Thoughts composed in a car

The strange comfort of a road trip

My wife and I are now back from a sojourn to visit midget grandchildren near Dallas, Texas. With pilots collapsing in the cockpit and fares going ever higher due to labour shortages and fewer customers, we opted to drive the three thousand kilometers. This decision providentially allowed us to move a car load of my daughter’s junk from my house to hers. In the more relaxed covid environment, there were no fake tests required and Joe Biden asked only that we say, with a straight face,

“Yes we are double vaccinated”.

We had made this trip the year before and had relied on a GPS to find our daughter’s home. This year I plotted a route that did not involve three days on an interstate highway and which took us deep into fly-over country on secondary roads that were better than the grade separated national highways of Canada. Just like in Canada, we had to slow down to pass through small communities along the way and that was the charm of the trip. Herewith my thoughts composed in a car.

Almost as if a giant fault had bifurcated North America, the Great Plains of Canada are offset to the west of the Great Plains of the American Midwest. I didn’t know that. Our route to Texas took us parallel to the Canadian border and then south along the western borders of the Dakotas. Northern Montana is all hills and abruptly rising bigger hills, North Dakota is all trees and oil well rigs while the geography of South Dakota and Nebraska is high, dry plains that reminded me of the altiplano of Peru - ridges of hills covered with spiky grass known to me as ichu. The fencing suggested that someone was ranching in the area but the lack of cows and homesteads suggested it was not a popular past-time. In Kansas we drove further east to find some cornfields and denser habitation. Then it was south into Oklahoma and east Texas. We ran out of snow in Kansas and started to feel warm in Oklahoma. As we neared my daughter’s home, the radio decided to quit and the heater knew only hot, A/C notwithstanding.

Our time in Texas was spent looking after the midgets, making it the highlight of 2023 for my wife. And for me, if the truth be known. One day at the park I tickled my grandson until he peed himself and then took his six as he finished the job behind a tree. He was a good sport about my teasing and the next day surprised me with,

“Papa, don’t you think peeing in your pants is just the best? I mean, seriously, it can’t be beat.”

I won’t bore you with details of the rest of the conversation as my editor doesn’t share my sense of humour in this respect but we got into a definition of “the best” and it was very funny. I was impressed that he was learning to handle, with humour, an event which had previously caused some distress even if it was not his fault. It was a bonding time and I don’t think he understands how imminently “peeing in your pants” threatens to be a bigger part of my life than his.

Part of the responsibilities, handed to me by my daughter, was to play soccer with and coach my grandson. I went to a couple of his games and was surprised to see the level of talent in kids so young. There were four-year-olds on the team handling the ball better than I ever could so it was humbling. I thought Americans only played football and baseball. It gave me an opportunity for more bonding with my grandson though. Being new to the sport, his skills were not up to the rest of his team and, from experience, I know that no amount of “Hey, that was great” makes up for yet another missed kick or check.

So I told him the story of my first soccer game played with the local senior team. I wanted to set a high standard for myself by making an elegant entry onto the field. We all exited the change house and trotted over to the field bounding over the wire fence one by one. Until it got to me. The fence was a wire that was strung between wooden posts. As I launched over the wire some kid four posts down sat on the wire bringing it up six inches to precisely the elevation of my instep. Down I went in a heap on the ground and the polite clapping of the fans turned to stifled guffaws and faces contorted in laughter quickly turned away. My grandson laughed at my misfortune and got the point. Perhaps he laughed a little too enthusiastically as I think of it.

We changed our route on the way home to stay further east for longer and then to move diagonally into Montana from central Nebraska. This allowed us more small communities to pass through and many more farms to wonder at. The weather, a month after our trip down, was much warmer and we watched the storm clouds over norther Kansas with an eagle eye wondering if the car would survive bouncing over an adjacent farmer’s field if a tornado suddenly appeared. It was still over thirty degrees Celcius in Nebraska when we pulled into the hotel at ten in the evening. Summer is coming north we thought exultantly. We set out the next morning with the temperature close to zero.

With intermittent rain, we saw millions of cows and many more farms. We passed strange, phallic rock formations weathered from prior seasons of active volcanism and retraced the route of Francis Parkman through the Black Hills of the Dakotas. The final day we raced north to the border to beat a couple of large boat-carrying trucks. Unsuccessfully as it turned out. Our hour at the border allowed us to determine that the average wait time to enter the United States was under five minutes while the average time to enter Canada was closer to ten minutes. That data point is telling us something I think. At least I didn’t fill out the ArriveCAN app incorrectly and have to quarantine for two weeks as happened the previous year. No ArriveCAN apps in our new non-covid world!

So what are my thoughts on the road trip? The citizens of the United States may be divided politically and socially but it remains a very beautiful country full of undiscovered promise. I suspect a part of our problem as human beings is that we still don’t know how to live in cities. You could move me to almost any of the small towns we passed through and I would be as happy as a clam. I stopped at a gas station to enquire of the female attendant the route to a nearby small town called Belle Fourché and I articulated the accented “e”.

“Oh you mean Belle Foosh. Folks around here don’t know how to pronounce the name of their own town!”

And then she guffawed. I left the gas station feeling better than when I entered it. It seemed to me that this is kind of the point of being a human being and my guess is that the relative frequency of those types of interactions is much higher in towns like Belle Foosh than in a larger city.

The ratio of Trump signs to Biden signs was pretty close to infinite as we only saw one Biden sign and dozens of Trump signs. One person even paid a commercial billboard to announce “Trump 2020” to convince readers that the election was, in fact, stolen I suppose. It wasn’t enough that there were lots of Trump signs but they tended to be yuuuge signs. Like the side of a barn or house or shipping container or trailer van.

I wondered what it must be like for Trump to travel through rural America and see all these signs of homage to him. I hope it is humbling to him. From my observation, it seems to be. In some funny way it reminded me of the relationship President Putin had with his voters when I visited Russia. Maybe Trump is bombastic and maybe Mr. Putin is a thug but they have both given hope to people who thought there was none to be had and those people were/are not shy to show their appreciation.

Billboards of exhortation were also fairly popular and some of them were very good. The two that remain in my memory said,

“Either Jesus is or he ain’t. What are you willing to bet?”

Blaise Pascal would be very proud. There isn’t a more succinct or accurate statement of his wager.

Another one that I found kind of punchy was,

“There is no point looking for God when you are dead.”

It made me think at least.

So what to make of all this. There is a simplicity in small town living that fits more comfortably into our souls than any amount of theatre-going or professional sports events in cities can do. The mere act of driving through these small towns and past remote farms has restored within me a sense of balance. Yes these communities experience unemployment and yes there is fentanyl. These are some of the many things about the current political, economic and social situation that tick me off. But I had convinced myself that being ticked off was a normal state of being. It is nice to know that it is not.

MacBeth was wrong. Life is more than a walking shadow or a loud angry tale told by a mindless idiot. It is still God’s world and, as I approach my seventh stage, it seems easier to play one’s parts with humour the closer we are to where the cows and the grasses grow. Perhaps this is as we like it.

I am looking forward to next year’s road trip.