From Sea to Shining Sea
Look at all that nothing!
My son recently invited me to drive with him across the country. He was moving from Connecticut to San Francisco and, although I’m sure a part of him wanted me for company, a larger part of him wanted me to foot the bill for decent hotels along the way. So we did it. We attended his graduation near to one sea[1] drove three thousand miles across I-80, and made it to the other shining sea on the other side of the country a week later.
I apologize to the many friends who I did not stop and see along the way. We were focused on our mission and determined not to get waylaid.
That’s not to say we didn’t stop at all. We did. We stopped at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, which also seemed to have the World’s Largest Display of truck nuts for sale, in a range of sizes, materials and colors[2]. It also had a dentist’s office. We stopped at the Museum of the Prairie Person. We cried at the Matthew Shepard Memorial Bench in Wyoming. We lost money in Reno. We stopped at a gas station in a town so small that we bought a bumper sticker that said “Population one, plus whoever is in the parking lot.” We went to Donner Pass, where they sell beef jerky in the gift shop, which seemed wrong.
We saw a lot of wind turbines. They were graceful and silent.
I grew up in New York and I now live near Atlanta. Those two places are radically different in attitude and in the way they look. I’m used to going back and forth between them and getting whiplash from the change. I’ve gotten on airplanes and flown to California and Utah and Nevada and other places out west, looked out the airplane window and seen trees change to mountains change to desert change to plains change to beaches. But I’ve never experienced it in real time like that before. It was something else.
In New York and Atlanta, when you’re driving your car, whether you’re looking at trees or skyscrapers, the world isn’t much bigger than the size of your windshield. The horizon simply isn’t that far away.
As we drove from Ohio to Illinois, from Indiana to Illinois to Iowa to Nebraska, the world opened up. We’d go miles without seeing anything or anyone. Sometimes it was fun when the road was straight and the speed limit was 80.
There’s a lot of nothing in this country, folks, and much of it is in Nebraska. They don’t believe in shade there, mainly because there is nothing to provide it. Not a tree, not a tall building, not so much as a hill. The horizon seemed not just miles away but light years.
It was grueling enough making it across the country in the leather seats of a Ford Escape. The thought of walking beside a covered wagon without so much as a Taco Bell every two hundred miles made me shudder. I can’t imagine how bad the circumstances must have been for the pioneers to make them say, “Nope. Not staying here. Gonna keep on going.”
I’ve met all kinds of people in my life, and I enjoy learning about different cultures and ways of thinking. The diversity of thought in this country is what makes it great. It didn’t really occur to me until we made this drive that it isn’t just thought that makes us diverse—it’s landscape. If your world is hemmed in by trees and buildings, that’s got to shape your world view in a different way than if you step out of your house and you see nothing but scrub grass for miles in any direction. If the world is flat or mountainous, curvy or a straight line, that’s got to change your assumptions about other things, too.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. The faster you go, the more your perspective changes. Isn’t that what general relativity is, according to Einstein? I don’t know. I just know that my perspective shifted along with the landscape.
[1] He got his masters in oboe performance at the Yale School of Music, in case you were wondering, and also in case you weren’t wondering, because I will take any chance I can to brag about this accomplishment. Not that I did any of his classwork, but since I formed him in my womb out of little more than Arby’s curly fries and Cheetos, so to speak, I did do a good bit of the groundwork.
[2] Yes, I have a picture. No, I will not post it.
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