by Paul Theroux
For Miller, St. Louis is a particular horror: “The houses seem to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, sweat, bile, rheum and elephant dung. Nothing can terrify me more than the thought of being doomed to spend the rest of my days in such a place.” California is just as bad: “The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public.” One year after this ordeal, Miller took up residence in California, first in Big Sur; he ended his days in Los Angeles, a happy man, as he said, “always merry and bright.”
Arduous America, alone in the elements, is the subject of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness—facing the bleak elements alone. “A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles,” but he failed to disclose that he had a car, and, “Wilderness. The word itself is music,” he wrote. In his celebration of solitude and his lonely communing with nature in southern Utah, Abbey does not mention that for one five-month period he was living in a trailer with his third wife, Rita, and their young son, not far from his drinking buddies and a town with a saloon.
In Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981), my good friend Jonathan Raban describes his trip in a small powerboat down the Mississippi River. One of the great descriptive writers of travel, a shrewd analyst of manners, he is insightful and witty in the book and, as an outsider, sees much of this country that Americans miss. Though there is minimal mock ordeal in his wonderful book, at one point he becomes fearful of a flock of birds. “On the Illinois side there was a dead tree which seemed to function as a skid-row hotel for a gang of large ne’er-do-well birds.” He is terrified of the birds. “I dug my dark glasses out of my grip, possessed by the thought that the first thing they’d try to peck out would be my eyes.”
Menacing though they seem, the birds do not peck out the English traveler’s eyes. He endures periods of bad weather, a failed love affair, and a near-drowning, but arrives in New Orleans unscathed. Another, more recent—but lazier, less ambitious—traveler sailing down the Mississippi, Mary Morris, in The River Queen, makes a meal of the mock ordeal. The boat is not to her liking, the cocaptains, Tom and Jerry, irritate her. The food disgusts her. Her ordeal can be summed up in one of her rants: “I hate pizza. I hate all that doughy stuff. I want a meal, shower, amenities.”
Hiking the Appalachian Trail one would have thought to be a bracing and satisfying experience for a healthy pedestrian. Many have accomplished it. Bill Bryson, who traipsed it with a friend for his book A Walk in the Woods (1998), includes a classic mock ordeal, his encounter with a bear while camped one night near a spring in Virginia. A bear—possibly two, all he sees are the eyes—wanders near for a drink. “I sat bolt upright. Instantly every neuron in my brain was awake and dashing around frantically, like ants when you disturb their nest. I reached instinctively for my knife.” He has no knife, he has fingernail clippers—the deflating beauty of this episode lies in its self-mockery. “Black bears rarely attack,” he goes on. “But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do . . . If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want.”
“Finally, this being America,” Bryson says at another point, “there is the constant possibility of murder.”
The bears leave him alone, he is not murdered, and apart from sore feet, he is hardly inconvenienced in what is, for all its mock ordeals, a likable book.
“Call me crazy,” Elijah Wald writes at the beginning of Riding with Strangers (2006). “I’m standing at a highway rest area outside Boston, in the rain, trying to get the first ride in yet another cross-country trek.” But this hitchhiking book is surpassed in both self-mockery and hilarity by John Waters, who, on a whim, bummed rides from Baltimore to San Francisco, resulting in Carsick (2014), which is filled with mock ordeals, most of them (as he freely admits) the delusions of the fearful and fevered brain of a wealthy gay movie director who can easily afford to fly first class, but who longs for an ordeal, to endow his laborious trip with some squalid glamour.
There are many other similar books, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but each in its peculiar, even revelatory way is an approximation of travel in far-off places, reimagining the United States as a foreign, hostile landscape, making travel into a risky exertion, a deadly sport, or a dangerous stunt.
Their exaggerations aside, some of these are worthy books, but what is missing is the plain fact that the United States puts very few delays in the path of the traveler. In walking, boating, hitchhiking, and camping these travel writers set out to make the business harder and to call attention to themselves, but nothing is easier than traversing this country by road. The car journey is celebrated in Larry McMurtry’s Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways (2000), a meditation on motoring: “What I want to do is treat the great roads as a river, floating down this one, struggling up that one.” This satisfying essay on driving across the country recounts the idiot joy of talking to oneself at the wheel, the reverie of the road, recalling books, old movies, reflections on the past: “blank driving, accompanied by minimal thought.”
“My old friend the 90,” McMurtry writes of one highway. On another ride, “Then I’m in Alabama for an hour,” and he seems airborne. He speaks of a 770-mile drive, Duluth to Wichita, remarking how “I never had to go more than one hundred yards off the highway for food, gasoline, or a restroom,” and, he might have added, a motel. His book accurately reflects what I feel in traveling in America—the solitary road trip that is in many respects a Zen experience, scattered with road candy, unavailable to motorists in any other country on earth.
