Lessons I’ve Learned from the Road / vol. 1

May 7, 2008
Lessons from the road

The plan was hatched in San Antonio before we headed west on highway 90. We were in the RV parked outside one of our student’s homes. The eight kids we’d been traveling with for seven days were inside, finally enjoying some TV and life outside a 29’ mobile home. My colleague looked at me desperate. He’d had enough of our ambling ways, our random stops along back roads. He wanted a destination. He wanted to be sure something would happen. He wanted to be able to plan.

What he wanted was contrary to the whole point of the trip. The class was called Destination: America. We were traveling back roads with no direction other than the intention to go west or south from our starting point: Dayton, Ohio. We eschewed fast food. We stopped whenever even one person wanted to stop. We limited long stretches of solitude (usually provided by CD players and head phones). We didn’t allow ourselves the luxury of backtracking. Our goal was to cast off our notions of America and find a new America through the out-of-the-way places.

And, I would be naïve not admit that we hoped to do the same with notions of ourselves.

By the time we had reached San Antonio, we had had $2 a person lunches at a tiny diner in Indiana. We had ambled through a small town along the Ohio river, we had seen porpoises swimming along a sand bar in Florida, we had picnicked at night alongside the USS Alabama, some of us had tasted pigs feet, we had danced until midnight in the French Quarter, and we had lazed on the Gulf Shore in Gallatin, Texas. It seemed as though the trip was proving Kafka’s maxim that “The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

And yet, my colleague was restless. He needed a tangible goal. We plotted a point, timed the hours of driving, and estimated the time it would take to get us there. He asked me to tell the kids that, as the drivers, we needed a break from the road. I did, and the next morning we were off.