Our one mistake so far: A sign on Highway 20 pointed the way toward The World’s Largest Popcorn Ball in Sac City, Iowa. Alas, with an 11-hour drive to Denver ahead of us, we pressed on.
Other than that lapse in judgment, our road trip across America has been one delightful surprise after another.
- In Cleveland, that quintessential Rust Belt city, we went kayaking on Lake Erie.
- In Humboldt, Iowa, we sat in (but did not drive) a giant tractor on a corn-and-soybeans farm.
- In Denver, we attended a youth hockey game (my grandnephew scored two goals).
- In Salt Lake City, we toured a ski manufacturing plant (where my son works).
- In otherwise barren eastern Nevada, we hiked in the lush Ruby Mountains and watched mutton-busting (a rodeo event where kids cling to the backs of sheep) on the TV of the bar where we ate dinner.
Normally, I’m not much for road trips. Driving bores me. Sitting enervates me. Seeing something interesting through a car window only teases me: I’d rather be out in the open air, where I can get a good look at it rather than hurtling past it.
But we had a wedding and a couple of reunions coming up in California and when we made our plans, we found that airfares were obscene, the airlines increasingly unreliable and car rental fees astronomical. So even with a gallon of gasoline threatening to cost as much as a half-gallon of Peachy Paterno, driving the 2,700 miles to the West Coast seemed like the best option.
The keys: having friends and family to visit (and stay with) along the way, and not being in a hurry.
Not being in a hurry meant making the four-hour drive from State College to Cleveland and calling it a day, and staying two nights in some places so it didn’t feel like we were living in our car.
Before we left, Facebook tantalized me with snapshots from friends living their best lives. It’s hard to look at posts from Bali, Paris, Lisbon and Amsterdam when you’re mowing your lawn in State College and about to drive to The Mistake on the Lake.
Turns out I was enormously impressed with Cleveland and wouldn’t have traded places with anyone during my 10-day meander across this troubled land. Again and again, I felt like I was seeing America’s best self – a land of homes and gardens on tree-lined streets (Cleveland, Evanston, Illinois, and Humboldt, Iowa); of urban parks (Cleveland again) and mountains majesty (the Rockies, the Rubies, the Sierra); of 21st century ingenuity (the ski factory in SLC) and the timeless wisdom of sowing and reaping (Iowa).
Were I able to ignore the news and the partiality of the view I was getting (I didn’t see any of Cleveland’s more forlorn neighborhoods), I would say rumors of our country’s imminent demise are greatly exaggerated.
I know better.
This was a vision, a reminder of what America could be if all of us were a little less greedy and xenophobic. We often talk about State College as a bubble, with the reliable engine of Penn State keeping the community solvent enough to indulge dreams of a better world.
On this trip I realized that when you live in a bubble, you tend to travel in a bubble: Everyone we visited was as well-off as we are. Every bed we slept in was comfortable, every towel soft, every home-cooked meal a feast.
Some observations from the road:
- Though we’re still averaging more than 100,000 cases per day, America is done with COVID. If I had kept a tally of mask wearers I saw in rest areas and fuel stops from Keystone State to Golden State, I doubt the number would be much higher than a dozen. Yet more people I know have gotten COVID in the past few weeks than in the previous two years.
- In Denver we watched, with avid relatives, the Colorado Avalanche win the Stanley Cup. It was the only hockey game I saw all season. At the end, I appreciated the ritualized interactions of the opposing teams even more than the game itself. The players hugged and shook hands. The two coaches engaged in what appeared to be a warm, extended conversation. Remember when sportsmanship was a bedrock American value? No matter how much it hurt, our coaches taught us, we were supposed to accept defeat and congratulate the victors for being, this time, at least, the better team. Modern-day conservatives have thrown their support behind a sore loser who tried and is still trying to lie, cheat, steal and bully his way back into the presidency – all of which sounds like a wholesale rejection of conservative values. I hope some of these folks took in the end of the Avs-Lightning game and were given pause.
- In case you’re wondering, The World’s Largest Popcorn Ball is 8 feet high and weighs 9,370 pounds.
The one problem with driving cross-country: We must drive back.