BUT THERE ARE obstacles to travel in the United States, or at least obstacles to penetrating the country. We are a naturally welcoming people, but with too strenuous a response from the stranger, the welcome wears off, it shreds, it cools, it vanishes and becomes wary and reluctant. We are full of opinions, but we are temperamentally inhospitable to opposition or to searching questions—and the best traveler has nothing but questions. Americans will talk all day, but they are terrible listeners and have an aversion to probing or any persistent inquisitiveness by a stranger.
Americans share with the simple furrow-browed villagers in the folk societies of the world a deep suspicion of personal questions. We say we tolerate dissent, but the expression of a strongly held contrary view can render you undesirable, or even an enemy. A difference of opinion is often construed as defiance. You would not know that from our obsessive self-congratulation and our boasts of liberty and freedom. New Americans, refugees, people fleeing the horrors and tyrannies of their homelands, who have come to the United States for its freedoms, are often the most narrow-minded and censorious. We tolerate difference only when we don’t have to look at it or listen to it, as long as it doesn’t impact our lives.
Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler.
Becoming a Traveler Again
Driving south, I became a traveler again in ways I’d forgotten. Because of the effortless release from my home to the road, the sense of being sprung, I rediscovered the joy in travel that I knew in the days before the halts, the checks, the affronts at airports—the invasions and violations of privacy that beset every air traveler. The discouragement and indignity of this querying casts a pall over the whole experience of travel—and this is before any forward progress can be made. All air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior.
Once, you slipped away unseen, showed your ticket, boarded the plane, your luggage and peace of mind intact; you set off undisturbed. Earlier in my traveling life, this was my happy lot.
There is so much disturbance in travel itself, it is intolerable that it begins so quickly, even before you leave. These days the airport experience is not only a disagreeable foretaste of
all the insults to come on the trip, but also an annoying way of reminding the prospective traveler that he or she is an alien at home, and not just a stranger but someone perhaps to be feared, a possible danger, a troublemaker if not a terrorist—the hoo-ha, shoes off, belt off, no jacket, denuded and simplified and subjected to screening while tapping your feet, eager to get away; all this while still in a mode of predeparture, scrutinized, needing to pass inspection before you can even think of the trip ahead.
An airport is an obstacle course, and because of that it can sour you on the whole notion of travel. By degrees, over the years, the airport experience has become an extreme example of a totalitarian regime at work, making you small and suspect, depriving you of control. Such is the clumsy questioning of motives that one’s usual response is the sort of suppressed rage that was the traveler’s emotion in Soviet-era Eastern Europe with its bullying policemen. Travel was once a liberation; now it is the opposite—air travel, that is. Younger travelers have no idea what has been lost.
The sense that you’re agreeing to this intrusion, that you’re collaborating (“It’s for my own good”), is worse than demeaning; it combines all the excuses and evasions that helped to create the oppressive dictatorships and tyrannies of the past. The stripping, at all airports, of the traveler’s dignity, forcing the traveler to submit, is the antithesis of what one seeks in travel. Yes, we live in dangerous times, but if that means surrendering all our rights to privacy, then it is hardly worth the misery of leaving home.
There is a remedy, but it is for the lucky few, those who live in a vast country like ours who have the option of avoiding all airports: those who stick to the open road. Even the lowest jalopy is better than a first-class seat on a plane, because to get to that seat you are forced to submit to the indignities of official scrutiny and a body search. But no one has the right to question your slipping into a car and driving away at high speed. There is no prologue, only the bliss of a sudden exit.
The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic, maintaining the delusion that it is travel. This is the equivalent of being measured like a projectile and being shot out of a cannon, and that’s how most of us feel in such a state, like a human cannonball, dazed and confused, in the company of other cannonballs.
There is a better way, a truer way, the old way—the proud highway, the rolling road.
Going South
Traveling without a specific destination, I had left home on Cape Cod, early on a morning autumnal and damp, steering my car south, dropped down past New York City and skirted Washington, D.C., keeping on until way past sunset, and drove into Front Royal, Virginia, in the dark. It was October. I was headed for the Deep South, so I still had a way to go. But already I knew the pleasant trance-like state of long-distance driving, the onset of highway hypnosis and white line fever in the long empty stretches: the satori of the open road, the ordinary experience of driving transformed into a higher spiritual path.
Normally I felt a tremor of anxiety before I set off on a long trip. This time I felt only joy, an eagerness to start, no passport, no security check, no plane to catch, no crowds. I felt a thrill throwing a jackknife into my bag. I loaded up with books; I had a tent and a sleeping bag just in case. I emptied out the refrigerator and had a bag of food too—juice and hard-boiled eggs, a container of homemade chili, cheese, fruit, and bottles of wine.
I was in the Deep South because I hardly knew it, and for the sheer pleasure of driving my own car, for the freedom of not having to make onward plans, because only in America can you travel in confidence without a destination: the humblest town has a place to stay, probably on its outskirts, probably a beat-up motel; and a place to eat, at best a soul food diner, but probably a Hardee’s, an Arby’s, a Zaxby’s, a Lizard’s Thicket, or a disenfranchised chicken place reeking of hot oil, but friendly. Typically it was a small eatery with a counter that displayed an anthology of fried food—catfish, chicken, burgers, corrugated French fries, even fried pie—peasant food eaten by everyone. A deep tray of okra, as viscous as frog spawn, next to a kettle of sodden collard greens looking like stewed dollar bills. You were always offered a wet biscuit, and often a blessing. I stayed away from the big cities and the coastal communities. I kept to the Lowcountry, the Black Belt, the Delta, the backwoods, the flyspeck towns.
