The Drive East

People seem to have the misconception that only a select few are able to unleash a steady flow of creative genius. That is not true at all. The fact is, creativity is very much like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to consistently give out great results. If you don't practice harnessing creative thinking, this skill will very much atrophy into inexistence. But keep working and this skill will soon come to you in a snap.

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By the time Hotel Subaru had rejoined Interstate 80, and Interstate 80 had quit Ohio and plugged itself into Pennsylvania, the twilight was in Illinois, racing towards the California that was now four days in my past. The car plunged into the black tunnel of tree-shrouded highway that the twilight had left behind.

The end of the drive was in sight; just as well, because people were expecting me to be in Maine the next evening, and what would prove to be a $950 hole in the exhaust system was beginning to make itself heard. But the Keystone State would not be crossed this night. The tankful of gas taken on in Ohio would last only as long as midnight and as far as State College. Happy Valley for me would be a 24-hour gas station with a convenience store, and one last overnight at a rest area.

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The decision to bypass Chicago had been a good one. Instead of the tolls, rough roads, and traffic jams of the hog butcher of the world, the car had clear sailing as it hummed (not roared, at least not yet; the hole in the exhaust system’s midpipe would not open up until the next day) through the centers of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

It was also territory that was known to me. Especially this part of Ohio. For, while the rest of the trip to this point had been mostly place after place that I was “just passing through", I had lived four years in Columbus. It would be good to see some old familiar sights, even if the schedule I was on demanded that I merely wave to them from an 80-mph distance.

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If you can know a town or region from its radio stations, then you can know a state from its rest areas. Each state, it seems, has its own ideas about how much, or how little, it needs to make available to the sojourners on its interstate highways. Each one wears its expression of these ideas in its freeway waystations like a badge – or, in some cases, a brand. You’d think that a state would like to be in good odor with its citizens about this. Literally.

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Anybody out there who lingers under the impression that America speaks with one voice in the world has not crossed the country in an aging Subaru listening to local radio stations. A few hours cruising the AM and FM bands in a moving car reveals the unique preferences, concerns, and tastes of each one of the cities, towns and rural communities of the Republic. And no two are alike.

To be sure, the voices are less unique now than they once were. In the early 80s, when I would drive fairly frequently between Massachusetts and Ohio, I would listen in as the radio powerhouses in Philadelphia and Scranton (westbound), or Pittsburgh and Wheeling (eastbound), faded into the static, leaving a no-station’s-land in the center of Pennsylvania. There, high among the Appalachian ridges and villages with names like DuBois and Clearview, the airwaves were filled by a single down-home speaker, nattering away at his listeners as if he were propped up on a chair near the pot-bellied stove at the general store, his feet on the counter.

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I first encountered the Big Sky country of the United States in 1975. When, with a starting point south of Boston, Massachusetts, I drove an old, dubious Ford Econoline van, with most of my worldly goods in it (a small load), across Montana on its way to a parking lot at the Anacortes terminal of Washington State Ferries, its battery dead, its alternator junk.

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I haven’t seen it much in recent years. But not all that long ago, it was a staple of cartoons and B movies. The tale of a man, dying of thirst in a desert, who sees water and runs towards it, only to discover more dry sand under the sun that is killing him. The water, of course, is a mirage. I had never seen a mirage that was remotely convincing, and I wondered how anyone could ever be foolish, or desperate, enough to be deceived. Until Hotel Subaru descended onto the Great Salt Desert of Utah on a hot Saturday afternoon in August.

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A river runs from the mountains to the sea. Always to the sea. Ask any grade school kid. So much water has got to go somewhere, doesn't it? It can't simply drop down a hole in the ground and vanish. That's just not natural. Who ever heard of riding down a river to nowhere, one that ends not in the ocean but in waves of sand? And yet, in the high desert of Nevada, there is such a river, trapped between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, its flow with no destination but down into the hardpan and up into the insatiably dry air. The Humboldt.

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I drive a Subaru. 1995 Legacy Brighton wagon. The cheapest model. Power nothing. Crank your own windows. Maybe if Microsoft Windows was powered by a crank, like the windows in my car, it would work better. When it comes to cars, my philosophy is: the more power gadgets, the more things to go wrong. Like the radio, which only plays the left half of stereo. I don't even bother with the tape player. Who wants to listen to just the left half of Talking Heads? Give me the essentials. Traction - trust me, the all wheel drive comes in real handy during a Maine snowstorm. Steering. Brakes. Heat, window defrosting, and air conditioning. Reclining bucket seats.

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