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Roads of Memory Maybe my father drove so much because he knew he would die young. Summers, we always hit the road by six and unless the old man made 500 miles a day, he said it wasn’t much of a vacation. To him, vacations were about journeys, not destinations. Even if Disney World had existed then, Dad wouldn’t have flown us somewhere and dragged us around a theme park, demanding we have fun. He instead reveled in the drive, the conversation and the time spent as a family. I reveal my geezerhood. How many fathers today voluntarily spend days in a car with their children? We have the constant beep of backseat thumb-throbbing video games and fights over radio stations bumping hip-hop or mind-numbing techno. Families don’t converse anymore; they have cell phones and iPods. There’s another relic from my youth called a sampler, something on which grandmas stitched wisdom. The one in my grandmother’s kitchen said, “Children learn what they live.” And so it was destined that I become a driver. My favorite memories of childhood are from the backseat, watching America through the window of my dad’s ’65 Cadillac. He delivered front-seat soliloquies on history and art to his captive pupils, my mother riding shotgun, and my brother, sister, dogs and me in the back seat. My summer highlight reels weren’t of swimming pools and sticky-fingered ice cream sandwiches, but of rounding a bend in the mountains and seeing Washington’s Rushmore profile, his nose the size of my Little League infield. Instead of the pungent sweat of the other revelers in line at Disney World, my olfactory memories are the mingled smells of gasoline and Cracker Jack. We woke to the comforting whine of tires on asphalt outside the motel window, and felt the nightly excitement of blinking neon beseeching us to consider Dog’n’Suds. I’m the age at which my father died and now see my family from across the great divide. I have seven children, and – like that earlier version of my family – we enjoy spending time together on the road. A few years ago, I welcomed my oldest son into adulthood by taking him on a 6,000-mile trip through the middle of America for a book called Highway 61. Because my three oldest children came from my first marriage, they were road warriors by genetic structure. With a long-distance dad, they had no choice – summer, spring breaks, holidays . . . we were always driving. The four little ones are still learning, but we love exploring U.S. 27, the Tamiami Trail and the Gulf Coast Highway, and seeing the Florida that time forgot. William Least Heat Moon came up with a great name for these roads when he wrote his classic Blue Highways. As an early evangelist for the cast-aside roads from America’s pre-Interstate days, he was the blacktop equivalent of the Beatles telling us to get back to where we once belonged. And he was right. Interstate highways are efficient but dull, as exciting as watching cheese grits congeal. These roads blanded the nation: an Interstate in Kansas is the same as an Interstate in Georgia or Oregon. Driving an Interstate is like looking at a painting. Drive a blue highway and you’re in the painting. The first old highway to get rediscovered was Route 66 – not that it needed any help. There was the old Nat King Cole song later covered by the Rolling Stones, and the 1960s TV show to keep the memory alive. In 1990, storyteller Michael Wallis published his testament of love, Route 66: The Mother Road, an effort to recreate the trip from Chicago to L.A. (Down to St. Louie . . . Joplin, Missouri . . . Oklahoma City, so doggone pretty.) Wallis created a sub-industry. Look up “Route 66” on Amazon and you’ll get nearly 4,000 results, from narratives that follow Wallis’ approach to cookbooks, picture books and elaborately detailed maps. The highway has been done, and Wallis remains its Shakespeare. (He lives in Tulsa, with an address on 66.) He also helped Pixar Studios develop the Citizen Kane of animation, Cars. With his brusque, gravelly voice, he was tagged to play the sheriff in that paean to blue-highway America. But there are many more great highways out there. My son and I picked Highway 61 because of its Bob Dylan connection and also because we thought the drive might be interesting. Here is a highway that bisects the nation, connecting North and South, rich and poor, urban and rural. Our book was mostly about our father-son connection and a year later, writer Tim Steil traveled the same road and filled Highway 61 Revisited with all of the pictures my son and I wished we had taken. Steil and I drove the same road, but we had quite-different journeys. The latest lost highway to be rediscovered goes from Times Square to the Golden Gate and was the first road to connect the coasts. Two years ago, blue-highway aficionado Brian Butko – author of Roadside Attractions, a picture book of magnificent mutations of bad taste along the nation’s roads – published Greetings from the Lincoln Highway, a words-and-photos testament to the American might that drove this highway West in 1913. The road connects two points of national glamour, but most of the road laces through the heartland – Ohio, Indiana, Illinois – and on through the beautiful desolation of the West. Michael Wallis has taken the trip too and for The Lincoln Highway, he brought along Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Michael Williamson to document the journey. For a generation who saw car trips as something to be endured rather than enjoyed – for such twits was the in-car DVD player invented – there doesn’t seem to be much point in long drives. Wallis sadly shakes his head and discourses on the dichotomy of “traveler” and “tourist.” “There’s a huge difference,” he said. “A traveler isn’t afraid to take the path less taken and knows that life begins at the off-ramp. A tourist totally misses that experience, going only to the safe places. Sometimes it’s good to get lost. Every time I’m on 66 or the Lincoln, I find something new. Could be a café, a sign, or a vista. I always find someone new. Without the people who live and work along these roads, the roads have lost their meaning.” The Lincoln Highway is more than mere travelogue. It’s a family portrait of the people who share this thread that binds the coasts. Every one of America’s blue highways has a special character and one of Wallis’ favorites is the Tamiami Trail. “I get down there and I’m eight years old again, buying a coconut head,” he said. This love of family travel goes back to childhood. Wallis remembers the reverence his father showed for his glorious two-week respite from work shared with his family each summer. “He’d back the Plymouth down the driveway and those tires hit the street and bam, the vacation was on.” Parents are always under surveillance. Children learn to be human by observing us. If we show them that our vacation – our designated, cordoned-off time as a family – is merely a plane flight to a garish resort where sweaty people serve over-priced umbrella drinks, they won’t find pleasure in that experience. But if they see us in this enclosed space, off on a mystery tour, choosing to spend time together, finding things we didn’t know we were looking for, then that’s an adventure. The farther we go, the closer we get. Children learn what they live. BOOKS MENTIONED
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