What is it about a road trip that soothes my soul?
I’m driving south through the middle of California’s fertile and abundant Central Valley on Highway 33, the old, industrial two-lane byway stretching from the eastern edges of the Bay Area (near Stockton), through endless farm land (down the western side of the San Joaquin Valley) and oil land (Kern County’s intense “Petroleum Highway”), eventually ending at the Pacific Ocean in Ventura. I can imagine some people would be bored to tears doing this, and yet as I wind my way home at the end of a 4,000-mile road trip, I sense profound happiness in my spirit.
A road trip is really a different creature from a long drive to get somewhere. The hours on the road and the places you drive through are the purpose of the road trip, not just the fastest way to get to a far-off destination. There’s a quality of spaciousness on a road trip, and ideally the itinerary gets built as you go along, out of your own attention and curiosity.
I’ve been on the road for a month now, exploring territory between home on the Central Coast and the middle of British Columbia. As someone who grew up on the East Coast, the West was a land of lure and myth that captured my imagination and drew me far from my birthplace. Yet after more than three decades in California, I realized I’ve seen so little of the West. So when I decided to take sabbatical this spring from my intensely busy work life, I felt a yearning to get out of my little coastal bubble to explore the West Coast outside of the urban areas I know well.
Part of the beauty of a road trip is that one can cover such a great amount of territory, see so many places and experience how the pieces fit together — the coastal waterways and mountains and inland plains, the dams and the rivers, ag country and oil country, the stopping points along the Pacific Flyway of our western migratory birds. County, state and national borders seem to fade away, and instead it’s nature that draws the lines between different ecosystems and topography.
A key ingredient to a satisfying road trip is to stay off the interstates and on the two-lane “blue highways” connecting rural America. The interstates were created for speed and designed using straight lines (which we all learned in school was the shortest distance between two points, right?). But they also are designed for sameness and predictability, and it’s easy to travel them without learning anything about where you are. I also find the interstates increasingly congested, even in completely unpopulated regions. From my own eye, much of that is because of the ever-growing fleets of Walmart and FedEx double-trailers. But whatever the cause, interstate driving has never been less enjoyable.
When one gets off the interstates and onto the blue highways, one opens up to a 3-D curriculum on a different world than we know in urban America. For instance, the inland West Coast has a completely different economy from ours. I occasionally read about it in the Los Angeles Times, but it comes to life on the road. My windshield has offered me a monthlong curriculum in nut trees and fruit trees, dams and canals, prisons and power plants, solar and wind farms, Native peoples and field workers, and much, much more.
One thing I love about road trips is talking to people in different places. The introvert in me softens a little on the road, and my curiosity takes over. It’s easy talk, as there’s always something to share and to learn when one is traveling. The conversation doesn’t go deep, but it’s upbeat and pleasurable. There is a camaraderie among travelers. It’s no secret how polarized we’ve become between urban and rural America in recent years. But the media exaggerate and exacerbate those differences in destructive ways. Hitting the road reminds me of the basic goodness of most people, and I return home with more hope.
A road trip also is a “kid in a candy store” experience for a history lover like me. As a child, I remember my father insisting on stopping at every roadside historical marker. Though I occasionally rolled my eyes back then, I sometimes hear his voice telling me to pull over and read. That’s part of his legacy to me today, and it gives me pleasure to follow in his footsteps. In addition, there are so many good little historical museums in small towns all over, filled with stories and artifacts of life in a bygone age, and people who are happy to tell you about where you are.
For the first time with this road trip, I decided to use my iPhone as my navigational companion rather than going old style with maps and travel books. In some ways, this was a mistake. My mapping apps gave me a false confidence in finding my way, and I quickly learned there was much they don’t tell you — such as weather conditions, elevation, road construction and more. Both in the southern Sierra and in south-central British Columbia, I ended up on mandatory chain-restricted routes that I wouldn’t have taken if I had known better. (I didn’t own chains when I departed, nor had I ever put them on. That changed on just the second day of my trip up near Mammoth.)
But Google Maps also took me places I might not have found otherwise. On my first day out from Santa Barbara, I selected the option on the app of avoiding highways. My phone then took me on a winding route through the San Francisquito Canyon in the mountains north of Los Angeles that I never would have found otherwise. On the walls of a local coffee shop, I found a bunch of articles and pictures describing the St. Francis Dam failure. I’d never heard of that, and wouldn’t have if I hadn’t stopped in there with time on my hands. But once I started reading, I was engrossed.
On the night of March 12, 1928, the new dam (about 10 miles north of Santa Clarita) catastrophically failed all at once a few minutes before midnight, and the resulting mix of water and debris damaged towns many tens of miles away (including Fillmore and Santa Paula) and killed more than 400 people. This was the second-greatest loss of life in California history after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and it led to career-ending disgrace for William Mulholland (chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power). The recent nightmare of our Montecito debris flow left me with much deeper feeling in reading about this 90-year-old middle-of-the-night horror.
The openness of the road trip leads to countless little surprises like that. When one goes into a journey with a desire to explore and without a fixed itinerary, one gets surprised all the time. Your job becomes noticing what’s around you and then exercising your freedom, making choices and humoring your curiosity. There’s a synchronicity and flow that emerge when you are following your intuition rather than a pre-planned itinerary. And there are people all along the way to point you in different directions.
For instance, several people told me about a cool little sea town called Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington — so I went there. I loved the town and its many historic Victorian buildings, and in walking its streets I ran into a cool-looking new massage and soaking spot. I thought after several weeks on the road that a massage might be just what I needed to keep my body healthy and happy. While she had her elbow in my back, the masseuse (who lived in Goleta for five years when her husband was in grad school at UCSB) told me about Astoria, Ore., at the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark finally reached the Pacific. This woman’s description caught my imagination, and I shifted my route and headed for Astoria. Just having the time and space to consider her suggestion and to decide with no need to justify the decision felt luxurious.
The majority of other road-trippers I saw out there were older folks, and I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. They are the people in our society with more discretionary time. I saw lots of older couples as well as small groups of older women out there. I do wonder how much road trips will appeal to future generations. If I’d been raised with always-on access to a screen offering entertainment and distraction designed to grab and keep my attention, I wonder if the pace and gentle stimuli of a road trip would feel too slow for me to enjoy.
But I do know that every so often in my life, I feel the yearning for a road trip. There’s something in that experience that provides spiritual nourishment I’ve not found elsewhere. What an enjoyable, meandering way to step away from the busyness of modern existence and reconnect with oneself. The mix of spaciousness, freedom, learning and stepping out of one’s “bubble” feels like a cure for a lot of what ails some of us in our fast-paced modern lives.
— Ken Saxon is board president of Leading From Within and an instructor in its Courage to Lead and Emerging Leaders programs. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.