Blue Moons and Hurricanes

Although I've made four coast-to-coast driving trips in my life, it seems fitting that I'm making my first such trip with Linda "once in a blue moon." Because of her dialysis, we didn't even consider this trip until last December, until she read the account I wrote of a 62-day adventure from 1998 and realized that she needed to see more of this country. Vacations like this don't happen every day, or every year, even for people with perfect health and a lot of money. We don't have either (I hope the folks at VISA use the interest we'll be paying in upcoming months wisely), but that hasn't stopped us. Once we got the itch to see the country together, nothing was going to stop us.

I also seems fitting that we'll be finishing reading Travels With Charley tonight, on the eve of launching the trip. The timing is perfect in many ways, including the fact that Steinbeck began his 1960 trip by battling a hurricane, while we'll be trying to outrun through the midwest for the next three days. Travels With Charley opens with him taking desperate measures to safeguard his boat off Sag Harbor on Long Island against the rages of Hurricane Donna, so he could take off around Labor Day on a three-month saga during which he mainly traversed the perimeter of the United States. He proceeded in the opposite direction of the route forged by William Least Heat-Moon in Blue Highways. Our trip will be more in the interior of the country--across the midwest and down through Wyoming into Colorado, where we'll visit friends for several days; from there a week or more exploring Edward Abbey country, the bleak and brilliantly colored canyons and parks of southern Utah and northern Arizona; finally a 40-hour turnaround in Las Vegas and onto I-40 for the return trip, which will include more friends, more beauty, and more adventure.

The first time I read Travels With Charley I was a college freshman who had never traveled west of Philadelphia. As soon as I could--the following summer--I spent 33 days on a circuit of the country that included the west coast. My big epiphany came in the Badlands of South Dakota, the first indication that the rocky western half of this vast nation looks quite a bit different from the more forested east. Like Steinbeck, I traveled with a French poodle who, like Charley, disappointed his owner by being completely unimpressed with redwoods. Only one part of the country captured Jacques' enthusiasm:  the day we drove across the northern tier of Wyoming, he never left his vantage point with his front paws perched on the door handle so he wouldn't miss any of the spectacular scenery. He gawked at Wyoming all day and collapsed as soon as we got to the motel. I knew how he felt.

That trip was the reason why I decided to settle in the west, and why I spent most of the next 30 years there following my college graduation. I lived in Oregon, Montana, Nevada, and California, but spent a lot of time criss-crossing the west and visiting its national parks. I also made three cross-country trips in the 1990s, primarily by myself since two of them centered around interviewing ex-major leaguers for various writing projects about baseball history. So, like Steinbeck, it has been awhile since I spent a lot of time in the country's midsection, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's going on around there. Reading Travels With Charley again this past week or so, Linda and I have doubled our excitement at exploring the USA the Schechter way.