I have been obsessed with driving ever since the State of Wisconsin granted me the right to get behind the wheel more than twenty years ago. The very night I got my license, a buddy and I took a road trip to Duluth, Minnesota (what constituted the 'city' for the likes of us at the time). I didn't tell my dad, and also didn't count on him knowing exactly how many miles were on the odometer when he allowed me to take it. I caught hell the next day, but it was worth it. That first road trip was monumental. There really wasn't much to it, just an hour's drive on a Wednesday night in the dead of winter, and not much for us to do but cruise down Superior Street (feeling totally urban), hit Orange Julius and Musicland at the mall, then drive back. But it was the crossing of a vast ocean in my mind, which before that night I could only stand on the shoreline of and imagine where all the waves were coming from.
Over time, the road trips got longer, more adventurous. I've done a hell of a lot of driving, and undertaken more than a few long hauls, all of them originating in northern Wisconsin. Laughlin, Nevada (2011). Fargo, North Dakota (2006). New York City (1994 and '97). Des Moines, Iowa (1995). Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan (1995). Thunder Bay, Ontario (1995 and 1997). Interspersed between these have been countless trips to Chicago and innumerable sojourns to the Twin Cities. I've always felt like I needed to be going somewhere, and more importantly, needed to be the one behind the wheel, and to that end have offered my vehicle, sometimes my gas money, to ensure that I was.
Shotgun is nowhere. The back seat, forget it.
My most epic, and also reckless, long haul took place in 1993, a run to Cincinnati, Ohio and back, non-stop, to pick someone up at the airport. Why they were flying in to Cincinnati rather than Chicago or Minneapolis, I have no idea, but I wasn't about to question a chance to drive to Ohio. It was as much a challenge as anything: 1500 miles round-trip, 24 straight hours on the road, which I stupidly attempted to drive myself. I came close to making it actually, but 20 hours in I was, quite literally, slapping myself to stay awake, chugging coffee as if it were doing anything other than making me nauseous, my fingers strangling the steering wheel, flinching and jerking the brake pedal whenever a winged monkey with flashing red eyes and leaving a rainbow trail behind jumped down from a tree and lumbered across the road, which started happening around the eighteenth hour, every fifteen minutes or so at first, but by the end, every 562 feet, 11 inches, like clockwork. Eventually, I had to be removed from the behind the wheel and deposited in the back seat, where I slowly laughed myself to sleep.
It's easy to look back on fondly now, but I would never try to do that again. Fondly, only because I didn't fall asleep at the wheel, careen off the road and up a tree (taking out a whole nest of winged monkeys). For as out of my mind with exhaustion as I was, I was truthfully no better a driver than if I'd been drunk. I didn't think I was being reckless at the time though, and it's frightening the way the young mind operates, how a sense of immortality blankets common sense.
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JOE DIRT EAT YOUR HEART OUT - November 1994 saw a stellar road trip out east, rolling into New York City via the Lincoln Tunnel in a '74 Chevy Nova with Wisconsin plates and Wisconsin road salt. Here, I am pictured at the fountain in Central Park, looking more or less covered in 'Wisconsin road salt' as well, with my pencil thin mustache, flannel shirt TUCKED INTO belted black jeans and 4-H prize winning mullet. By some miracle, I made it out alive.
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Far and away, my favorite long haul of all time took place in the summer of 1990. I was seventeen, on vacation with my parents. We were doing a marathon run to Maine for my dad's high school reunion. By midnight of the first day my Mom and Dad had fallen asleep, leaving me the job of getting us across Ontario. I spent that savory overnight cruising east on King's Highway 17, finding French-speaking radio stations, watching for moose, identifying stars and planets in what seemed at the time to be an astonishingly clear sky. Around 3 a.m. the gasoline light came on and I started to panic a little, but found a filling station about an hour later, just in the nick of time (my parents never knew!) I will never forget my dad and I peeing on the side of the highway near Sudbury just before midnight (my poor mother shrinking down in her seat, mortified), or reaching Montreal at sunrise, as news came over the radio that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait.
So I am no stranger to long-distance driving, but this road trip will be different than all the others. I will be alone. There won't be anyone to relieve me of duty when exhaustion overtakes me, nobody to 'deposit' me in the back seat. I will have to have the common sense to not push myself, not feel as though I have to make a certain amount of distance in a day, and not let bullheadedness or machismo get in the way.
