Introduction

Two months after I married the man of my dreams, I left him.

I’d been planning to leave for years and I wasn’t going to let anyone stop me now. I had been dreaming of the ultimate road trip ever since I was a kid and actually planning it for several years. Firmly entrenched in America’s love of personal vehicle travel, I wanted to see the wonders of the world lying within driving distance of my home in the upper Midwest. A single mom for many years, I’d been timing my departure on my only son’s high school graduation.

As for the man of my dreams, I’d been waiting for him even longer than I’d been planning my travels.

After a stupendous trip wherein I figured out that I really liked the RV life, Tom and I had connected after twenty-five years of casual acquaintance when I returned from my shakedown voyage in March of 2003. I had taken a month off my job to go on a trip to New Mexico in my little Toyota Sunrader motor home, accompanied by a stellar Scottish terrier named The Dude. In April I resumed attending a weekly “Drinks, Dinner and Informal Discussion Group” hosted by our friend Wendi at a downtown Duluth restaurant. One night after the gathering, I asked Tom for a ride on his Harley and discovered we’d been missing something all these years. By the end of the summer we were engaged in figuring out how to combine two households. When the next year was just getting started, we were married.

I still had my travel plans. In April of 2004, I left on a ten-week trip, meeting Tom in New Mexico for the last two weeks of the adventure.

My family had been hooked on car travel. In our 1950 Ford sedan, three kids, seven to twelve years old, stuffed in the back seat, we drove west from Minneapolis. We toured Yellowstone, delighted to run from bears approaching our picnic table, my mom not as delighted as us kids. Mom and dad enjoyed Mount Rushmore while us kids couldn’t see the big deal. We visited Rocky Mountain National Park, where I fell in love with mountains. At Mesa Verde, I was awed by the ancient ruins of cliff dwellings, but disappointed when my parents refused to take the close up tours. My father had trouble walking very far due to Multiple Sclerosis, and we couldn’t go without him. I determined to return when I grew up. The traveling I’ve done as an adult has only increased my desire for more.

Tales of wandering also make me want to seek the satisfaction that accompanies traveling with an open heart and an open mind. Good people always seem to outnumber the bad in face-to-face travel situations. I suppose, a tourist is almost always desirable to the other people she is likely to meet, whether it is a salesperson who wants your business or a fellow tourist who enjoys people.  So I'll push my luck with the equation and wander off into Tourist Land and parklands.

Wild places face a variety of threats resulting from our ever-growing population and our ever-growing need for more stuff. National parks and other preserves face budget cuts while the land itself literally is destroyed. Corporate mining tactics blow the tops off mountains and let the waste erode into the rivers. Our cities sprawl ever outward from their centers, driving away the wildlife that cannot adapt to people (or that people cannot adapt to having in their backyards). Within my lifetime, we could lose most of what is left of our sacred natural places.

I want to see the endangered natural beauty of our national parks before they are destroyed by the never-ending need to drill for more oil, to cut trees for more toilet paper, and to blast for more minerals. Is it greedy to want to see all of them? My dream is to see the supplier of these raw materials--this planet we are privileged to live on. Looking at reports about threats to our wild places in the National Parks Conservation Association e-news as well as in the daily paper, it looks to me like we’re killing the planet and it’s driving me crazy.

Of course, the irony for the environmentalist in me is that by driving hundreds of miles on these trips, I contribute to global warming and the depletion of oil. Well, says the child in me, “everyone else is doing it!” People who consider themselves conservative environmentalists are flying to conferences and to “green” vacations, using what ration of oil they can afford to buy. I can afford it; why shouldn’t I use some? Respected scientists tell us that the oil will be running out, perhaps in my lifetime. Those of us with the itch to drive will have to go back to the “walk-about” to satisfy our craving for seeing what’s out there.

I expect I will not always be able to afford the price of gas for my field trips. Before then, I want to emulate Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. He set out to see the last members of several nearly extinct species in his book, Last Chance to See. Another inspiration, John Steinbeck’s road trip book Travels with Charley describes a pastime many people may not be able to afford once gasoline gets scarce. While it is still possible, I want to see some more of what’s out there and do it in the grand style of Steinbeck. I see road trips as my last chance to “travel with Charley” as well as my “last chance to see” the national parks.

