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SAILING ON DRY LAND

To many visitors, and locals, America is the sum of its roads, but these days its long love affair with the car seems less of a gas. Rebecca Willis and family take a trip through the Rockies ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2009

If you had been in what is now the state of Montana in June 1805, you might have seen a curious sight: a dugout canoe balanced on two pairs of wheels, with a sail hoisted, being blown along the ground by the wind. It was part of the expedition sent by Thomas Jefferson to explore the Pacific Northwest and to find “the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce”, in other words, a navigable route to the Pacific. The expedition leaders were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose vivid diaries record their various encounters with Native American tribes and most kinds of wildlife from bears to mosquitoes. They followed the Missouri river upstream until they came to the Great Falls, an 80-foot waterfall with a succession of rapids and cascades behind, and had to make an 18-mile detour to get round them. This “portage”, where all their equipment had to be moved over land, took a whole gruelling month, and it was during this part of the expedition that Lewis wrote in his journal: “the winds are sometimes so strong in these plains that the men informed me that they hoisted a sail in the canoe and it had driven her along on the truck wheels. This is really sailing on dry land.”

It is a memorable image, which shows the elements that fused to make the spirit of the West: the resourcefulness of the European explorers, the long-honed craft of the Native Americans, the vital force of nature. Of course, we know now that wind-power would have been the green way to go, but that’s with the wisdom of hindsight. History took a different course—combining the wheel with the internal-combustion engine seemed like a good idea at the time—and thereby sealed the character, and perhaps the fate, of modern America. Because so much of the country was settled in the post-machine age, and its sheer vastness demanded mobility, the automobile came to rule and over time roads sculpted the land into ribbon developments and strip malls. The United States has 814 vehicles per 1,000 people, according to World Bank statistics for 2005, compared with 517 in the United Kingdom, and the population is famously peripatetic (the question “where are you from?” isn’t just for tourists). You can perform most of the rituals of modern life in a car—from eating a burger and watching a movie to worshipping and getting married.

This mobility seems inextricably wound around the country’s history, far more so than in settled old Europe, from the semi-nomadic Native American tribes (notably the Comanche, who could “eat, sleep and defecate in the saddle”) through the dusty wagon trains of the pioneers to the huge recreational vehicles (RVs) of today’s leisure industry. And the motif of the journey is embedded in the literature, whether you’re reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Grapes of Wrath” or “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Kerouac’s “On the Road” or Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic “The Road”. As for the music, “Route 66” is the tip of a very large iceberg, and I don’t know of another country that has a genre named after its “Motor City”.

Europeans, because of our exposure—some would say over-exposure—to popular American culture, can experience a feeling of déjà vu when finally getting behind the wheel for a road trip. Everything looks weirdly familiar, and as you drive along you see quotations and references everywhere. Every gas station is a painting by Edward Hopper, every truck is the one in Spielberg’s “Duel”. A couple of bikers pass by, reclined on their choppers (Easy Rider!), you drive along the edge of an ochre canyon (Thelma and Louise!), you see a sheriff’s car (Deputy Dawg!) or talk to a khaki-clad park ranger (Yogi Bear!). To start with this has the peculiar effect of objectifying what you pass through, of keeping everything at a distance. But after a couple of days it wears off, and then you are in the journey rather than watching it, you are living the experience, and as the tarmac disappears under your wheels, it is suddenly fresh and marvellous.

On the when-in-Rome principle, we hired an RV to drive through the Rockies on a family holiday last summer. Our two sons, aged 11 and seven, proclaimed the day we took possession of it the best day of their lives. Not everyone is as enthusiastic about these huge motor-homes, though: they clog the roads, guzzle gas, look hideous and are self-sufficient, so don’t benefit the places they visit. Real campers deride them for being cushy and suburban. A friend told me they were “blue collar”. But they are part of the American dream, combining as they do freedom of movement and homeownership, and they are enormously popular, particularly out West. Everyone has his own tolerance threshold for camping. I love being outdoors and can cope with almost anything as long as I have slept well, which never seems to happen in a tent; so an RV was about as rough as I wanted to go on a family holiday. You still have to deal with certain practicalities of life—“hooking up” to electricity and fresh water, dumping “grey” and “black” water (that’s sewage to you and me), and parking on levelling blocks to ensure that the fridge continues to work. And when you are camping in bear country it is reassuring to be in a container with hard sides.

