The Longest Road Read online

  An Airstream is wanderlust made visible and tangible. It sings with Walt Whitman, “Allons!… come travel with me” … sings of lonesome highways stretching on and on.

  I cannot count the hours spent surfing print and online classifieds for an Airstream I could afford. No luck. Eventually I e-mailed Airstream’s CEO, Bob Wheeler, at the company’s factory in Jackson Center, Ohio, pitching my travel plans—and myself. I told him I would write about the journey, and touted the publicity value if the company leased me a trailer or sold me one at a discount. Ignorance and egotism led me to presume that this was an offer he would not refuse. I didn’t know then that the first vehicle occupied by the Apollo 11 astronauts upon their return from the moon had been a modified Airstream; nor that carpeted, wood-paneled Airstreams furnished with leather chairs, TVs, and DVD players are installed in air force cargo planes that fly the president and other American officials the world over.

  Thus Wheeler and his marketing people considered my offer one they could refuse, and they did.

  By holiday season, I was still trailerless and growing anxious; I hoped to depart from Key West sometime between late May and early June, leaving time to reach the Arctic before the snow fell and road travel there became a matter for the experts on the TV show Ice Road Truckers. I’d begun to consider alternatives to an Airstream when a friend introduced me to Rich Luhr, who lives in Tucson.

  In his late forties, dark-haired and slender, Luhr is the founder and publisher of Airstream Life, a magazine dedicated to respectable vagrancy, a lifestyle summed up in the gerund Airstreaming. He’s lost count of how many times he and his family have crisscrossed the country in their thirty-foot trailer.

  I should point out that Airstreamers form a subculture almost cultic in its attachment to the trailers; in its exclusivity (there are Airstream parks that will not permit non-Airstreams past their gates); in its rituals and in its specialized lingo, which can be as opaque to an outsider as nautical jargon to a landlubber. Airstreamers disdain recreational vehicles of all other makes and models. Disdain chills into contempt when it comes to bus-size, boxy RVs with garish exteriors and interiors so loaded with luxuries they are for all practical purposes condominiums on wheels. As a leader in the cult, Luhr refused to listen to any talk about substitutes. He was going to help me find an Airstream.

  We fell into a routine: I would scan the classifieds, then e-mail him with candidates. Very few were acceptable. This one was too big; that one overloaded with aftermarket gewgaws; this other one had the following defects. Luhr was a discriminating judge of trailer flesh. Whenever he gave one a rare thumbs-up, its price moved me to give it a thumbs-down. I began to despair of finding a Goldilocks Airstream—and found myself encouraging my own discouragement.

  A long journey is more attractive when imagined than in reality; the closer I came to the start date I’d set, the more I felt a coldness in my feet, while an argument went on in my head, in stereo.

  It’s too far, said a voice in the right speaker, it will take too long [three to four months, I’d figured] and cost too much. Besides, you’re too old.

  It announced a headline: AGING WRITER’S REMAINS FOUND IN MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.

  Buck up! replied the left speaker. Every year you drive from Connecticut to Arizona and back without a problem. And you’re not circling the drain yet.

  * * *

  In early March, Luhr e-mailed with good news. He’d met a woman, Erica Sherwood, who restored and sold antique Airstreams from her home in Breckenridge, Texas. A burnished 1967 Caravel on her Web site caught my eye. At nineteen feet, it was ideal for a guy and two dogs. But then there was the asking price: $24,500. Private owners almost never lease their Airstreams, but I phoned Sherwood asking if she would and was surprised when she agreed. We settled on another vehicle in her inventory: a renovated 1962 Globetrotter, also nineteen feet, but with higher clearance that would be better on rough roads.

  Leslie flew home to Connecticut while I remained in Arizona, where I bought a 2007 Toyota Tundra, a pickup capable of hauling a boxcar, and then a hardtop shell for the truck’s bed to provide a home for the dogs. After Sherwood’s lawyer drew up a lease agreement, she drove eight hundred miles to Tucson and delivered the Globetrotter to Luhr’s house. I met her and the trailer there at the end of March.

