Basin & Range

When you know you need to say something but do not quite know how to say it, you get this....

The first long car ride I remember is a night-time trip from northern Illinois to western Kentucky, from our home to my great-uncle's farm. It is the first family vacation I recall. Of course, it might have been a daytime ride that has simply grown darker over the ensuing decades. I was probably 6 or 7...maybe 8 or 9. Maybe 4 or 5. My great-uncle had tractors and pigs. I have 8mm movies of me sitting on the tractor and of pigs sticking their snouts through the fence. We made that trip once more when I was a kid, and on one trip or another my oldest sister got one of my younger sisters to close her eyes and open her mouth, and then my oldest sister put a frog in that open mouth. Ha ha ha. You have to love oldest sisters. I also remember looking for Boonesborough, something that certainly betrays my age. (Sing along: "From the coonskin cap on the top of old Dan to the heel of his rawhide shoe....")

But Kentucky is not what I want to discuss....

The second long car trip I remember was from that same spot in northern Illinois to Ohio, though I don't remember exactly where. We where there for a family reunion, but there were no tractors or pigs. Decades later I would return to Kentucky for a family reunion, and someone from Illinois would show up. But, again, that's not what I want to discuss.

A third trip involved driving all night with my grandparents to Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada, for a wonderful fishing trip. We drove through International Falls, the first place I encountered the odor of a paper mill. Later in life I would encounter that same odor in Pensacola, Florida, and Antioch, California. Once you've smelled it, you always will.

There were other car trips somewhere in there--shorter trips to Michigan and Wisconsin and Missouri. On the way to Missouri for summer vacation, the car somehow ran off the road and we bounded through a field until the front wheels dropped into a ditched and everything stopped moving. That was fun.

For all of these trips, I was in the back seat. My first trip in the front seat was when my father and I left that place in northern Illinois for a new place in northern California. We headed south on Route 47, turned right on Interstate 80, and then didn't stop for several days. In the car with us were a dog and a hamster, both of which were on their first long car trip. If you want to make a 13-year-old boy miserable, put him in a blue Ford station wagon, and send him cross-country with a silent father and no radio.

There were few car trips for several years afterward. Then, during another batch of several years, most of my miles were nautical. When I finally got back on land and bought my first car (a Honda Civic), I discovered that I had learned something from even my limited number of trips: I like long car trips. I even started calling them "road trips" because it sounds more romantic in a Kerouac sort of way.

And believe it or not, everything that comes before this is a waste of time--merely a setup for the main point. Of anyplace I've driven, Nevada's Basin and Range has become my favorite. Interstates by design and nature are not especially attractive, but Interstate 80 from one side of Nevada to another is a good thing. I don't remember making the trip with my father, our dog, and our hamster, but I remember the first time I did it alone: leaving Sacramento about 3 a.m., getting to Park City, Utah, about 12 hours later. I was in a 1984 Ford Tempo, and I lost radio reception so was alone with my thoughts for a long, long time. I realized on that trip that my father must have felt the same thing when he was driving us west and I was looking out the window on the north side of the car: nobody to talk to.

I have since made the west-east-west trip* many times--alone, with my wife and sons, with my friend, with my friend and his wife--Reno-Sparks-Lovelock-Winnemucca-Battle Mountain-Elko-West Wendover... Last year while driving alone from my home town in Illinois to St. Louis, following part of the same route my father and I took, I found that flat Illinois prairie is certainly nice, but it is not...expansive. Perhaps other places, provide what Nevada does--northwestern Oregon is certainly wide open, and what I've seen of Arizona might be the next best thing.

But cruise control and good music an hour before sunrise in Nevada, either alone or with someone sitting quietly in the seat next to you, is treasure.

* Kominski has experienced this place, so perhaps he'll chime in.... Anyone, of course, may comment.