Travels in the present

By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
I took a road trip recently, driving out of Cedar on a hot and humid afternoon, the sort of day that had me wondering why we’d be going anywhere other than the beach. I was traveling with two Irish friends, which is important to this story because often the world looks different when you begin to see it from someone else’s eyes. We packed the car with as many water bottles as we could fill, plugged in the iPod, and set off on our journey.

Ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to travel. As my mother tells it, it was not uncommon for me to be found at the fork in the road, attempting to hitchhike out of our little community. I was eight. We lived on 40 acres at the end of a long driveway off Hejhal Road about nine miles from the little town of East Jordan. Neighbors knew that I had an appetite for going other places and I’d be brought along on grocery shopping trips, or even sometimes to their places of work, which did go a small distance in satisfying my wanderlust.
So I’ve always been curious about the world out there. For the last half of my life I’ve been a frequent traveler with experiences accumulated from several dozen countries, and almost every state in the union. My companions are similarly inclined, both of them sharing my own deep desire to know other places and perspectives, and to tell stories about these encounters. Muireann is a documentary filmmaker who often works in the global south and Ramor has just published his first book, the title of which conveys his own unique perspective vis a vis home and the world: Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile.
Even before we merged onto I-75 in Grayling, we were wilted. As we headed south toward Detroit, we began to speak almost wistful of the Treasure Island we had left behind. With some anxiety, we noted that the lake was at our back as also the good air, and quietude. The previous night we came home late from a cookout and stood in the yard looking at the stars knowing it would be some time before we encountered a proper night sky again.
I think we’d all been looking forward to settling into the rhythm of the road, reflecting on life and it’s questions with the advantage of a little bit of distance. Of course, the journey was meant to underscore a poetic element in my friendship with Muireann and Ramor as well; we’ve shared other odysseys over the past decade or so and because it is no small undertaking to all find ourselves in one place, at the same time, the notion of hitting the road together had the element of being some kind of pilgrimage.
This was the hope and the dream, as it has been the seed of many other road trips in the past. It is an antidote to our provincialism, and I’ve always considered it a sort of “rite of passage,” or at least a necessary experience in the process of growing up.
With all of this in mind, you can see what I am finding it hard to come to grips with what it really means to travel by car these days. Our trip was organized in part around a series of readings that Ramor was doing for the launch of his book. I was on my way to a workshop on nature writing in northern Vermont and had thought it a nice idea to combine our missions. We imagined a sort of Kerouac-ian adventure. In any case, this was a chance for my international guests to see what American looks like beyond the big cities and beyond Leelanau County. We had looked forward to our travels with visions of ourselves gliding down scenic roads, hair blowing in the wind, the conversation meandering into the highways and byways of memory and imagination.
In the late 1960s, Journalist Charles Kuralt did a regular segment for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite called ‘On the Road’ in which he profiled the Americans he met while traveling around the country in a mobile home. In his book about the experience Kuralt wrote “The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody. If the United States interests you, stay off the interstates.” I realize that this makes me either a very slow learner, or else an indomitable optimist. Mostly I’m just chagrinned to realize that I keep taking off on these endeavors only to discover that it is indeed true, there really is nothing to be gained from being in a car at 75 miles per hour.
A tad more than a decade before Kuralt made this statement, President Eisenhower had signed the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956. The goal was to connect major population centers for purposes of national defense. Roads were needed to facilitate troop deployment and the movement of military supplies in the event of an emergency. The other thing this accomplished was urban sprawl.
In the 1962 memoir, Travels with Charley, author John Steinbeck remarked on the condition of the country he had traveled up and down, from the east to west: “Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
Currently there are over 46,000 miles of interstate highways in the United States. This is easy to take for granted, and yet only a century ago, 93 percent of the country’s roads were unimproved dirt. At that time people used rails or horse-drawn modes of transportation; the first gasoline powered automobile was invented in Germany by Karl Benz in 1885. In 1908, Henry Ford presented his Model T to the public, with the goal of providing personal transport for “the great multitude,” and thereby initiating the Automobile Era. We’ve been driving ever since.
We are filling our tank up at over $3 per gallon and besides the expense, I don’t see how we can keep this up. I’m already feeling crushed, and I mean, to the bottom of my heart, at what this urge to go far fast, is doing to the American landscape.
Sometime during our second day, Muireann remarked “so this is what the war is all about,” sweeping her hand in front of her, indicating the breadth of I-75 as we zoomed toward Cincinnati at 80 miles her hour. A semi passed at that moment, the BP logo obscuring for just a moment, the Jeep factory on our right with it’s display of recreational vehicles painted top to bottom with the stars and stripes. We pressed on, past an oil depot and refinery, past Pilot Travel Centers and malls, past the usual Americana which lately means fast food joints, gas station, and chain motels; the ubiquitous sprawl of our sprawling urge to be able to consume at any given moment without hesitation or impediment.
There is no other way to say this: America is getting downright ugly. Furthermore, each place bears such a resemblance to the next in terms of natural features (they are typically flattened and paved over), architecture (vinyl, massive) and cuisine (if you can call it that). The speed with which we are losing open space is not new news to most of us, but it continues to alarm me. Our road trip was that microcosm of time — just five days — that reminded me that all is not well with the world and Leelanau, with its own flair for ill-considered development, is also a rare refuge.
The trip was not without its good moments, which did seem to coincide with encounters with less damaged landscapes: our drive through upper New York and chance to drink a beer beside Seneca Lake; the curving, green byways of Vermont and their absence of billboards, which allows the eyes to alight on mountain ridges and wild rivers instead of liquor ads.
What I am left thinking about, however, is the auto-centric manner in which this beautiful land of ours is being conquered and divided. I am thinking about how much more fun it is to go places on trains, as I have in Europe. I’m thinking that as a nation at war, we all need to do some serious soul searching with respect to our petroleum use and dependence.
My friends appreciated the lesson in what America looks like to a lot of people — those who commute each day, those who inhabit the burgeoning suburbs and exurbs. But I think we all had our hearts broken, again, by the scale and significance of the asphalted terrain. By the unrelenting lights at night, illuminating car dealerships and parking lots.
I’m looking forward to returning to Leelanau later this summer. In the meanwhile I’m relieved to be installed in a little village in the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont where I can go anywhere I need to go on foot. It seems a reasonable pace at which to see and consider the world.