The Summer Road Trip Expedition

The Casimiro Ford-LTD-Station-Wagon Cross-Continental Expedition of 1973 was by any measure an epic undertaking: a journey from the Atlantic Seaboard to the western edge of North America and back, some eight thousand miles of overlanding in the hottest part of the year, with no air conditioning except windows and a driver who refused to lower them. The driver was, in fact, the expedition leader, a man in his mid-forties, with graying sideburns and a somewhat Mediterranean look, though his ancestry was Azorean, a man of a generation for whom asking for directions, pausing to eat, or pulling over to pee would signal an erosion of masculinity and fortitude.

The navigator, who grew up wild and barefoot on a farm in Pennsylvania Dutch country, was now a woman in her late thirties who shared few of the leader’s views on road trips. She liked fresh air, food, and answering nature’s call on the first ring. The expedition support team stood solidly behind the navigator. It consisted of one soul, a boy on the cusp of twelve, with coltish legs and his father’s dark summer tan, plus the unfortunate recent acquisition of silver metal braces on his teeth. To that indignity was added what orthodontists called external fixation, in layman’s terms, headgear, which plugged into the upper molars and wrapped around the nape to inflict unceasing dental and spiritual pain. The boy sprawled in the back and stared at the ceiling—no seatbelts for this expedition. He imagined his arrival at the Pacific shore, where he would sprint across the beach, fling his headgear to the sand, and swim to Asia, where, he wagered, no one bothered about crooked teeth.

It occurred to the boy only many years later that their pilgrimage across the American states was one of countless hundreds of thousands of station wagons and sedans beetling over the continent that summer, kids out of school, dads burning time off, driven by obligations to relatives, the promise of Disneyland delivered on a budget, or some suburban Zugunruhe, an urge to flee the cul-de-sac for parts unknown. He didn’t yet understand the freedom of a driver’s license, a full tank of gas, and the U.S. highway system; he didn’t know migration was an essential part of being human, nor that every culture in every place had its version of a road trip, by foot, by camel, or by car. “Whither thou goest?” wrote Jack Kerouac, but it’s not the whither that counts, it’s the goest. He got that.

Which was the main event, the hours watching Nebraska roll by or the ninety minutes gaping in the World’s Only Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota? The books read and reread in the back seat or the nightly motor lodge pool cannonballs? Counting the states or lying across Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico at once? Seeing Muir Woods or carrying home souvenir redwood seeds that would never sprout? It all blurred, and blended, and before he could affix everything in his brain, they’d moved on to the next.

In Yellowstone, the boy put down his reading and looked out the window. There, a few feet away, was an elk. And then a buffalo. And a bear. Old Faithful was…wild, that was the word, wild. The Tetons—how could there be snow in July? Going over the pass to Idaho, they made jokes to distract the navigator from the heights. His head felt light from the altitude, and from the scale—he’d never known anything like it, and something in him responded, like the ocean to the moon.

In central California, at a beach called Rancho Guadalupe Dunes, the boy got his chance to swim in the sea at last. The headgear was tucked away, pulled out only to appease leadership, and his nylon trunks were on. He sprinted, as he knew he would, and dove into the surf, and he spluttered and yelped. The water was ice, it was polar, it was so much colder than he expected, and Asia was so far away. He streaked back for the towel the navigator held. She wrapped him in warmth, and they agreed, all three of them, that it was time for lunch, burgers and fries—again and of course.