Road Trip

Road trips, especially in the Mountain and Southwest states always serve to remind me how big America is.  In the past days I have been on a journey that has taken me from Oregon to Texas.  Along the way we passed through some of the most beautiful landscape America has to offer stopping over in Canyonlands, Arches and Mesa Verde National Parks.  America’s National Parks are the jewels of the nation.  They are precious monuments to a wild and beautiful unsettled land.  

Two guys at Mesa Verde, National Park

As the miles slip away and we wind our way through miles of land with scarcely a single human present it reminds one of how empty and unsettled America is.  The tiny farm towns we cross through are monuments to the past and decaying representations of the present.  What little remains of a Main Street is often fronted by a few beautiful old brick buildings long since abandoned.  It makes me wonder how they ever served as a commercial center but I suppose in the era of Amazon they are simply no longer needed.  As America is stormed by immigrant populations I can’t help but wonder what might happen if the government chose to direct some of these people with needed capabilities to these small and forgotten remnants of the past.

Perhaps provide some subsidized land deal to encourage settlement.  When I was growing up in Alaska there was a region just north of my home known as the Matanuska Valley.  Matansuka is a derivation of a Russian name and came to represent a valley surrounded by imposing mountains and fed by a river that flows from a huge glacial ice field.  In many ways it is a kind of Shangri-la in a region of harsh winters and long nights of darkness for half the year.  

Matanuska Valley, Alaska

The region was settled during the Roosevelt Administration as an effort to populate the region and provide opportunity for Minnesota farmers struggling to survive.  The government offered them a deal.  They would pay their way and transport them and their families to Alaska.  Once there they would be settled on potential farmland, built a house and offered generous loans and mortgages for their property.  Essentially they were homesteaders with a helping hand.  The idea was to populate the region and create an agricultural base for a growing Alaska population in Anchorage and beyond.  

The whole plan came under fierce criticism as a few farmers defected and went back to what was called the “Lower 48.”  Their reality was used as a criticism of the Roosevelt administration and their “Socialist” efforts.  In truth the entire effort had little if nothing to do with “Socialism” but as always in America the term was used to create an evil specter over a legitimate policy effort.  Farmers in the North tried to fight back with editorials in the nations papers saying the truth was they were building new and productive lives and promoting new industry in an underpopulated region.

When I was young I grew up drinking milk from what we called the “Mat-Valley” and was sold under the collective name of Matanuska Maid.  The cartons had a hand drawn image of a cute girl wearing a native parka.  Once a year we might drive to Palmer for the State Fair and observe enormous cabbages and other produce that had been cultivated in the fertile valley.  The population served to create a unique connection between Alaska and the Scandinavian descendant's of Minnesota.  Every year dog mushers would come from Minnesota to compete and our local collegiate hockey team would celebrate games against Minnesota college teams.  

I wonder if in all of this there might be some model for those coming to America.  Perhaps a rebirth of the agricultural dreams of this rural population seeking a home.  Lord knows America might benefit from a return to citizen agriculture. Today in our nation the concept of the “Family Farm” is a virtual illusion.  Most have been bought up or surrendered to giant agricultural companies that have come to monopolize farming in America.  It has created a centralized structure that while productive has created massive production facilities and often cesspool’s of animal waste.  Might regional collectives become a model to supersede corporate productivity skirted by a wrap of greed?  Anyway, these are the thoughts I have as I navigate hundreds of miles of rural roads and empty towns.  

At times on such trips I find myself craving elements of my childhood.  On two occasions my parents, 2 dogs and myself ventured out of Alaska to explore America.  My parents were educators and that meant summers off for them.  It was the perfect opportunity time-wise to load me and the dogs up and drive for months.  Our first trip we did it my father’s 50’s era Mercedes Benz.  The second trip was in a VW Camper Bus.  We would combine camping with an occasional motel here or there.

Upon reaching the motel my mother would check in and then we would smuggle the dogs in and relish a shower as I explored the mysteries of Americas motel culture a remnant of 1950s America and the nearly mythical Route 66.  One night just after passing into Texas on our way towards Houston we stopped at a long forgotten town called Vega straddling a tiny piece of Route 66.  The ugly little concrete building shaped in a classic square with one side open was a testament to a bygone era.  It sat amidst forgotten and abandoned buildings on an island surrounded by windswept farms and scarce trees.  

I could barely understand the owner of the hotel as he emerged from the back of a curtain in a tiny front office.  He was aged and Indian, not the American kind.  His Indian accent was combined with a West Texas drawl that seemed almost incomprehensible.   Early in the morning I had the chance to say hello to his wife as she hobbled across the motor court with a walker and a bag of crumbs for the birds.  She seemed forbidding at first but I smiled which was returned in kind almost with a sigh of relief.  I can only imagine what it must be like to be an aged Indian couple living in a tiny speck of a farm town in the Texas Panhandle.  

Somewhere around 3am a car pulled up and checked in.  Awakened I immediately contemplated what it must be like to be the owner of the motel awakened constantly at all hours as people came and went.  No wonder I could hardly understand him.  The car was from California and the people spoke unconcerned about anyone around them that might be resting.  They were loud as the slammed doors and a small dog barked.  Awakened by them time seemed to pass slowly until finally the paper thin walls revealed continuous snoring. 

In the morning when we awoke just prior to departing, I was overwhelmed with the desire to be as loud and obnoxious as possible.  While the urge was nearly impossible to suppress as she always does, my wife tempered my desire for revenge.  

There is an uncompromising human desire when visiting any place to compare that place to one’s own.  It’s just natural as we ponder how cheap in Texas everything is compared to our home in Oregon.  Food is cheaper, gas is cheaper as are houses.  For what I pay for my simple little town house I could buy a small Texas mansion.  I am sure that is why so many Californians are choosing to move here.  As they trade their over priced California Bungalows for accommodation in Texas they are greeted with mansions they could only dream of.   

It is difficult to explain but Texas feels so vast and lonely.  This is a strange comment coming from a person from Alaska yet perhaps the expense of living in a place far from everything made us look at the world with slightly more modesty.  I think there was also a unified feeling that we were all in it together.  When I was a child, Texans used to come with regularity to Alaska to work on the construction of the Alaska Pipeline or in the oil industry.  We would laugh at them and their obnoxious boasts of how big Texas was and how great their lives were there.  We often reminded them that at least we had the tallest mountain in North America.  

In Texas, I feel soulless in a way.  Perhaps that is why religion seems to run rampant here.  Everywhere you turn there is a mega church.  The land has so little texture and trees are few and far between.  There is little horizon beyond strip malls and endless subdivision especially in a place like Dallas or Houston.  While I am extremely comfortable in the small mansion my wife’s cousin lives in by herself, I find myself longing for the spaces we will encounter on our return trip home.  Places like Taos and Sedona that offer divergent personalities and impulses of creativity buffered by a beautiful and awe inspiring landscape.  

America is a truly amazing country, so amazing it is often taken for granted by the people who live here.  American individualism tends to supersede the collective that allows people in densely populated cities in the world to tolerate and survive.   Out here thoughts of the collective are seen as liberal socialism and interference in the ability to self propagate ones own desires.

I can’t help but remember an attitude that must have once prevailed here.  One where people supported each other as they built lives.  I hope it still exists but the fear of the outsider seems to overwhelm it.  

As I gaze across the bounty of this “red state” I can’t help but wonder what drives the feelings of anger, fear and hate.  Overall, life is pretty damn good here, I suppose it is only human to want to protect all that you have anyway you can deep in the heart of Texas.