I don't think it will be all that hard. The point of a nebulous life is to have no schedule whatsoever, no itinerary to follow, no place to be at any given time, nobody waiting for you. I fully intend to take my sweet time on 1/48/50. I want to stop along the way, stay over if I can, meet people, talk to people, backtrack if I feel like it, or turn left instead of right on a moment's notice. As much as possible, anyway, I want to drift.
That's living nebulously. For all the driving I have done in my life, every single one of the aforementioned 'long hauls', I haven't been able to drift. There was always an objective I needed to achieve, a destination to get to, a finish line. All my miles have been empty miles, sporting about as much flavor - and almost as satisfying - as a rice cake.
Time
Meeting people, talking to people, takes time, which means I will need to invest a significant chunk of my time to this trip. There's no getting around it; if I want to drift as opposed to drive, it's going to cause a major, if temporary, disruption of my personal and professional life.
As the time nears, I'm sure it will open to interpretation, but right now I picture myself leaving in late May, and returning in late September. Some people might think I'm crazy to travel during the summer, highways and byways clogged as they are with vacationers determined to squeeze as much time and distance out of their precious two weeks as possible (doing anything BUT living nebulously). Steinbeck specifically waited until after Labor Day to begin his travels with Charley for that very reason, and he's not the only one. But I like summer. I like the light, the heat, the aroma, the holidays, the storms, and indeed, the sense of urgency that propels us (me, anyway) to run.
"For all the driving I have done in my life, every single one of the aforementioned 'long hauls', I haven't been able to drift. There was always an objective I needed to achieve, a destination to get to, a finish line."
Not only do I like summer, but I despise winter with a white-hot passion you'd think would melt all the snow and ice, but never does. My relationship with winter has only gotten worse as I've gotten older. I do not want so much as a mile of this road trip to fall victim to chilled weather. I want to be on the road only after the last threat of frost in the spring, and off the road long before the first threat of flurries in the fall. Four months will provide ample time, I'd say, to hit all 48 states, and see something of them at the same time.
Er...right?
Until very recently, I wasn't sure how much time I would need. During my 2011 trip, driving through 'big sky' country in eastern Colorado, the enormity of this land really hit me, and I wondered, how long can I expect it to take me to drive through the contiguous 48? And how wil I go about reconciling time and distance and getting it all to create as minimal a footprint on my life as possible?
I found the answer on-line: a website that allows you to create a point-by-point driving route, quite literally a road trip-planner. While this site is a bit too fastidious in its planning (I have no intention of treating 1/48/50 like Clark Griswold, niggling every detail down to the last second, penny and gallon of gas), it does help to actually see the trip strung out across a map, get an idea of where to drive and have the distance and time quantified. I spent the weekend carefully plotting my course, keeping in mind a few key requirements:
a) I have to hit all of the lower 48 states. It's in the name, after all. '1/48/50'
b) There are a few landmarks I want to see, and I do not feel guilty for this.
c) With a few notable exceptions, I want to avoid heavy urban areas; I'm far more interested in rural areas and small towns, not because I believe them to be any more 'real' than urban areas, the people any more virtuous or interesting or relatable, but because, speaking honestly, they're just less of a pain in the ass to navigate, generally less dangerous to take a wrong turn in.
After all the plotting and calculating, my entire trip, as I envision it, tops off at 13,848 miles, and requires 233 hours of driving time. Yowza. From this, I figured if I drive eight hours a day, it will take me about 30 days to complete. Not only would that be physically taxing, but also depressingly self-defeating. I wouldn't see anything or talk to anyone driving that much, and I'd be able to do little more than fall dead asleep at the end of each day, right back to miles tasting like rice cakes.
No sir, this is not the Cannonball Run I'm planning; there's no finish line, so eight hours a day of driving is out of the question. But then, how much do I whittle that number down? Four hours a day? That'd turn it into a two-month trip...ish. Two hours a day? That would get me right up around the three or four month mark, taking into consideration all the variables, but that seems kind of paltry and lame, inching my way across the USA. I want to feel like I'm getting somewhere!
On the other hand, living nebulously means nothing if not being perfectly okay with getting nowhere fast