I determined to atone for my selfish consumption of the world’s oil supplies. I would pick up litter at campsites, hiking trails and other spots of modern trash dispersion. There is plenty of trash to be picked, even in our treasured national parks. Sometimes I rated parks by the one-to-infinity number of bags full of trash I recovered. OK, I have never picked up an infinite number of bags. I don’t have that kind of tenacity.

To offset the pollution I make by driving, I generate my own electricity with a solar collector on the camper roof. I rarely hook up to the electricity available at a campground. At least then I don’t use much coal or nuclear-generated power on my trips. My environmental footprint is smaller than it might have been, because I drove one of the more fuel-efficient RVs I could find, a 1987 twenty-one-foot Toyota Escaper (aka Toy House). The Sunrader RV that I drove on a 2003 trip died of rust. At seventeen feet, it got up to twenty miles-per-gallon. I couldn’t find a similar one to replace it, but The Escaper is roomier thus less claustrophobic for me. It does make my energy footprint bigger at 12 miles-per-gallon.
 
I’d like to go whole hog and convert my motor home to run on French fry oil, like some savvy people I know. But I’m not a good enough mechanical geek when it comes to such things. I would be traveling alone but for my canine companion, The Dude, a sometimes cranky but generally amiable being, much like myself. I was afraid to do something new and tricky. I needed the security that dinosaur oil provides. Bad environmentalist.

To calm my environmentalist guilt further, I came up with the “Deplete to Preserve” theory, so named by my poet friend, Chris. I figure that I should help use up the oil quickly so there is not enough left to finish demolishing the planet. It takes a lot of petroleum products to expand cities, mine and transport raw materials, travel great distances, manufacture and use our various toy vehicles and just generally to sustain the extravagant lifestyles that most of the population of industrialized countries enjoys. If there are no petroleum products available, we can’t continue the destruction that comes of consumption. OK. There are severe errors of logic in the theory, but it has a catchy title. I am well aware that humans have managed to degrade their environment for eons without the advantage of petroleum products. We could now be well on our way to nuking ourselves with toxic waste and explosive nuclear facilities in our quest for more and more power to run our machines. In our collective past, we were not capable of destroying the entire planet. In the good old days, we just destroyed an area here and an area there.

I travel to use up the oil. I travel to marvel at the world. I travel to run away from mundane living. I crave time to experience the forests and oceans, the mountains and prairies. I figure it won’t be long before we humans reproduce ourselves into oblivion -- swarming all over each other at places of recreation like national parks. Then we’ll chew up the trees and the minerals and the oil for baubles, battleships and bombs.

Still, despite my contribution to the complete and utter destruction of our planet, I can’t resist the urge to travel. To go out there. To see for myself. To be there myself. To see who else is there. The experience of traveling is like that old story of several blind people with an elephant. You’ve no doubt heard the one in which each of them misses the whole picture by touching only one part of the elephant. The United States is a huge elephant and “finding America” is not in the least a doable goal, despite the romance of the popular concept. I accept the elephant parable’s limitations as inevitable, but will touch whatever parts of the U.S. I encounter and make my best guess as to what it’s all about.

Looping down the US southeast and back up through the southwest, I didn’t play investigative journalist – interviewing people and trying to see behind the scenes. I played tourist – enjoying what we’ve still got to enjoy, pleased to find that the United States is full of kind and helpful individuals -- at least for middle-aged white tourist ladies like myself, but that’s probably a sociological treatise I don’t want to go into here.

Before my trip, I had come to the conclusion that much of the world surrounding me on a daily basis – from bosses to presidents, from news to gossip – was unbearable: unbearably evil, unbearably mundane, or just unbearably unbearable. I needed to enter that twilight zone of the traveler, ignoring dates, clocks and world events. I was looking for a bearable escape and I found it as a tourist.