The Most Perfect Road Trip of All Time

Continued from Fill-in-the-Blank for President

The summer of 1988--which fell between my last two semesters of college--was one of those special times in my life that few other times can rival in the intensity of my memory of it.  I was aware of this at the time it was happening and over the years this feeling never diminished.

Perhaps every young man has a time like this, one which arrives after the years of feeling as if one has been an apprentice to all the worldly things that seem beyond one's grasp as a child and adolescent. One has been yearning to break free and find one's destined role within the world. Suddenly the path seems to open up, revealing the strides that one can take forward with new ease, the way a toddler breaks into a steady run after learning to walk. During that season of life, which might typically happen at the end of one's college years, one feels the melting away of the frustrating friction from one's adolescence. The apple is offered for you to bite. Things seem to happen for you, and only you, that speed you towards an elevation into full manhood.

It is natural perhaps that one thinks this season will last forever, but like cherry blossoms it is meant to come and go, giving one a brief experience of the happiness, confidence, and inner peace that is possible in life, but which, as one learns, can be won in sustained fashion only by a day-by-day struggle over the years to come. As everyone learns, it is for the most part a prosaic struggle that turns out to be more arduous than the simpler lessons one had been mastering throughout childhood.

I could write a novel from that summer alone, and at one point I might have wanted to do so, but now it strikes me as far too specific to me to be useful to anyone. Some memories are meant to be private, especially the ones that would reveal personal secrets of others, that I have no right to share. It would be my ego writing it now. But the feeling of it remains, both the thrill of that moment, and the lasting treasure of hard-won experience that came out of it.

Hard-won, yes, because by the end of that summer that feeling of the wind being at my back, and accelerating into beautiful adulthood seemed to have been blown away like the fallen cherry blossoms of spring. But that is the way of the world. I am merely the umpteenth billionth man to have lived who has learned this. Perhaps my fall---literally by the coming of autumn---was steeper than others, but only because in my youthful romanticism about life and the world, I let myself be swept into fantasies beyond what the visions afforded to me---the true insights granted by the Almighty in His grace. I saw glimpses of the Real to be sure---deep rich ones, priceless in value---but I also saw things that I simply wanted to see, that were not there.

Before the summer began, towards the middle of that spring semester--the semester that I took that environmental ethics course---I had only a vague idea of what I was going to do once the school year ended. Back then that kind of situation was normal for me. Things always seemed to pop up at the last minute to save me from my lack of planning, and in this case, the same proved to be true. Heaven forbid that I could depend on that kind of luck now, but at the time it was unfailing in gifting me exactly what I needed to do next. Such is the privilege of being young, and blissfully unaware.

That past year my friend Charles had been living in Oakland, sharing a house with his girlfriend Geraldine and a few other folks, including my friend David, who had originally gone to college in Berkeley, and whom I had gone down to visit multiple times during my college years in Oregon.

The three of us---Charles, David, and I---had graduated in the same high school class back in Colorado. We were all in the high achiever college-bound group. But I had taken time off, after dropping out for a year and half during my freshman year, so by 1988 most of my friends had already graduated the previous year, including Charles. He and his girlfriend--whom he had met in college---were both planning on going to law school.  In the meantime they had gone out to California and had been working in Oakland as pre-law interns at a Catholic charity that provided legal services for Mexican immigrants.

At the end of that spring, when their internships came to an end, Geraldine was to fly back to Washington, D.C., which is where she and Charles (and I originally) had gone to college. Charles was going to drive his car back across the country to meet up with her. At the time he owned a 1974 Dodge Dart, a Swinger two-door, chestnut brown with a white hard-top, that his parents had owned in Colorado. It had been a fixture in their driveway during our high school years, before his parents had gifted it to him at the end of college. Charles had put in new leaf springs that gave a nice ride from the rejuvenated suspension. We all cherished the sturdy vehicle as a dependable chariot for our adventures.

During Spring Break, when I was down in Oakland visiting them, Charles posed a question to me. Would I want to drive across the country with him, back to Washington, D.C., at the end of the semester? He would even come up to Salem and pick me up when my finals ended, and then we would head east from there. We would take our time, and would visit a number of people he knew along the way, stopping in our hometown in Colorado, but the precise route and schedule would be something we could improvise as we went along. We could visit regions of the country that were new to both of us. I didn't consider saying no. It sounded like the best idea ever.

In many ways it was indeed the best idea ever---two high school friends driving across America at the end of college, and at the end of the 1980s, when the cultural ice jam of the Reagan years and the Cold War was breaking apart. Even as it was happening we came to think of it as possibly the most perfect road trip of all time. During it, and for years later, it took on almost a mystical significance for us. Mile by mile, one state after another, it felt as if the Dodge Dart and its beautiful slant six engine was literally taking us into different states of being, revealing layers of America and its history that were beyond what we had imagined. Even today, despite our estrangement and all the years that have passed, all I would have to do is mention a specific place to Charles that we visited along the way, and he would know exactly what I meant.

