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Written by asap
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Monday, 17 July 2006 |
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 Gas prices are currently hovering around the $3/gallon mark. It’s a 3,000-mile trek from coast to coast. Translation: this summer, the only people in America with enough money to take a cross-country trip are Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
But for those of us who aren’t friends with them (at least, not yet) or are just plain lazy, there’s another option: Robert Sullivan’s lively travelogue “Cross Country.”
The Vogue contributing editor -- who claims to have made the trip more than two dozen times -- became inspired to write the chatty, hilarious book after making a connection between certain cross-country milestones this summer. This year marks both the 50th anniversary of the Interstate highway system and the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s return home from the Oregon coast.
“Cross Country” interweaves an account of the Sullivan clan’s drive from Portland to New York with historical anecdotes. And yes, there are many. Oh-so many. Just how long-winded is Sullivan? Check out the subtitle: “Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant.”
Whew. asap decided to put Sullivan’s verbosity to use by asking him for other road book recommendations.
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SIX ROAD BOOKS THAT THAT ROBERT SULLIVAN ENJOYS, IN HIS OWN WORDS:
1. “Roughing It,” by Mark Twain (1872), which is, among other things, about a stage coach ride across the continent. I’m not certain which part I like better: the part where he interviews Brigham Young and Brigham Young can’t figure out which grandkids are which or the part where he is offered a cup of coffee by a guy everyone in the west describes as a vicious killer.
2. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” by Wallace Stegner (1943), which, to me, is a book about a family spending their entire life in the road, or at least moving.
3. “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac (1957), which I like for obvious reasons, but mostly as a book that recounts how you feel when you actually see the country, as a book that is a kind of spiritual gazetteer, if that makes any sense.
4. “By Motor to the Golden Gate,” by Emily Post (1916), the etiquette maven, who drove when it was not always clear that the continent could be driven. She is critical of the places that she visits but always enthusiastic about them, and the one thing that really drives her nuts is people not taking the good with the bad, especially while cross country-ing, if I may oversimplify for the sake of this oversimplified list.
5. “A Field Guide to Sprawl,” by Dolores Hayden (2004), a book that helps you identify road-centric roadside sights in the city and in the country and everywhere that is being covered up in between. Sprawl-related words include: Litter on a Stick, Ruburb (an “urbanized rural area”), Logo Building, Sitcom Suburb, Zoomburb (a “place growing even faster than a “boomburb”).
6. Anything by John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the king of the road writing genre, in my opinion -- even if his books might not technically be considered road books.
Here is a passage from one of the last essays he published before he died, in the collection entitled “A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time”: “(O)ver the last century and a half, two developments have taken place: we have produced a new kind of road and a new metaphor, a vast network of smooth, efficient highways leading to every conceivable destination. At the same time we have largely ceased to believe in one universally accepted religious goal, usually identified with Christianity and the notion of spiritual redemption and of an afterlife.
“Heaven is no longer our destination. A third interpretation is taking shape: a multitude of roads, each with its own destination, obliges us to choose, to make decisions of our own; and the discourse of planning, of policy in the public realm, increasingly resorts to such road-associated phrases as crossroads, dead ends, avenues of agreement, gridlock, collision course, impasse and bypass.
“’Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/ And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler....’ Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” has implications transcending the individual experience. It tells us of the dilemma of living in a world where there is no longer the one right way, the royal road to happiness and success, a path to the Heavenly City. Whichever road we take ultimately leads us to the agonizing moment of private decision.
“As with Saul of Tarsus, the road to Damascus may lie straight ahead, but it is only in the course of the journey that we discover our true destination.”
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asap contributor Karla Starr once borrowed her mother’s car and drove from New York to Alaska.
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