  Sherwood is a presence, a six-foot, blue-eyed blonde of thirty-seven who’d played guard for the women’s basketball teams at Baylor and Abilene Christian universities. As for the trailer, a roof-mounted air conditioner slightly spoiled its aerodynamic lines, but it was otherwise a compact beauty, so polished that I could have shaved in it without missing a spot. Inside, it was equipped with a minifridge that ran on propane or electric power; a galley with a sink, counter, and three-burner propane stove; a dinette in front that broke down into a bed; a sofa in back that pulled out into another bed; a stainless steel shower stall-cum-toilet, and a small, chip-burning stove for heat, all compressed into about 150 square feet. Luhr and Sherwood took me to a Tucson Walmart and a camping supply store for essential equipment: tools, a 30-amp power cord, a water hose, a flexible sewer hose, stabilizer jacks, a hydraulic jack, work gloves, butane lighters, and sundry other articles. Sherwood had told me that her Web site’s domain name, Nomadica, was intended to encapsulate a footloose, minimalist mode of travel. But after the buying spree I began to wonder just how minimalist it was going to be.

  I was introduced to the routines, procedures, and terminology of trailer life: hitching up, hooking up, leveling and stabilizing, dry-camping (done in wilderness areas lacking sewer, water, and electricity hookups).

  Luhr presented a manual he’d written—The Newbies Guide to Airstreaming—and opened it to the chapter on checklists. There were two daily departure checklists, one for the outside, one for the inside; ditto for arrival. Total items to be checked: thirty-five. I was starting to feel as if I were in my first day of flight school.

  More terminology followed. GVWR, for Gross Vehicle Weight Rating, meaning how much the trailer weighs (the Globetrotter was 3,100 pounds); Net Carrying Capacity, meaning how much weight could be put into the trailer; GAWR, for Gross Axle Weight Rating, meaning how much weight the tow vehicle’s front and rear axles could take. The trailer’s tongue weight—the weight it exerted on the tow vehicle’s axles—could not exceed either axle’s maximum rating. Happily, Luhr reported after a look at the specs, the Globetrotter’s tongue weight was a scant 340 pounds, while the Tundra’s GAWR was 4,000 pounds (front) and 4,150 (rear).

  Nevertheless, I nearly wept as the Whitmanesque romance of the open road was crushed under, well, the weight of all this technical information.

  But Luhr and Sherwood burbled on, and such was their enthusiasm, such their joy in overcoming my ignorance, that I morphed from flight trainee to heathen in the hands of two chipper missionaries bringing my benighted soul into the fold.

  The convert, having been catechized, was now to be baptized. I put theory into practice by hitching up the Globetrotter to the Tundra. Herewith the procedure. The truck had to be backed up till its hitch ball was directly under the trailer’s hitch coupler (lining them up was a tricky maneuver). Then the hitch jack, electrically powered in newer trailers, manually operated in antiques like the Globetrotter, was cranked, lowering the coupler over the hitch ball. The assembly was secured with a padlock inserted through a hole in a lever, this to avoid becoming unhitched at, say, fifty or sixty miles an hour. Two safety chains were shackled to a sturdy bracket on the Tundra as an added precaution; should coupler and ball part company, the chains would keep the trailer and the tow vehicle together long enough for the panic-stricken driver to pull off the road.

  The next step was to attach the breakaway switch, a black box with a braided cable fixed to the Airstream’s A-frame. The cable was clipped to the same bracket as the safety chains. In the event that everything failed, causing trailer and tow vehicle to undergo a sudden divorce, the cable would pop out of the box, activating the trailer’s br
akes so it didn’t careen down the highway by itself.

  Finally, the brake controller was plugged in. This device consisted of: (1) an electrical box installed under the truck’s rear bumper and wired to its brakes, lights, and turn signals; (2) a power cord and plug wired to the trailer’s electrical system. Connect (1) to (2) and the trailer brakes would be activated when I applied the tow vehicle’s brakes. Also, the brake lights and turn signals of tower and towee would operate as one.

  I drove out for a test run, under Sherwood’s supervision, past the city limits into the desert, back again for some experience at urban towing. The Tundra pulled the trailer so easily that I sometimes forgot it was there.

  “I wouldn’t drive this fast,” Sherwood cautioned, diplomatically, as I zipped through a construction zone. She spoke with a lilting Texas drawl that often caused me to not pay attention to what she was saying because I was listening to the way she said it. “And remember when you’re changing lanes that you’re about twenty feet longer than you’re used to.”

