A Tale of Two Road Trips … And Two Americas
By Walter Nicklin
The sun was sinking fast. Much faster, it seemed, than it ever did “back East.” The Corvair’s headlights tunneled through the darkness descending on the mile-high plateau known as the Big Horn Basin. Whizzing past on either side of the road were two parallel lines, straight and endless, of barbed wire fencing, presumably to keep cattle in and people like us out.
There was hardly room on the highway shoulders to pull off, much less make a campfire to cook a couple of hotdogs and make some coffee. That at least would have kept us awake until we found a place to set up a real camp. We were no longer picky; any old place would do.
“Maybe just around the next bend?” Arch posited. When a road twists and turns, there’s always the geometry of hope, but in this case I yelled:
— What bend?
Then, suddenly, a light up ahead. Maybe a place to get a cup of coffee? Then more lights: a town!
— Must be Cody. I think that’s what the map says.
Population roughly 5,000, according to the pocket atlas, named after Buffalo Bill, William Frederick Cody.
— Cody. Cody, Wyoming. Cool.
— Yeah, cool.
Before the night was out we would end up in the Cody, Wyoming jail.
That was 50 years ago, but one of countless adventures a high school classmate and I set off on that uniquely American rite of passage — the cross-country road trip. You can tell how ancient we now are by our out-of-style names: Archibald and Walter.
We had studied Lewis and Clark, read Jack Kerouac, listened to Woody Guthrie. Why not do what they had done, go where they had gone, and light out for the territory? That was the alluring idea, the not-so-wild a dream, the beckoning promise, embodied — I can see her now — in the newest Hollywood starlet to grace a “Life” magazine cover. What was her name? Oh, yes, Yvette Mimieux. Like we Baby Boomers ourselves, the country seemed so young, full of infinite possibilities and promise, yet we knew it could all end tomorrow in a nuclear exchange.
Whatever happened, anyway, to Yvette Mimieux? To America? To my fellow Boomers? And to me?
I think of all this now because my 18-year-old son Tom just finished his own transcontinental adventure. He’s the exact same age I was then, and upon his high school graduation he couldn’t wait to hit the open road before starting college, to get out of the house and leave his parents behind. Good riddance especially to his controlling (Tom’s adjective) father. Symmetrical at least. My term for his senior-year performance: lazy.
Over the years Tom was growing up, I’d told him about my long-ago road trip — hitchhiking, hopping freights, working my way around the country vin episodic, nostalgic drips and drabs. Never in a single, coherent narrative. With Old Fart segues like “That reminds me of the time….” Which Tom absorbed, typically, with a teenage mask of sullen indifference.
Yet these reminiscences, and their fantastical fairy-tale elements, must have made an impression. I began to hear from others — his teachers, even his peers — that he had shared with them his plans to do what I had done, to go where I had gone, to create his own Great American Road Trip.
Tom was so excited, they said. I had seldom seen him excited about anything, except possibly surfing and snowboarding. And he began, at first hesitantly, to pepper me with detailed logistical questions — requiring the imaginative, empathetic leap (difficult for any teenager) that his ancient father had indeed once been young. Yes, so young — during that oh-so-sweet summer between high school and college — when the meaning of life seemed within my grasp. I wanted Tom to experience that feeling. His helicopter mother wasn’t so sure:
“It’s a different time, a different America,” she protested.
But Tom’s very practical proposition ultimately won the day. He had to get from the East Coast to California anyway; that’s where he was starting college in the fall. Why limit his cross-country experience to the view from 30,000 feet? Instead, he would turn it into the summer equivalent of a “gap year,” an educational voyage of discovery.
Vicariously going along for the ride, Tom’s invisible backseat driver, would be the man who’s often mistaken for his grandfather — namely me. At almost 70 years, I’m among the oldest of the Baby Boomers, while Tom, born in 1997, is in the Millennials’ youngest cohort. The two generations putatively resent each other: Millennials think they’re “special,” and Boomers have “mortgaged their children’s future.” As of this year, in fact, Millennials began to be called Echo Boomers, as they finally outnumber (at 76 million) my Boomer generation — and so can expect to have a similarly outsized influence on America’s economy and culture.
