« Pass the Mike | Main | Not the last words from Kentucky »

The end of the road song

We are a rootless, restless people, we who have settled across the continent of these United States; even, best I can tell in my ignorance, even those who were native to the place. The safety net we have all had is that we could leave where we were and go somewhere else, abandoning caste and castle, arriving re-made ("beware," my mentor Thoreau wrote, "of ventures which require new clothes, and not a new wearer of clothes"), readymade, and refreshed.

How else to explain the dominance of train songs in early country music, the continuing lure of Kerouac's On The Road (still to be read only in ones early 20s), the perplexing success of Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again" and every song Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie and every other touring musician ever wrote about the simple joys of driving from one place to another place, known or unknown. Dashiell Hammett's "Flitcraft Parable," recently illustrated in the Tacoma, Washington magazine City Arts by longtime ND contributing artist Stan Shaw. Jon Dee Graham's blank, bleak, joyous "Swept Away." The popularity of Robert Service's poetry at the turn of the twentieth century:

"There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
and roam the world at will...."

A benediction, and a curse, that.

This morning I spent a few minutes trying to find a photograph of my 1967 Dodge van, the one I fixed up with a bed and a stereo and a writing table and two hidden compartments the customs inspectors never found, where I stashed dirty laundry and my two 35mm cameras and lenses. I took its picture at the top of a dirt road that had taken me over a mountain in Colorado, though I do not know the summit's name. But it won't be found this morning, at least not quickly, and so it goes.

That was my first time communing with the road. I went to find America, perplexed by its adoration of Ronald Reagan; and I went to find a home. As it worked out, as I have told before, I ended up back in Seattle and took another decade leaving. I am too private a person to have found America, but all that time alone, I did find myself. Quicksilver, of course, that finding, but it helped.

The first night I still remember. It took longer getting the van ready than I'd hoped, and so it was early fall and not early in the day when finally the road took me away across the North Cascades. My head took to hurting almost as soon as I got into traffic, a reminder that the pressure of Northwest clouds often lead to sinus headaches. By the time I was far enough away to stop without shame, my first night in a crowded campground, I was almost physically sick. And very alone. Very alone. Turning back seemed prudent, but once left, going home was not really an option. And so I stayed, stayed the course. It took three or four days to find the rhythm of the road, switching cassettes as moods passed, always playing old blues at high volume when the road took me through rich neighborhoods. Not that anybody noticed.

But there is still no better place to hear an album in all its glory and with all its shortcomings than in a car, alone, in the quiet of a cool, clear night, driving. (Ah, Pearl Harbour & The Explosions...)

I have driven a lot, and though it has never been my aspiration to drive competitively, for I have not the eyesight, nor, at this point, the reflexes for that work (nor do I have a clue how to do more than change a tire), I would say with an American man's pride that I drive well. At least that I do not hit things when I drive, and that I am able to be comfortable driving whatever's at hand, though my father-in-law's tractor is not yet my friend.

But I feel that road coming to an end. Not because I have become middle aged, nor unemployed, but because gas is now $4 a gallon, and will get no cheaper for any length of time in my lifetime. Our daughter is five, and we plan carefully the trips we want to take her on, the roads and places we want her to know, keenly aware that at some point those roads will close to us.

Once it was nothing to hop in Susan's jeep and drive past New Orleans on our way to Houston, and then, on the way back, decide to stop in New Orleans for dinner and two days of exploration in the old book stores and galleries. Now...now I treat my travels as a rare treat, each one potentially a final indulgence.

And I feel caged. Not by the place I have chosen to live, but by the closing off of so many choices. I am an American, and the calculation that it's not worth driving somewhere because...that's tough math, even for me. It has been part of our DNA for centuries that we could pull up stakes and go. We still can, of course, and in part I am writing this for a friend who is amid just that journey. And we should ("Sing!" again, please: "Fear is a man's best friend!").

Part of our safety net has been that we could operate without a net. That we could leave. That the grass might be greener, or, at least, they might pay us to mow it when we got there. Those days aren't over, not yet. But I can see them coming to an end, as the airlines cut flights, as friends cut down to a single car, as we measure each trip against the possibility that there might not be another.

This will make no sense in Europe, where the spaces are different and there is no real escaping one's past (unless one emigrates, of course).

I can half hear Steve Earle's early song about working at a gas station near the interstate, saving enough money to get gone down that road one day and never look back.

Inevitably one looks back.

But what will it mean for us -- for all of us -- if going down that road ceases to be an option, save for the very rich or the very desperate.

Perhaps it has always been that way, and we have lived in a fortunate bubble that is near to bursting.

Perhaps.

But we as a people are not ready to be caged in the places we have settled. And it will not go easily.

Posted by grant on June 5, 2008 9:12 AM | Permalink