Ever since the first Conestoga wagon headed west from Pennsylvania we’ve been waxing poetic about road trips. There’s something liberating about saddling up for a mini-voyage with no destination, no time frame and no kids. The Boys at the Bar go on runners pretty regular, mostly in search of booze and broads, while pretending to escape from the law, the Old Lady or the building inspector.
Threats of winter make fall the best time to scratch the itch, feed the wanderlust and indulge in windshield time. In Colorado, where we call snow “white gold” and coal “black gold,” everyone knows the real rush for the gold comes in fall when color transforms mountains and meadows into quilts of yellow, red and orange. Book clubs go on field trips, soccer teams take off for tournaments, hunters scout game trails, and birders clog the state’s 23 Scenic and Historic Byways. If you hike it’s time to visit one of 41 state parks. If you fish it’s time to check out the state’s 168 miles of Gold Medal streams.
CDOT says there are 82,171 miles of road in Colorado, 59 percent of them unpaved, and fall is a glorious time to explore internal and external landscapes. The call of the open road blinds us to the price of gas, back-to-school responsibilities and office deadlines. We lust for places where there are no scones, wine lists, ATMs and holistic health centers. We want to enjoy places where you can’t see man-made things and can prowl a pioneer cemetery or shoot out a stop sign, secret places where elk calve out and the telephone line dead heads. We want to drive into a sunset or out of a rainstorm. We want to get lost.
MBA-types claim windshield time wastes energy, depreciates vehicles and diminishes profit. They say it’s expensive, unproductive and avoidable but they’re wrong. Windshield time is good for the soul. It permits us to exercise the imagination, change filters, vacate the mind and body. It provides space to relax and meditate, to remember the past, to find inspiration in new surroundings, to think about the future. It’s easy to become so intent upon exercising the body that we fail to make time for the mind to dance in the land of make believe. Road trips are our “child time” when, like Ferdinand the Bull, we can sit under a tree and smell the flowers.
Real road runners don’t know when they have arrived because they don’t know where they’re going. It is essential to avoid the 25 million websites that supply maps, books and planning guides for trips. Ignore all the educational, geophysical and cyber-activated tools for travel. Resist the temptation to take a mountain bike, pack a camera, dress in Spandex or schlep water bottles. Just put a knife and a salt shaker in the glove compartment, so you can snack in roadside gardens, turn a John Prine CD up loud and sing like you are in the shower.
You may want a traveling companion. Thelma had Louise, Steinbeck had Charlie and Lewis had Clark. But it’s fun to travel solo because it gives you time to think about the important things in life. How many towns have streets named for Martin Van Buren? What percent of the gross national product is generated by speeding tickets in forgotten towns? What are people who put plastic deer in their front yards attempting to say? Why does root beer taste better at a Dairy Queen? Will the motel provide a fly swatter instead of a telephone? Is there any relationship between an open range and a closed mind?
Travel slow. Explore country where a community is judged by the size of its grain elevator and guys not only know what sorghum is but keep close tabs on the market price. Search for a place beyond the reach of public radio, with no library, where everyone can recite the 4-H pledge. Read every historic marker, eat at the greasy spoon and visit with someone driving a tractor. Find the town where high-school football jocks lobbed a drunken chicken across the end zone at halftime.
As my pal Noreen says, a good run is better than a bad stand. Runners create space to breathe deep, air out the mind, and explore wide-open meadows, white-topped peaks and black forests. Politicians promote Road Maps, coaches encourage Life Maps and birders compile Life Lists. The rest of us know there is no road map for life and a little windshield time reminds us to hang on to the steering wheel.
