Robert Sullivan is a collector. He collects memories, anecdotes, quotations, and bits of history, all of which he weaves together into a patchwork of experience, the experience of, in this particular case, crossing the country.
Crossing the country is a serious past-time for Sullivan, who claims to have done the deed 27 times, logging some 90,000 miles. The trip that this book revolves around is a five day return from Oregon to the family's New York home. Sullivan's sojourns have long ago ceased being solitary, now involving his wife and two children. Not content to drive through the night while the kids sleep, the approach my wife and I take when faced with a long car trip, Sullivan takes every opportunity to squeeze experience from the experience.
Starting with his country-crossing heroes, Lewis and Clark, Sullivan traces not only the history of the traversing of this land, but he remarks on just about everyone who helped inform what we now know as the road trip.
Crossing the country is a serious past-time for Sullivan, who claims to have done the deed 27 times, logging some 90,000 miles. The trip that this book revolves around is a five day return from Oregon to the family's New York home. Sullivan's sojourns have long ago ceased being solitary, now involving his wife and two children. Not content to drive through the night while the kids sleep, the approach my wife and I take when faced with a long car trip, Sullivan takes every opportunity to squeeze experience from the experience.
Starting with his country-crossing heroes, Lewis and Clark, Sullivan traces not only the history of the traversing of this land, but he remarks on just about everyone who helped inform what we now know as the road trip.
From the mountain men, largely French Canadian trappers and miners who between 1820 and 1840 mapped routes throughout the West that would later become the original American roadways, to etiquette writer, Emily Post, who in 1915 traveled by car from New York to San Francisco, a journey she recounted in one of the original cross country travel memoirs, By Motor to the Golden Gate.
But it's not just the people that snag Sullivan's insatiable curiosity. He writes relentlessly about the origins of the Interstate Highway System, the first automobiles, the first gas stations, the first motels, the rise of fast food, and even the nascence of coffee cup lids or "drink=through lids."
But it's not just the people that snag Sullivan's insatiable curiosity. He writes relentlessly about the origins of the Interstate Highway System, the first automobiles, the first gas stations, the first motels, the rise of fast food, and even the nascence of coffee cup lids or "drink=through lids."
All of this history, minutia, and arcane knowledge, Sullivan intersperses not only with narration of the family's current cross country trip, but also with anecdotes from prior trips. Robert Sullivan is a rabid chronicler, and he draws upon his records to regale the reader with interesting bits from earlier travels. My favorites among these include a visit to Woody Guthrie's birthplace in Okemah, Oklahoma where Sullivan's son pulls out a mandolin and the whole family sings "This Land is Your Land" in front of the weed-covered ruin of the old Guthrie home, and a failed attempt to view a traveling exhibit of Jack Kerouac's On the Road manuscript leading to the discovery of Boulder, Colorado's Beat Book Shop and a nearby gas station in front of which Kerouac reputedly had once napped.
And of course, Sullivan has a number of just plain funny stories from years of road=tripping:
The next day, the woman who would soon be my wife got a ticket in Montana. I watched her and the police officer chat in the police car as they sat in front of me. She came back and showed me her ticket, for five dollars. I asked her how she managed to get a ticket for only five dollars. "I asked him if I could touch his gun," she said.
As you might imagine with this breadth of material, Cross Country is often a rambling affair that flits from one topic to the next with little to no transition. It is the history of ramble, however, and this sort of informal road journal format, though sometimes annoying, is forgivable. In Cross Country, Sullivan illuminates aspects of the road, its history, its defining characteristics, and the figures who shaped what it is today, that never occurred to me and never would have had not it been splayed out in this colorful and awe-inspiring fashion.
The next day, the woman who would soon be my wife got a ticket in Montana. I watched her and the police officer chat in the police car as they sat in front of me. She came back and showed me her ticket, for five dollars. I asked her how she managed to get a ticket for only five dollars. "I asked him if I could touch his gun," she said.
As you might imagine with this breadth of material, Cross Country is often a rambling affair that flits from one topic to the next with little to no transition. It is the history of ramble, however, and this sort of informal road journal format, though sometimes annoying, is forgivable. In Cross Country, Sullivan illuminates aspects of the road, its history, its defining characteristics, and the figures who shaped what it is today, that never occurred to me and never would have had not it been splayed out in this colorful and awe-inspiring fashion.
