48 States, 50 Days

Concerning Tourist Destinations

(This obviously isn’t an entire chapter. I think I’m going to try posting bite-size quips several times a week instead of one entire chapter at a time.)

“As soon as I had planned out the route for the trip, until I was just a few states away from Minneapolis, I had been having a constant inner debate about what to do about the Mall of America. I was going to be in Minneapolis for a day, and the Mall of America is the biggest thing that Minnesota has going on, so it made sense to see the monument to commercialism while I was there.

But there was a voice in the back of my head that pleaded, “The Mall of America? That’s tourist shit man! That’s not America, that’s a plastic, soulless imitation of America!” It’s pretentious, but that’s how I felt. Throughout most travel writing, the overarching theme has been this: If it’s popular, it’s fake, and if a destination is somewhere your average tourist would go, “real travelers” must avoid it like the plague. Don’t ask me what a “real traveler” is, but from what I hear they only eat regional cuisine and only drive on gravel roads.

After struggling with these notions of authenticity while on the road, I eventually decided that I would visit the Mall of America. Because really, the Mall of America is just as representative of America as Central Park is, or the Washington Monument is. It’s similar how, and trust me, I don’t feel great writing this, McDonald’s represents America just as well as the mom and pop diner. Yes, the independent restaurants are more romanticized, and have unarguably better food, but that doesn’t invalidate McDonald’s authenticity. Now, I’m not referring to the food’s authenticity, but the ability in which a place represents the population and lifestyle of the country. Because America is where the people are at, and if you really want to see the country, you have to go to them, no matter if you consider a place to be trite or cliché.”

The Best Meal

(Here’s the majority of the second New York essay. Yes, there are two New York essays. No, this is not a book exclusively about New York. These are the only two. Also, I say “the majority” because this isn’t the whole thing, because I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I wanted to get something out today. Again, this is a rough draft, so, parts of it are, admittedly, rough.)

Throughout my life, I would say that I’ve eaten well. I’ve hit all the usual suspects, lobster, stuffed quail, fresh crab on the piers of Baltimore, and of course, being born and raised in Texas, all of the delicious Southern home cooking that make the heat and humidity worth it. On the other hand, I’ve never been anything close to a foodie. I don’t know the hip spots to eat, even in towns I’ve lived in for years, I get uncomfortable when a menu’s average item is above twenty bucks, and the one time I had foie gras I thought it was fucking disgusting. In other words, as much as it would absolutely thrill me, I will never be able to hang with Tony Bourdain, at least not at a dinner table. I suppose my palate just isn’t refined enough.

But I digress. Before the road trip, my death row meal would have been a large, deep bowl of chicken and dumplings. As far as I knew, there was nothing better. But on June 19, 2010, I had the best meal I had ever tasted, and to this day I have not found anything that makes my tastebuds quiver in such response.

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Lost in New York

(Hello! It’s me. I’m still writing. I had about 8000 words in the bank of the travelogue in its original, straightforward narrative form, but there was a problem. While I definitely have enough material to write a book about, writing the “state 1, state 2, state 3” just wasn’t working out. There was a lot of…empty spaces, just as there were on the trip. Which isn’t bad in and of itself, but I was getting to where I didn’t enjoy the writing, and I was pretty sure what I was writing wasn’t very entertaining to read, which isn’t good for anyone. So I’ve sort of changed up the outline of the beast, and it’s now more of a collection of essays. The final product will still be mostly linear in nature, but you’ll also be able to open it in the middle and read a random story and enjoy for itself. And this way I will be able to focus on the more entertaining and interesting parts of my trip. This is a rough draft of the first essay I’ve written, although it’s obviously not the first essay chronologically.)

I opened my eyes, but just slightly. They slammed close in response, and I waited a few seconds before trying again. My head hurt. A lot. Half of my body was laying on the edge of a blow-up mattress, with the other half dangling onto the hardwood floor. I forced myself to stand, assessing my situation. There were five or six other bodies scattered among the uncomfortable wooden floors, all using blankets, shirts, and other people to make their night’s sleep a little softer. There was another group of six or so, lucky enough to have passed out on couches, curled in the fetal position, making room for each other. Why they got to sleep on furniture and some of us didn’t, I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.

