Traveling and writing and travel writing: Where I've Been and Where I'm Going

Regular visitors to Mindful Pleasures will have noticed the absence of new posts over the past few weeks. Rest assured that the reason for this silence is good, exemplary, maybe even admirable, and has not a trace of slackerhood about it. In late September I made like Kerouac and took off on the road. The route I actually drove--as opposed to the considerably different one I had planned to drive--took me out of Ohio and across Indiana on US-30, across Illinois on I-80, along the eastern edge of Iowa on the Great River Road from Davenport to Dubuque, where a wrong turn took me back across the Mississippi and into Wisconsin (damn those Dubuque street signs!), along the Wisconsin Great River Road from the aptly-named Dickeyville to Prairie du Chien (pronounced 'do sheen,' like a suggestion to perform oral sex on Bishop Fulton J. or Charlie) and onward and upward to La Crosse, where I caught I-90 and turned west again, driving 90 across Minnesota, South Dakota and into Wyoming, turning south on Wyoming 59 at Gillette, catching I-25 at Douglas, riding it down the eastern edge of the Rockies through Colorado and into New Mexico, where I turned east on I-40 and Route 66ed it through Billy the Kid country and the Texas Panhandle into Oklahoma, catching I-44 outside Oklahoma City and riding it across the Ozarks rollercoaster through southern Missouri to catch I-55 on the east side of St. Louis, turning east at Bloomington onto Illinois 9 which became Indiana 26 and eventually detoured me onto Indiana 22 (Indiana's state seal is a DETOUR sign) to Interstate 69 (make your own joke) north to Fort Wayne and US-30, the last leg of the trip repeating the first leg in reverse, because the end of all my exploring is to arrive at the place where I started and be reminded why I left...

I have flown over the west before, but this was my first time driving into it, my first long drive west of the Mississippi--and, given the condition of my eyes, perhaps my last (as a driver, anyway). It was, unsurprisingly, a momentous journey.

Now, after catching my breath, I'm holed up at home trying to turn my memories, notes, thoughts, dirty jokes and altitude-induced hallucinations into something resembling a travel book, a hybrid of nonfiction and fiction akin to Sebald's Rings of Saturn but wilder, ruder, more American, attuned to the 'old, weird America' of Bob Dylan, the Beats, Hunter Thompson, Robert Johnson, Robert Altman, Louis Armstrong, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull, a book sometimes spoken in an American voice that's a bizarre hybrid of carnival barker, old time evangelist and contemporary urban rapper. That's the tall order I've set myself, and while I work on filling it, here are a few off-the-top-of-my-head highlights and lowlights, state by state, from my days on the road:

OHIO: Stretching for miles along US-30 between Van Wert and the Indiana border is a surprisingly beautiful windfarm. The white turbines stand not ranked in military rows but clustered into groups across the open fields, their long, spiky, superimposed blades sometimes resembling gigantic Claus Oldenburg versions of the barbs that punctuate the fences around these fields. Stand here at sunset on a clear evening, and you'll catch yourself thinking that if the future will look like this, it might be worth the trouble.

INDIANA: There's a firearms emporium on US-30 called Guntown, and in case the name and the building's Western movie set facade don't hammer the message home, the owners have helpfully posted a sign that reads: We Sell GUNS, the last word in HUGE letters. This place is so multiply an epiphany of a certain type of American sensibility that I don't really know where to begin unpacking it.

ILLINOIS: On my way back I stopped in Bloomington and asked a selection of citizens chosen at random if the name 'David Foster Wallace' rang a bell. Not a single bell rang. This too was an epiphany, of the declining cultural importance of literary fiction. I would hazard a guess that although none of those people might have read Saul Bellow, at least one would have heard of him.

IOWA: There's a spot along the Great River Road (Route 67) north of Clinton that must be one of the loveliest places in the entire Midwest. The roads climbs a hill, and at its crest you see laid out for miles below and around you a gorgeously luminous, painterly landscape of rolling hills, green valleys, fertile fields, blue sky, wispy white clouds. And then you descend and drive into the painting. It's a breathtaking place and it constituted my trip's first pure 'landscape high.'

WISCONSIN: The wrong turn in Dubuque turned out to be a fortunate error, for it led me to a stretch of the Great River Road between Prairie du Chien and La Crosse that hugs a riverside cliff for miles and provides gorgeous views out over the wide Mississippi, so wide in places that the mind cannot quite comprehend it as a river and so imagines it is seeing a lake.

MINNESOTA: Driving through the western Minnesota prairie at sundown I experienced for the first time in my life one of America's great natural wonders: sunset in the flatlands, the slow dying of the light over the plains, that evening redness in the west.

SOUTH DAKOTA: My advice for travelers going west along I-90 through South Dakota: ignore all the billboards, avoid the Great Black Hills Tourist Trap, and spend a day in Badlands National Park. Listen to the music of the canyons and the cliffs. This is a Rilkean place.

WYOMING: If Conrad's Kurtz had been an American, his last words would have been, "The vastness...the vastness." Drifting like Eastwood along the High Plains taught me more of America and its terrors than any experience of my life short of reading Melville and Cormac McCarthy.

COLORADO: The entrance to Big Thompson Canyon along Route 34 on the way to Rocky Mountain National Park is a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed, sheer cliff-walled stunner. My mind was blown long before I arrived at the mountains. But I loved the natural pine scented air up there. It must be breathed to be believed.

NEW MEXICO: Santa Fe is the southwest's Great Adobe Tourist Trap. Pray you, avoid it. (And on the way there, watch out for the Welcome to New Mexico Speed Trap on I-25 at the bottom of the Raton Pass.)

TEXAS: The eyeboggling flatness of the Texas Panhandle--and the treeless, flat vastness of the High Plains generally--is guaranteed to blow the corneas and minds of travelers accustomed to the eastern and midwestern landscape of rolling hills and plentiful woods and a stand of fifty-foot trees eventually blocking the horizon in every direction. No wonder easterners came out here in the 1800s and went completely insane.

OKLAHOMA: Still the dustiest state. When I think of Oklahoma I see a pickup truck driving flat out between two fields on the red dirt prairie and sending up behind it a long, high smokescreen of Oklahoma dust.

MISSOURI: A porn shop at every highway exit and a Golden Corral in every town, Missouri is a state dedicated to the conspicuous consumption of fake sex and cheap food. What do Missourians do when they're not masturbating? They go to Golden Corral and eat until their legs give out. And then they go to Golden Corral in electric wheelchairs.

Of course, all this is but a hucksterish tease for the book to come, the book I have only just begun to write. My working title, unoriginal but appropriate, is Wide Open Spaces: An American Journey. A journey not only into the land, but into the past, wandering as far afield as Gnadenhutten, Mankato, Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Ludlow, Amache, the Johnson County War, postwar Poland, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An American book, in other words. A song of the barbed-wired road.