Review: Re-centering the American Road Trip

In 1903, two men and a pit bull made the first documented American road trip: using only a network of dirt roads, cow paths, and railroad beds, the trio drove from San Francisco to New York in 63 days.

Look at that pupper!

Since their lauded adventure, taking to the roads has become something of an American odyssey. Environmentalist that I am, I have strong thoughts on romanticizing this, but that’s its own story, which you can read from this gratuitously long link.

Close your eyes and consider the American road trip story, and you’ll probably name a few: Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. Kerouac’s On the Road. Arguably Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas. Fitzgerald’s admittedly funny The Cruise of the Rolling Junk. Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.

We’re seeing a pattern, right? The “great” canonized American road trip books are written by white men. It’s almost like white men have historically had the resources and privilege to travel freely. As Cheryl Strayed wrote in Wild, “Women can’t just walk out of their own lives.”

Browbeating over, let’s refocus on writing on the great American road trip from more marginalized voices, so you can armchair travel this summer with more diverse guides:

1. The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls (memoir)

This remains one of my favorite books of forever, one I re-read at least once a year. Jeanette writes from the intersection of girlhood and poverty, and how. Jeanette and her siblings are the smart, introspective witnesses of their charismatic but objectively neglectful parents — their father is a mean drunk — who leave each small town — “do the skedaddle” — whenever wanderlust or bill collectors come calling.

"How many places have we lived?" I asked Lori.

"That depends on what you mean by 'lived,'" she said. "If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week?"

I thought. "If you unpack all your things," I said.

We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn't remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of cars.

"What do you think would happen if we weren't always moving around?" I asked.

"We'd get caught," Lori said.

A story of survival and seriously amazing kids, all of whom grew up to be successful, stable adults while their parents continued to live on the streets until their passings, much of the book features the family’s travels in a series of decrepit cars. In one memorable scene, Jeanette’s family moves from Arizona to West Virginia.

“….we had stopped naming the Walls family cars, because they were all such heaps that Dad said they didn't deserve names. Mom said that when she was growing up on the ranch, they never named the cattle, because they knew they would have to kill them. If we didn't name the car, we didn't feel as sad when we had to abandon it… That Oldsmobile was a clunker from the moment we bought it. The first time it conked out, we were still an hour shy of the New Mexico border. Dad stuck his head under the hood, tinkered with the engine, and got it going, but it broke down again a couple of hours later. Dad got it running. "More like limping," he said—but it never went any faster than fifteen or twenty miles an hour. Also, the hood kept popping up, so we had to tie it down with a rope…..It took us a month to cross the country. We might as well have been traveling in a Conestoga wagon.”

2. South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir, by Eddy L. Harris (memoir)

“These many years later, the South still owns my nightmares…”

The premise alone is chilling: a Black man compelled to journey through the South, to look American history in its human-trafficking face. Harris holds memories of racist atrocities from the near past close at hand, and South of Haunted Dreams is both a motorcycle travelogue and mental self-examination. In inclusivity-focused circles, we’ve begun to talk a lot about “doing the work”. Doing out own excavation, understanding where misogyny and racism and white supremacy live under our own skins. Reading South of Haunted Dreams, the phrase doing the work kept crossing my mind. We all have our pre-suppositions, our stories, our tightly-held beliefs and fears. Mr. Harris has the relentless courage to look at his own.

“Perhaps the South, more even than the wild wild West, more in fact than any other region, is responsible for who we are as a people and as a nation.”

3. Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder (non-fiction)

This one was a mind-blower. Journalist Jessica Bruder follows a generation of houseless + hapless elders — many of whom lost their savings in the 2008 recession — as they follow seasonal jobs as camp hosts and Amazon warehouse workers in their RVs and cars. This one broke my heart and shaped it differently: all these sincerely trying, doing-their-best, but-for-the-grace-of-God-could-be-your-grandparents people facing paying off predatory loans, ageism in the workplace and resorting to living in the back of sedans. You absolutely will not look at Amazon (who very intentionally recruit these older “campers”, who look, don’t even need to be provided housing, since they come in their cars!) the same way again. A devastating and extremely readable look at class, chance, work ethic, the United States’ lack of communal safety nets for its elderly, and permissible exploitation just under the surface of the American fabric.

