The Life in My Years

How do you render over 8000 road miles down to a small handful of photos?

That’s the challenge presented by Ann-Christine. To describe a trip in 5 to 10 images.

May 2021. COVID was just barely loosening its grip, enough that people were starting to come out of hibernation. My daughter and her two children were living with my wife Cora and I. Maybe it was the stress of the pandemic along with the home confinement that started the argument between my daughter and I, that compelled me to decide, “I need to get away.” It took less than a week for me to put together an itinerary that covered sixteen states.

Cora and I packed two suitcases, a cooler, our dog Lexi, and her dog bed into a rental van and hit the road, southbound from San Francisco to pick up iconic and quirky Route 66.

Established in 1926 as the highway to get from Chicago to Southern California, Route 66 was a nearly 2500 mile long ribbon of promise for Americans looking to achieve the dream of owning their own business. For a while the dream had been fulfilled, until the 1950s when a new Interstate Highway system bypassed a number of the towns and businesses along what had been known as the Mother Road.

Grand Canyon
From Flagstaff, Arizona we took a brief detour from Route 66 to see the Grand Canyon. While the view is indescribably spectacular, my lasting memory is seeing tears of wonder in Cora’s eyes as she looked out over the rim.

Broken dreams of Route 66
In Newberry Springs, California all that remains of a small four room motel that was established in 1947 is a dark neon sign. The motel that was located here was actually called the West Winds but the sign, saying Henning, had been moved from a shuttered motel in nearby Barstow. Whatever its name, all that was left when we drove by was the sign and a pile of rocks.

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Quirky
What happens when a Texas millionaire with some spare change and a plot of land gets together with a group of hippie-artists from San Francisco that call themselves the Ant Farm Collective? The Cadillac Ranch is what happens. Located just west of Amarillo, Texas. Cadillac Ranch is public art consisting of ten Cadillacs, ranging from a 1949 Club Sedan to a 1963 Sedan de Ville, each one buried nose down-fins up in the dirt of remote Texas, each one placed at a 60 degree angle (supposedly the matching the slope of the Great Pyramid of Giza).

At Cadillac Ranch where vandalism in the form of spray painted graffiti is encouraged, you can buy a can of spray paint at a stand on the premises. It was a windy afternoon when Cora and I stopped to get our fix of Texan public art so we passed on the spray paint, although a number of people had decided to leave their artistic marks. Given the windy conditions, we took a long circuitous route to get upwind so that we wouldn’t be an unwilling part of someone’s creativity.

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History
There was plenty of history. A day before we arrived in Arkansas we paid our respects at the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum, established in remembrance of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. In Arkansas, we visited the Pea Ridge Civil War Battleground where a combined 26,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were engaged in three days of fighting in May of 1862.

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The Beartooth Highway (US 212)
Six years prior to this trip we had visited Yellowstone National Park. One of my goals during that trip was to drive the 68 mile Beartooth Highway, between Cooke City, Wyoming and Red Lodge, Montana. Unfortunately the Beartooth was closed due to snow.

This time the Beartooth, which summits at just under 11,000 feet, was open. Cora had a death grip on the armrest as I negotiated the many switchbacks that loomed over valleys and lakes far below. We stopped at the Top of the World Store for snacks, and watched Lexi play in the snow.

Bison National Park
Traveling through Montana we stopped to see the majestic American bison. Before the 1870s, it was estimated that there were 60 million bison roaming the plains and mountain states. By the 1880s, the bison had been hunted to near extinction. Through the efforts of conservation the herds made a comeback.

Truck stop sunset
If anything was a constant throughout the trip, it was the truck stop/travel center. Aside from fueling the car we stopped for bathroom breaks; a chance for Lexi to stretch her legs and have some water; junk food stops and coffee breaks; or a place to stop so that I could take a short nap before moving on. At a stop outside of Ritzville,Washington I captured an image of a spectacular sunset.

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Devastation and lush beauty
In Northern California we passed through an area that had been ravaged by wildfire, where once verdant forests that fought a valiant last stand that only resulted as denuded spikes in a barren land. .
Just the day before we had stopped by the cool mists of Multnomah Falls in Oregon.

Our road trip was not just a getaway from the stress of the pandemic and a reentry into some semblance of normalcy. It was a chance to visit parts of our country that we’d always dismissed as irrelevant – the so-called flyover region. We got to take a brief glimpse into an America that we never knew. Driving 8000 miles with an unplanned plan was also one of those bucket list things – scratching an itch that you thought you could never reach.

To see Ann-Christine’s version of ten images or less, and to link to other perspectives of this subject, click here.