"You don't take a trip so much as a trip takes you!" wrote John Steinbeck. And that was certainly true on the 1800-mile road trip I took this summer with my buddy Eric Hanson. In five days, we drove from Bismarck, North Dakota to Laredo, Texas on two-lane U.S. Rt. 83 through six states and six geographical regions.
The ideal trip has a destination, of course, but also allows for impulse and surprise.
One surprise was how relaxing it was to drive 65 to 70 miles an hour on roads as straight as a die and nearly devoid of traffic and billboards. Solitary trees gave cows shade and our eyes some visual variety. Oil derricks and cell-phone towers rose like sky-scrapers on this prairie.
Our trip was full of Americana, including an antique auto museum, a 100-foot steel cross in the middle of nowhere, Lawrence Welk's birthplace, a Czech-American restaurant specializing in cabbage burgers, and the nickname of the football team in Hamlin, Texas - "The Pied Pipers."
We visited my wife's cousin's ranch in a Nebraska county two thirds the size of Vermont. The ranch itself is 20,000 acres and they use a plane to patrol the fence line for cows in distress. It's an hour's drive to school or the grocery store.
Along the way we watched crops change from wheat to corn to peanuts and cotton. We passed million dollar wheat combines moving north with the harvest. We watched immense rubber-tired irrigation systems, two to three hundred yards long, pivoting slowly around the fields. Crop dusting planes darted and glided like mechanical birds.
The state of Kansas was a green sea of corn rolling into a haze of eternity
The new fracking technology has spurred an oil boom in North Dakota, Kansas and Texas. We drove past hundreds of oil wells with pick-up sized donkey engines, or "grass hoppers," pumping as much as a hundred barrels of oil a day.
Though the region is prosperous, jobs are still scarce and little income stays local. Farming is so mechanized they don't need many workers or local services. Scores of towns look like the dusty movie set in "The Last Picture Show." Across South and West Texas many ranchers now earn more money selling hunting leases for deer, turkey, wild boar and doves than from beef.
Eric's most vivid impressions include being awed yet again by how vast this country is. He was impressed by the scale and mechanization of agriculture. And he marveled at how tough and intrepid the pioneers must have been. "Yes," I agreed. "My parents used to say, 'The cowards never started and the weak died along the way.'" Our road trip ended at a steel bar border fence, overlooking the Rio Grande River. We'd started in the north where one hundred and forty years ago, the country beckoned "huddled masses" to come and settle. We finished at a wordless steel barrier that still managed to convey the clear warning to "KEEP OUT!"
