Roadtrip West
In a week or so I will be leaving for an extended trip to the American West. I will write a separate post about gear and prep for the trip … for now I would like to focus on the plan and the inspiration.
The plan … Rosie the dog and I will leave the east coast and make a sprint (sleeping where I can get a campsite, or in a WalMart parking lot) to the first stop, the Badlands of South Dakota. My base is a commercial campground, but I intend to get out into the Badlands for a couple of nights of dispersed camping. From there I head to Story, Wyoming, a classic small Western town snug between two mountain ranges. From Story I turn south to Steamboat Lake, Colorado, then continue South to near Abiquiu, New Mexico. There I will go to Sunday Mass at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, what I consider the goal of the trip. Seems appropriate as I will be gone about 40 days and 40 nights. Next, I turn back east into Texas, and visit Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the US. I can take the van right to the bottom and camp with the rattlesnakes. Heading South, I stop and visit a friend with hunting rights on 10000 acres near Aspermont TX. He promises cowboy ribeyes on the campfire. Then back northeast to Ardmore, Oklahoma, the hometown of my mentor and longtime partner Frank. I will be camping near the Red River. Then into Arkansas, for fly fishing on the White River. There the guide will tell me how they were really biting last week. Across the Mississippi into Tennessee for a visit with my NYC ex-pat buddies near Nashville, then sprint home. It’s an ambitious route and there will be mid-course corrections. Drive time between each stop is 4 to 6 hours, with a stay of 2-4 days when I get to wherever it is I am going. Doable.
Invariably, when I tell people that the first stop is South Dakota, they ask if I am going to Mount Rushmore. Not a chance. Absent from the route are any of the great National Parks of the West. There is a practical and a purposeful reason. The practical is that dogs are, for the most part, not allowed on the trails at the major National Parks. I suppose this is for the protection of both the dog and the wildlife, but I have no intention of leaving Rosie to sleep in the van while I explore. Wherever I go she is my official greeter, with her happy demeanor and interesting, coyote like appearance. She promotes the purposeful, that is to find out what is going on in the lives of the people I meet … where they live. In the National Parks, most everyone is from somewhere else, taking selfies and getting ready to bolt to the next pile of rocks. When I stop for lunch in some small town off a rural 2 lane county road, the people I meet, more than likely, come there every day.
Inspiration … Decades in the making, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman marks the beginning of modern American poetry. Close reading can get us all caught up in the homo-erotic implications of some of the text. (A post on my loathing of experts to come soon.) For most readers, it is a love poem, an homage, to the idea of America. “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear ..” Mostly alone, he traveled the country by foot and by train, and what he observed flowed into his long, evolving poem. “Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for the New World.” 100 years later, in 1962, John Steinbeck published Travels with Charley: In Search of America. When Steinbeck set out west from Long Island in his pickup camper, he knew he was dying. Death is a part of my trip, too. His standard poodle Charley was, like my Rosie, his icebreaker. In post war/ cold war America, he sought conversations with the people he wrote about in his novels. More recently, Chris Arnade, a Wall Street refugee, has been blogging and Substacking (is that a word?) about his walking and driving tours in the US and abroad. His book, Dignity, recounts his tours, mostly on foot, of the areas of cities and towns where no one else goes, to document the impact of the hollowing out of America’s center. (Perhaps I cribbed the idea of combining pics and stories from him.) And finally, do yourself a favor and subscribe to County Highway, a new broadsheet newspaper from the fertile mind of author Walter Kirn. As the name suggests, it covers all the weirdness that happens off the coasts and interstates of this fascinating country.
The writing in the inspirations above is superior to mine. Last I heard I was not in the queue for the Nobel prize. Nonetheless, I hope to document the things I see along the way as best I can. Stay tuned.
