A Fast Cross-country Trip
I'd been planning for quite a while to spend a few days visiting family in Utah. It was to be my reward for writing that pernicious, Procrustified paper for my meeting in November. But then the Great Car-totaling of 2006 (as it came to be known) intervened. My father, who had already been thinking about buying a new car, very generously offered us his '96 Maxima as a replacement for Kathy's poor, defunct car, and even volunteered to help drive it here-more than halfway across the country.
Consequently, I only spent two days in Utah. Dad picked me up at the Salt Lake City airport. On account of some diabolical construction project, he was forced to park a long way from the terminal. Normally we'd just stroll across the skyway over the terminal pickup area and hop right in the car. But this time we boarded a shuttle bus and-no joke-rode for twenty minutes past row after row after row of huge SUVs and pickup trucks baking in the midafternoon sun. Seriously: if every vehicle in that vast expanse were magically transformed into a Honda Civic, this country would save a million barrels of oil a year. We passed ranks of parking stalls for every letter in the alphabet, and then past the double letters: AA, BB, etc., and all the way to RR, without ever passing an empty spot. And then the letters started over again, but this time the rows had numbers, and the letters referred to broad expanses of the outer parking area, each one of which could have covered your average New England state. I looked back toward the terminal. It was hidden behind the earth's curvature (or was the horizon raised artificially by an unending line of Escalades?). At any time I expected to cross the Nevada state line, but before then we arrived at the proper number-letter coordinate, meaning we could expect to make the remainder of the journey out to Dad's car on foot without dying of thirst or exposure.
I told Dad that next time I'd be happy to meet him at the curb outside the baggage claim. I don't know which was worse: the interminable wait to get to his car, or the dejection from witnessing so much senseless waste of resources on conspicuous consumption and sexual insecurity.
Alas, I got to goof around with the brother for only a day. Still, we had a chance to get caught up and to dine at a couple of our favorite restaurants. (I'll spare you the details of our visit. Not that we didn't have fun, of course; it just doesn't make for good storytelling. Besides, I want to focus on traveling in this entry, and specifically by automobile.)
Driving in SLC has become a gen-you-wine white-knuckle adventure. You see, its downtown area used to have these nice wide streets, courtesy of Brigham Young Himself. (Mormons will say that he was divinely inspired in anticipating the need for wide thoroughfares in what was at first a small town; but I'm certain he was merely ahead of his time.) Recently, however, some ingenious city planner decided to solve the pernicious parking problem downtown by installing two rows of angle parking right down the middle of some of the streets. In consequence, the conditions of a supermarket parking lot, with its complete lack of visibility, are precisely duplicated, except that the speed limit is 30 MPH (48 km/h)-and in actuality everyone drives considerably faster than that. Combine this with Utah drivers' native cluelessness and inattention and you have the most exciting population control measure since the Iraq war. (Utahs had perfected the art of distracted driving, primarily due to breaking up fights among members of the "backseat brood," decades before the advent of cell phones.) The resulting deathtrap has apparently made SLC infamous among urban safety experts; and the city's brilliant solution was to provide little orange flags for pedestrians at mid-block crosswalks to wave in front of the inevitable minivan bearing down at relativistic speed, in the vain hope that the operator will glance up from simultaneously discussing the recent drop in tithing revenue with his Bishop on the phone, and rescuing his baby from crawling out the window, long enough to recognize and avert the developing deadly encounter.
Dad and I left his house in Ogden, Utah at six on Friday morning. Oh six hundred: an hour that belongs more to the previous night than the present morning. Only the barest glimmer of the approaching dawn was visible behind the Wasatch Mountains. It was so early that I wasn't even tired yet.
We were about to get more intimately familiar with Interstate 80 than anyone in his right mind would ever want to be.
You want to know how bizarre our family is? I'll tell you anyway. We drove over 1,700 miles (2,720 km) across the barren, featureless expanses of the Mountain West and the fertile but still featureless Great Plains without music or any other form of entertainment except what we brought with us inside our cranial cavities. Such sensory deprivation, intolerable to most Americans, posed no problem whatsoever for us. I know from whom I inherited my infinite attention span, and we didn't come close to running out of subjects for conversation. Stamina was another matter. I did the large majority of the driving, but the hours I didn't drive were crucial for keeping up our comfortable but relentless pace. Not only could I relax my attention during these treasured rest periods, but I could shift my weight around to keep my nether regions from falling asleep or, worse, developing painful muscle knots. (In our lexicon this maneuver is called "turning the other cheek.")
