Broad Shoulders
This is Part 1 of a 2 (maybe 3?) part series written from the road while my wife, daughter, and I take a long, rambling road trip around the U.S.
In the past 5 days, we’ve meandered from the Central Basin of Tennessee across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains — from Yuchi and Cherokee land in Nashville to where I write you now in Denver, land of the Ute and Arapaho peoples.
We’ve traveled from 554 feet above sea level at our little house in the woods outside Nashville to 5,321 feet (with more to climb). I’ve slept in a converted 1930s stone chicken shed, read the inscription on Satchel Paige’s pocket watch, and posed for a picture under a giant statue of Superman.
I’ve learned that hot black coffee is good no matter where you are, and that a solid playlist enhances the open road like sea salt on chocolate.
From a Louise Bourgeois spider in Kansas City to Wizard of Oz roadside attractions in Kansas, we’ve taken in an all-you-can-eat buffet of American road trip experiences and we’re not even halfway done.
I love cross-country drives. Since the early 1990s, I’ve criss-crossed the country a dozen times, and every trip has heralded a major life change. These days, I’m a little too old (or at least sober and cautious) to dive headfirst into my youthful Kerouac-inspired odysseys fueled by Tom Waits, cigarettes, and the sheer exhilaration of the road.
Today, I take my time. The family and I follow our noses and interesting signs. I’ve traded the Econolodges of my younger days for Air BnBs in historic neighborhoods, and I try not to drive more than four or five hours in a day because I get drowsy a little faster than I did in my 20s … or 30s.
This is an interesting time to roam around America. As we peek our newly vaccinated heads out from under the heavy lid of COVID, we also begin to poke around a little in the big mess America finds itself in, thanks to a shrill and mean-spirited year of culture wars.
We travel through cities like Ferguson where the Black Lives Matter movement took root, and where cultures clashed violently last summer. We travel across the Great Plains and into the West just after the discovery of a mass grave with the remains of 215 indigenous children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. We travel rural America at the beginning of Pride month.
We’ve met people in BLM caps, in Trump shirts, rainbow socks, with masks and without masks. We pass civil rights murals, pro-life billboards, and plenty of banners claiming a need to “save America” from one group or another.
In short, it’s America going about the business of being America — big, diverse, and complicated.
I’ve also found that people light up when you’re kind to them. Complimenting a person’s hat or food or shoes or dog, making eye contact, and simply listening go a long way to defuse the tensions created by our zealously curated and guarded worldview that teaches us daily that America is a cultural powder keg.
Travel gives you the luxury of reflection, particularly on your life at home. Twice on this trip, I’ve made the mistake of trying to write about what I’m experiencing now, but lack of perspective makes this (for me) useless for much more than jotting down ideas for future work.
But, I do have a wider perspective on my life at home — my habits, relationship to work, and my relationships to people.
We’re in a global cultural moment of distraction. None of us seem able to concentrate for a long period, and we easily lose track of simple tasks (like the thrust of this wandering article). I’m at an age where it’s notoriously difficult for men to make new friends, but also where I’ve moved enough and done enough different things in my life that it’s also difficult to meet people I can be my complete self with. Maybe that’s why I spend so much time dipping into the lives of others — artists, writers, musicians, theatremakers — looking for kindred spirits.
These are the things that rattle around in your skull when you’re driving across Kansas, listening to Howlin’ Wolf or Emmylou Harris or Nina Simone.
At some point, I will write about the farm dogs and the miles of fields left fallow in corn stubble. About the albino boy chasing his friends up the stairs of a stone tower in St. Louis. About Annie Oakley and L Frank Baum, about Charlie Parker’s saxophone on loan to Disney World, about Neníisótoyóú’u renamed Long’s Peak, about Bleeding Kansas.
For now, I’ll go indoor skydiving with my daughter, watch a drive-in movie presentation of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead at Red Rocks, visit Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, get a tattoo or two, and eat a whole lot of really great food. The stuff of life.
I’m learning to value the roadside attraction and the museum equally. There isn’t ultimately much separating Michael Heizer’s Double Negative from the world’s largest ball of twine, or Donald Judd’s 15 Works In Concrete from Foam Henge. I’m learning that the ingenuity that leads a town to build an Oz museum in the middle of Kansas isn’t so different from the creativity behind the City Museum.
Our America is a hot mess and a big, problematic muddle of bad decisions, greed, and cruelty in the name of destiny. It’s also a capacious place with big shoulders that holds space for us all and provides an opportunity for us to bump up against one another and surprise each other with unexpected generosity, and with boundless creativity.
As Joy Harjo writes in “A Map to the Next World”,
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