Politically all of us were of like mind---we were all young Democrats, although I, the election junkie, was certainly the most intolerant firebrand in my leftist beliefs. My impatience for change only grew in intensity during that summer, partly as a result of that Earth Science course I had just taken. As I mentioned, in the 1980s, environmentalism had all but disappeared from the political discourse of America. My Cassandra-like professor in the Earth Science department, who had experienced the earlier flush of the Sixties Earth awareness, continually bemoaned this situation in his lectures. I told him confidently that things would change, that it would all come back someday.

He pooh-poohed this possibility, saying America was too selfishly conservative for that to happen. His long frustration at imparting the urgency of the course materials to politically apathetic students was proof enough. But that was his temperament---dour and pessimistic. Who am I to judge how he came to be that way, in disappointment from previous idealism?

I can recall almost the precise moment, later during that summer, when, having absorbed his course lectures and the readings on the philosophy of deep ecology, and then having experienced the insights that only a road trip across America can bring, that the realization burst forth in my head. "I think that I'm an...environmentalist."

It seems comical now to recall this moment, but at the time it seemed like a huge step forward to apply this label to myself. Immediately I felt the romantic flush of power that comes from adoption of a political identity, and the instant alliance with a group of like-minded people one doesn't even know. It was like putting on body armor and being furnished with combat weapons, with a righteous commission to seek and fight a clearly defined enemy in the world. That moment would become the genesis of many years of being a hard-core humorless Greenie in my politics, my anger at the world growing in intensity during the 1990s, until I became chagrined at every insult to the Earth wrought by human civilization.

Charles was already on board with environmentalism, but in a different more relaxed way that came from years of outdoors experience in Colorado. He was a hiker, and he had hunted and fished with his father, and then with his high school friends (the two of us went fly fishing with his father in Wyoming as part of the road trip itself). By nature, he was an Establishment-minded man, and would do things through the system, not in rebellion to it. His environmentalism was more melancholic in expression, like the mellow appreciation of a John Denver song absorbed while looking out from a mountain top. Fittingly mine would become white-hot choleric, loaded with the political demands of Crypto-Marxism and frustration at the world for not seeing things the way I saw them. But in 1988, only the seeds for that anger had been planted. At the moment, all was new and fresh, like cherry blossoms. All was possible. All was beautiful

That first night out from Salem, having gone up to Portland, and then up the Columbia Gorge---familiar to me, but all new to Charles---while taking turns driving, we made it as far as southern Idaho.  Long past nightfall we stopped at a rest area on the Interstate outside the tiny town of Malta, where we decided to catch some sleep under the stars before proceeding south into Utah.

I remember the two of us standing there in the overpowering darkness, looking out over the empty landscape as the tireless engine of the car radiated its accumulated heat from the day's drive, and the metal of the chassis contracted as it cooled. We were many miles from any trace of the lights of civilization, and even the rim of the horizon, where one might see a distant glow of a city, was pitch black. The atmospheric conditions were such that the air must have been dead calm all the way up to the stratosphere, dry and with not a hint of haze or diffraction that would normally obscure the view into deep space. It seemed as if we could see uncountable stars in every direction we looked, and the disk of the Galaxy itself rose up out of the horizon and streamed over our heads giving proof to its ancient name---the Milky Way---in a display that few city dwellers ever experience.

I had been a stargazer for years, on camping trips, and been given special permission by my physics advisor to use the reflecting telescope on the top of the science building on campus. But never in my life had I seen the night sky so clearly, and the Galaxy so thick with a seamless fluid of distant pinpoint suns, the minuteness of them too rich for the mind to absorb even a sliver of their number.

While standing there, I located the heart of the Galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius, where the central bulge of the Galaxy was clearly visible as a massive orb unto itself. I kept my gaze at it while putting my arms out like wings, rotating them until they were aligned with the plane of the Galactic disk. As my arms came into position, I felt as if my being were lifted from my body out to the void of space, so that I could see the Galaxy from some cosmic vantage point beyond normal human mental capacity. It was sublime---as sublime as anything I have seen in my life---and terrifying in its own way, as all sublime things are.

For a long time after that, I sought to see the stars and the Galaxy that way again, even going back to the same spot years later, when I was in a very different place in my life. But I have never seen the night sky so clear and infinite as we saw it that night in mid May 1988 in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. It was a special vision of that moment, a special grace. It wasn't meant to be something for every night. It took me a long time to accept that.