The brother's good friend from college once described the traffic on I-5 by saying, "Well, it's not a solid line of trucks from LA to San Francisco." Likewise, I-80 isn't quite a solid line of trucks from Ogden, Utah to Cleveland, but close enough that we spent hardly a minute in the righthand lane. By the time we got far enough ahead of the last 18-wheeler to change out of the passing lane, it was time to pass the next one. And as long as we enjoyed a 75-MPH (120-km/h) speed limit-all the way across Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska, woohoo!-nobody ever passed us except the occasional gigantic pickup truck whose owner was obviously trying to find a way to whittle down his gas mileage to less than 5 MPG (2.1 km/ℓ) using nothing but wind resistance. (With the Dodge Ram 1500 series for the Ford F-150 series, it's no problem at all: anything above a brisk walking speed will do the trick. Come to think of it, anything below a brisk walking speed will do, as well.)
We were well into Wyoming by the time the sun rose-and what a glorious dawn it was, with shafts of orange-yellow sunlight bouncing around between thin layers of stratus clouds. Here's some advice: if you ever get a chance to skip out on driving all the way across southern Wyoming, take it. The stark beauty of the semiarid landscape of hills and mesas, with clumps of crabgrass and sagebrush hanging on grimly to the parched earth, whipping back and forth in the continual gale, stays interesting for about fifteen minutes; the remaining six hours, you're on your own for amusement. We did get one reprieve near the eastern edge of the state, as we gradually climbed up and up to a ridge on the north slope of a long, narrow, snow-capped mountain. As we ascended, we passed stands of brick-red maples huddling in the Vs between grassy knolls, eking out a living from the few drops of water that collected from runoff; and higher, an occasional grove of sickly aspens, their scraggly yellow foliage fluttering away in the wind. We crested the ridge at 8,640 feet (2,600 m), and far to the south we saw a long line of icy crags taking a shark's bite out of the sky: the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, at a distance of fully 80 miles (128 km).
So much for scenery. Soon after zipping through Cheyenne we crossed into Nebraska, whose landscapes were just like those of Wyoming, only without the mountains and striking fall colors. We were simultaneously amazed and bored to discover that as the interstate crawls, Nebraska is even further across than Wyoming. There were still enough hills to ensure that every few minutes we'd get stuck behind the second-slowest truck in the entire state passing the slowest truck in the entire state. Why the trucker always had to choose that exact moment-at the base of a long upward slope-to pass, when the slower vehicle was traveling at 50 MPH (80 km/h) and the faster at (50 + ε) MPH ((80 + 1.6ε) km/h, where ε is an arbitrarly small positive number), was never obvious to us, but presumably they had some marvelous insight into the physics of highway driving that our untrained eyes couldn't perceive.
While we cruised along and passed truck after truck and talked about everything under the sun and that huge expanse of periwinkle sky, I came to realize that I have even more in common with Dad than I thought. When he's out touring around with his friends, for example, he will occasionally notice and call his companions' attention to some unusually pretty facet of nature, such as a dazzling display of wildflowers or an unusually picturesque moon. And yet they always seem astonished that first, he perceived something so unimportant and mundane, and second, that he was so stricken with the aesthetic qualities of whatever it was that he thought they would enjoy it, as well. I do that all the time. Kathy will appreciate the finer nuances of nature, such as the sori on the underside of fern leaves, but my coworkers merely humor me with a noncommittal "That's nice" or "Very [yawn] pretty."
Just after sunset we threaded our way through Omaha, Nebraska, zoomed across the Missouri River without even noticing the bridge (on on account of all the traffic) and into Iowa. At this point we'd completed half the journey: whatever else we covered put us ahead of schedule for a two-day drive. I asked Dad whether he was up for going on, and he said sure, as long as I was up for driving after dark. Expecting that the traffic would thin out as it darkened and as we put some miles between us and Omaha, I was happy to press on. I didn’t want to continue for too long, however, because all through the gathering dusk we’d been watching a huge bank of vast cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon ahead of us being periodically illuminated from behind by eerie, Creamsicle-colored flashes; and I wasn’t overly eager to navigate a heavy thunderstorm, at night, wearied from such a long day in the car.
