BIGFORK, Mont. – I write these words early in a darkened motel room, 2,460 miles from home, eight hours east of Seattle and 45 minutes south of Glacier National Park. Five other people sleep around me: my wife and four children, crammed together on queen-size beds, an air mattress, and a pack-and-play. These were our terms for the last 16 nights we’ve spent claiming an important American birthright: the westward migration by minibus, the great cross-country drive.
In “The Hunt for Red October,” that classic of late Cold War Americana, one of the defected Soviet submarine officers, played by Sam Neill, talks about his future as a free American – living in Montana with a pickup truck or “possibly even driving a ‘recreational vehicle’ and driving ‘state to state’ without ‘papers’. Late in the film, the character is shot, and dying, he mutters, “I would have loved to see Montana.”
Whatever flaws there may be in our children’s education, at least our children have now seen Montana—and before that, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota and so on backwards through the Midwest to our distant hobbit homeland of Connecticut. By the time you read this, assuming I’m not recruited into a survival group somewhere north of Coeur d’Alene, they’ll have seen Idaho and Washington, too.
More specifically, they’ve seen the Pittsburgh Zoo and the golden dome at Notre Dame (in a 15-minute leg-stretch stop), looked down on Chicago from a skyscraper, and plunged their feet into Lake Michigan. They lost hours in a water park in Minnesota, roamed the prairie where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in the later “Little House” books, saw Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial, baked in the Badlands, and dodged lightning around Devil’s Tower, bathed in hot springs and dug for dinosaur bones in Thermopolis, Wyo., observed geysers and grizzly bears in Yellowstone and a particularly unwary beaver in Glacier National Park, and gazed wide-eyed at home prices in Bozeman, Mont.
OK, the latter were actually their parents; the kids were busy with overpriced burgers as we pondered the influx of money to ‘Boz Angeles’. Like a good journalist, I’ve tried to gather string for columns on this trip, and questions of migration, density, and development loom as you traverse the (arguably) underpopulated West—the size of the billboard that greets visitors in Cody, Wyo. , read “Don’t California Our Cody.”
But for this column, with our journey not yet complete, I’d like to venture two general observations about America on a grand scale—banal perhaps, but I’m taking that risk.
The first is a sense of wonder at the quiet availability of sights and spectacles on the western roads. I’ve read all the stories about rising US travel and overcrowded national parks, but the only real sticking point we encountered was at Glacier, where the high roads were closed by snow and everyone was pushed onto the same few trails. And every place we stopped with a degree less fame than the major national parks—like South Dakota’s beautiful Custer State Park or the Thermopolis hot springs—was extraordinarily empty. There were probably 20 people under the wild, impossible shadow of Devil’s Tower the night we went up.
Available doesn’t mean perfectly accessible, of course: Even when we’re stuffed into motel rooms, we’ve dropped a pretty penny just on gas alone, and spent day after day of hour-long rides trying to teach the kids American presidents (we’re stuck after Lincoln, predictably) and realizing that the 2-year-old knows some of the inappropriate parts of “Hamilton” isn’t an experience for everyone. But if you’re used to the crowded spots of the coast, you should know that it really all melts away – and not just in cornfields or meadows or desert, but in a landscape full of places made for travelers, that offer immediate rewards for even the most casual visitor.
This ties in with the second observation, namely the intense difference between experiencing America as a geographic entity, a continental empire, and experiencing America as a virtual landscape, through the screens and apps through which we increasingly encounter each other.
The comparison doesn’t align well with virtual America, which feels crowded and exhausting, a thousand people yelling at each other in a mid-sized hotel ballroom. I’m not saying that crossing physical America exposes the online version as “unreal,” as online life is very real in its own way, and our national parks and roadside attractions aren’t where most Americans spend their time. lead daily life. lives.
But the state-to-state spaciousness of this country, its complexity and diversity and simple wildness, still feels like a potential asset to be contrasted with the claustrophobia of small-screen politics and cultural wars—an outlet that not every divided society can enjoy. enjoy, a way to escape and reinvent that the internet has limited, but has not yet eliminated.
Seeing America gives you hope for America. Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have eight hours ahead of me in an overcrowded minivan.
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