Rambling : The Road to Opportunity

A hale and hearty tale of the bountiful journey west.

My husband and I both arrived at the decision to move out west as if by
simultaneous revelation. After a brief interment in upstate New York, where the winter leaves much to be desired, we were both desperate to get back to some place warm and forgiving. Our decision to leave sooner, rather than later, was doubtless inspired by lackluster accommodations.

During our 5-month stay we slept on an aging, saggy bed in sleeping bags wrapped in the frosty chill air of a house with no heat. I had left the safe confines of New York City with the express purpose of skulking about and reliving the college life while simultaneously my husband took a stab at finally getting the PhD he had been savoring for the past 11 years.

Five months later, having relived the college life all over again with a
bevy of roommates all stepping on each other's toes and fighting about whom used the last square of toilet paper and who should be forced to cough up the 1.99 to buy a new roll, I was thoroughly disillusioned. I loved college, but I have no desire to live like that again. So in the midst of undue angst about who ground flavored coffee in a coveted, 'non-flavored-coffee-only' coffee grinder and buried in 6 feet of snow with no end in sight, I looked at my husband and we both said "California".

When I was 14 I dreamed of traveling the US. My friend Sarah and I would huddle together on her bed over extensive road maps and plan for the road trips we would take when we were grown up and free to see and do what we liked. We planned two-month trips across the whole of the US, visiting nearly every state. We made lists of need-to-have articles for our trip and endlessly discussed our preferred mode of transportation -- a VW bus (of course) with unparalleled psychedelic external decor courtesy of yours truly. We did all this without wondering how we would fund our two-month jaunt through the verdant United States landscape or whether or not we would kill each other on the way. It hardly seemed to matter -– traveling this great country of ours was the stuff of my teenage imagination and nothing even resembling real life could encroach on that dream.

Since then I have had the occasion to travel across country by means other than an airplane 7 times. The first time was in college, when not being offered a prestigious paid internship in Wood Hole, I decided to travel west for the summer. I had convinced a college friend to abandon her summer plans and hop on a train to San Francisco with me. The train ride was long and arduous and the smell at the end of 5 days, completely unbearable, but I fell in love with San Francisco and vowed to return after I graduated college. So two years later, as planned, I packed up my 84 Honda Accord and drove hesitantly through the southeast and then through the southwest, and up along the coast until I reached the lofty hills of San Francisco.

Since that initial car trip, I have taken a staggering three more trips
(this included) across country. Once to drive with my then boyfriend, now husband, when he decided to seal his fate with mine, once to move to Manhattan to attend graduate school, and finally, this time. I guess that makes me an old pro.

On a cross country trip, time becomes frighteningly distorted. Hours and days run together like water. Some days pass like the blink of an eye and others drag on endlessly in a way that makes you think someone must have set the clock back just to fuck with you. Time inevitably passes and before you know it you find yourself in some small town in Arizona with one stoplight watching the most beautiful sunset you have ever seen.

Even if you have a host of activities planned to fill the long hours of your trip, you will still come up with a dearth of things to do. After three days on the road, you will have listened to every book on tape, talked through and discarded every philosophical breakthrough and covered all the states in your game of "License Plates". At this point in the trip, you must find creative ways to occupy yourself, so you spend countless hours dividing the various legs of your journey into "the good" and "the bad". Imagine for example, that you are driving the northern route, where "the good" is writing your name in small stones in the milky, white salt flats outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, a surprise visit to a casino in Elko, Nevada, the red rocks of Colorado and sunsets that will knock your knickers off. "The Bad" is Nebraska. I am not talking about just one part of it, but the whole dirty lot. Endless miles of featureless flat land with no discernable qualities. You cross the Nebraska state line and three days later you are still in the same state feeling suicidal and stuck in a time blip. I have done the northern trip 4 times and as a result I felt a change was in order.

This time we would grab 40W which is an expansive stretch of highway running from the eastern part of the country all the way through till California. On 40 there is the promise of endless delights such as running parallel along "the Mother Road", Route 66, where you can only but imagine the hardships that American families endured as they made their way west on the "Road to Opportunity". There is the allure of road kill in the form of armadillos, instead of raccoons, as we see in the north; there are southern accents and then there is Nashville.