Two hours later, we approached the outskirts of Des Moines. My eyes began to feel like a dry lake bed, and my contacts like two potato chips stuck in my eyes. Ruffles, no less. I gratefully took the next opportunity to exit at the next Môtel 6 sign and call it a night.
We had covered 1035 miles (1650 km) in 14 hours, 45 min. That’s an average of 70 MPH (112 km/h), assuming we had driven nonstop. Of course, we had stopped several times for gas and rest breaks, and so our average speed in motion was considerably greater. Damn, I love those 75 MPH highways. We almost broke Kathy's and my one-day record of 1050 miles (1680 km) from Calgary, Alberta to Salt Lake City, and we probably would have if we’d actually been in a hurry.
Somehow our transit across America didn’t seem as much like an adventure the next day. We both started looking forward more and more to a big, relaxed meal and lounging on a nice, supportive recliner with our legs outstretched. In Iowa we found the real Great Plains: endless corn- and wheatfields had replaced the grassy, undulating hills of Nebraska, and the terrain leveled out yet a bit more (but not all the way; that would have to wait 'til Indiana). Dad told me of a very similar cross-country car trip he took from Salt Lake to his residency program in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He'd had a rougher time of it then we were having: it was 1952 and Eisenhower hadn't even been elected yet, so the interstate system wasn't even a concept. As a result, all the way across the Great Plains Dad had to take narrow two-lane highways that made an abrupt right-angle turn every time he encountered a new farmer's property lines, and where bad luck meant spending an entire afternoon creeping along behind a thresher straddling the road and barreling ahead at the exhilirating pace of four miles per hour.
At one of the many identical I-80 rest stops I had a Profound Revelation. If you look at a mirror image of the word UTAH in all capitals, you see HATU. Though the reversed image is not an English word, each of the letters is right-left symmetrical, so it's still readable. Better yet, it's pronounceable in English. I knew about that from an early age, and was delighted to find, my first semester in college, that OHIO was also mirror-image readable (OIHO). For nearly twenty years I thought that Ohio and Utah were the only two such American states; but I was enlightened upon staring up at the back of a large Iowa state flag, flapping lazily in a fresh breeze, reading AWOI. (Before you start in, I want to point out that I'IAWAH is not well-formed in Hawaiian, and therefore doesn't count.)
You know that when you stare at something for a long time with out moving your eyes at all, your retina gets bored and stops sending the image? Somewhere in Iowa I experienced the driving-on-I-80-through-Middle-American equivalent. I was alert and adequately rested; yet my brain had finally reached saturation for images of pastoral scenery and Mack trucks. Or perhaps it had kicked into altruist mode, and had taken steps to spare my consciousness the dolorous ennui of the interminable Great Plains. In either case, we slid through the rest of Iowa, across Illinois and most of Indiana without significant impact on my long-term memories. And I count my life no less rich for the fact.
The fun began as we approached the Ohio border. We'd started to chase a line of thunderstorms again early in the afternoon. This one displayed less lightning than the previous evening's squall line, but more forbidding dark shadows below the cloud bases. Presently the sun winked out as if turned off by a switch, and we began to hear the splat! pow! of truly colossal raindrops striking the windshield, sounding more like bumblebees than water globules. The individual impacts soon merged into a continuous, deafening roar. Right about then we pulled into the exit booth for the Indiana Turnpike. For some obscure reason the tollbooth attendant was mortally offended that we'd left the windshield wipers on in the small dry space under the booth. She managed to scream at us to turn them off even over the torrential rain, which had by that point been accompanied by a cacophonous barrage of pea-sized hail that struck the pavement and bounced back upward a meter or two, like a magnified view of a swarm of albino fleas.