In the presidential debates during the election campaign of 2012 the candidates made constant reference to America’s middle class—how it was under siege, overtaxed, burdened by debt and uncertainty, and how each candidate was going to save the middle class—and appealed for their votes. On the way down, in New Jersey, I heard on the radio that fifty million Americans lived in poverty, not many where I was coming from, a great number where I was headed. Sixteen percent of Americans were classified as poor—and it was twenty percent in the South, in places where the income gap was growing wider than at any time in history. The presidential candidates did not allude to saving the poor.
“They avoid using the word ‘poor,’” a social worker in Alabama told me early on in my trip, and explained, “‘Poor’ is shorthand for ‘black.’”
I was curious about the poor in the South. It is impossible to travel the country roads of the South and not be in regular contact with America’s underclass. I was traveling for my usual reasons, out of restlessness and curiosity, to look at places that were new to me. We travel for pleasure, for a door-slamming sense of “I’m outta here,” for a change of air, for edification, for the big vulgar boast of being distant, for the possibility of being transformed, for the voyeuristic romance of gawping at the exotic.
“You’ve been everywhere,” people said to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long, but in many cases blindingly obvious. Yes, I had been to Patagonia and the Congo and Sikkim, but I—an American—hadn’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho, or the Dakotas, and I’d had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I had not traveled in the Deep South. I wanted to see these states, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc.”
Nothing to me has more excitement than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much can beat it for a sense of freedom—no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American, beginning with reliable autos, early in the last century.
The first cross-country road, the Lincoln Highway, was inaugurated in 1913. Linking New York and San Francisco, this notional thoroughfare, pieced together from an assortment of east-west–trending roads, was not a US government project but rather an idea seen through to completion by private businessmen. These men, all of whom were associated with the automobile industry, were supervised by Carl G. Fisher, who manufactured car headlights in Indianapolis. (He also built the Indianapolis Speedway.) An accepted north-south route was established at around the same time. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald took a celebrated trip on it in a 1918 Marmon Roadster, from Connecticut to Alabama in 1920, three months after their marriage. Scott wrote a jaunty account of it in The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, one of the earliest American car journey narratives.
Many other road books followed: Henry Miller’s, Kerouac’s, Steinbeck’s, and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways being the notable ones. The road trips Nabokov took all over America with his wife at the wheel, seeking butterflies, resulted in Lolita, a novel that is also incidentally a road trip. Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South is one of the great road trip novels, starting in Arkansas and ending in Honduras, a wild ride, played for laughs, and wise too: “The car ran well and I glowed in the joy of solitary fli
ght. It was almost a blessed state.”
EVER SINCE THE advent of the motorcar people have turned road trips into narratives, both in America and in Europe. Rudyard Kipling was an early motorist, and bought a Rolls-Royce in 1910 in which his chauffeur drove him around England while he made notes. Edith Wharton was an enthusiastic car owner; she took her first ride in 1902, bought a Panhard-Levassor in 1904, and later a black Pope-Hartford. Wharton wrote A Motor-Flight Through France (1908), its first sentence, “The motor car has restored the romance of travel.” Like Kipling she had a chauffeur, and her bachelor friend Henry James was often her passenger. James loved her cars and called her new one the “Vehicle of Passion.”
“James grew to admire her and wonder at her energy,” Colm Tóibín wrote in Vogue of “the Master.” “During a heat wave on one of his stays at The Mount”—Wharton’s estate in Massachusetts—“the only relief James found was in ‘incessant motoring.’ They motored, Wharton wrote, ‘daily, incessantly, over miles and miles of lustrous landscape lying motionless under the still glaze of heat. While we were moving he was refreshed and happy, his spirits rose.’”
WHILE ALL ROADS in America are pretty much the same, and predictably smooth, American places and its people are distinctly different and pose other problems. The roads in general represent effortless and standardized pleasure, even with the traffic, which no one wants to hear about. This makes the abrupt arrivals, and encounters, somewhat surrealistic—in one day, driving from my house on Cape Cod, an abode of familiarity, and on that same road, at nightfall, finding myself in an utterly different landscape, among people who, while polite enough, did not want to be known.
In Africa and China and India and Patagonia, the locals seem grateful to be visited by a stranger. This is the drama, the color, the encounter in the familiar travel book. But in the United States, a visit by another citizen is not an occasion to rehearse traditional hospitality, or to utter the Arabic formula “Salam aleikum ya dayf al-Rahman! Peace upon you, guest of the Merciful One!” or the Hindi version, “Welcome! Atithi devo Bhava! The guest is God!”