  After overnighting in the Globetrotter, it was time to go. Sherwood came out of the house with Luhr and ceremonially draped a set of keys on a cloth lanyard around my neck. I was now an Airstreamer. Then she passed her palm across the trailer’s shining skin and said, “Now, Phil”—adding a syllable to my first name—“I want you to treat her like a beautiful lady who bruises easily.”

  I thought of the great distance the beautiful lady was going to cover, of the bruising time she was bound to have going up and back down the Dalton Highway, and said that I’d do my best.

  3.

  I started on a shakedown cruise, heading east on I-10 for the Florida panhandle. The plan was to leave the Globetrotter at a friend’s farm near Tallahassee while I tied up loose ends at home in Connecticut.

  It was Sage, the twelve-year-old English setter, who convinced me that I shouldn’t try the journey solo. Sage was a spry elder but no longer able to jump into or out of the truck bed. Removal and reinsertion had to be done four times a day—the morning walk, the evening walk, and two rest stops in between. Each time, she writhed and kicked as if she thought I was going to toss her into a wood chipper. Eight daily wrestling matches with sixty-four pounds of squirming dog was wearing, but it did simplify my life by reducing my wants to a stiff nightcap and a motel room with a king-size bed.

  So it went on the drive to Tallahassee, but without the martinis and the motel rooms. (On the first night, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I settled for a beer from the Globetrotter’s minifridge and for its bunk—sized for a king provided he was as thin as a fence post.) On the morning of day three, camped beside the Llano River in the Texas hill country, I was struggling to lift Sage into the truck when a flock of fat, white domestic ducks waddled past. Instantly, she twisted out of my arms and took off after them. Wild ducks would have flown; those barnyard degenerates ran, fleeing into the dense rushes bordering the Llano, Sage in pursuit.

  “No! Sage, no!” I hollered, pointlessly—she was deaf as a brick.

  I thrashed through the rushes to the riverbank and saw the ducks swimming with the slow current, Sage paddling right behind, her pretty head held high above the slate-green water. I ran downstream, keeping up with the procession, and noticed that the ducks were more clever than they looked. They would swim at a leisurely pace for a few seconds, allowing Sage to almost catch up; when she got to within a yard, they would take flight and land ten or fifteen feet farther on. She would paddle faster to close the gap, then they would fly again. Their plan became clear to me, though not to Sage: they were going to lure her on until she quit or drowned from exhaustion.

  Stumbling along the bank, I shouted to her, waved my arms, tossed rocks to get her attention. Several people from the campground had gathered to watch this amusing spectacle. By now, she was about a hundred yards from where she’d leaped in, and although she was tiring, she showed no signs of giving up, nor that she’d caught on to the ducks’ tricks. English setters have three things in common with English aristocracy: they are generally good-looking, love to hunt, and are not terribly bright. It looked as though I was going to have to strip down to my underwear and plunge in after her. Instead, I flung another stone, aiming for a point a foot from her nose. It wasn’t a major-league pitch; the missile landed on her skull. It did no harm; in fact it did a lot of good. Distracted from her quarry, she turned and saw me, frantically giving the hand signal to come. She swam across the river, clambered up the bank, and vigorously shook herself off at my feet. I wanted to hug her but figured she’d regard that as a reward for bad behavior, so I snapped a leash to her collar, jerked her toward the truck, and scolded, “You goddamn, thick-headed, pea-brained moron, don’t ever do that again!” She looked up at me with umber eyes that seemed to ask, “What are you so worked up about?”

  I related this misadventure to my friend Guy de la Valdene when I arrived at his Dogwood Farm two days later. He advised me to take Sky for companionship and leave Sage home with Leslie or put her in a kennel.

  That was the sensible thing, but if I were sensible I wouldn’t even be taking this trip. Sage was not a coddled pet; she’d been my hunting dog for a dozen years. We’d chased grouse, pheasant, and quail everywhere from Canada to the Mexican border, from Montana to New Hampshire. We’d shared hardships and occasional dangers; one time, lost in the Arizona mountains on a night when the temperature plummeted to sixteen degrees, we’d huddled together beside a fire and heard the menacing cough of a nearby mountain lion.

