The past four weeks have been a whirlwind of driving.
On May 1st, I left New York. Today I am in Nevada. I’ve driven over 2,500 miles through 11 states. My van has crossed the Great Plains of the Midwest, gone over the Rockies in Colorado, trekked the desert of Southern Utah, and sits now on the sand of the Las Vegas Valley.
I have visited places I never thought I would see in this lifetime and checked off bucket list items I imagined were still years away. I watched the moon rise in purple skies over snow-capped mountains in late May and felt the icy wash of meltwater running through the Colorado River. I stood atop mountains, climbed canyons, got caught in a desert rainstorm, found an ancient dinosaur track, and stared in awe at the grandeur of the setting sun in the western sky more nights than not.
I have reveled in the stunning beauty and ecologic diversity of this country for over a year now. Despite driving the East Coast from the most northern point to the most southern point, I feel as though I have seen more in the past month than in the past year.
Perhaps it is comfortability – I have traveled the East Coast all my life and although I went many new places, I still felt at home. Perhaps it was the time zone – it took me 18 states to move back into CST. But most of all I think it is the landscape. These rugged peaks, endless layers of mountains, and scrubby desert are a world away from the forested land in which I was raised. The sun blazes with more intensity than it does even in the Everglades, with no humidity to provide a barrier from the UVs. It is relentless, unforgiving, and alien to me.
Last night, on federally managed desert miles outside of Las Vegas, the still-warm wind kissed my skin at 9 pm, Sin City unseen but still a blazing beacon of light beyond the mountains. Temperatures here are already in the triple digits and the lows at night are often the mid-day highs in my home state.
I have not stopped at the world’s largest ball of yarn or Alien Joe’s gas station, but I have wandered land mostly unchanged for centuries. I have searched for traces of the indigenous peoples who once called this land home and found them all but erased. One stone structure here, a few petroglyphs there, and a single sentence at the end of a park description, glossing over the tens of thousands who lived here for tens of thousands of years.
As I drove through the cliffs and canyons of Utah I thought of the stories of the native women throwing themselves and their children off cliffs rather than become slaves for the invading armies of Joseph Smith and his sycophantic Mormons. I have wondered at the differences between the people here and my home back east, the centuries of isolation not afforded to the Haudenosaunee people or the Mohawk, or the Wabenaki. Here the settlement is much more fresh: most western states were admitted to the union at the tail-end of the 19th century.
There are more reservations out here than back east, and larger ones too. The Onondaga nation is a fraction of what it once was, and a fraction of the land reserved for people here. Size does not improve a prison, but there is something to be said for having more room to spread out.
When I was traveling through the South, my husband and I made a game (for lack of a better word) out of reading the historical marker signs: how long would it take them to mention the native and enslaved peoples, and how quickly would they gloss over the horrors? The answer was always too long and too quickly.
This country is stunningly beautiful but she is also sad. That is not hippie hyperbole – Beach Leaf disease threatens millions of acres of forest on the East Coast, rising temperatures are increasing the spread of toxic algae, and water is running dry in the West thanks to decades of wantonly wasteful use. This is land soaked in blood and reparations have not been made, much less begun.
America the Beautiful will have to reckon with her violent past sooner or later. My family has called this country home for generations and I am American before I am anything else. Often that does not fill me with pride, but profound sadness. This country was paradise, a true Garden of Eden before it was invaded and cut down to fit into the mold of a capitalist wet dream. Food grew freely from the ground, people were housed, fed, and cared for when sick.
Today we mascarade as a first-world country while tens of thousands of people lack access to clean water, healthy food, and safe places to live. I have been appalled at the conditions in which I see my fellow countrymen living. I have driven past homes that could hardly be called such and mega-mansions oozing waste. We are not free, shackled to the chains of mortgage debt, car debt, college debt, medical debt, and credit card debt. There is no equality of opportunity here: your zip code at birth determines much of your life before you even begin to cry.
I embarked on this trip for many reasons: foremost among them was a better understanding of what it means to be an American in this day and age. As I enter the last leg of my journey, I am forced to grapple with the most uncomfortable of questions set against some of the most beautiful places you could dream of.
Taking a road trip is as American as apple pie and fireworks. But I am not Jack Kerouac, concerned only with my transportation and next drink, nor am I Steinbeck seeking to peer into the hearts of my fellow citizens. I am curious about the land itself, the people that once called her home, and the damage my ancestors have wrecked.
If this makes my travels sound depressing, they are not. This is an adventure of a lifetime and I cherish every night spent in my bed with the cool air blowing in through the vent fan. I search the same stars as the eons before me and I remember that I am miniscule in the grand scheme of the universe. That is comforting to me.
