By the Longest Path Possible

Driving across the United States for all the best reasons

Photo by Connor Wilkins on Unsplash

I’m off this week to help a friend move from the furthest southeast tip of the US to the (nearly) furthest northwest tip of the US. We’ll be driving a minivan of his most important valuables across states, through prairies, over mountain passes, alongside rivers.

As a kid, just about the only thing my parents got right was family road trips. Often in the hottest summer heat, we would pack ourselves into a 1980s-something Honda Civic hatchback – my brother and I with an assortment of backseat games to play – and drive to national parks and historic attractions. We suffered through indescribable heat during the “year of highway construction” in Georgia, watched my dad sprain his ankle at the birthplace of Lincoln, regretted buying that park ranger scratch-n-sniff book with the skunk page in it from the Rocky Mountains (man, I loved that page), and stared at a huge lump of rock that still hasn’t entirely been carved into the shape of Crazy Horse. I have incredibly fond memories of those trips, though I know my brain has scrubbed out the awful parts that are inevitable.

Let me give you a brief example. My father loved nothing more than getting in the maximum amount of mileage possible during every single driving day of a trip. If going an extra two-hundred miles could knock off a day of driving and save us a night in a motel, Dad would do it. This meant my brother and I were often asleep and couldn’t feel our butts by the time we were dragged or carried into the motel room for the night.

We learned to play Battleship on paper in the backseat of that car. I even had a set of little games with peel-up clear plastic you could write on (Magic slate? Anybody else remember those?). This was way before Kindles and iPads, a generation before GameBoys or handheld Nintendo systems. There were no cell phones, no pagers, no GPS anything. Dad mapped out our trips on… maps. Paper maps. Which meant we didn’t know if roads were closed or how to reroute if something blocked our way.

And even with so few conveniences, I saw incredible things on those vacations. We once drove all the way south to Carlsbad, New Mexico, just to see the caves and the bats after my brother had begged to go. That trip wound us up through a handful of other incredible parks: Mesa Verde, Bryce Canyon, Zion, the Grand Canyon. I decided on that trip I wanted to be a geologist.¹

Roadside signs for “the vortex of weirdness” caught my eye, but we never stopped for the hokey stuff. My parents were all about wholesome parks, zoos, national history museums, aquariums. Over thousands of miles in the backseat of a compact hatchback, I cultivated a deep love of “different.” My eyes needed to see new things… Tumbleweed actually tumbling, a real rainforest, the Pacific Ocean, a bar of Ghirardelli Chocolate bigger than my own head. My first glimpse of bison had me enthralled. We ran from a moose in a picnic spot, and nothing my mother said could convince me that such an animal might hurt me. I just needed to see it with my own eyes up close.

As an adult, life gets in the way so easily. We work, we make plans, we have kids, we adopt dogs, we need to water the garden. Road trips take time. They’re not fast, and they’re not easy. My adventures in the last twenty years have been tame and very local. So when my best friend mentioned he needed to drive his precious cargo across the country, I jumped at the chance to help.

This is the start of an adventure, and I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I hope that the road throws us a curveball.

I hope I get to see something unexpected.

I hope I don’t have to change a tire. That’s not fun.

I hope the coffee tastes good.

I hope I can find a friendly restroom.

I hope we laugh all the way through an entire state.

We might stop and see some cool things. We might drive through the night. We might get sick from eating too much candy. We might discover new truths we weren’t expecting. We might wish to get home, but we might also wish the trip didn’t have to end.

I’ll tell you about my journey once it’s done.

If you could drive across the country, would you do it? And what would you hope to have happen along the way?

Your trans friend,

Robin

1. That didn’t last long. When I met a real geologist she explained that the only money to be made was in Big Oil, and my dreams were kinda crushed.