A: Theories About Road Trips #1

This paid subscriber episode is later than I planned, and it’s also recorded on a different device than I’ve used for the past three posts. I am coming to you from Columbus, Ohio, where it is significantly colder (though I think less windy) than Providence, Rhode Island. Spoiler alert, I drove here. This episode starts off with some thinking about traveling and road trips before getting into the text of a conference presentation I gave last year at the 2024 Northeastern Modern Language Association in Boston, Mass. This year’s NeMLA conference is in Philadelphia and I am ostensibly tying up my paper for that conference. Soon, we’ll be back in New England wrapping up episodes on the parks I visited back in January, but for now, I give you this. There isn’t any special editing going on, and no theme music, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

Episode Intro

When it’s winter, like it is, and it’s cold, like it is, my interests lead me towards planning extensive, long trips to warmer climates, or at least climates that seem like they might be warmer than the icy frozen hellscape that is New England during February. Let’s be honest: February is the worst month of the year. Despite its brevity, it overstays its welcome. There’s not a boomer alive in southern New England who doesn’t still talk about the Blizzard of ‘78 as though it were yesterday, and regardless of climate change and the heating of New England—it’s the area of the U.S. experiencing some of the most drastic changes in overall temperature—February still feels brutal and raw. Like any other time I’ve wanted to escape, I dream up road trips that will take me away from this precipitation and south. I’m not so different from the birds.

I don’t fly when I travel. I haven’t flown since before the COVID-19 pandemic, and with current failures of airline safety, even if it is still the safer way of traveling than driving, I’m still inclined to opt for the devil I know—the interstate highway system—rather than the problems of flying. I hate airports. I hate waiting. I like to leave at a moment’s notice. It’s fun to me to surprise my family and friends with Snapchat updates from random places in the United States without having told them that I was driving there before; most recently, I attended a bachelorette weekend in Charleston, making the drive from Rhode Island not exactly in one shot (I took a three hour nap at a rest stop not far from the border between North and South Carolina), and when I sent an update from the rest area, my older sister replied with just a question mark. The truth is, I probably can’t cut the stress of having to be anywhere at a specific time anymore, especially not when I know that there are probably going to be delays on their end regardless of how early or on time when I show up. There are other considerations: I like to be able to bring a bunch of stuff in my car and be indecisive about what to wear, I like moving at my own pace, I like the sense of control (and it is always control) from being in a car. I don’t think that we’re meant to move at the speeds that modern travel moves us through, and it is an entirely unnatural experience, racing through as I do the roads of America, but I like to see my country, and I like to see it first hand, even though I’m still seeing it, often, passing by the windows of my Toyota Corolla (this is another attempt to get Toyota to sponsor me).

This is where my unabashed patriotism expresses itself most, I think. I do not doubt that the majority of the people running this country have never actually seen most of it. I don’t think that they know their country, or even necessarily all of the corners of the states they represent. The beautiful thing about America is its size and breadth, its expansiveness. This place makes us small. This place reminds us that we are nothing. And yet: we are a movement-bound creature; I think it’s probably only recently that we’ve become tied to specific geographies, and even within that, those hyper-regionalisms are cultural and don’t bind most of us. For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a larger project regarding American Gothic Aesthetics, and I think that there are a few things I’m noting: for all its regional differences, there’s very little actually different in America for what it thinks of itself, and one of the things that is most off-putting is the tendency in the Gothic to see unfriendliness towards strangers, the cultishness of some communities, the threat against outsiders passing through. The fear of outsiders is ironic because we are all outsiders. It is uncomfortable and weird to be greeted with hostility. Besides, aside from the towniness that characterizes a place like, for example, Rhode Island, most places have much more flexibility in relation to where you live. New England’s sequestering of itself is unusual compared to the rest of the country, in which people relocate all the time. For us to pretend that any borders are impermeable or even that they have been the way that they are now is to ignore the reality of history and the fact that humans like to move around. I love the fact that this country is so big and so beautiful. I like that I can drive and see it in all of its strangeness. I won’t speak on other countries because I don’t know them like this, but I can speak to the sense of overwhelm—sublimity—that comes when you are bordered on both sides of the roads by mountains, or the press of open land in front of you in all directions. We actually do not need to develop these spaces. It is okay to let the land be the land. And so on.

In my driving, I’ve realized that there are a few other unifying things about America: no matter where in the country you are, or whatever it is that inspires the reaction, there is nowhere that you can go that you are not going to ask yourself, “What the fuck.” It comes from many places: bad driving, unhinged billboards, roadside attractions, moments of natural beauty, shocking architectural developments—it doesn’t matter. America, at its core, is a place of “What the fuck.” What the fuck was that. What the fuck am I looking at. What the fuck is this place. This is the dominating impression of this country. It also applies to everything happening here at any given time outside of roads and travels. I think this is true regardless of your religious beliefs (though you may use a different phrase than “What the fuck,” the energy or emotion is still the same), it is true regardless of your politics, it is true regardless where you come from, and it is true regardless of where you are going. It is true when we look at science. It is true when we look at people. It is true when we think about history.

Other unifying things about America: no matter where you are in the country, the roads are going to suck and the people who use those roads are coming to agree that they suck. Does any state have good roads? It’s one of our few bipartisan agreements.

The only time you will experience zero traffic in America is during the Super Bowl. All Americans agree on watching the Super Bowl, whether they know anything about football or not.

Truckers are always going to try to pass other trucks without being able to get enough speed to really justify their use of the passing lane, and at the same time they are going to make sure to drive as irresponsibly as possible when the weather makes the roads dangerous. This will happen in New York, it will happen in Pennsylvania, and it will especially happen in Arkansas.

At a conference last year, I presented a version of the following essay, “Landscape Painting Through Car Windshields: Transformations of Perceptions of Geographic Space Via Road Tripping.”

Landscape Painting Through Car Windshields: Transformations of Perceptions of Geographic Space Via Road Tripping.”