Go West, Young Man!

I drove across the country recently. If you are an American, at some point you should drive across the country. Preferably East-West, but I'm willing to accept the opposite if you put the car in reverse.

The are a rather large number of scholars/historians/philosophers/poetic drunks who argue that the character of the United States is defined by the ability to go far away from everybody else.* This may be why we're so obsessed with our cars.

The thing is that if you stay in a little corner of our country, you just never quite understand how MUCH of it there is. And how different any given section is from any other. We're pretty much half a continent.


I drove across the country alone. Due to the fact that I have no money, I slept in my car. Often in gas stations. When they heard that this was my plan, most people expressed shock and fear, and warned me about all the bad people who were out to get me. My brother called me daily "to see if I'd been raped and murdered yet."

It reminded me of a rather peculiar tradition in my family. When we were little, whenever my mom would stop to buy gas, we'd asked her to "tell us a stranger story," and while she filled the tank, she'd tell us a story. The stories always had the same beginning: a little boy or girl would do something stupid like wander off in a public place. They always had the same middle: a "stranger" would find them, and somehow lure them away, and always they ended the exact same way, "And they never saw their mom or their dad again!"

There's a reason we tell our children stories like these. But I think we grownups should probably stop believing them.

I was fine sleeping in my car and driving alone across the country because I think that most people would be more likely to help than hurt, more likely to be kind than cruel, and far more likely to take me under their wing than offer me poisoned apples.

That said, I stayed in well-lit areas, and I made sure I had a cell-phone, and I didn't pick up any hitchhikers. It never hurts to be cautious.



*See the School House Rock song, "Elbow Room."