About Road Trips
I remember back when gas was 98 cents a gallonBy Stacey Bloomfield
The temptation is always there, sitting in the drive way the car looks so ready, as if it saying ‘come on what do you really have to do today or tomorrow’. But with the cost of gas at $3 a gallon and the knowledge of what is coming out on my tail pipe our trips have been reduced to local jaunts. It seems as though the era of road trips is passing, we know too much to feel good about the pollution we make especially when others are driving 9 mile a gallon behemoths.
But I remember back when gas was 98 cents a gallon and the only time I worried about my tail pipe was when the wire that held it in place came loose. Back then Baby, my ’82 Celica, and I found ourselves on the road often. Why not drive up to Ely Minnesota for a week or down the Blue Ridge Highway, the roads were there and so was the time. So I’d throw some clothes in the back and a bottle of water next to me and go. There were coast lines to see and mountain ranges to explore.
Later, in a different car living in a different state my trips would take me into isolated corners of the New Mexican and Utah deserts or high up above tree line. I learned how to maneuver a truck through a dry river bed the same way I made my way through a traffic jam. It was during these trips that I realized that people took to the road for different reasons. For many it was a way to see the country or it was an adventure to be taken with a group of friends but to me the road has always been a place where I could find time alone. My destinations, whether natural or man made were for the most part mine alone.
On one trip I made my way through New Mexico, northern Texas and all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel without air conditioning in the middle of July. I made it by becoming the woman in the short black dress with the cowboy boots. I cooled myself with a series of bandannas that sat in the water in the cooler. As this chick I stopped at diners along the way and made small talk in a voice I barely recognized. It was a persona that joined me just for that trip, a woman made for the road.
Somewhere around the time I met my husband my driving became more about where I was going, the journey was interesting, but the destinations were more important. My own wedding had me, with fiancé in the passenger seat rushing across the country towards a New England wedding. It was a blur, a stop at the Mississippi in Twain country, a pause at the largest replica of a Van Gogh painting, the occasional farm-stand. Mainly it was hours of the road with Harry Potter as a back drop.
There is so much to be done close to home that setting out on the road now has a different meaning. We live in a new region where everything is so close together, there is so much unexplored territory here. Today I could leave my house and be in Montreal by lunch or Philadelphia by dinner. But even these trips I am aware of the environmental effects we are having and it often makes us pause at the door and trade my car keys for hiking boots.
Until the car companies sort out emissions and efficiency I think I'll save my long trips. The spirits of Kerouac and Steinbeck will have to sit by while I join Huck Finn and Thoreau in a different form of travel. I can’t say the road trip is dead, but I will say that for the time being I’m staying closer to home right now, learning to lose myself on the trails and roads near by. I hope that when my son asks I won’t have to tell him about road trips as a thing of the past, that someday I can stand in the drive way as he heads out to where ever strikes him.
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