We stayed four days, in a campground on an old ranch outside the city. I was curious if any descendants of the Oñate expedition lived in the city, and found my way to Joe Lujan. Square-shouldered, black-haired, fifty-eight years old, Lujan works in the state historical museum, housed in the former Palace of the Governors. His ancestors were among the colonists who’d followed Oñate in 1598, and he was proud of it.
“We predate the Mayflower,” he said. “We have first families that have been here more than four hundred years. We speak a unique dialect in northern New Mexico, an archaic Spanish that resembles the Spanish spoken in the sixteenth century.”
Was he ever irritated by the Anglo dominance of our national story, the idea that American civilization began with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and marched westward?
He was, but nowhere near as much as he used to be. “I started school in the late fifties, and we were all led to believe that we had to stop speaking Spanish and learn about all the stuff that happened back East and forget about where we came from—it was no longer important. They tried to de-Hispanicize us. All that changed with the civil rights acts in the midsixties, bilingual education and all that.”
Santa Fe was such a mosaic of Anglo and Spaniard and Indian, of new immigrants from Mexico and venerable families like his. What was the mortar that kept all those racial and cultural tiles in place?
“There’s a lot of tolerance out here,” Lujan said. “For the most part, all the cultures pretty much get along. I don’t know if it’s our space. We’re not all crowded in. It’s the roaming space out here, and I think that goes for the West in general.”
I asked if that could go for the country in general. He wasn’t sure; he thought so.
“It’s probably our laws and our Christian values, our tolerance. This country was built by everybody, not just one group or nationality. They’ve all contributed something. You know, I see the Native Americans here, the older men, a lot of veterans, and proud of it. It’s their country, too. It’s probably more their country.”
* * *
I find this note in my journal for September 3: “We’re winding it up! Leslie leaves Sunday a.m. The trip to Breckenridge and then home to CT will be lonesome without her.”
And it was. Half an hour after kissing her good-bye at the airport, I found myself turning to say something to her and felt her absence as a tangible thing when I looked at the empty passenger seat. After traveling so far together, after living literally side by side for three and a half months, it was as if some part of myself were missing.
I missed her all the way down U.S. 84 through the great, open solitudes of the New Mexican rangelands to Fort Sumner, where Billy the Kid was buried, and then east across the even greater solitudes of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plain, then south again, the small towns—Lariat, Muleshoe, Littlefield—clinging to the asphalt ribbon as if threatened by the Llano’s annihilating emptiness. I missed her still more in Lubbock, where I called it quits for the day. She phoned late in the night to say that she’d made it safely home. Her disembodied voice made me wish the truck could grow wings and fly me back to her side and to my own bed in my own house.
Eighty miles out of Lubbock, I picked up U.S. 180 east, a high wind blasting across the stretched-out land, dust devils pirouetting in the distance. More towns—Snyder, Roby, Anson—and over the Clear Fork of the Brazos, more creek than river in the worst drought Texas and Oklahoma had experienced since the thirties. Triple-digit temperatures, no rain for months, range fires consuming grass that crunched underfoot like brown paper bags. “Like the dust bowl days all over again,” an Oklahoman had told me in Santa Fe. Funston, Albany, and finally Breckenridge.
I checked into a motel, where my gut reacted to fourteen weeks of road food, questionable water, handling sick dogs, and sheer exhaustion. I promptly threw up breakfast.
I splashed cold water on my face, rinsed my mouth with Listerine, and hauled Ethel her last three miles to the east end of town, where Erica Sherwood and her husband, Jef, ran a silk-screen and embroidery shop that sold uniforms to sports teams in their neck of Texas. Erica came out, and towering over me the onetime point guard for Baylor University gave me a welcoming hug.
Ethel, the beautiful lady, had acquired a few bruises, not surprisingly. A lot of detours and side trips had made the journey much longer than expected. Ethel had been taken over every kind of road for a total of 16,241 miles—two-thirds of the way around the world. After unhitching for the last time, I spent about two hours off-loading her and spiffing her up, inside and out. Then I closed the door, and she was no longer mine, no longer Ethel but merely a trailer made of metal, rubber, and wood, a lifeless thing without the power to delight or exasperate.
Later on, Erica and Jef treated me to Texas-style hospitality. They bought me dinner at a TexMex restaurant and invited me to go dove shooting on Erica’s stepfather’s ranch the next day. I accepted. Anxious as I was to get home, I couldn’t face three more days on the road without a break.
That night, we had a glass of wine apiece in the family den—a 1948 Airstream that Erica had renovated to its original luster. The brutal heat had abated, and we sat outside, under the trailer’s awning. My hosts wanted to hear my traveler’s tale. I said it would take me till dawn. So I hit a few highlights, and somewhere in that fractured narrative I mentioned that I’d set out to discover people’s thoughts on what kept our immense, scrambled nation in one piece. I told them about Dean Cannon’s scholarly analysis, and Carol Springer’s idea that it was a belief, not necessarily based on evidence, that we had more in common than we had differences, and a quip I’d heard from a college kid in Tuscaloosa: the glue was professional sports.
“What do you think?” asked Erica.
My answer was inspired by the night of stargazing with Lowell Messely in Idaho and a comment made by Analiese Apel, the Montana wrangler: “The country definitely is in disarray. At the same time, to grow as a country, we need to have conflict, and conflict is healthy, conflict is good.”