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Chapter 3 Part 1

I hadn’t gotten to see much of Jackson the night before, so I set about it in the morning. The capitol building was less than a mile away from my motel, so it seemed like an obvious destination. While I say the capitol building was less than a mile from my motel, there were actually two capitol buildings less than a mile away from my motel. The Old Capitol is now a museum of state history, and the New Capitol replaced the Old Capitol as the functioning house of the state government in 1903. I drove to the New Capitol in about as quickly as the state leaders had decided on the names for the buildings back at the turn of the twentieth century.

“Well boys, now that we’re moving from this old capitol building to the new one, how will we and future generations possibly tell them apart?”

“Um, sir, maybe we could call the old capitol building Old Capitol, and the new one New Capitol.”

“My God, Richardson, that’s the kind of thinking that will make us the greatest state in this nation.”

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Chapter 2 Part 3

I hit the road early and departed Texarkana, this time for good. I drove back down to Shreveport to meet another cousin, this time on my mother’s side, for lunch. By pure coincidence, the restaurant we were meeting at was located on the boardwalk I had just been the previous afternoon. Cousin George had been not just my mom’s cousin but her best friend growing up, and after we had ordered and taken our seats, talk almost immediately turned to her.

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Chapter 2 Part 2

[Author’s Note: Before this post, I had not been using “Read More” links in these posts. Mainly because I didn’t want it to seem like I was trying to drive pageviews to the actual website at the expense of the people who like to stay on the Tumblr Dashboard. But this post is ~1800 words, and the rest of the posts aren’t going to get much shorter, so I am putting a “Read More” link for these posts starting now, as a consideration for people who don’t want a wall of text on their Dashboard]

I rose in the morning with Shreveport as my destination, but before making my way to Louisiana I wanted to drive further into Arkansas. Texarkana is barely within Arkansas, and I technically slept in Texas, so if I’d left Arkansas then, I would already not be doing a very good job of seeing all of the contiguous states. So I drove to Murfreesboro.

I followed Highway 67 northwest as it paralleled I-30 until Fulton, then took AR-195 to Washington, where I continued my climb north on US-278. I saw more towns with three digit populations during this foray into southwest Arkansas than I had ever previously seen. I even passed by a town in the double digits. That’s not even a town. It’s insane to think you could take an entire town, put them in the same house, and no one would even feel claustrophobic.

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Chapter 2 Part 1

My great road trip, my vision quest on wheels aimed to take me places I’d never been to, places no one I knew had ever been to. Because what is self-progression if not confronting the unfamiliar? But first, I had to go somewhere very familiar. I had to go in reverse, taking the same route out of Dallas in the opposite way my parents arrived. I had to go back to the family history.

Five years before I was born, my parents looked at each other and said “What the hell are we still doing in Texarkana? Let’s leave.” Then they left. Although I have never actually lived in Texarkana, it played a large role in my life. In 1955, when my father was five years old, he, his sisters, and his parents moved there from Murfreesboro, Arkansas. He married my mother there, and they decided to head for the big city of Dallas in 1982. As far back as I can remember, I have fond memories of my parents taking me up to Texarkana with a decent frequency, visiting the various aunts, uncles, cousins, and other family members who had stayed in Bowie County. And, as is the way a small town operates, many of them are still there.

The drive to Texarkana is generally uninspiring. I may feel this way because I’ve been up there so many times, but acclimatization bias aside, no one’s writing poetry about Interstate 30. Of course, the hardnose opposition towards interstates has long been a favorite subject of travel writers. William Least Heat-Moon made his name and fortune by rejecting and damning “the tyranny of the freeway”. But as I drove out of McKinney, passed through Farmersville, and merged with I-30 on the outskirts of Greenville, I found one thing to be true. There’s no difference, in Texas at least, between the back roads and expressways. Consumerism has played no favorites in its reach across areas both rural and urban. No matter what route you picked, Dairy Queens and Jack in the Boxes were the chosen landscape. The only difference that mattered was, on local roads you were forced to stop every half a mile, likely to encourage passing drivers to really consider stopping at that Burger King. On the interstate, you were gone baby, gone. As long as you have fuel in the tank, you’re allowed to zoom past the franchised eyesores.

