The Endless American Road (2024 Edition)
8,000 Miles and a Nation in Flux.
I live for the Endless American Road. In 2024, I drove 8,000 miles across 14 states. These are some images, sounds, and reflections from my journeys this year.
How far have I gone? This furious route from my family home in Kentucky to my adult home in Arizona during a January snowstorm has been an adventure. I’ve been outrunning a blizzard for two days now. A little bad weather driving is one thing; 2000 miles of it in a car that’s bad on ice is entirely different. I wake up in a beat- down hotel in a bad part of Little Rock on a bed whose sheets I didn’t turn down, and whose hallways smell of cannabis, piss, and curry. I do not linger but get on the road as soon as I can. This will be a day of Casinos, truck stop towns, and endless fucking windmills.
At least the skies seem to clear with every mile west I drive.
To drive across America is a holy and mundane experience. It’s “weird” in the most Old English of ways. The Old World was wyrd, full of Gods and Spirits, miracles and resurrections passed down over millennia. In America, our weirdness comes from the Gods we have made in the new world. They haunt this place.
I reach the Texas panhandle at the edge of day, knowing that I don’t want to drive much farther at night. I pull into Amarillo intending to stop but the energy drink I had a few stops back has kicked in so I keep going. I leave the lights of Amarillo—a city built on industry I don’t know or understand, and set my sites on Tucumcari, New Mexico just over the border. I like the idea of waking up in New Mexico.
A dozen miles west of Amarillo it is pitch black except for the synchronized LED lights on top of the fields of windmills. I pull over at an exit with no traffic to take a piss and the night is pitch black—no moon and stars clear, cold, and abundant. I feel the lonesomeness of this place in my bones. I keep driving.
The song “No Death” by Mirel Wagner comes on—it’s a haunting ballad, a ghost story. Immediately following it comes “Car Crash Terror!” by M83. The two tracks together disorient me. They seem to not be playing from the speakers but from the landscape itself. I am about to drive through a portal, the dark of the American Psyche is breaking through, I may not be safe out here, or maybe I just really need some sleep.
This moment in my playlist is a deep sync; a sync, in the context of this reflection, is when a song or sequence of songs from a playlist set to shuffle falls into a deep and meaningful co-existence with the landscape I am passing through. It’s a simple form of magick that I practice on the road. When a sync happens, I feel it on every level. They are rare and cannot be faked or repeated. They are bound by time, experience, weather, mood, and magic. My map of the country is comprised of these syncs.
During a contentious election year, the truck stops, diners, random brief encounters, and roadside impression bring me closer to the bleeding heart of America—its contradictions, its despair, its resilience—than the fake news fed to us through corporate or social media. I experience my country through overheard conversations at truck stops, the waiting room of a cannabis dispensary in rural Missouri, through a conversation with a strung out receptionist at a cheap hotel in the middle of the night who doesn’t charge me extra for my second dog because I make her laugh when I’m checking in.
In college I minored in “American Culture,” but that degree taught me less about America than one long road trip across the country.
America is a mess of symbols and contradictions. America is the filter I see through. America is a Christian Boot Store on an Indian Reservation. It’s a crashed car museum. It’s another dark motel full of good and bad people just passing through. I get breakfast at a diner in Tucumcari and sit pondering the Americana kitsch as I wait for my biscuits and gravy to arrive. I will drive through the burned out hull of the town on the way to the highway, along the once classic “Route 66” that is now just a museum of decay. This, too, is America.
Later that year, I see the most American of landmarks for the first time—the Grand Canyon. I camp a few miles from the National Park gate and get there early in the morning before the crowds. It’s almost possible to imagine what these places were like before they were settled, but that is someone else’s America, not the one I was born into.
I stay two nights at the Grand Canyon before the urge to see new lands pushes me into Northeastern Arizona, up into Utah, and eventually back down to Vermilion Cliffs and home through Flagstaff.
Back in Phoenix, it is summer and a record number of days above 110 presses even the hardiest of desert rats to their breaking point. It’s a motherfucker of a Summer, and in the middle of it my AC goes out and takes six weeks to be repaired. I experience the relentless heat and an eclipse. I try to find cool spots for my old dog to swim.
At the end of August, I take a birthday trip back to Oregon, my first since I left two years ago.
I drive through this other part of America, perhaps the most desolate—Nevada, Area 51, old friends in the desert, then through the high desert of Oregon where I have never felt more myself. I spend 12 days driving up, camping in Central Oregon, driving to the southern coast and finding a dispersed campsite that is splendid beyond belief.
The dogs and I spend three days there, and they are the best three days of my year. For Daphne, at 13, it was a return to her favorite place in the world. For Jones, an Arctic dog born in the desert, it was a wonder to behold—a freedom he could never have imagined existed.
On the way back to Phoenix, I see an old friend in Arcata then head west—through the unbelievable Redwoods across the long width of Northern California where the roads are somehow always under construction. The gas is so expensive I switch from debit to credit just to fill up. California is an awe inspiring state full of lonesome wonder and people who are cultural very removed from the ruined costal elites.
After a day and a half of driving I am back in Nevada, through Reno, down to the land of aliens, independent people, secret government test sites, and miles and miles of brutal desert.
I slept on the ground for 12 nights and it all went well until the final night when the distant threat of rain spooked me and led me to break camp at midnight and take refuge at a pull out along the highway where an idling semi and two restless dogs kept me awake all night. The last day of driving was a bitch.
Life is simple on the road. I am just a passenger passing through much as we all are vessels in this world trying to make meaning of our fleeting lives as they pass us by. The music is good and I keep driving.
In October I drive to Tucson to see an old friend from a previous life. He has just lost his lover of more than 30 years after a long battle with Parkinson’s and is on a quest of his own. I feel so different sitting across from him—so many lives have come and gone since we first met. We drive to the oldest church in the country, south of Tucson, a huge cathedral rising out of the desolation of the desert so close to the border. What do we build today that will weather these strains of time?
On the return drive to Phoenix a sequence of electronic songs play from the roadtrip playlist, and they fall into a deep hypnotic sync bringing my year of adventure to its end.
My journeys through America this year have changed me, just as they always do. The elite coastal persona that I wore for a while crumbles completely under Kamala’s vacuous and dangerous cackle. There is no denying that my working class roots pull on me, and I travel through this year realigned, changed. I am closer to the truck stop in Kansas than the gay bar in Portland, though I feel at odds in both.
At a Navajo crafts booth outside of Vermillion Cliffs in June, I bought a dream catcher. I hang it on my bedroom door along with a Brighid’s cross that I made to honor my Celtic roots. The two symbols feel at home together; this, too, is America.
This is the road trip life. These are some pictures of where I went and a distillation of the music that guided me. The roadtrip playlist tells a story—songs for driving through the plains, songs for the desert.
To the Road. To America. To Renewal and the astonishing resilience of our character. Until next year.
XOXO