ROAD TRIPPING MID-AMERICA

We used to just fly over it all. California, where we were from, to New York, where we had moved. Everything beneath us obscured, anonymous, largely unconsidered as our legs crossed, then uncrossed, then crossed again in the useless attempt to get comfortable on those five- to six-hour flights. Slowly, but eventually obviously, New York became home.

So, we thought we’d finally retrieve some of our things. Back in California, we unloaded our storage unit, discarded most of it and stuffed the rest in our hatchback for what would be our first cross-country road trip. Funny that it took necessity to finally do it. Getting things from one place to another.

For many, the road trip is a bucket list item. It doesn’t take long to understand why. The alien, mirrored landscape of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, the bending red rock formations of Moab. The scale, the sheer grandness, of The Rockies. In simple terms, it just takes getting in your car and driving a bit to see these things. But we don’t. Mostly. We’ll get around to it, we figure, but never do, even as people around the world save up for it: the trip of a lifetime.

But the road trip is also everything that’s in-between. That anonymous America we pass over in the air, which is hardly any less anonymous when passed by at eye level. The insular lives of people who have lost interest, or never had any, in the wonders that are actually so close to home. (Inways, those stories are just as compelling.)

The landscape changes drastically, jaw-droppingly: mountains, deserts, large cities, small towns, blizzards and heat waves. Yet those are all just different shades of normal for those who live within them. It doesn’t matter how it looks from the outside. For them, it’s still just about getting things from one place to another.