The creation of Interstate 30, and the rest of the interstate highways, was the result of a road trip that lasted about as long as mine. A young Dwight Eisenhower participated in the Army’s first Transcontinental Motor Convoy, designed to draw attention to the poor state of America’s then-current public road infrastructure. The convoy traveled from Washington D.C. to San Francisco, leaving July 7, 1919 and arriving on September 6 of the same year. Forty-seven years later, Eisenhower’s experience in the convoy resulted in his support for the Federal Highway Act of 1956, which birthed the Interstate Highway System. Thanks to Eisenhower, the same trip from D.C. to San Fran would take just about two days, compared to the two month journey back in 1919. I’d say we owe a lot of gratitude to and for our highways.

While I defend our nation’s arteries of transportation against critics like Least Heat-Moon, I again concede that the drive from Dallas to Texarkana is, frankly, boring. Thankfully, it is a quick trip, clocking in at just 3 hours. I was spending the night at my cousin Susan’s house, on the Texas side of Texarkana. When the city was founded, it was believed to sit on the border of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, providing the namesake. Unfortunately, after the city was already named, it was discovered that no part of Texarkana actually rested within Louisiana. And though this must have certainly been embarrassing for the surveying team that took the original measurements, I feel that Texarkana rolls off the tongue better than Texarkansas would have.

When I arrived at my cousin’s house, the majority of the Texarkana-based family was already there, sitting in the living room waiting for me. Also waiting for me was a pan of chicken dumplings in the kitchen. Chicken Dumplings is my Death Row last meal, and I was almost as happy to see it as I was my family.

After hugs were exchanged and food was served, we piled in my cousin’s SUV and drove across I-35 to see my aunts. The two of them live in side-by-side apartments in an assisted-living community, and are two of the sweetest ladies you could ask for. Just a second after knocking on the apartment door, it opened and I was greeted with the reminder, “You look so much like your father.” Being my dad’s older sisters, conversation revolved around him almost the entire visit.

My father died in 2001 when I was thirteen years old, as a result of a freak accident while working on his car. One of the tragic effects of having a parent die before you grow up, besides everything, is that you lose a large access to your genealogical narrative. If I have questions about my father’s childhood or another aspect of his life prior to where my memory kicks in, I can’t just ask him. Everything is second-hand, like a family history Goodwill.

Every time I get the chance to hear stories about my dad, I’m all ears, and this day was no different. One of my aunts shared a good one that I had never heard before. When he was a teen, for some reason no one in the room could remember, my dad disliked the neighborhood paper boy. Ever the joker, so he taught his niece and nephew, my cousins, to flip the paper boy off every time he rode by, and, being kids, they didn’t know any better, so they did. They did this for some time without incident, until one morning my aunt came outside to see her children proudly raising their middle fingers proudly in the paper boy’s direction.

“What are you two doing?” she screamed.

They turned, beaming with smiles. “The Hawaiian Peace Sign!”

“The what?”

“The Hawaiian Peace Sign!”

“Who taught you the Hawaiian Peace Sign?”

“Uncle Rick.”

That’s the kind of person my father was, and I like to think it’s the kind of person I am. It’s cliché but, as the saying goes, don’t take life too seriously. Because you really won’t make it out alive.

Chapter 1

{Author’s Note: Hey everyone. It’s been over 7 months since I got back from the road trip that this blog is about. I’ve done a lot of things (well, not that much) in that time, but putting fingers to keyboard about the trip has not really been one of them. And in that time, I’ve only lost about 200 followers from when my blog was in peak readership. I’m not sure why most of you haven’t given up on me, but I’m glad you haven’t. I’ve got about 10% of the book written, and I’m finally in a set writing schedule, so I swear (really) this time that these posts will come with some consistency. Finally, this is just a first draft. Some of it, maybe quite a bit of it, isn’t very good writing. However, I’m tired of making you - and me - wait, so here you go.}

When you tell someone you are going to drive across the country, in fact not just across the country, but across all 48 contiguous United States, the first question they often ask is, “What made you decide to do that?” I know this because when I told my friends and family that I was going to drive across the country the summer after I graduated from college, that is what was mostly asked. My response was usually something along the lines of “I don’t know. A lot of things.” And it was the result of a lot of things.

