Across USA - The Call of the Road
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Image: Bernd Schuler/ Corbis
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oad trip.” That’s all I needed to say to my friend Eileen. A week later, we piled into my 1986 Toyota Camry and headed out of Los Angeles. Destination: Home, Chicago, 2,112 miles away. The Camry was as old as I was — in fact, a mechanic had pronounced it incapable of making the trip — but there had been no question of whether I would take it with me.
The cult of the road trip in America boils down to this: We love our automobiles. A mere 8 percent of us don’t own a car. When automobiles first came out in the early 1900s, critics said it would be better to just get yourself a horse. But, as American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke has pointed out, the automobile did get a horse for everybody. My Camry was my horse, and I loved it deeply, for its automatic seatbelts, deep furry seats, cassette tape player, and the right-hand window that could only roll down halfway.
H. Nelson Jackson, a San Francisco doctor, was another American who really loved his car. In 1903, he bet his friends that he could drive his two-cylinder Winston Automobile (he called it “Vermont”) all the way across the country.
At that time, the only modes of travel were horses and railroads. No one had ever done a cross-country road trip before. He set off with a friend who doubled as a mechanic, and a dog named Bud. Vermont got a gas leak in Oregon. They had to drag the car at one point, get it towed by a horse at another. But 63 days later, Jackson smugly collected his $50 bet.
The Great American Road Trip as it exists today is bound to be an adventure. The weird people you meet and the heartland food, the changing landscape, the car troubles, figuring out maps and managing the little money you have. And singing along to the music, loud, the whole way.
We hoped to make it from LA to Chicago in three days. That is, if we made it at all. Neither of us said it, but I knew we both thought the Camry wouldn’t make it. So when we drove the first 270 miles from LA to Las Vegas without a hitch, we laughed, delighted to be wrong.
Around the time Jackson finished his cross-country road trip, Henry Ford’s Model T cars started rolling off his famous assembly lines; more than 15 million from 1909 to 1927. Americans were happy to ditch the railroads for their own personal horse. The automobile became a member of the family. Like Jackson, Americans gave their cars names; I christened my Camry “La Cienega”, after a street I loved in Los Angeles.
Driving La Cienega out of Las Vegas, Eileen and I imagined ourselves like the family in Grapes of Wrath, but setting out in the opposite direction, back from California, because we’d already seen the Promised Land. Or like Dean Moriarty and Sal in On the Road, though we didn’t have the guts to try the drugs or antics they did. No, we decided, we were more like Thelma and Louise. Two young women trying to escape our lives with a little bit of adventure.
Ah, adventure. As we entered Death Valley, the lowest, driest, hottest place in all of North America, La Cienega began to tremble. We should have known she couldn’t take the desert heat; we could have driven around it. But we were determined to take the speedy 15-70-76-80 interstate route, which cut straight through the valley.
Eileen and I kept pushing it. Brave La Cienega huffed and puffed until the middle of the valley. And then she went into a coma.
“S**t, I think she’s overheated,” Eileen said. “What do we do?” I asked in an unsteady voice, feeling for La Cienega as if she was my child in hospital.
We popped the hood and poured coolant in the engine. La Cienega didn’t move. We put in water. More coolant. Still nothing. We tried to wave down a car, a truck, anything, but there was endless desert around us. Some vehicles passed, but no one stopped.
After three hours in the sweltering sun, we stripped down to just our bras and shorts. Partly because we were hot, but also because Eileen pointed out we could better wave down a bus driver that way.
We had made good time, having reached Death Valley from Los Angeles in just six hours.
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