An RV is not a performance vehicle. It wallows and yaws like a yogurt pot on an ocean. It is about as aerodynamic as a shoebox, and probably as crush-proof—a thought I chose not to dwell on while the fruits of my womb were sitting in the back with the iPod and the Audubon “Field Guide to North American Mammals”. Most roads are broad and smooth, unrolling in generous, sweeping gestures across the countryside; but on the Interstate Highways—which Eisenhower copied from Hitler’s autobahns—the RV handles badly, buffeted by the displaced air from passing trucks. Pushing the blunt mass of an RV through the air takes a lot of power: the mileage per gallon is about the same as a Bentley, and this knowledge plucked uncomfortably at my conscience. Petrol is deceptively cheap here, but even the cashier shouted “Whoa!” when he saw that our tankful cost $185.

Living in an RV is rather like being on a yacht, only with right-angles. You have to be very orderly and stow everything neatly (a challenge with children) and you have to move around carefully, otherwise you end up covered in bruises, especially if you are a bouncy seven-year-old. Then, as at sea, it’s sensible to batten things down before moving off. For the first few days, and intermittently thereafter when we forgot, right-hand turns were accompanied by a loud crash and the answering cry of “Fridge door!”, whereas for left-hand turns it was “Cutlery drawer!” or “Loo seat!” Lots of belongings would end up on the floor by the time we came to rest.

People were keen to help novices like us. One man and his wife used a walkie-talkie radio when parking their RV, a particularly difficult manoeuvre if you have a “back-in” rather than a “pull-through” site; he attributed the survival of their marriage to this invention. Our neighbour at Pebble Creek campsite showed us around her immaculate, deep-pile-carpeted RV and offered to lend us her condo in Bozeman next time we were passing. And the owner of the Howlin’ Hounds Café in Emigrant, Montana, took time out from serving elk and buffalo burgers to check the oil for us when we couldn’t read the stick.

Top-of-the-range RVs are the size of a commercial coach, all gleaming café-au-lait paintwork and tinted windows. Inside they may have carpet, washer-dryers, satellite TV, pets and other comforts of home. And they have slide-outs. A slide-out is an ingenious bit of design, an extension which slides out at the press of a button to give more space. Our RV had a single modest slide-out, but then it was “only” 28-feet long, deliberately chosen because some campsites don’t allow vehicles over 30 feet. Like most of the smaller RVs it is built on the chassis of a removals van, and the kinship is evident. But we came to love our unwieldy vehicle, not least because of the places to which, with little or no forward planning, it took us. And the boys, in their bed in the “cab-over” (above the driver’s seat), thought they were in heaven.

The best places our van took us were inside the National Parks and Forests, of which Grand Teton was a particular favourite. These are brilliantly set up for campers sweeping in with no local knowledge. There are visitor centres which hand out hiking maps, camp hosts (often a couple of “retirees”) and notice boards displaying camp rules (such as, no generators from 10pm to 6am) and other useful matters like staying bear safe (“a fed bear is a dead bear”). The individual campsites are arranged on a looped road or track, and you drive around until you find a vacant site that you like, then fill in the slip on an envelope and enclose payment for the nights you’ll be there. Each site has a pub-style table-with-benches, and a metal fire ring sunk into the ground in which you can safely light a campfire (unless it’s so dry that there’s a fire ban). There are different levels of campsite—a “primitive” one has no running water and no flushing toilets, others have both of these, many have running water and “long drop” or “vault” toilets (not for the squeamish). The neighbours can be quite close by as they sit on their folding chairs outside their RV, and at times the campsite can feel like suburbia in a parallel universe—where houses have wheels, people cook like cavemen, and bears might come.

The antidote is to get your boots on and go for a hike—the campsite is best used as a means rather than an end in itself. Trails are well-marked, and a hike of several hours might start in the cool of morning with the light filtering through the trees, continue past a loud waterfall, take you higher, hotter and dustier, and back down again to end with a swim in a lake of glacier water. You can perform your ablutions if you’ve remembered to bring the biodegradable soap. On one such occasion, at Mill Pond near Lake Sullivan in Washington State, our son said: “This is the best bit—skimming stones naked with my family.” The boys became fascinated by the wildlife and they spent happy hours whittling sticks with their penknives, even volunteering that they were glad they hadn’t been allowed to bring Gameboys. It is restorative to be up this close and personal to nature and, like all the best holidays, camping like this gives you a long perspective on your usual life. You soon wonder how it ever got so complicated, and how you could possibly have so many belongings at home.