4. The Wangs vs the World, by Jade Chang (novel)

A little Filthy Rich Asians meets Schitts Creek, The Wangs vs. the World follows the newly disenfranchised Wang family pulling out of their Bel-Air lifestyle to upstate New York. Jade says, “I really wanted to write an immigrant novel that gave the big middle finger to the traditional immigrant novel that we see in America.”

Two things Ms. Chang does I love:

One, she finds creative and almost convincing ways of airing out serious grievances of American culture by placing her characters in episodic encounters where characters get to riff. E.g., a failed stand-up routine touching, cringingly, on racial comedy in Austin, a bizarre wedding in New Orleans (“Y’all know how to eat crawfish?” — “We’re Chinese, the only thing with legs we don’t eat is a table” — “No man, I meant you being from the West Coast, I’m not racist…”), an economics lecture at ASU.

For example, the narrative follows one of the Wang kids, the only boy, Andrew, through his Czech professor’s economic lecture on the real estate recession of 2008 that cost Andrew Wang’s father his plush life. Behold:

“The market doesn’t lie. How many times have you heard people say that?…. it’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts…. [T]here were people…. who chased down ‘rare’ Beanie Babies. Who bought heart-shaped plastic-tag protectors. Who told themselves that their massive collection of plush toys would pay for their children's college tuition. In fact, you were those children, and I’ll wager that none of you are being floated in this fine institution with proceeds from Beanie Babies… we all mocked those assholes, but their only mistake was that they chose to believe, as we all have, that money is rational. That price is truth. That the market doesn’t lie. But it does. It lies…. Real estate [is] our present-day delusion.”

I’m sorry, that’s hilarious. Jade Chang is obviously brilliant — is there a touch of her, in the oldest Wang child, Saina, the intelligent, introspective, foolish-decision-reckoning artist? — and she opens her otherwise rhapsodic novel into places where the characters, god forbid, learn something. The lessons aren’t easy, smooth, well-wrapped. It makes them better.

And two — and this, personal opinion, is important — she de-romanticizes the “great American roadtrip” as all about rivers and streams, mountains and plains. Y’all driven across the country? Because I have. More times than I can count. And yes, you can find rivers and streams, mountains and plains, deserts and jade green hot springs, volcanic outcroppings and ancient arrowheads — but you probably won’t. If you’re following Google Maps, do you know what you’ll really see?

“Outside, the alien desert unfurled itself in all directions. Punctuating the endless interstate were fading billboards for strip clubs and churches. As they passed the limits of Van Horn, Texas, a brand-new billboard lit by a row of spotlights… screamed PATRIOTS UNITE! SECURE OUR BORDERS!"

And

“They were winding down the greenest road [he]’d ever seen, verdant swamp on either side of them. Occasionally, a sign would appear at the head of a narrow path snaking into the wild: ATASKA GUN CLUB/KEEP OUT. OLD BOGS GUNS AND FISH SOCIETY.”

It’s a novel, yes. And also, this insight is real. You drive a road across the United States, and it’s only ever partially and patchwork wildlands. It’s more block chains and telephone wires and monoculture farms. It’s billboards for Gentlemen’s Clubs and bizarre exhibitions (which admittedly are occasionally, in their own right, ceremonial).

Jade Chang calls it for what it is: if you pass from sea to shining sea in a car, you may just miss the country.

5. Red Road Across the Great Plains, by Chandra Lahiri (memoir, still reading!)

On my short list, so I can’t offer a review as of yet.

I want more! Please send me recommendations (or leave in comments) American roadtrips written by POC and/or women.

I’ll leave you with this essay from a Black lady climber on the dream of freedom of the open road.

But it has always been one of my personal dreams to hit the open road and travel around the country and climb and find a deeper connection to the country’s land and people. Taking almost two weeks off work would not be easy for me, but I was determined to figure out a way… I wanted to help continue breaking down the narrative of who travels, who climbs and who connects to mountains, waterways and land.