An American road trip through troubled times

I was driving cross-country to visit my friend who has a farmhouse in Maine.

She was dying. She told me I needed to accept that fact before I got there so we could get on with enjoying our visit.

I set a route that would carry me through wide open places and small towns. I was going to write about the parts of America I saw along the way. I worried I might be too raw, too unsettled, to try to understand the country stretching before me. Then I decided that was the right state of mind for a summer of vaccines, variants, disaster, division, reckoning, rage and floundering forward. I woke up on a Monday morning and headed east from Fresno, California.

Outside of Yosemite National Park, I waited in a line that didn’t move.

I had my car parked in the shade, windows down. Murphy, my Lab, was in the backseat.

Each time his nostrils flared, I tensed, even though I told myself it was someone eating pizza and not wildfire he was smelling. A heatwave was building, with a week of record-breaking temperatures predicted across the West.

“Where ya going?” asked a ranger who laughed as she gave Murphy a biscuit.

Did I make note of these little encounters before pandemic masks and distance?

The road swirled up, past the blinding white granite of Olmstead Point, past Tuolumne Meadows, and then, like always, a split-second of shock as I came out of Tioga Pass and the Great Basin unfurled in front of me, endless waves of arid rust and silver-gray.

Usually there is snow in the High Sierra even in July. There had been none.

———

In Colorado, I took the I-70 over the Continental Divide. Striped traffic barrels narrowed lanes. It looked like the Cat in the Hat had multiplied his headwear and tossed them up the mountain. After pandemic delays, the entire country was under construction trying to repair what had crumbled.

A thunderstorm pelted down.

Jackson Browne was singing