“Conflict is what holds a star together,” I said. Cosmologists call it dynamic disequilibrium, a tension between gravity, which pulls a star toward collapse, and thermonuclear fusion, which releases tremendous energy that sends the star’s matter expanding outward. If gravity dominates, the star is crushed down into a black hole; if fusion wins out, it explodes into dust.
Almost from its birth, America had been in a state of “dynamic disequilibrium” between the Jeffersonian force, which aims toward an expansion of individual liberty (“the government that governs least governs best”) and the Hamiltonian force, which pulls the citizen toward centralized, federal power. As a star exists between physical extremes, so does America between its political extremes. But this isn’t the mushy “middle of the road” so favored by moderates. (As a Texas legislator once put it, all you find in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.) No, it’s the perpetual conflict of extremes that generates the binding force. Today it’s the Tea Party, We-Don’t-Need-No-Stinking-Government righties and the Let’s-Regulate-Everything, Nanny-State lefties. Tomorrow, there will be other labels. By whatever name, neither should be allowed to overcome the other. Too much Jefferson leads to anarchy, too much Hamilton to tyranny.
Jef’s and Erica’s quizzical frowns told me that they found the analogy between astrophysics and politics a little far-fetched.
“Well, Erica, what are your thoughts?”
“About what you said or what keeps us together?”
“What keeps us together.”
“Hope,” she said. “Isn’t that what it’s always been?”
Notes
Chapter 14
1The characters portrayed by Martin Milner and George Maharis in the TV series Route 66. It aired from 1960 to 1964.
Chapter 15
1Psalm 90, verse 10: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorro
w; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
Chapter 17
1A section—640 acres—equals a square mile. Kansas is laid out on a grid of townships, each consisting of thirty-six sections.
Chapter 19
1In 1980, the average hourly wage in the industry, measured in today’s dollars, was $21.75; by 2007, it had fallen to $12.03.
2Official name, the American Party. Its members were called “Know-nothings” because their leaders had instructed them, if they were asked about the secret organization, to answer, “I know nothing.”
Chapter 21
1Oglala Lakota protesting misrule on the reservation, joined by other Native Americans and American Indian Movement militants, seized Wounded Knee and held out against a seventy-one-day siege by federal law enforcement authorities. A Cherokee, Frank Clearwater, was also killed. Although the protest did not improve conditions on Pine Ridge, it sparked a revival of Native American customs, ceremonies, and languages throughout the country.
2At the time, state of the art in weaponry. The Hotchkiss fired a 42 mm exploding shell at the rate of forty-three rounds per minute.
Chapter 25
1During the Civil War, Custer was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general at age twenty-three. After the war, he reverted to his previous rank of captain. He was a lieutenant colonel at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
2Fifty-five more were wounded. They and other survivors were from Reno’s and Benteen’s commands, which regrouped on a hilltop and held off an Indian siege for two days before help arrived.
Chapter 27
1The Mississippi is 2,320 miles long.
2For President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin.
Chapter 29
1The explorers first called it Beaten Rock and later changed it to Beacon Rock. Its exact altitude is 848 feet.
Chapter 31
1The oldest verified western red cedar sprouted in approximately AD 550, about a century after the fall of the Roman Empire. There is another on the Olympic Peninsula believed to be two thousand years old.
Chapter 34
1Counties in Alaska are called boroughs. There are twenty, and some are larger than the states in the Lower 48. The Unorganized Borough, for example, could accommodate all of Texas.
Chapter 36
1The lowest temperature ever recorded in the United States, eighty degrees below zero, was in 1971 at the Prospect Creek Camp, south of Coldfoot.
Chapter 37
1Athabascan is the language spoken by the tribes of interior Alaska. Curiously enough, the Navajo and Apache of the Southwest speak a dialect of Athabascan.
2Like the Alaska Highway, it’s an engineering marvel, built in three years, in the most difficult conditions imaginable, by tens of thousands of workers, thirty-two of whom died in its construction.
POSTSCRIPT
IN MEMORY OF
AURORA SAGE
JULY 10, 1998–DECEMBER 21, 2011
STILL HUNTING
Also by Philip Caputo
A Rumor of War
Horn of Africa
Delcorso’s Gallery
Indian Country
Means of Escape
Equation for Evil
Exiles
The Voyage
Ghosts of Tsavo
In the Shadows of the Morning
13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings
Acts of Faith
Ten Thousand Days of Thunder
Crossers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHILIP CAPUTO is a former journalist and a Pulitzer Prize cowinner who has written numerous works of nonfiction, including A Rumor of War, one of the most highly praised books of the twentieth century, which is read widely in colleges throughout the country. His novels include Acts of Faith, The Voyage, Indian Country, Horn of Africa, and his most recent, Crossers. He divides his time between Norwalk, Connecticut, and Patagonia, Arizona.
THE LONGEST ROAD. Copyright © 2013 by Philip Caputo. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover art credit: Rick Pracher
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Caputo, Philip.
The longest road: overland in search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean / Philip Caputo.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8050-9446-6
1. Caputo, Philip—Travel—United States. 2. United States—Description and travel. 3. National characteristics, American. 4. United States—Biography. 5. United States—Social life and customs—21st century. 6. United States—Social conditions—21st century. I. Title.
E169.Z83C37 2013
973.93—dc23 2012050451
e-ISBN 978-0-8050-9696-5
First Edition: June 2013
The Longest Road Page 34