take I-80 from Cheyenne to, say, Omaha, and maybe all the way to Chicago. Repeated journeys of what first seemed unremittingly boring made it familiar and interesting. I developed friendly feelings for rest stops and sights along the way (Kopp Brothers' giant coffeepot, a Christian summer camp, a speedway), and even the cornfields seemed to develop visual interest. Much the same thing happened with our chronic drive from Fort Collins to Bandera, Texas.

Of course, now I'd be outraged. (Hey! Where's that billboard that used to be here?)

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

As we went through Wyoming, Ellen remarked that no doubt Lady Bird Johnson had been, on the whole, a positive influence on the highways of the United States, but it would have been nice to have a bit more information about the motels and restaurants in our future.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

The year one of my sisters had colitis, we were always on the lookout for bathrooms. In Oklahoma, you could go about 50 miles without finding one. One time we were driving in Texas, and the urgently needed comfort station turned out to be in Lady Bird Johnson State Park. Thank you, Lady Bird! You have a warm place in my sister's heart.

[weemallard.livejournal.com]

This sounds really sweet.

[tomaqmar.livejournal.com]

I'm flashing on a comment William Gibson recently made about how we're getting to the point where it will be impossible to occupy a space (on Earth) that hasn't been annotated. He was talking about Europe. I wonder if he's ever been to Wyoming.

You should be able to get the podcast of the interview here (http://www.nytimes.com/ref/multimedia/podcasts.html) if you have iTunes or the like.

--Documentation-Happy Tom