The quintessential all-American road trip, depending on your mood, can either recall Thelma and Louise driving a 1966 Thunderbird off a cliff, or Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis picking up Brad Pitt on the side of the road. For me, it was a matter of outlook.
But contrary to popular lore, you don't have to kill a man to go on a road trip - just wanting to kill something is enough. It can be your e-mail, your cell phone, your to-do lists or your boss - frankly, it doesn't matter. What's vital is a burning desire to get out of town, have a bad hair day, flirt with strangers and change your name. There is something mesmerizing, addicting and downright freeing about escaping a civilized, Palm Pilot-planned life and putting the pedal to the metal.
With this in mind, and a buttoned-up summer of corporate law behind me, I cut off my sleeves, put on a trucker cap, rented a battle-ready SUV and grabbed two game gal pals for the ultimate college road trip - an eight-day adventure on Interstate 80 that would take us from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from San Francisco to Providence, via the most eccentric roadside attractions in America.
At the outset, my lingering concerns - Where will we sleep? Was that Kurt Russell killer trucker movie "Breakdown" based in reality? - overshadowed the obvious positives of driving 3,118 miles. I could, after all, bring mascara and shampoo with me and not have to wait in lines at airport security.
As I reversed out of my driveway with "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" blaring, little did I realize that this trip wouldn't turn out to be an arduous nightmare at all; it would be the vacation of a lifetime and an education in America.
It was high time for such a lesson. I've lived 21 bicoastal years with a great deal of ignorance about what goes on in the vast lands between. More than just ignorance, though, I realized that I've spent too many years blindly making assumptions about life in Middle America, categorizing states as red or blue and nothing more.
That's not news to anyone, though. New to me, however, was realizing that, although I never had anything against Winnemucca, Nev., or Ogallala, Neb., I never thought I would have a reason to visit. That was the problem, though - road-tripping isn't about reason; it's about going and doing and then making up a reason later. If your only aim is to haul ass from point A to point B, that's not a true road trip. That's a task.
If I had driven with my eye on the end prize from the start, I would have missed the real gems of America: watching the countryside change from desert to mountain to plains to corn; two-stepping with an 80-year-old man named Bill at a Polkafest in Wahoo, Nebraska; touring the Maytag Farms cheese factory in Newton, Iowa; surviving a drive-through African safari in Ohio; running out of gas in the heart of Amish country; the nation's straightest stretch of road (76 miles!).
Indeed, one of the key ingredients for the perfect road trip is finding the ideal balance between actively seeking out the nutty and just stumbling upon it. Sure, I knew that the small town of Rawlins, Wyo., was the home of the illustrious Carbon County Museum, which featured a skullcap made from the corpse of an executed murderer. Strange? Certainly.
But what I didn't know was that an old coal miner by the name of Stagecoach Bob, who wore an outfit straight out of a box of costumes, would give us a full tour along with an animated story of how taxidermists stuffed a bald eagle for the exhibit on Native American coming-of-age rituals and then about how the featured shoes covered in the human skin of executed train robber Big Nose George were worn to the governor's inaugural ball... by the governor himself.
Within an hour we had directions to Bob's doctor's farm down the road where he promised we could spot a rare white buffalo. This kind of generosity of spirit and helpfulness wasn't uncommon. On the contrary, it seemed that, instead of being ostracized for being three California fish out of water, we were embraced for it.
Truth be told, before the trip started I thought I would be thrilled about stopping in Chicago on our fifth day; I saw it as a safe haven, a respite from Middle America, our return to civilization. But as we left the rolling hills of Iowa and ran into the heavy bumper-to-bumper traffic and skyscrapers of the Windy City, I felt more stifled than ever before. I yearned to be back out on the open road, to have the freedom to exit at will, to ask women with American flag skullcaps for directions to the world's smallest church, to cruise at 80 miles per hour with the AC blasting and the radio on. After all, I was on my way to a date with the world's largest wheel of cheese and I didn't need civilization to get in my way.
Courtney Jenkins '07 wants to add "Stagecoach" as a prefix to her name.