  We were comrades, and I couldn’t imagine leaving her at home, much less incarcerating her in a kennel for four months. Likewise, I couldn’t imagine taking care of her and Sky while towing an antique trailer for thousands of miles. The solution was obvious. Still, I was reluctant to let go of that knight-errant image. With my wife beside me, I would not be an adventurer but merely one more senior citizen “seeing the country.” A tourist. On the other hand, it had occurred to me that Leslie’s absence would make the lonesome road a bit too lonesome, and such a long separation might put a strain on our marriage. I phoned her and asked her to join me, if she could swing it with her employer. She could; intuiting that I would come to my senses, she’d already explored taking a leave of absence with her boss, who, to her surprise, was all for it. She’d been with Consumer Reports magazine for twenty years; she’d earned some time off. Soon, things were settled. She arranged for a working leave: she would put in twenty-five hours a week, editing stories on her laptop, staying in touch with the office by cell phone and e-mail. As for her arrangement with me, she volunteered to look after Sage and Sky, conferring upon herself the title “dog wrangler.”

  * * *

  I left Guy’s place on April 11. Late that afternoon, while bypassing Charleston, South Carolina, I heard a lively radio debate about the city’s plans to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Someone argued that the ceremonies were going to be too festive for such a somber occasion. Another person was incensed about the “Secession Ball” that had been held four months earlier to mark South Carolina’s departure from the Union: white men and women garbed in period tuxedos and gowns, celebrating their forefathers’ defense of black slavery, he said. No, another voice chimed in, not in defense of slavery but of states’ rights.

  That this discussion was taking place at all perplexed me. Issues that I thought had been resolved ages ago still had the power to touch hot buttons.

  And not only in the Bethlehem of the Confederacy. The following day, as I picked my way through traffic on the Washington Beltway, I was listening to another talk show and heard “secession” once again. This time, it came from both sides of the political divide. Out in the Arizona I’d left a week earlier, the Republican-led state senate was considering legislation that would empower Arizona to invalidate any federal law it deemed unconstitutional. If it passed (it didn’t), Arizona would for all practical purposes have declared itself independent of the United States. The proposal had upset
people in Democratic Pima County, which includes Tucson and is as big as Vermont. Led by a lawyer (who else?), the county’s citizens had started a movement to break away from Arizona and form a new state, Baja Arizona.

  Baja Arizona? Oh, that was wondrously weird. And unsettling. I’d lived through the sixties, but the divisiveness now, in these times of recession at home and war abroad, seemed graver still. Secessionist balls and squabbles about states’ rights in South Carolina, a separatist movement in Arizona. Did I hear, or merely imagine I heard, ever so faintly, the great American rift creaking as it widened?

  4.

  Without a design, a journey becomes aimless wandering. I spent days planning the trip in my Connecticut office and damn near went blind, squinting at road atlases and Google maps. Plotting routes through western Canada and Alaska was easy—there were only two or three—but the Lower 48, with some three million miles of road and highway, presented bewildering webs of red, green, yellow, and blue lines meandering all over the place. I felt like a shopper staring at a hundred different brands of breakfast cereal, not sure which one to pick.

  Sitting on my desk was a copy of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited by Bernard DeVoto. Once we were west of the Mississippi, we would retrace, as much as was possible by road, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s voyage up the Missouri River, across the Rockies, and down the Columbia to where it ended, on the Oregon coast. From there, we would proceed to the Canadian border, then take the storied Alaska Highway to Fairbanks, and, finally, the Dalton to Prudhoe Bay.

  That left east of the Mississippi. Once again, Lewis and Clark guided me. While staring at the Rand McNally atlas, I noticed the Natchez Trace Parkway, bordered by green dots to indicate that it was a scenic highway. It led through Mississippi and Alabama into Tennessee, where, near the town of Hohenwald, the words Meriwether Lewis Monument appeared in tiny red letters. I remembered reading that the explorer had died on the Natchez Trace while on his way to Washington in 1809. The monument marked his gravesite. Not far from it, U.S. 412 ran westward across Tennessee and over the Mississippi into Missouri. That settled it—Lewis’s grave would be a waypoint.