The road more or less traveled by

Travel, it seems, is the new black. Many an article will solemnly assert that people who travel are happier, smarter, more interesting, more popular, and better looking than those who don’t. Only fools spend their money on—ugh!—things; the truly wise among us spend it on experiences. And if you’re idly wondering “are food, rent, and healthcare things or experiences?”, oh ye cretin, we have a great rash of books detailing how their authors happily lived out of their Hyundai for six years, munching on uncooked ramen and slurping from fast-food ketchup packets, simultaneously seeing the world and putting themselves through Ivy League grad school debt-free, so if they could do it, well, quit your whining about food and rent and get out there!

Lovely. But not realistic, for a great many people. And perversely, this is the first thing I think when I sit down to write about a recent travel experience: the fact that privilege is the main thing allowing me to do so. The second thing I think is the fact that acknowledging this privilege does not absolve me of anything. I’m lucky. I’m also responsible for my words and actions. The third thing I think is that I think too damn much. I wanted to tell you about the road trip I took with my husband and stepdaughter, but when I sat down to write, my mind went in an entirely different direction from describing beautiful natural scenery and kitschy roadside attractions. Appropriate, I suppose.

I’ve spent nearly a half-century on earth, all of it as a U.S. citizen, and yet up until the last couple years I had seen relatively little of its land. I knew about all of these places, of course—the national parks of Yellowstone and the Badlands, the monuments of Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore—but the funny thing is many of my international ESL students had seen them all before I had. I had only a vague idea of what Crazy Horse was all about until a student from Taiwan showed me pictures of the monument and told me what he’d learned there. Yes, he and the others mostly traveled with tours of the “15 sites in 14 days” variety, but they also managed to see aspects of America that I daresay most Americans never do, myself included.

That said, the places we saw were hardly empty of Americans, even though we’d managed to get out there slightly ahead of the summer rush. Seeing the USA in your Chevrolet (or Ford hybrid, in our case) is a time-honored tradition. Granted, that tradition now mandates holding aloft a phone throughout the journey, because experiencing it is less important than posting about it and it’s far more crucial to “make memories” than live in the moment. But all these places, these parks and monuments and roadside attractions, are known things. And for all that guidebooks like to disparage “tourist attractions,” there’s a reason these things are so popular. Old Faithful is fun to watch. Mt. Rushmore is kind of neat. Wall Drug—is kind of lame, but in an amusing way. In any case, I suspect that travel writers who urge all of us to go off the beaten path either don’t really mean it (because what they really mean is “I’m the only one daring enough to go off the beaten path, which is why I wrote about it and you’re only reading about it”) or haven’t thought this through much. How do you suppose paths get beaten down in the first place?

It is all well and good to urge people to get out and see this great land of ours—“before it’s too late,” as I can’t help but add, as so many others over the decades have thought, including Theodore Roosevelt, instrumental in the creation of our National Parks system, as well as nearly everyone else involved therein. There is always the sense that anything beautiful and natural, anything wild and free, won’t be this way forever. Perhaps merely beholding these things already lessens their wildness. And so another travel paradox: instead of being changed by the things we see during our travels, we change them to be more familiar to us. At one of the parks I saw a man wearing a T-shirt with a picture of an astronaut standing next to an American flag, on what I supposed was the moon. “Finders Keepers,” it said beneath the image. I guess it was sort of comical, yet also puzzling. Were we supposed to make the moon the 51^st State? Why would we want to? We have a hard time getting water to Flint and Puerto Rico; did he really think lunar malls and subdivisions were a good use of resources? There have been reports of garbage on Mt. Everest from the increasing number of people journeying up it. How much longer before the Sea of Tranquility fills with empty Dasani bottles?

Ooh, dark. I assure you, I did have a good time on this trip. Maybe the thing I enjoyed the most, however, was not what I saw but what I didn’t see. Standing at nearly 8000 feet up in Yellowstone, taking in the vastness, I realized that most of the land I viewed was inaccessible to me. Visitors are only allowed into a small portion of the park, and while some people no doubt find that irksome, I find it reassuring. I like knowing things are going on in the world that I’m not a part of—or, rather, that I’m not directly experiencing. It’s still part of my country, still part of my planet, so we’re still connected; I still have a responsibility to make sure I don’t do anything to screw it up. But it’s still there whether anyone’s holding a phone over it or not, and I hope it stays that way.

So I’m not going to describe anything else I saw. I’ll leave that up to you to discover—or not. It’s OK either way. As the cliché goes, not all who wander are lost, and not all who wander need do it by leaving their current location. Some journeys just require you to think a little too much.