After we crossed the Ohio border the rain slacked off, and we enjoyed smooth sailing until our last (our last!) rest stop. A drizzle started up just as we re-entered the freeway for the home stretch. It quickly strengthened into a solid downpour: not a torrential rain like the last one, but heavy enough to reduce both visibility and traction to the point that I wanted to take it slow and easy. Problem was that we had finally reached the Cleveland metro area, so the traffic was as heavy as any we'd seen all weekend, and everyone else on the road apparently felt that Mach 3 was the ideal speed for these conditions, and even in the right lane I was terrorized by a continual procession of huge vehicles approaching from behind at some 40 MPH (64 km/h) until I could see nothing but grill and angry headlights before peeling off at the last millisecond, missing our bumper by millimeters, and tearing off into the tempest, twin tsunamis diverging from their rear tires. The occasional overturned SUV on the shoulder didn't deter these maniacs in the slightest. I can't possibly express the magnitude of my relief upon turning off I-480 at our exit at last. Naturally, the precipitation chose that exact moment to slacken off. Oh SIGH.
We pulled into our driveway almost exactly 35 hours after leaving Dad's house in Ogden. In that time we traveled some 1,730 miles (2,770 km), across seven states and three time zones. And the nifty part is that we didn't even have to drive dangerously fast: we just kept at it, stopping only when necessary, and eating only what we could easily take with us in the car. I don't know many people who have the kind of attention span-or internal plumbing-necessary to maintain such a relentless pace.
Post Scriptum. While I'm on the subject of automobiles and driving, I should add the following: I filled the tank the night before we set off and later squawked to Dad about how ridiculously expensive gas was in Utah. He explained, "Well, the Republicans know they have the Senate race sewn up here, so they don't need to artificially depress the price of gasoline here." Well, I had noticed the recent sharp drop in gas prices, but even I wasn't cynical enough to make that connection. But later I heard someone in Kathy's family draw the same conclusion, and then just today we went hiking in the Allegheny Mountains, and I can provide the following data:
My first reaction was to say to myself, "The Republicans and their corporate allies can't possibly think that we Americans are so idiotic that they expect a transparent ploy like this to work." And my second reaction was to reply to myself, "Well, what about the 2004 election?" And that shut me up most effectively.
Anyone want to start up a pool to guess by how much gas prices will leap upward a week after the election?
Consequently, I only spent two days in Utah. Dad picked me up at the Salt Lake City airport. On account of some diabolical construction project, he was forced to park a long way from the terminal. Normally we'd just stroll across the skyway over the terminal pickup area and hop right in the car. But this time we boarded a shuttle bus and-no joke-rode for twenty minutes past row after row after row of huge SUVs and pickup trucks baking in the midafternoon sun. Seriously: if every vehicle in that vast expanse were magically transformed into a Honda Civic, this country would save a million barrels of oil a year. We passed ranks of parking stalls for every letter in the alphabet, and then past the double letters: AA, BB, etc., and all the way to RR, without ever passing an empty spot. And then the letters started over again, but this time the rows had numbers, and the letters referred to broad expanses of the outer parking area, each one of which could have covered your average New England state. I looked back toward the terminal. It was hidden behind the earth's curvature (or was the horizon raised artificially by an unending line of Escalades?). At any time I expected to cross the Nevada state line, but before then we arrived at the proper number-letter coordinate, meaning we could expect to make the remainder of the journey out to Dad's car on foot without dying of thirst or exposure.
I told Dad that next time I'd be happy to meet him at the curb outside the baggage claim. I don't know which was worse: the interminable wait to get to his car, or the dejection from witnessing so much senseless waste of resources on conspicuous consumption and sexual insecurity.
Alas, I got to goof around with the brother for only a day. Still, we had a chance to get caught up and to dine at a couple of our favorite restaurants. (I'll spare you the details of our visit. Not that we didn't have fun, of course; it just doesn't make for good storytelling. Besides, I want to focus on traveling in this entry, and specifically by automobile.)
