On the Road

In early June, I bought a car, filled the trunk with camping gear, and headed north on the I-15 for a drive that, I reasoned, could very well last forever—or as long as the gas prices held. The day I left California was dim. The sky was brown, the interstate brown. The wind sprayed my windshield with a thin film of dust. About ninety minutes in, I spotted the first scrunchy Joshua trees rising from the desert like contorted toilet brushes. Three hours in, I passed through Primm, Nevada, where electric signboards announced that the Buffalo Bill’s Casino was open for business despite the pandemic. The cluster of resorts in Las Vegas glinted under the mid-afternoon sun; neon rock stacks, which I learned were an art installation called the “Seven Magic Mountains,” teetered on the baked earth a few miles east of the interstate. Around four in the afternoon, I arrived at a campground in Hurricane, Utah, where I mangled a few of my stakes hammering my tent into the ground. A man sitting at an RV lot across the street shouted that I should re-pitch my tent so the wind didn’t kick dirt through the mesh door. “Thanks,” I yelled back, “I’ll try that next time.” Then I pulled my propane stove from the trunk, boiled water for a cup of tea, and sat back in my camping chair to watch the sun set on the western hills. In my journal, under the heading “Learning,” I wrote: “Windy. Red rock. Gorgeous blue sky. Cheap gas in Henderson. Yellow brush. 400 miles. Stress in back. North & east, north & east.”

For years, I had wanted to partake in the great American tradition of driving across the country. I wanted to see the terrain change between time zones. I wanted to visit places I’d only read about in books. More abstractly, I wanted to feel the size of the country. “Everything seems bigger in the United States,” my European friends would tell me when I talked about leaving home three years earlier to live in the considerably smaller countries of Spain and Belgium. In response, I’d tell them what I knew about vastness. I’d seen the Grand Canyon from Arizona and marveled at how its gaping red mouth stretched on for miles. From a dizzying cliffside perch, I’d observed ant-sized rafts float down the Merced River and through the Yosemite Valley. Once, I took a two-day train from Seattle to San Diego and watched pines blend into mountains and mountains blend into coastline. I grew up a forty-minute drive from the Pacific Ocean; each walk along the beach, the sea spreading far beyond the limits of my vision, was a lesson in scale.

Three months into the US coronavirus pandemic, it was not the best time to