I write these words early in the morning in a dark motel room, nearly 4,000 km from my home, eight hours east of Seattle and 45 minutes south of Glacier National Park.
Five other people around me are still sleeping: my wife and our four children, all crammed into queen-size beds, an inflatable mattress, and a collapsible bassinet. It’s the conditions we’ve been sleeping in for the past 16 days, which we’ve spent enjoying an important American birthright: making the westward migration by minivan, the great crossing of the country.
In “The Hunt for Red October,” a late-Cold War classic, one of the submarine’s Soviet defectors, played by Sam Neill, weaves fantasies about his future as a free American — living in Montana with a pickup truck or “possibly even a ‘vehicle’. recreational'”, driving “from state to state”, “undocumented”. Toward the end of the film, the character dies, whispering “I wish I’d seen Montana”.
Whatever faults in the upbringing we give our children, they have now at least seen Montana — and before that Wyoming, Minnesota and so on, back through the Midwest to the faraway hobbit land we inhabit, Connecticut. . By the time you read this, assuming I haven’t been recruited into some survivalist group somewhere north of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, they’ll have seen Idaho and Washington state, too.
More specifically, they toured the Pittsburgh Zoo and the golden dome of Notre Dame University in Indiana (in a 15-minute stop to stretch their legs), looked out over Chicago from the top of a skyscraper, and dipped their toes in Lake Michigan. .
They spent hours at a water park in Minnesota, hiked the prairie where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in the later books in the “Little House” series, saw Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse memorial, basked in the heat of Badlands National Park, and avoided being struck by lightning nearby. Devil’s Tower, bathed in hot springs and looked for dinosaur bones in Thermopolis, Wyoming, watched geysers and grizzly bears in Yellowstone and a carefree beaver in Glacier National Park, and stared in amazement at home prices in Bozeman , in Montana.
Okay, actually that last thing was done by their parents; the kids were amused by their overpriced hamburgers while the two of us watched the wave of well-heeled newcomers to “Boz Angeles.” As a good journalist, I’ve been trying to gather material for columns as I make this trip, and issues of migration, population density, and development come to the fore as you traverse the (probably) underpopulated West – with such a big highlight on the billboard that greets anyone arriving in Cody, in Wyoming, asking “not to ‘californiem’ our Cody”.
But for this column, with our journey still unfinished, I want to venture two general observations about America on a grand scale. Perhaps they are banal remarks, but I will take that risk.
The first is my sense of surprise and awe at the amount of beautiful things to see and see on the roads of the West, without having to face crowds of tourists. I’ve read all the reports about the growth of American tourism and the overcrowding of national parks, but the only real bottleneck we found was in Glacier National Park, where the higher-altitude roads were closed by snow and everyone was forced to walk the same ones. few trails.
And every place we passed that was a degree less famous than the big national parks — places like the wonderful Custer State Park in Dakota or the hot springs at Thermopolis — was staggeringly empty. There couldn’t have been more than 20 people under the wild and impossible shadow of Devil’s Tower the afternoon we climbed the mountain.
Of course, available doesn’t mean perfectly accessible: even if we’re all crammed into the same motel room, we’ve already spent a good deal of money on gas alone, and day after day of multi-hour drive spent trying to teach kids about American presidents. (we gave up after Lincoln, predictably), aside from realizing that our 2-year-old knows some of the inappropriate bits of “Hamilton,” it’s not an experience everyone would like.
But if you’re used to the overcrowded spaces on the coasts, you should know that they really do disappear — and not just sprawling cornfields, grasslands or desert, but a landscape full of places that were made for travelers, who offer immediate rewards for even the most casual visitor.
This is linked to the second observation, which is simply the intense difference between America experienced as a geographical entity, a continental empire, and America experienced as a virtual landscape, through the screens and apps through which, increasingly, We found.
The comparison is not a positive one for virtual America, which seems overcrowded and exhausting — over a thousand people screaming at each other in a mid-sized hotel ballroom.
I don’t mean that crossing physical America exposes the online version as being “unreal”, because online life is quite real in its own way and because our national parks and roadside attractions are not the places most Americans live. your daily life.
But the breadth of this country, from state to state, with its complexity, diversity, and sheer natural wildness, still seems like a potential quality to counter the claustrophobia of small-screen politics and culture wars — an escape valve that isn’t within reach. of all divided societies, a means of escape and reinvention that the internet restricts but has not yet eliminated.
Seeing America gives hope in America. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have eight hours ahead of me in a crowded minivan.