Planning the route is not the most important thing on a freewheeling road trip. Ours took us, in 18 days, through Washington State, then south from Glacier National Park in Montana through the Rockies, dancing to one side and then the other of the Continental Divide, and delivered us to Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park. John Steinbeck wrote: “we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation…Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland,” and it is indeed a one-off freak of nature. Its volcanic origins give it more geothermal activity than any other place on the planet, as the boiling underworld herniates into ours, displaying its insides in a spluttering, sulphur-smelling, steaming sequence of geysers, fumaroles, jewel-hued pools, hot springs and bubbling mud.

The roads in Yellowstone make a rough figure of eight and, to simplify, the southern loop shows off the park’s extraordinary geology, while the northern loop is best for viewing wildlife: elk, coyote, bison, moose, and if you’re lucky wolf and bear. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes follow each other round this circuit, stopping in designated spots to look at the sights, such as Old Faithful (literally, a regular old geyser; signs tell you exactly when it’s next going to blow) or the Prismatic Pool, exquisitely painted by nature.

Paradoxically it is possible to feel claustrophobic in Yellowstone’s 2.2m acres of natural wonderland. This is because human activity is severely restricted in order to protect the animals and their environment from the tourists, and also to protect the tourists from their own stupidity—12 people have been scalded to death in the hot pools, a horrible, lobster’s death; others, posing for photographs next to a bison, have been charged by one of these giant, primeval-looking creatures. It was prescient of Steinbeck to mention Disneyland in the same breath as Yellowstone. You feel as if you are being processed through a system: stop here, learn here, see this here, admire the view here, eat here, buy tacky souvenirs here. Exactly who is the herd animal in this place, one wonders, watching the droves of similarly clad, obedient tourists clutching their cameras and heading for the gift shop.

After a while, though, I start to enjoy the role swap, the sensation of being in a reverse zoo where the humans are caged and the animals are free. The door to the cage is open for those people prepared to put on their hiking boots and stride out along almost 1,000 miles of backcountry trails. But most don’t seem to venture far from the road and their vehicles.

In terms of wildlife viewing, Yellowstone has changed a lot since Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes came here in 1959. They had, he wrote, “67 different sights of bears, one of them (no 55) tearing the rear side window of our car out at 3am”. The incident inspired Plath’s short story “The Fifty-Ninth Bear”, about the growing tensions between a young married couple. I can testify that not seeing a bear can cause considerable tensions too, particularly when you have children who are desperate for a sight of one. We didn’t see a single bear in five days, but we had lots of sightings of people who might have seen one. Everyone is looking for bears. In fact, if you stop your car in Yellowstone and get out a pair of binoculars, or just start pointing, you will soon cause a traffic jam as other drivers stop to find out what you have seen.

We got up painfully early one morning from our campsite at Pebble Creek, where there was a stream outside our window and ground squirrels scuttling  around, to go on a bear hunt. There was a bison carcass visible from the road in the Lamarr Valley and people had seen bears there most mornings. In the event the bear had already left, soon after sunrise, but we saw wolves instead. They looked rather like our neighbours’ black Alsatian at home. But still, wolves.

In 1893 the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote an essay entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, which came to be regarded as seminal. He advanced the idea that, as the frontier rolled in its irregular tide from east to west across the continent, you could observe a speeded-up version of the history of society, from the Indian and the hunter right up to the cities and factories of his day. And specifically, he argued that as the essentially European civilisation of the east came into contact with the hardships of the wilderness at the frontier, it was transformed into the rugged individualism and confidence that lies at the heart of the American identity.

The West retains the footprint of the frontiersman today: people hunt and shoot; shops offer “taxidermy and gifts”. And the instinct to press up against the wilderness is still there, even if it’s in a campsite. But the frontier has gone, and today’s nose-to-tail RVs seem like a bloated, modern wagon train, circling without purpose, frontierless, exploring what is already known and parking where they are told to.

The RV is emblematic of so much that characterises modern America, taking for granted as it does space, mobility, ease and fuel. It is hardest to imagine the United States, of all countries, without oil, and in this time of climate change and peak oil, and now that President Barack Obama has put clean vehicles firmly on his to-do list, the future of the RV seems intertwined with the future of the country that created it. The whole world needs to find a way of “sailing on dry land”, of fuelling its habit of movement by the forces of nature rather than by plundering nature itself. If forecasts are correct, we are cutting it fine, perhaps too fine. In our happy holiday photos, our 28-foot van has a sad, fin-de-siècle look to it, that speaks of past certainties.
 

Picture Credit: Rebecca Willis

(Rebecca Willis is associate editor at Intelligent Life.)