On the Road Again
American writers and their affiliation with the great open road...
“Europe by her trains… America by her great open roads.”
~ A Bowman Family travel motto
From the destitute Joad Family, fleeing the Depression-era Dustbowl in John Steinbeck’s classic (The Grapes of Wrath)…
…to Jack Kerouac’s unfurling scroll, a centerpiece of the Beat Generation and in some ways symbolic of the journey itself (On The Road)…
…to Robert Pirsig’s timeless meditation on the nature of quality (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)… American writers have long celebrated their ongoing love affair with the great open road.
F. Scott Fitzgerald himself had a go at a rambling jaunt in his wry series of essays for Motor Magazine, later collected as a novella under the title The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.
Rumor had it that, awakening one morning in 1920, the wife of America’s favorite writer had a hankering for southern-style breakfast biscuits and Alabama peaches. What else could the pair do but load up their 1918 Marmon (dubbed the Rolling Junk) and set out on an 8-day, 1,200 mile road trip to Zelda’s hometown, during which the hapless couple almost buried the machine altogether. (They returned by train.)
On the other end of the spectrum – far from the picaresque Fitzgerald… the philosophical Pirsig… and Kerouac, the mad prose-stylist… – Cormac McCarthy delivered his sparse, post-apocalyptic hell scape, titled simply The Road. It seems even mired in macabre McCarthy pathos, America’s greatest writers cannot escape their inner-desire for movement and motion.
You can probably think of half a dozen other works – either novels, poems, songs or motion pictures – in which that restless American spirit is shot out across the continent’s great plains, over Rockies and Prairies, from sea to shining sea.
(One might even add Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as a kind of road trip novel, set as much of it is in shabby motels across Anytowns, USA. Apparently the Russian émigré considered himself “partially American” on account of his having gained some 50 lbs from the all-American diet he consumed after decamping from the Continent, a good deal of which was undoubtedly served up at the roadside diners that sustained him during the years he spent behind the wheel, wandering the nation’s myriad backroads, long-suffering Vera by his side…)
Even we stubborn peripatetics, who ordinarily prefer a casual stroll through a bustling metropolis, must admit – there is something to the idea of setting off on a grand, westward adventure, nothing but a liquid relay of molten sunsets ahead…
What about you, Fellow Flâneur? Have you a favorite road trip passage, poem, scene, song, what-have-you? Feel free to drop your nomination in the comments section, below.
But before you do, in the spirit of “prose in motion,” we present an excerpt from our own humble debut: Morris, Alive. (Newly available in paperback, no less!) The following scene picks up the action as our protagonist blasts west from New York City, leaving plenty behind, but ready for so much more…
Morris, Alive (From Chapter XI - Enter, America)
The air rushed by the windows, brisk and fresh, as Morris guided the old green Jeep through the Lincoln Tunnel and over the imagined state line buried somewhere deep within the Hudson’s cleaving gorge. Emerging from the darkness and into the rusted morning light, he adjusted the rearview mirror to deflect the glare, New York City’s now familiar skyline shrinking in its jolting reflection. Fall was in firm control of the atmosphere now, summer having surrendered its annual bid to merge the days into a single, blistering eternity. Before long the trees would appear bare against the slate-gray skies, Schiele’s sickly distorted limbs climbing into the emptying heavens above.
Morris recalled the morning he came to New York, to America, in a trance. The gritty snow. His breath heavy in the air. The commuters hustling along well-worn routes. He remembered the taxi ride uptown, his jet-lagged mind wandering though the cafes and laundromats and dive bars dotting the island’s broad avenues, the mile high buildings preserving a cacophony of life and energy and irrepressible vitality from the wintry sea of blacks and grays and dirty whites outside. And against that monochromatic scene, the green-eyed girl who had brought him there, seated across from him, her emerald gaze directed through the cab window, the skin on the back of her hand close enough to touch, to kiss... That was almost a year ago, he mused to himself as he steered the vehicle onto the new and unfamiliar roads ahead.