Driving in SLC has become a gen-you-wine white-knuckle adventure. You see, its downtown area used to have these nice wide streets, courtesy of Brigham Young Himself. (Mormons will say that he was divinely inspired in anticipating the need for wide thoroughfares in what was at first a small town; but I'm certain he was merely ahead of his time.) Recently, however, some ingenious city planner decided to solve the pernicious parking problem downtown by installing two rows of angle parking right down the middle of some of the streets. In consequence, the conditions of a supermarket parking lot, with its complete lack of visibility, are precisely duplicated, except that the speed limit is 30 MPH (48 km/h)-and in actuality everyone drives considerably faster than that. Combine this with Utah drivers' native cluelessness and inattention and you have the most exciting population control measure since the Iraq war. (Utahs had perfected the art of distracted driving, primarily due to breaking up fights among members of the "backseat brood," decades before the advent of cell phones.) The resulting deathtrap has apparently made SLC infamous among urban safety experts; and the city's brilliant solution was to provide little orange flags for pedestrians at mid-block crosswalks to wave in front of the inevitable minivan bearing down at relativistic speed, in the vain hope that the operator will glance up from simultaneously discussing the recent drop in tithing revenue with his Bishop on the phone, and rescuing his baby from crawling out the window, long enough to recognize and avert the developing deadly encounter.
Dad and I left his house in Ogden, Utah at six on Friday morning. Oh six hundred: an hour that belongs more to the previous night than the present morning. Only the barest glimmer of the approaching dawn was visible behind the Wasatch Mountains. It was so early that I wasn't even tired yet.
We were about to get more intimately familiar with Interstate 80 than anyone in his right mind would ever want to be.
You want to know how bizarre our family is? I'll tell you anyway. We drove over 1,700 miles (2,720 km) across the barren, featureless expanses of the Mountain West and the fertile but still featureless Great Plains without music or any other form of entertainment except what we brought with us inside our cranial cavities. Such sensory deprivation, intolerable to most Americans, posed no problem whatsoever for us. I know from whom I inherited my infinite attention span, and we didn't come close to running out of subjects for conversation. Stamina was another matter. I did the large majority of the driving, but the hours I didn't drive were crucial for keeping up our comfortable but relentless pace. Not only could I relax my attention during these treasured rest periods, but I could shift my weight around to keep my nether regions from falling asleep or, worse, developing painful muscle knots. (In our lexicon this maneuver is called "turning the other cheek.")
The brother's good friend from college once described the traffic on I-5 by saying, "Well, it's not a solid line of trucks from LA to San Francisco." Likewise, I-80 isn't quite a solid line of trucks from Ogden, Utah to Cleveland, but close enough that we spent hardly a minute in the righthand lane. By the time we got far enough ahead of the last 18-wheeler to change out of the passing lane, it was time to pass the next one. And as long as we enjoyed a 75-MPH (120-km/h) speed limit-all the way across Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska, woohoo!-nobody ever passed us except the occasional gigantic pickup truck whose owner was obviously trying to find a way to whittle down his gas mileage to less than 5 MPG (2.1 km/ℓ) using nothing but wind resistance. (With the Dodge Ram 1500 series for the Ford F-150 series, it's no problem at all: anything above a brisk walking speed will do the trick. Come to think of it, anything below a brisk walking speed will do, as well.)
We were well into Wyoming by the time the sun rose-and what a glorious dawn it was, with shafts of orange-yellow sunlight bouncing around between thin layers of stratus clouds. Here's some advice: if you ever get a chance to skip out on driving all the way across southern Wyoming, take it. The stark beauty of the semiarid landscape of hills and mesas, with clumps of crabgrass and sagebrush hanging on grimly to the parched earth, whipping back and forth in the continual gale, stays interesting for about fifteen minutes; the remaining six hours, you're on your own for amusement. We did get one reprieve near the eastern edge of the state, as we gradually climbed up and up to a ridge on the north slope of a long, narrow, snow-capped mountain. As we ascended, we passed stands of brick-red maples huddling in the Vs between grassy knolls, eking out a living from the few drops of water that collected from runoff; and higher, an occasional grove of sickly aspens, their scraggly yellow foliage fluttering away in the wind. We crested the ridge at 8,640 feet (2,600 m), and far to the south we saw a long line of icy crags taking a shark's bite out of the sky: the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, at a distance of fully 80 miles (128 km).
