Illustration: Michael Mucci.
Lance Richardson unleashes his white line fever in a salute to the great American road-trip.
The first time I visited the US, it was to go on a road trip. Partly, this was motivated by too many movies: I pictured a dazzling stranger slouching by my side as we sped through the country in a blue Thunderbird convertible. In reality, I had never learnt to drive, but Greyhound buses could substitute.
I travelled alone and would meet people along the way. "Sauntering the pavement or riding the country byroads here then are faces," Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass. "Faces of friendship, precision, caution, sauvity." The trip started in New York and my open ticket was valid for two months of travel.
Things went well in the beginning. Washington, DC, was pink with cherry blossoms and the white spray of Niagara Falls looked like a volcano. It was
pre-Katrina days down in New Orleans, with voodoo trinkets in the French Quarter and jambalaya in the bayou.
By week four, however, exhaustion started to slide into view, and by Arizona my dazzling stranger had split in two and taken on the shape of Thelma and Louise. I imagined them driving the bus over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long - but not, it turns out, in an endless procession of Greyhound buses.
Still, the trip showed me a truthful picture of America, covering the spectrum from graceful monuments to grotesque poverty. And even at my lowest point - Albuquerque, sleeping on the terminal floor - I was determined to see it through to the end. Needing to fill a prescription on the cheap, I crossed the US-Mexico border and wandered around Ciudad Juarez, blithely unaware of its status as one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
I stayed in cheap motels on the fringe of Las Vegas, pretending to play pokies to score free drinks from bleary-eyed waitresses. I was going towards California, to San Francisco - going west, in the end, because that's the way America faces. In a country in love with progress and open roads, the west has always been its dream destination.
In the 19th century, going west was significantly more difficult. One pioneer travelling overland from New York in 1849 describes, in nine days of passage, steamships, ferries, carts and the Columbia Railroad. All that was just to reach Pittsburgh, though, meaning there were still 4200 kilometres to come. The west pulled people over mountain ranges, prairies and hostile badlands because it represented greener pastures and a chance of prosperity. The meek could inherit the earth - never mind the natives - if they had the gumption to get there.
Things became a little easier with the advance of the railways, but the future of America was writ with its auto trails. In the early decades of the 20th century, cars came into vogue and entrepreneurs began building auto trails to squeeze out a fortune. These men would devise memorable names - the "Dixie Overland Highway" (Savannah to San Diego), the "Egyptian Trail" (Chicago to Cairo, Illinois) - promote them through newsletters, and then collect dues from the towns and businesses along the way that benefited from a sudden influx of motor travellers.
Eventually, auto trails were absorbed into the Numbered Highway System overseen by the government. These routes have been superseded, too, but some linger in the popular imagination as the best drives around. Route 1 takes on the east coast in a single grand sweep, meandering from Maine to New England, down through former plantations in Georgia, all the way to the humid island enclave of Key West, Florida. Route 212, linking Montana and Wyoming along what some call the most beautiful drive in the country, soars more than 3000 metres to Beartooth Pass. And Route 66, the "Main Street of America", starts in Illinois and terminates in California, pulling countless millions along its history to the palm-fringed promise of Los Angeles.
Much of Route 66 fell into decline during the 1950s, although recent efforts and official heritage-listing have sanctified some parts that remain. People want the old-fashioned drive-ins on their way out west, those "mom and pop" gas stations surrounded by saguaro cactuses. Somehow, Route 66 has become more than just a road. The obsession with highways runs deeper in the US than anywhere else, too. Australia is nearly as wide, for example, but who considers the drive from Sydney to Perth a hallowed rite of passage?
Travelling down American highways feels like touring through its aspirations: in Colorado or Oregon, you find regular people searching for the same freedom and good fortune that drove their ancestors across the Rocky Mountains 100 years ago. This is why you take a car if you want to see the "real" America.
Freedom, after all, is sometimes represented as a couple screaming down the Pacific Highway past redwood groves and the cliffs of Big Sur. Sometimes it's the beat poet Jack Kerouac, recording his thinly fictionalised road trips in California, Virginia, and New York on a continuous roll of telex paper (On the Road).
Kerouac is usually hailed as the greatest writer of American road journeys, but my money is on William Least Heat-Moon, who separated from his wife and in 1978 found solace by climbing into a beat-up green van he nicknamed Ghost Dancing. Blue Highways, released in 1982, tells the tale of his 20,000-kilometre odyssey through small towns and forgotten byways. "O public road," he writes, quoting Whitman, "you express me better than I can express myself." Least Heat-Moon depicts the highway as a path to redemption and a place of endless possibility. "When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then," he says. "People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
The open road is a way to cut loose and be creative. Marfa, Texas, is a thriving artist colony and wilfully inaccessible to nearly anything but motor traffic. You can fly to Las Vegas but it's more potent to drive there, seeing the Strip rise in the night like a shimmering mirage where nobody judges your actions ("What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"). America's most outlandish festival, Burning Man, takes place in the Black Rock Desert near Reno, Nevada, and driving there acts as an essential transition - a kind of crossing the frontier of respectability into something wilder and less restrained.
Indeed, highways remain a palpable link to wildness in the US. Yellowstone National Park is accessed via a figure-eight of sealed roads, brushing against geothermal activity that occasionally eats holes in the asphalt. And drive west long enough and you will eventually come to the wildest place of all: Alaska. The North American highway system reaches its terminus at Anchor Point.
Here, on a fragrant salt beach, the Old Sterling Highway gives way to driftwood in a thick marine haze. Mount Augustine rises in the distance. Beyond that is the great Alaskan mystery of thick forests and glaciers, all but impenetrable unless you have a light plane or dog sled.
In the end, the highway is simply the best way to get your head around the place. Writer Ada Limon has a good poem titled Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America.
"The road is long," she writes, "and all the dogs don't care too much about roadside concrete history and postcards of state treasures, they just want their head out the window, and the speeding air to make them feel faster and younger, and newer than all the dogs that went before them."
Maybe that's the best metaphor for the US I've read all year. But it makes me restless, too, with its long road and speeding air and sense of carefree hopefulness. Who wouldn't want to be alive on a highway like that, driving anywhere on a road through America?
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