Epilogue: The trip comes to an end.
13,770 kilometres/8,556 miles
32 days
8 National Parks & Monuments:
- Smoky Mountains
- Arches
- Grand Canyon
- Zion
- Yosemite
- Yellowstone
- Devil’s Tower
- Badlands
20 States: Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland
When we got home, I was exhausted. The kids were exhausted. Silvia was exhausted. We unpacked and then huddled in our air-conditioned house with our eyes attached to screens for a good few days. This gave me time to assess and think, I suppose.
I am happy with the last post from Badlands, the one that reminds us to relish the beauty. The one on Yosemite is damn near perfect. Yet, we set out on this journey with other aspirations. We wanted to get out of the house. We wanted to see America, whatever that means. We wanted the kids to get some kind of break. Honestly, keeping ourselves and others safe from COVID was important but it was all the psychological stuff that was really paramount for us. People can criticize us. All of it was a tad crazy and perhaps more than a tad irresponsible. I did have worries about us either contracting COVID or being, somehow, super spreaders, leaving a trail of COVID dust wherever we went. Who knows. We are now in self quarantine here so talk to me in a few weeks.
We certainly were not perfect. Another person I know through a FB group did a similar thing and his tally included “0 public restrooms”—we failed on that point. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to use our tiny commode all the time. We certainly avoided all other public places. In fact, one of the things I had hoped to do was to talk to people—to chat with all the diverse characters that one would hope to meet on a USA road trip. I wanted to know better what people thought and to touch, if ever so gently, the humanity that I am nearly 100% certain exists in all of us. Yet, really, we didn’t talk to that many people. People kept their distance and most of the time, at campsites, that distance was pretty vast. We all seemed to be observing each other from a distance or passing each other very quickly, little satellites at night.
For the kids, however, the trip, as we hoped, was monumental. They are different, better, people now. They saw and thought and played and laughed and cried. They grew. They also got insights into the country that are super important.
Everyone is always trying to characterise ‘America’, to distill it down to some pithy observation. My kids and Silvia really know now how impossible that is. America is a country founded on ideals, or, more precisely, lofty ideas. That means that the room for interpretation, for diversity of thought, for a maddening whirl of good, bad, and ugly is inevitable here. How do you think about the two boys we met whose mother owned a small shop in Interior South Dakota with the gilded and suave of San Francisco? How do you compare the broad swathes of land that are only lightly sprinkled with people to the mass urban areas of the coasts? This goes well beyond Trum and all his hatred, all his racism, all his bile. This is about a hodgepodge of people living such completely different lives that it is incredible that we can share any ideals at all. And, this is the challenge of America. How do we as such a diverse set of people keep striving for the best promises of America? How do we make sure those promises grace all of us, equally, and in ways that let us appreciate the beauty? I’m certainly no closer to an answer to this but I know, after this long trip, that these seem to be the right questions to be asking.
When you get a chance to see America in this way, it deepens your sense that was best characterised by my mother in two basic principles for life: “Give each other a break” and “Leave the campsite a bit cleaner than when you found it.” The first implies that we not only need to be open to and understanding of other people and to not leap up on some judgement pedestal all the time but to also do the same for ourselves, to take a breath and accept the good, the bad, and the beauty of it all. The second means that we need to work to make it better for everyone else. These, to me, are not only universal but they are very particularly American lessons, at least in our best times.
Finally, I highly recommend such a journey. Do it. Take a month. My friend mentioned doing this on motorcycles a la “Easy Rider. Sounds cool to me. However, I must admit that, man, it was exhausting!!!