So much for scenery. Soon after zipping through Cheyenne we crossed into Nebraska, whose landscapes were just like those of Wyoming, only without the mountains and striking fall colors. We were simultaneously amazed and bored to discover that as the interstate crawls, Nebraska is even further across than Wyoming. There were still enough hills to ensure that every few minutes we'd get stuck behind the second-slowest truck in the entire state passing the slowest truck in the entire state. Why the trucker always had to choose that exact moment-at the base of a long upward slope-to pass, when the slower vehicle was traveling at 50 MPH (80 km/h) and the faster at (50 + ε) MPH ((80 + 1.6ε) km/h, where ε is an arbitrarly small positive number), was never obvious to us, but presumably they had some marvelous insight into the physics of highway driving that our untrained eyes couldn't perceive.
While we cruised along and passed truck after truck and talked about everything under the sun and that huge expanse of periwinkle sky, I came to realize that I have even more in common with Dad than I thought. When he's out touring around with his friends, for example, he will occasionally notice and call his companions' attention to some unusually pretty facet of nature, such as a dazzling display of wildflowers or an unusually picturesque moon. And yet they always seem astonished that first, he perceived something so unimportant and mundane, and second, that he was so stricken with the aesthetic qualities of whatever it was that he thought they would enjoy it, as well. I do that all the time. Kathy will appreciate the finer nuances of nature, such as the sori on the underside of fern leaves, but my coworkers merely humor me with a noncommittal "That's nice" or "Very [yawn] pretty."
Just after sunset we threaded our way through Omaha, Nebraska, zoomed across the Missouri River without even noticing the bridge (on on account of all the traffic) and into Iowa. At this point we'd completed half the journey: whatever else we covered put us ahead of schedule for a two-day drive. I asked Dad whether he was up for going on, and he said sure, as long as I was up for driving after dark. Expecting that the traffic would thin out as it darkened and as we put some miles between us and Omaha, I was happy to press on. I didn’t want to continue for too long, however, because all through the gathering dusk we’d been watching a huge bank of vast cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon ahead of us being periodically illuminated from behind by eerie, Creamsicle-colored flashes; and I wasn’t overly eager to navigate a heavy thunderstorm, at night, wearied from such a long day in the car.
Two hours later, we approached the outskirts of Des Moines. My eyes began to feel like a dry lake bed, and my contacts like two potato chips stuck in my eyes. Ruffles, no less. I gratefully took the next opportunity to exit at the next Môtel 6 sign and call it a night.
We had covered 1035 miles (1650 km) in 14 hours, 45 min. That’s an average of 70 MPH (112 km/h), assuming we had driven nonstop. Of course, we had stopped several times for gas and rest breaks, and so our average speed in motion was considerably greater. Damn, I love those 75 MPH highways. We almost broke Kathy's and my one-day record of 1050 miles (1680 km) from Calgary, Alberta to Salt Lake City, and we probably would have if we’d actually been in a hurry.
Somehow our transit across America didn’t seem as much like an adventure the next day. We both started looking forward more and more to a big, relaxed meal and lounging on a nice, supportive recliner with our legs outstretched. In Iowa we found the real Great Plains: endless corn- and wheatfields had replaced the grassy, undulating hills of Nebraska, and the terrain leveled out yet a bit more (but not all the way; that would have to wait 'til Indiana). Dad told me of a very similar cross-country car trip he took from Salt Lake to his residency program in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He'd had a rougher time of it then we were having: it was 1952 and Eisenhower hadn't even been elected yet, so the interstate system wasn't even a concept. As a result, all the way across the Great Plains Dad had to take narrow two-lane highways that made an abrupt right-angle turn every time he encountered a new farmer's property lines, and where bad luck meant spending an entire afternoon creeping along behind a thresher straddling the road and barreling ahead at the exhilirating pace of four miles per hour.
At one of the many identical I-80 rest stops I had a Profound Revelation. If you look at a mirror image of the word UTAH in all capitals, you see HATU. Though the reversed image is not an English word, each of the letters is right-left symmetrical, so it's still readable. Better yet, it's pronounceable in English. I knew about that from an early age, and was delighted to find, my first semester in college, that OHIO was also mirror-image readable (OIHO). For nearly twenty years I thought that Ohio and Utah were the only two such American states; but I was enlightened upon staring up at the back of a large Iowa state flag, flapping lazily in a fresh breeze, reading AWOI. (Before you start in, I want to point out that I'IAWAH is not well-formed in Hawaiian, and therefore doesn't count.)
