SEEING AMERICAN THROUGH A WINDSHIELD

DRIVING CROSS COUNTRY

As we drive away from the Vegas area, the Mojave Desert looks so majestic. We are plunging into the vastness that separates west from east on our twelfth journey cross country. Once so many cities were just names in songs, but now I know them personally.

Into the first stormy night, the rear lights of trucks are like beacons. Theatrical flashes of lightening offer glimpses of an empty, rocky landscape. In daylight, signs become a poetic accompaniment to the scenery: “Windy Conditions may Exist…Ride the Sky…Squirming Worms…World’s Largest Dream Catcher.” Driving all day is a way to do nearly nothing, to watch the world go by, to pass so many wonders, just out of reach—“Dorothy’s House, Land of Oz, 5-miles…Round Barn, go left.”

Above all is the sky. Lavender, gray and peach streaks fill the horizon. Clouds seem painted on. The light stays later on the western edge of each time zone we cross. We drive into a fog that turns out to be the dust from stamping hooves in a slaughter lot. The images assemble, and disassemble before my eyes, an ever changing portrait of the American landscape.

We’re on the fabled I-40, in high country where a tree is a lone sentry in a square ten miles, and tires dot roofs to keep the wind from ripping tiles off. We’ve been through this stretch before when mattress-sized tumbleweeds ominously blew across the interstate.

Animals are a constant fixture: from road kill to the zoo-like cornucopia one encounters at gas stations: ninety-two half-ton sows on their last ride sticking their snouts through the grill; stud Boer Bock goats munching feed; traveling companion dogs ready for a friendly pet. Sculpture punctuates the view: ersatz wild life on hillsides above gift shops; a 12-foot effigy of a cowboy; dozens of handmade metal whirligigs; windmills every few miles along one stretch; and an oil derrick in the middle of a corn field.

Old trestle railroad bridges traverse dells in the rolling high plains of the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. Black cows stand in a golden field studded with yuccas, as one ecosystem gives way to another. We enter the region where commercial radio isn’t homogenized—the listeners too few—and the music, wonderfully eclectic. The “morning farm report” announces the harvesting of the winter wheat. We pass favorite spots where we ate an incredible piece of bumble-berry pie, filled a bag with goodies from a great Spanish bakery.

Highways hold history—our own memories of trips past, but also in the names they direct us to: turn south for the mythic Red River Valley; forty-two miles to Fort Sumner, north to Dodge City. So many places have a claim to fame: from the “Dalton Gang Hideout” to “Stratford: Pheasant Capital of Texas.”

American’s small towns sit astride blue and red highways, their reduced status nakedly apparent. Architectural gems from past heydays sit derelict. Those with Mainstreet programs exude car-stopping charm. Sometimes we pretend they’re our hometowns, and stop awhile to watch baseball from the bleachers or listen to a youth orchestra, our backs against the cool grass of the town park.

I gaze enviously at vegetable gardens in yards and wax nostalgic for my own. I can feel the east coming as the wildflowers flash by in a wash of color, too fast to identify. I can almost taste home, yet there is the same sun setting that set so majestically over the Ivanpah and Clark Mountains. The three thousand miles end here in our nation’s capital, the land so shockingly green, the air so sticky with humidity.

With this journey, I have logged in another lap of the U.S., felt the length and breadth of this land, its distinctive regional vistas, flying pass my windshield. I’ve held so much of America with my eyes.

ESSAY BY ROSIE DEMPSEY FROM KNPR