Would Tom’s road trip redux, crossing paths between my “then” and his “now,” somehow transcend this generational divide? At the very least, it became an occasion for me to confront, in a refreshingly concrete way, America’s many changes that have occurred in my lifetime. It was like going home again, for the very first time in a half century, to the place you grew up. If you’ve never left, the changes are never glaring; your hometown changes along with you — contemporaneously.
As I shared my road trip’s decades-old scribblings, crumbled and yellowed, mostly illegible, hardly intelligible now not even to me, Tom’s eyes didn’t glaze over. Even more remarkable was the fact that the scribblings even existed, since all the women in my life (starting with my mother through my current wife) had sought to toss them out. Not maliciously, of course, but in the commendable spirit of de-cluttering. For his own trip, Tom promised to create a blog and post regularly on Facebook. All paperless, of course.
Of more interest to Tom were my old accordion-folded U. S. highway maps, with their brightly colored logos for 76 Union, Gulf, Conoco, Philips 66, Standard Oil. Among the creases, smudges, and wrinkles, I can still trace routes taken with my fingertips. The magical place names, together with my teenage marginalia, are more redolent than any diary. Yes, old maps are my mnemonic, my madeleine.
But when I bought (for $19.95) an up-to-date road atlas for Tom to take along on his trip, his gratitude was at best perfunctory. He’s become totally dependent on the vocal directions of GPS or cellphone navigation. I understand their seductive appeal. As with any seduction, however, the romance is often oh-so fleeting. Cell tower and satellite positioning might tell you precisely where you are at the moment; but to understand where you’re going — and where you’ve been — it’s hard to beat the permanence of a map.
Even before Tom departed, I realized that, no matter how substantively different the two Americas of our respective youths, perhaps the most fundamental and radical difference would be the lens — the windshield — through America is viewed and recorded. From accordion road maps to digital navigation, from written journals to selfies and blog postings, how we see things can be even more defining than what we see.
The roads, and where they lead, have surely changed. But nothing has changed so much as the trip itself. Tripping, epistemologically speaking.
I drank and drove and thought nothing of it. Nicely complementing my car’s typically open bottle of Rolling Rock — referred to as a “traveler” — were a couple of unfiltered Lucky Strikes. Tom neither smokes cigarettes nor drinks alcohol, only an occasional beer (he says); but he does have a medical marijuana card. For migraines, it says. But at least two of Tom’s contemporaries have ended up in the ER, however, after taking so-called synthetic (definitely not prescription) cannabinoids. Maybe Tom inherited his migraines from me, but I called them sinus headaches; and I carried a prescription for penicillin in case they got so unbearably bad they signaled an infection.
Another, more universal, type of tripping is musically induced. What you see on the other side of your car’s windshield is tinted, in the case of my Boomer generation, by nostalgic hits on SiriusXM’s “Sixties on Six.” We first heard them by constantly jiggling and fiddling with the AM Radio dial, trying to pick up a signal bouncing off the stratosphere.
Coming into Cody, Wyoming, I can hear it now: Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” Or is my mind playing tricks? Instead of a car radio, Tom streams music via his iPhone6. I don’t have a clue — and don’t bother asking — what road trip music he favors.
What was that smell permeating the cooling crepuscular wind blowing in our faces through the open car windows? A peculiar, pungent combination of cow pies and freshly mowed hay? Maybe buffalo poop? Certainly it wasn’t the same stink as from that Midwest mill town we went through a thousand miles back. But for the rest of my life whenever I would smell something similar, I would think of what happened in Cody, Wyoming.
This and countless other slices/scents of Americana Tom would miss because, like virtually all of his countrymen these days, he drives with the car windows rolled up and the A/C on. But at least when he’s my age he won’t be suffering hearing loss in his left ear. That’s a common ailment among my contemporaries, says my doctor — the long-term consequence of exposure to eardrum-pumping decibels when the driver’s window is not closed. So on the Boomer-Millennial balance sheet, is this a wash?