You know that when you stare at something for a long time with out moving your eyes at all, your retina gets bored and stops sending the image? Somewhere in Iowa I experienced the driving-on-I-80-through-Middle-American equivalent. I was alert and adequately rested; yet my brain had finally reached saturation for images of pastoral scenery and Mack trucks. Or perhaps it had kicked into altruist mode, and had taken steps to spare my consciousness the dolorous ennui of the interminable Great Plains. In either case, we slid through the rest of Iowa, across Illinois and most of Indiana without significant impact on my long-term memories. And I count my life no less rich for the fact.
The fun began as we approached the Ohio border. We'd started to chase a line of thunderstorms again early in the afternoon. This one displayed less lightning than the previous evening's squall line, but more forbidding dark shadows below the cloud bases. Presently the sun winked out as if turned off by a switch, and we began to hear the splat! pow! of truly colossal raindrops striking the windshield, sounding more like bumblebees than water globules. The individual impacts soon merged into a continuous, deafening roar. Right about then we pulled into the exit booth for the Indiana Turnpike. For some obscure reason the tollbooth attendant was mortally offended that we'd left the windshield wipers on in the small dry space under the booth. She managed to scream at us to turn them off even over the torrential rain, which had by that point been accompanied by a cacophonous barrage of pea-sized hail that struck the pavement and bounced back upward a meter or two, like a magnified view of a swarm of albino fleas.
After we crossed the Ohio border the rain slacked off, and we enjoyed smooth sailing until our last (our last!) rest stop. A drizzle started up just as we re-entered the freeway for the home stretch. It quickly strengthened into a solid downpour: not a torrential rain like the last one, but heavy enough to reduce both visibility and traction to the point that I wanted to take it slow and easy. Problem was that we had finally reached the Cleveland metro area, so the traffic was as heavy as any we'd seen all weekend, and everyone else on the road apparently felt that Mach 3 was the ideal speed for these conditions, and even in the right lane I was terrorized by a continual procession of huge vehicles approaching from behind at some 40 MPH (64 km/h) until I could see nothing but grill and angry headlights before peeling off at the last millisecond, missing our bumper by millimeters, and tearing off into the tempest, twin tsunamis diverging from their rear tires. The occasional overturned SUV on the shoulder didn't deter these maniacs in the slightest. I can't possibly express the magnitude of my relief upon turning off I-480 at our exit at last. Naturally, the precipitation chose that exact moment to slacken off. Oh SIGH.
We pulled into our driveway almost exactly 35 hours after leaving Dad's house in Ogden. In that time we traveled some 1,730 miles (2,770 km), across seven states and three time zones. And the nifty part is that we didn't even have to drive dangerously fast: we just kept at it, stopping only when necessary, and eating only what we could easily take with us in the car. I don't know many people who have the kind of attention span-or internal plumbing-necessary to maintain such a relentless pace.
Post Scriptum. While I'm on the subject of automobiles and driving, I should add the following: I filled the tank the night before we set off and later squawked to Dad about how ridiculously expensive gas was in Utah. He explained, "Well, the Republicans know they have the Senate race sewn up here, so they don't need to artificially depress the price of gasoline here." Well, I had noticed the recent sharp drop in gas prices, but even I wasn't cynical enough to make that connection. But later I heard someone in Kathy's family draw the same conclusion, and then just today we went hiking in the Allegheny Mountains, and I can provide the following data:
- Utah: Certain Republican Senate victory, gasoline butt-expensive
- Ohio: Very tight Senate race, gasoline cheap as dirt
- New York: Certain Democratic Senate victory, gasoline butt-expensive
My first reaction was to say to myself, "The Republicans and their corporate allies can't possibly think that we Americans are so idiotic that they expect a transparent ploy like this to work." And my second reaction was to reply to myself, "Well, what about the 2004 election?" And that shut me up most effectively.
Anyone want to start up a pool to guess by how much gas prices will leap upward a week after the election?