The Road Less Traveled

The Open Road: A photo that I took on the my road trip from Los Angeles to Sedona, Arizona.   I could relate the most to the last chapter of Asch's The Road, when he returns to New York City with a different perspective, after traveling around America on a bus and witnessing the hardship and suffering in his own country that he had never before been exposed to. He comes back to New York City and and feels almost claustrophobic in the crowds, the dirt, and the noise. He writes, “this after the frankness of the Coast, the kindness of the mountains, the friendliness of the Middle West.” Even the simple adjectives that he uses to describe New York are negative: “black and noisy,” “dirty, “hurt, senseless, dead,” “pushed and pushing.” This past summer, I went on a road trip from Los Angeles to Arizona and Las Vegas and back. I definitely experienced this sense of pressure and of a new perspective when I returned to California. On the road in the dessert, I was surrounded by open skies, endless farming fields, groves of Joshua trees, and distant mountains. Living in cities all my life, I love being in this much pure space, where I can really breathe. It's a relief, in a way, an definite contrast from the New York City crowds. The people that I met along my trip were also always friendly. Even when we got a flat tire in the middle of a desert road between Flagstaff and Phoenix, a old couple stopped to help us change the tire and make sure that we were ok, something that I'm not sure would have happened on a crowded Los Angeles freeway. We talked to gas station attendants, met some new friends at a red rock river in Sedona, shared a camp fire at our site, under an empty sky, where you could actually see stars. Frolicking in the Fields: We stopped on the side of the highway to run through an empty field, one advantage the road trip has over a cross country flight.   When I arrived back in Los Angeles, I felt that something was missing, a sense of adventure, a willingness to talk to strangers and of those strangers to actually engage and talk back. It's a similar sensation when I come back to New York City after being gone for a long time. Like Asch, I am always initially shocked by just how crowded it is, how many people exist, crammed into such small spaces, people who pay a fortune to share tiny studio apartments, which seem ridiculous in comparison to the miles and miles of developmental suburbs that I passed again and again on the roads in the South west. While I think people in the major coastal cities tend to look down upon a lifestyle in “the middle of nowhere,” maybe we are the ones that tend to miss out on actually being able to appreciate the natural world around us, to breathe fresh air, and truly live on the land.

Fresh air, fresh view: Stopped in Sedona and climbed a mountain vortex to enjoy breathtaking views.

I think the beauty of the road trip is that it really does force you to interact with the people that you meet along the way. It forces you to see everything you pass, to have the luxury of being able to make small stops at places you wouldn't ordinarily know exist. Although plane travel has broadened the distances of where we can travel and made going to the far corners of the earth readily accessible, we have lost the desire to see our own country in a lot of ways. I frequently hear people my age talking about traveling to Cambodia or South America; it seems like everyone wants to go as far away from America as possible. Although I would love to travel far away and see the “exotic,” I have just as much of a desire to do what a lot of these authors have done and actually see America, by car. It's a shame that more people don't continue the tradition of the road trip. I love driving along long stretches of highway and experiencing that sense of utter freedom that makes traveling on the open road so enticing.