The earliest event I can trace my journey back to was Thanksgiving dinner of 2007. As my family sat in the dining room in our pajamas, after everyone had gotten seconds, I cleared my throat. I announced to the table that after spending 4 semesters in my university’s architecture program, I had finally realized that I was actually not very good at architecture, and I would be switching to a new major. That major was geography, not that I had a particular interest of the subject at the time, but because it was one of the only majors that would accept a student with a GPA as low as mine. My family was quite supportive of this, even though I didn’t have a clue in hell what I would do with a degree in geography.  I just figured as long as I received a bachelor’s degree, life would work itself out.

Fast forward to August 2009 and I was eating barbecue in some no-name town located in the Texas Panhandle, a few hours before my best friend was due to marry his high school sweetheart. In between bites of delicious farm animals, I’d been introduced to a fellow named Ben, a friend of the groom and somewhat of a rolling stone from the stories being told. He had driven to the wedding in his newly purchased, but certainly not new, Chinook recreational vehicle. Like all free souls who have the opportunity to have a place of residence that sat on wheels, Ben moved around a lot. I remember thinking how romantic that sounded, being able to get out of bed and into the driver’s seat when you got tired of a place.

I probably enjoyed the notion because, if college hadn’t at least gotten tired of me, I was getting tired of college. I had just finished my fourth year pursuing a four-year degree, and by the time I received that overly expensive piece of paper, five years of my life had gone by. Considering the time spent acquiring a diploma I didn’t really want, it’s no stretch of the imagination to see that I wasn’t exactly jumping at the idea of entering the soul-sucking workforce as soon as I graduated either. So, as I headed into the home stretch of my college education, as my classmates went to job fairs, polished their resumes, and interviewed for the careers they would likely have until they retired, I coasted. When friends and family would ask what I was going to do after graduation, I shrugged and offered the not quite inspiring “I’ll figure it out.”

I conceived of the trip by way of epiphany in the first few days of 2010. A cross-country road trip did not seem like an unreasonable action for a graduate with a geography degree, I could justify it as a complement to my higher education! And it would delay the concern of getting a job, at least for a while. After I decided the trip was happening, it was a matter of working out the details. I reasoned that if I was going to drive across the US, I might as well see all 48 states, it would be a waste not to. A day per state made sense, meaning I would be able to experience a little bit of everywhere while keeping a constant forward momentum. Forty-eight days became forty-nine when, as I was mapping out my eventual route, I saw I would have to double back through upstate New York, adding an extra day. Forty-nine became an even fifty when I was unable to decide whether I wanted to stay in Los Angeles or San Francisco for my California day. I ended up choosing both.

The last obstacle I had to face before I embarked was telling my family that as soon as I graduated I was going to spend two months on the road, and somehow explain to them that this was actually not a dumb as shit idea. Surprisingly, when I did tell them, there wasn’t much in the way of resistance. The response went something along the lines of, “What? Why? Well, it’s your life.”

Although I was ready to begin my pilgrimage of pavement, I still had to deal with the situation that was already at hand, finishing my final semester of college. The wait was torturous. I sat in class and daydreamed of New York City, the Rocky Mountains, and all of the uncertainty that comes with temporarily becoming a drifter. This absentmindedness would have been perfectly acceptable, except for the fact that this was the last semester of college I would be able to afford, and I had to pass all of my four classes if I was actually to graduate, and a minor slip-up could result in no diploma and five years of my life down the drain. The looming of the road trip actually gave me a sort of cosmic peace in this regard, as I knew that, diploma or no diploma, soon I’d be driving away from it all.

After three high-stress final exams, I found out just twelve hours before graduation ceremonies began that I would indeed be a college graduate. I was so relieved that I called the registrar to notify them that I would pick my diploma up after the weekend, and in my final act of defiance in the face of collegiate expectations, slept through commencement.

I would have left the day after I graduated if I could have, but my younger brother was graduating from high school two weeks after I graduated from university, and I wasn’t looking to win any “Worst Brother of the Year” awards, so I moved back home and idled. Finally, on June 7, I packed my duffel bag, which carried the contents of what would be my life for the next two months, hugged and kissed my family goodbye, and started driving north-eastbound on I-30, towards the Arkansas state line.