How much of America can you see anyway — truly see — going 70 miles an hour on an Interstate that you exit only for fast food and gas? In the early 1960’s, both the Interstates and fast-food chains were in their infancy — such novelties on my cross-country trip I went out of my way to experience them both. Speed and cheap, industrialized eats seemed synchronous, if not mutually dependent. The novelty nowadays, of course, is the old, slower world that Tom’s father left behind. But if Tom tried exploring picturesque back roads, he risked breaking an axle in a pothole or premature death on a collapsing bridge. Deferred infrastructure maintenance is a Boomer specialty, just another future tax on the Millennials.
People, not just places, are what the best road trips are ultimately all about, but how many fellow Americans would Tom meet in his hermetically sealed car? Would he dare to pick up a hitchhiker? Would he even see one? Probably not, for they’ve long since gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Not extinct exactly, but scattered by fear.
When I was Tom’s age, hitchhikers were everywhere (I was one of them). And when my own father was not much older than Tom, during the Second World War, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler” was a popular, patriotic slogan.
Fear: Is that the same reason Tom found but one job during his entire cross-country adventure — at a resort hotel in Colorado, whose owner was a friend-of-a-friend and where he got room-and-board in exchange for odd errands. Every other perspective employer required weeks-long background checks. Or so Tom claimed. Maybe he’s just a lazy, spoiled Millennial?
For his generation, even when away from home, it just seems too easy to ask parents for money: from instant Facebook messaging to cellphone texting. On the other hand, the Stone-Age-like tools I had to entreat my parents — of the Greatest Generation — were only postcards, telegrams, and payphones. And it’s too hard not to send money, for the same technological advances that brought high-frequency trading to Wall Street enable teenagers to get cash in any number ways wherever they are. Back in the day, the only options to keep your traveling loved ones from starving were Western Union or money orders snail-mailed c/o General Delivery.
Fifty years ago, wherever I went, I found work: flipping burgers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, harvesting peas for Jolly Green Giant in Walla Walla, picking strawberries at a family farm along the Columbia River, digging postholes in the San Joaquin Valley.
That America of 50 years ago seems for most aging Boomers — whether liberal or conservative, economically well-off or struggling — a far better place than it is today. If that’s indeed true — and not just a nostalgic distortion — then we Boomers have no one to blame but ourselves. For we’re the ones who’ve been most recently in charge, America’s stewards.
Tom is more forgiving. The stark contrast between then and now has connected us. Same trip, different experiences: talking about them, sharing them. It’s as if Tom bumped into — and asked to ride shotgun — another 18-year-old boy, not unlike himself, who would one day become his father.
“Should I stop at the Cody jail?” Tom texted as he was nearing Yellowstone. “It’s a bit out of the way.”
When Arch and I had pulled into Cody, Wyoming 50 years ago, right there on Main Street, brightly lit, was the Sheriff’s office and county jail. Instead of trespassing or otherwise breaking the law, why not stop there and ask for a recommendation for a place to camp?
— Why, you two can bed down right here for the night!
The voice sounded just like Gunsmoke’s Marshall Dillon, and he looked the part, too. Sheriff Harley Kincade, I’ll never forget his name, the pitch-perfect name for a TallStrongSilent type bringing law and order to Cowboy Country and the Wild West. (In today’s America, casting people against type seems edgy and attention-getting; think Barack Obama as a Texas Ranger.)
— You’ve got clean sheets, a good breakfast, and nobody else to share the cell with. But I’ll have to mug you and fingerprint you first, just to follow procedure.
Sheriff Kincade pointed at a Polaroid on the counter.
— Maybe you can show me how to work my new camera?
How cool is that! Or if neither Arch nor I actually said it out loud (uncool), we certainly thought it and turned toward each other, nodding and grinning. We were going to spend the night in jail! Now that would be something to brag about — just as I guess I’m doing even now.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” was Tom’s reaction when I first told him this story.
And when I looked up the phone number on the Internet and called the Sheriff’s office in Cody to see if Tom might possibly recreate my experience, someone on the other end of the line had the exact same reaction.
— You’ve got to be kidding!
