Three Cross Country Trips, 1903-2013

On our summer US road trip we’ve visited cities, borders, jails and mayor’s offices.  Today we consider the great American coming of age experience, driving across the country.

Driving all the way from one coast to the other, 3000 miles from sea to shining sea, is something of a rite of passage for young Americans.  A summer adventure during college, a relocation to a new job in your 20’s, a way to end a relationship or move to be with a new one, it’s the American walkabout, a way to earn the badge of adulthood.  Driving cross country, you find yourself and you find America.  Or like the characters in the great cross country movie, Easy Rider, America finds you.

Most Americans can tell you a dramatic story about their drive, emphasizing that it was:

- Fast (You can do it in two days of straight driving, with some crazy all night adventures.)

- Slow (Some chose a theme, like visiting every major league baseball park.)

- Winter (Make sure you drive south of the Rockies and take snow tires.)

- Summer (Start each day before sunrise, get to the motel pool by 3, explore the small towns at dusk.)

- Interstate (Just get on Rt. 80 in NYC, cross the George Washington Bridge and next thing you know, San Francisco Bay.)

- Back roads (Delightful local cuisine, curious radio stations, obey the speed limit with your out of state license plates.)

- Solo (I started a major new chapter in my life by driving alone in my Volkswagen bug with everything I owned in it, including a nice old chair, from New York to California.)

- In a group (This can be tricky; shall we stop here, you like to eat what?  Also very bonding; remember when we drove through the tornado?)

In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first American to drive all the way across the country.  A wealthy doctor, he and his wife were on holiday in San Francisco, having taken the train from their home in Vermont.  There they became enamored with this new fangled contraption, the motor car, and took some driving lessons.  Many people thought the automobile was just a passing fad, but Jackson was so enthusiastic he accepted a $50 bet that he couldn’t drive back to Vermont.   He bought a used, 2 cylinder, 20 horsepower Winton, which he renamed The Vermont.  He set out on May 31 and had one adventure and disaster after another; blown tires, no ways to get new tires, no maps, no roads, part of the way he drove on the old Oregon trail, got lost in Wyoming, begged a farmer for wheel bearings from his mower, forded streams.  But he finally made it home (his wife took the train back) after 63 days on the “road.”  Read the Wikipedia account of it or even better watch the Ken Burn’s documentary, Horatio’s Drive.  The Vermont is now in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.  Later in life Jackson got a speeding ticket in Burlington, Vermont for exceeding the 6 mile per hour limit.

65 years later two scruffy drug dealers named Billy and Captain America left Los Angeles on Harley Davidson motor cycles for their cross country trip, which (spoiler alert!) did not end as happily as Dr. Jackson’s.  The movie Easy Rider with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson (and a memorable scene with Karen Black as a New Orleans prostitute – she died this past week) was a counterculture classic that took the nation by storm and continues to evoke and symbolize the late 60’s mood in our nation.  The sound track by itself blasted conventional movie music; Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 was 9” – the filmmakers were concerned that long shots of motorcycles in the southwest would be boring, so they spent more on the music, $1 million, than the film’s whole budget.  The film made $41 million, and along with two other films that year, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde signified a new era of avant-guard independent movies.  (Come to think of it, there are a lot of travel scenes in both those movies as well.)

Last story of a cross country drive.  This very summer, 2013, my two dear friends Joan and Marie spent six weeks driving in their Mini Cooper, with their two dogs, all the way across the country and back, California to their home state of New York and back. This wasn’t a coming of age trip for sure; Joan and Marie are in their 70’s, and have been together for 30 years.  They came home tired and happy from many adventures, and with a new possession – a marriage license from New York.  None of their many friends here in California knew of their wedding plans, but it sounds to me like a good use of a cross country trip – set out on the road, roll with the challenges, slow down for the surprises, end each day with a thank you.  Oh, that’s not just a cross country trip.  That’s marriage.  A good road to travel.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter