My religion within the American highway journey was saved by a small city in Texas on the Fourth of July.
When that religion started to waver, and the way far the highway journey sank on my leaderboard of American pastimes — properly, that’s more durable to say. Under putt-putt golf, maybe, and south of riverboat playing. The freeway had taken on an elegiac torpor, and a line by the poet Louis Simpson crammed my head: “[T]he Open Highway goes to the used-car lot.”
That’s a grim mantra, significantly should you take — or often train — the American highway journey. I’m afraid I do each. In a syllabus I’ve peddled, principally proudly, for a decade, I provide the highway as a cellular entrée to generational angst (Jack Kerouac’s “On the Highway”) and racial hierarchies (Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”). I introduce dads in quest of salvation (Cormac McCarthy’s “The Highway”) and younger ladies escaping abuse (“Thelma & Louise”).
This transcontinental whirlwind of texts implies that highway journeys are uniquely certified to seize an unlimited, stunning and flawed nation. That wanderlust is a defining aspect of the American psyche. That we’ll discover ourselves simply over that hill.
For years I believed this. I may opine on the Interstate Freeway System and the drive-thru window. I ascribed that means to the car that NASA left on the moon. My course, simply certainly one of many on the subject, gave my musings function, and pleasure.
However when my household and I drove from Oregon to Indiana in 2023, I had doubts. The West burned in our rearview, and our Camry’s combustive hum felt like one other agent of ecological despair. We rolled up the home windows and maxed out the AC till our sedan grew to become a conveyable front room that principally succeeded in maintaining the world at bay. Right here had been our snacks, and there have been our pillows. Every passenger may pacify themselves with a display.
That is the place the highway journey fails us — or we fail it. Prepared entry to digital detachments (and instructions) have introduced sameness to an expertise that must be constructed on shock. A great highway journey is a sequence of discrete episodes (I did this, I did that) held collectively by the flimsiest of threads: I did them by automotive.
Planning (and plot) are inappropriate, as anybody who’s learn “On the Highway” is aware of — although that didn’t cease my spouse and me from planning our cross-country trek. We visited the Mojave (lunar-like and Looney Tunes) and the Grand Canyon (OK, it’s breathtaking). We spied Jesse Pinkman’s house in Albuquerque and ate fudge from — forgive me — Uranus, Mo. I liked alternating between the elegant and the profane. I liked the fudge too.
However this felt extra like sightseeing than road-tripping, a notion that returned at any time when I returned to the automotive. Sameness haunted that inside, however sameness stalked us down the freeway too. That is an previous grievance, thoughts you — previous as Howard Johnson’s, previous as Humbert Humbert — however company lodgings and chain eating places do flatten the highway journey.
My studying, although, had taught me that folks (not place) outline a highway journey. The Simple Riders and the Cheryl Strayeds. The Misfits or the Brad Pitts bouncing shirtless on a bed. And that the folks of the highway change always, stretching one’s fastened concept of those United States. Sadly, that is the place the worst of my highway dread started: the American demos itself.
There’s no technique to say this that doesn’t sound cynical or misanthropic, however I used to be over assembly the American folks. Regardless of the potential for their unacknowledged insights. With little hope that they had been stockpiling some nuance misplaced to the polls. I’d date this disillusionment to Nov. 3, 2016, and easily be aware that I’m sorry.
Let me let you know then about Shamrock, Texas — or actually the Shamrock Country Inn in Shamrock, Texas — the place my bottomed-out perception within the highway was restored. At the very least briefly.
The inn is simply east of a well-known art deco filling station that appears like a nail caught within the floor. Shamrock sits at a symbolic crossroads the place two border-to-border highways converge. (U.S. Route 83 and our route: I-40.) And every part from the vape store to the towing-agency-cum-pizza-parlor bore the title of Historic Route 66. This all lent our night within the city a whiff of kismet, of cosmic reality.
A South Asian household lived on website and owned the motel; they had been the warmest hosts we’d recognized all journey. A middle-aged girl led us to our room, one hand discovering my spouse’s shoulder as she unlocked the door. A person, the girl’s husband presumably, watered new flowers ringing the inn’s signal.
They requested about our travels and famous the forecast, doing so with an air of safety that felt historical, as if “shelter” meant greater than clear sheets and cable TV. As we talked, the sundown gathered power within the west.
I’m a poet and thus programmed to seek out that means within the unlikeliest of locations. However that night, it arrived simple as fireflies. I may maintain its small gentle in my hand. Take the inn’s title, the city’s too, which is greater than a token of luck, or an emoji. It’s a reminder of earlier immigrants who, following persecution, folded themselves into the U.S.
I considered the Irish as I seemed on the motel’s partitions: white atop purple, blue doorways with a star, newly painted to evoke the Texas state flag. I considered assimilation and acceptance. I questioned if my hosts had sought — and maybe discovered — both, or each. I questioned if whiteness, a trait that had aided the Irish, would stand of their manner.
As darkness fell, fireworks began rising like exclamation factors within the east, every burst briefly muffling a legion of bullfrogs. Then one got here hopping towards us, warty and large, to our son’s nice delight. We coaxed it towards our motel room, yet another reward — wholly undeserved — from a pure world we degraded every day.
Just a few friends arrived as we stood there. Good ole boys in pickups. A vanload of Swedes headed to the Grand Canyon. And our hosts remained too, watching the sky. Within the morning they’d serve us breakfast: eggs, biscuits and Texas-shaped waffles.
“I feel no matter I shall meet on the highway I shall like,” Walt Whitman writes in “Song of the Open Road.” It’s a line that I’ve liked for years with out ever believing it held any broad reality. And but I do know full properly that I — a white man who’d not heard of “The Negro Motorist Green Book” till researching for my class — must be the likeliest reader to agree. On that night, as sleep overtook me, I obtained shut.
For just a few hours there, I liked the American highway journey. Because the desires of dissimilar folks, dazzled and drowsy and dwelling collectively, crammed a motel in rural Texas. As fireworks resolved right into a sulfurous breeze. However sleep would additionally illustrate the tenuousness of that union. Quickly we’d drive into the warmth of tomorrow, and this night — just like the promise of our nation — would disappear into the previous.
Derek Mong is a poet, critic and English professor at Wabash School. His newest assortment is “When the Earth Flies into the Sun.” This text was produced in partnership with Zócalo Public Square.
