A Journey's End

As we walk down the Muzak-filled hallways towards Gate 66 in the terribly crowded and unhelpfully employed LAX Airport, a sense of melancholy fills me. It’s the end of our trip. The past two weeks are just a blur of memories from 14 states and 5,178 miles of roads that got us to our cross-country destinations. It’s been a momentous trip that will have impacted me for the rest of my life. It’s only fitting that I’m writing this now in Gate number 66, the same number as the very famous route that spans the United States, which starts back east and ends here in Los Angeles. It’s also fitting that we drove on Route 66 here in California for the only time on our trip just a few days ago.

It’s hard to sum up a trip of this nature, where almost every day was a new destination, where every person we passed along the way was unique to their location in this grand United States, where each and every attraction—from the Columbus corner store to the Grand Canyon—that we came across was also unique to itself and its location, but was new to us in our journey. We now have a specific memory and opinion about each of these places, these cities, states, stores, and roads that we have crossed along this journey.

We discovered so much about this country, but there are an innumerable amount of places in this country that I have yet to discover and can only hope to. In a place this immense of which I am a part, I think it’s important that I take the time to actually go and try to figure it out. If I share the title of “American” with millions of others, I should know what it is to be an American. I feel like I touched only upon the tip of the iceberg in determining that on this trip. But I am more knowledgeable about America, having traveled across a large section of this great country, and for that I will always be thankful.

Having the advantage now of cross-national retrospect, I can say which states and cities I loved more than others, and why. Chicago and Denver were two of the greatest cities we visited. Chicago for its beautiful people, beautiful lakeside location, fun bars and cultural music. One of the greatest times I had on this trip was watching Joanna Connor rip her guitar to shreds at Kingston Mines Night Club. Denver was a constant blast, with tons to do thanks to both its amazing nightlife and its proximity to endless nature activities like whitewater rafting—which we loved—and hiking, especially by the Red Rocks Amphitheater. The best state we visited was Montana and the worst, no surprise, was Nebraska. Montana, from the second we entered, was a gorgeous retreat from city life, while still embodying aspects of that society—like nightlife, outgoing people, and friendliness—that I love. Walking down Main Street in Bozeman, so much a “Main Street USA,” was an amazing way to see the culture of this mountainside college town, radically different to what I’m used to home on Long Island or in college in Delaware. There were musicians playing beautiful country western in the bars, people were willing to start up a conversation about your life and theirs, and everyone seemed to just be happy-go-lucky. I saw this same type of people in Wyoming as well. I don’t know if it’s the serene mountain atmosphere that gets to their heads or what exactly it is, but it went to mine as well, and I now too have become a Midwest/Montana/Wyoming addict. As previously mentioned, Nebraska was the worst state, and although our outlook during this interim period (between Chicago and Denver) was probably the lowest of the whole trip, the vast emptiness of the state did not help our declining mood. It seemed that the people of Nebraska were sheltered and negative in a sense, like they just didn’t realize there was a whole world out there if they only went east or west of their state. It’s depressing really, if you think about it.

I can’t say enough of the Midwest/Western people. By far the nicest people we met, complete strangers in reality, were in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, and I will rave about these people and look forward to encountering them for the rest of my life.

On the contrary, however, were the less than helpful or kind people that we unfortunately came across in this nation. Of these are the Navajo, LA & San Francisco people. The Navajo had a strange way about them that just seemed put off in a sense to everyone who was “staying” on their reservation. People of LA and San Francisco were impersonal and impatient, a flaw common to east coast cities that we’re used to like Philadelphia (where I’m writing this now) and New York.

We visited a few tourist havens of vacuity, where everyone was mindless and people walked around like zombies ooh-ing and ahh-ing just like everyone else. These areas were the Grand Canyon, LA, and San Francisco. My impatient self came out in places like these where I just couldn’t deal with the immense amount of people, many of whom were foreigners who had a hard time understanding English. It just put a damper on the experience of these places, which otherwise I would largely enjoy.

Of course we encountered some incredible landscapes; I’d even venture to say that 90% of the trip was the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen. Here are the most notable landscapes that I noticed: the California Pacific Coast Highway, southern Utah/northern Arizona on US-89, and all of Montana/Yellowstone/Wyoming. Each of these landscapes is unique in their own ways and cannot be described anymore than you just have to see it for yourself.

We were blessed with phenomenal weather the entire time. It only rained significantly while we were on the road only twice in Indiana and Iowa. When it was oppressively hot, it didn’t stay hot. But the sun was shining for us 95% of our journey, and that’s pretty damn good.

Yesterday, before we boarded our plane in San Francisco, we drove up to Muir Woods, north of the Bay Area. Walking around this ancient forest, where most of the trees are over 1000 years old, I got a surreal kind of perspective that I had only experienced in glimpses on this trip. Touching one of those trees was like touching the past, before my life, before California was called California, before any humans inhabited the area. But it was also like touching the future. If those trees have lasted 1000 years, who knows how many more they will persist. And the saplings in that forest are our link to the future; they will grow into huge redwoods that will be a link to the distant past, a time that is present in my life right now. Steinbeck wrote about them as “ambassadors from another time,” and that “the vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.” It is this respect that I have found throughout this trip, respect for something greater than myself, something greater than any one of us, that words can barely show.

It’s also surreal growing up my entire life minutes from the Atlantic Ocean and then driving clear cross the country to the other ocean and spending a few days there. It’s another way to put life and this country into perspective. The end of the United States, looking out onto the Pacific, is so vast that I was compelled to ask the question, “What’s there?” which then evokes the question, “What’s here?” and that’s a question that I’m going to keep asking myself for the rest of my life, and one for which I will be in constant search of an answer.

The entire way home, the following quote from Robert Pirsig has been hanging over my head like an albatross: “You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.” During the hours of reflecting at where I’ve been on the endless flights back east, I come to sense a feeling of longing that I have for more travel, but also a sincere sense of accomplishment that I possess. To answer my question of what’s here, and to add to my search for happiness, I have learned that happiness is here and now in life and can be found in all parts of the country, we just have to be looking for it within ourselves. Happiness did not exist at those specific cities, coordinates of latitude and longitude, it existed in me while I was in those cities, traveling at a specific latitude and longitude, and that is something that I learned that I will take with me wherever I travel for the rest of my life.