After an incredibly grueling winter in upstate New York where a forecast of snow is the norm, it was wonderful to reach the 76-degree weather of Tennessee. We spent the night in Nashville proper on Music City row -- we ate at a small open-air country and blues bar and chowed down on cornbread that looked (and tasted) like a pancake. I had a desire to stop in Memphis, to go to Graceland and the Martin Luther King museum, but it rained so hard all the next day that we pushed on to Oklahoma City. On day 4, we landed in Santa Fe, just north east of Albuquerque where we embarked on a search for the perfect Native American pottery to place on the landing in our new home.

The different tribes in the southwest produce a myriad of different kinds of pottery. Perhaps the most well known are the hand painted ceramics covered in carvings and southwestern motifs. I was on the search for the beautiful pots, which are twice fired in a pit full of horseshit and hence are coated in the black of carbon and then burnished shiny. This sounds revolting, but the yield is quite a beautiful, unique and distinctive work of art. If bought in a gallery in Santa Fe, one piece can run you upwards of $350 for something barely big enough to store a pair of earrings in. Your best bet is to travel to smaller towns just outside the Navajo reservation and hunt for off-the-beaten-path stores and galleries. Interestingly enough, the res itself does not carry a large selection, due, I can only assume, to the lack of tourism.

The weather outside of Albuquerque is changeable and so we drove through intermittent bouts of snow and sunny weather. It was on this stretch of road that we experienced a phenomenon completely unknown to us Yanks -- tumbleweeds.

On the stretch of expansive road between Albuquerque, NM and Flagstaff, Arizona we were pelted with an onslaught of misguided tumbleweeds. What else could we do but pull over, hop out of the car and try and catch a few? Catching the little buggers was easier said than done, as the wind was blowing at a high clip, thus sending a bevy of tumbleweeds into a frenzied orgy. They were in their glory -- feisty and illusive.



After dawdling the entire day on catching tumbleweeds, visiting Indian reservations and buying horseshit pottery, we had haul butt to make it to Flagstaff by sun down. Another beautiful sunset, another small hotel room with no wifi or even an adequate roadside restaurant. I was already starting to wish I would wake up in California.

The next day we drove down the twisty, turny road to Sedona, which is a coniferous respite from the desert that bristles and breathes outside the car window. We followed the road down 20 miles, which seemed more like 45. At the base, we were surrounded by red rock canyon walls and found ourselves in the little town of Sedona proper where unfortunately dressed tourists can take jeep tours of the canyon, grab a helicopter for breathtaking views or do simply what we did, which was to walk around in the sunshine and scarf down a breakfast of huevos rancheros. At this point, California seemed but a stone’s throw away from our present location, but the reality is that California is a big state and we still had two more days of driving.

The two of us shared the driving -- he, driving more than me. Often times we sat in deafening silence, trapped in the sway of our own thoughts, punctuated only by a single volley: tired? Yeah. K, I’ll drive. Then we would pull into a gas station and swap seats. One would drive while the other sat in the passenger seat staring out the window, passing the long hours by combing the roadside for small animals, or talking about one’s childhood, or new business ideas or nothing at all: just watching the ever-changing landscape slip by for hours ad nauseum. And so we drove, and we drove and then when we were nauseously sick of driving, we just kept pushing on. We drove toward mountains, which we could have sworn were 20 miles away, but which we never seemed to reach.

By the last day on the road, we were itching to reach our destination. Our legs were stiff, our necks were cramped and I was starting to think I would go nuts if I had to sleep in a hotel one more night. When we finally got to our new home, I was so grateful that I practically kissed the front stoop.

Each long journey ends with roughly the same sequence of events culminated by a promise to stay put for the rest of eternity. Inevitably though, in a few years, wanderlust creeps back in like water into a badly patched ship and I find myself in a car making my way across the great United States filled with the promise of a new home and a new beginning.