Road trip redux

Oh the thinks you can think...

It has now been a month since the last annual road trip. In keeping with my belief that understanding life needs the perspective of soak time, it is only now that meaningful conclusions can be drawn from that event. You didn’t realize that road trips are such psychic events? Then you need to take a road trip.

Our annual road trip to Texas is necessarily coordinated with the Easter holidays because this period minimizes the number of history classes I will miss. School is on a two-week vacation, and I only miss one week thus providing driving time and a couple of weeks with the grandkids. All of this is to say that, with Easter coming later this year, the trip did not coincide with snowstorms in Wyoming or tornadoes in Kansas. In fact, the countryside from beginning to end was verdant with spring rains and, north of Texas, the air was crisp in the mornings and warm during the day.

(Grok sometimes draws using the weirdest perspectives! Do Tesla cars have multiple steering wheels now?)

We experienced some extreme weather on the trip home, though. North and west of Dallas we hit a lightening storm that was like entering Dante’s second ring of hell. At mid-morning the vehicle lights were required to see and, when the heavens opened, the wipers were soon overwhelmed. Traffic slowed in the wimpy lane, but cars continued to swoosh by in the hero’s lane. It was intimidating especially when a set of rear lights would suddenly appear out of the mist and heavy brake pressure was required to avoid a rear end collision. Other than sore hands from gripping the steering wheel so tightly nothing was the worst for wear, and we outran the rain within half an hour. The radio emergency signal was continuous with warnings of flash floods which, at times, breeched the highway from the torrents in the ditches along the sides. Everyone should experience the thrill of hitting a six-inch stream of water at 80 kilometers per hour creating parallel walls of water and giving the sensation of skating. Without reason, I was reminded of Madagascar and King Julian’s instructions,

“Put your hands in the air! It is more fun that way!”

While much less harrowing, our entry into Nebraska was far more entertaining. Again, the civil warning alerts on the radio were constant and the darkening clouds to the northwest attested to the object of the warning. For a couple of hours, we travelled parallel to the storm formation and had a picture window view of the intense lightening strikes. An hour short of our destination, the rains came and, instead of traveling parallel to the storm, we were headed straight into it. Having just bought a new, secondhand vehicle I was concerned about a massive hailstorm giving it an “acne” look so we turned around and found safer accommodation.

But what a display of sub-tropospheric pyrotechnics! On the flat Nebraska prairie, the storm was visible from start to finish and the sheet and forked lightning would start at one end and roll its way to the other discharging sufficient energy to power every home south of the Mason-Dixon line. The sheets lit up the night sky and the forks descended in clusters bringing Dante, once again, to mind.

I was once caught in an electrical storm high in the Peruvian Andes. The lightning strikes just appeared with a simultaneous “Boom!” and I lay down in a shallow ditch to avoid attracting the ire of the storm gods. That was an impressive display of the force of weather, but it paled in comparison with a Nebraska summer storm.

Our trip this year coincided with a federal election in Canada, so we dutifully voted early and then set off. We had intended to enter the United States at a minor border crossing to avoid the line-ups at the Coutts crossing but the Canadian animus towards the United States – the “elbows up” nonsense and all that – suggested that traffic might be diminished so we took our usual trip to Shelby, Montana. Sure enough, there were no line-ups. Even the return to Canada at Coutts was only a twenty-minute delay.

As a result of this timing, we missed the overheated, truth-stretching rhetoric of a Canadian election but were able to listen to the US perspective on our election. But first, two things need to be said. In Canada, I am told, AM radio is dead. There are very few stations because most broadcasters have migrated to FM frequencies. Such is not the case in the United States. Our newly purchased vehicle had a much better radio than the previous vehicle and we received a wider spectrum of talk radio stations and held them for much longer during the trip. We overdosed on conservative talk radio. I don’t write this to brag or lament but simply to inform.

Most of the talk was about tariffs and the Canadian election was mentioned only to make a point about why tariffs were necessary. At least from the American perspective. I happen to agree in principle with what Mr. Trump is seeking to do and have often wondered at the longsuffering nature of Americans who, for decades, have allowed Canadians to “steal their signal” as it were in terms of defense and border security. The big steal was coming to an end, and Canada was all “elbows up” in protest. To the extent that Americans were aware of Canada, their response to our outrage was,

“Yeah, we kinda forgot about you folks up there.”

That hurt.

The laughable irony of the whole “elbows up” thing was that, either Mr. Carney got tired of having high elbows or is a practiced liar because the elbows dropped with his capitulation and removal of retaliatory tariffs on April 16. Funny he never told Canadians about this. In any event, we were spared the worst of the election rhetoric and received, instead, a conservative primer on the use of tariffs as geopolitical and economic cudgels. Glenn Beck and others made the time and miles pass very quickly.

It is much faster and efficient to travel long distances by putting up the cash and buying an airplane ticket. Having spent far too many hours in airports during periods when air travel was more fun and not so stressful, I am highly resistant to being “efficient”. Air travel today, at least in my experience, is both stressful and no longer fun. What is the utility of efficiency when one is retired and time is no longer a commodity to be husbanded? Give me the three-day road trip over the three-hour flight any time.

It is only by taking the time to travel through affected terrain that one can get an appreciation for the statistics that come from news broadcasts. Is the family farm in grave danger? Perhaps, but we passed thousands of farms, and none seemed to be industrial scale and most seemed to be doing quite well based on the state of their buildings, the number of drive-wheels on their tractors or the length of the tables on their combines. That was comforting to see.

The Indian reservations still looked like Indian reservations, but the number and quality of the band buildings showed real improvement and that, too, was comforting. The mid-sized cities of the states we traversed were not the failed derelicts of large, inner city social experiments. One small town in South Dakota, anticipating a future president by calling itself Wall, had staved off “ghost” status by converting their main street into one long “shopping mall”. The mall was filled with interesting trinkets being examined by curious tourists. Large billboard after large billboard had advertised the town and the option of not stopping was not really on the table. It was a delightful place and very comforting to see.

Purveyors of news usually paint a grim picture of life in the United States. Our road trip offered a much different picture. When we stop to consider the things not available to the senses by a hermetically sealed airplane trip but readily available on a road trip, there is really no competition for my traveling dollar.