Not for the first time Morris felt a peculiar surge of kinetic energy, the sense of movement swelling within his being, the world revolving beneath his feet, catapulting him across the arcs and slopes and ravines of her teeming continents and beyond the vast, melancholic oceans surging between. He thought of the moment at his fingertips, buzzing with imprisoned lightning. Behind him, the beacon-hand that had twice welcomed him to her sea-washed, sunset shores; before him the expanse of an idea, a particular notion of liberty and the waves of huddled masses that had spilled in earnest, tired and afraid and hopeful, over the harsh, untamed lands. In one way or another, all of humanity had found its way here, flailing, yearning, stumbling and rising again to determined knee. They came from lands holy and desecrated, some arriving in shackles with the smell of death rancid in their nostrils, others in first class cabins with fat cigars between clenched teeth. They came for succor, for opportunity, for escape and to discover the unknown frontiers beyond their own lands and within their own hearts.
Brimming with nervous excitement and no small dose of caffeine, Morris followed the signs northwest to the 280, which he would take until it linked up with Interstate 80, often referred to by beaming tourists as the Christopher Columbus Highway. Though he had no intention of seeing the country from the concrete stretches of its primary arteries, he did feel an acute motivation to put some distance between himself and his immediate point of departure. It occurred to him that, until this moment, his journey had been guided, to varying degree, by a relay of co-pilots. First Katelyn, then Aubrey and, to a lesser extent Ben and Richard. Even Celine, in her own, unspoken way. All these characters had impacted his trajectory, though for better or worse he could not definitively say. With the wheel firmly in his own two hands, still reverberating with anticipation, he felt a supreme sense of relief.
There are precious few moments in life so free, so liberated, that even death herself cannot touch them. For Morris, this was one such moment. He tapped his fingers along with the beat of a vaguely familiar tune and considered the horizon opening before him. Beyond the first few turns, the barrel of the gun, he had no route in mind. No fixed schedule. No predetermined ballistics. And no possession he need turn back for if a sudden gust blew it out the Jeep’s rear window. Even the car he could ditch, if absolutely necessary.
“It’s not like I’m going to report it stolen,” he recalled Aubrey’s words from when he left the apartment that same morning. “Take your time and end up where you end up. And if that’s not where I end up, you can owe me one old, albeit reliable, clunker. ‘No worries,’ as your countrymen would say.”
“For better,” Morris thought to himself as he opened the gas along the conquering Spaniard’s namesake trail. Looking first over his shoulder, he pulled out around a merging truck and cruised past its shiny silver siding. The driver returned his salute as he crossed in front. “Whatever confluence of events, of characters, has brought me to this moment,” Morris asserted, “has surely been for the better.”
The sun rising at his back, he drove on for a spell, daydreaming across the burned hillsides and flicking through the local radio stations, from country to talk back to bible verses read in quavering voices by earnest, morally territorial men. The morning was dry and crisp and cool when the windows were lowered. A featureless sky stretched out above...
As mentioned above, an order today will still land our novel – Morris, Alive – in your stocking in time for the holidays. Grab yours today then sit back, relax and calmly await our unending gratitude.
Until next week…
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Joel, your range is wide. And you write with both charm and penetration. On matters financial I’ve come to think that if your prognostications of calamity come to pass you’ll somehow manage to induce smiles in your readers even as we grope for life vests. I salute you.
I have ordered “Morris, Alive.” If you someday find yourself in Baltimore, perhaps you’ll inscribe it for me.
From "the diversion" found In "the collection" by Ron Callison
"We’re going to Da Lat later so we’re required to spend another day here in order to catch the morning bus. To pass the day we took a minivan trip with other tourists to “surf" the white sand dunes near by. Along the road we passed fishing villages and coves scattered with blue-cabined fishing boats as if Neptune himself had rolled a handful of boats like dice on an emerald table and they moored where they fell. Our driver turned down a trail off the main road and headed for the rolling hills beyond. A lake emerged on our left with lotus pads growing on the margins. The white pods and the pink flowers dotted the green pads over the brown water with white-white sand dunes on the far shoreline all framed by a crystal blue sky. We arrived at the entrance to the dunes to be greeted by young boys who would escort us to the dunes for the surfing experience........