On the road: Getting in the car and taking off

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
This opening passage of “Moby Dick” sums up the yearning to thrust yourself out of familiar surroundings and give the brain new landscapes to process, new voices to hear, different customs to comprehend.
Trips into the unknown are necessary so we don’t sink too far down into what we’re used to.
And the sea can just as easily be substituted with the road.
The road trip is a thing of American myth. And rightly so. With such a large, mighty country, it only makes sense to hop in the car to explore it every once and awhile.
I recently took off for a week, making it all the way from Manistee to New Orleans and back.
My travels took me through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama (for about 10 minutes). Oh, yeah, I went through Ohio too. How could I forget such a dazzling, interesting state?
Yes, it was hot in the Bosom of the Confederacy, but I saw so many strange and interesting things that it was worth the humid, scorching weather that greeted Meredith and I each day.
Let’s start in the Buckeye State. Meredith was very excited to point out a large statue of Jesus on the side of I-75 near Monroe, Ohio she had seen on a previous road trip.
“You’ve got to see this thing,” she said. “It’s huuuge.”
She wasn’t joking. It was impressively massive at 62 feet high. The Solid Rock Church’s ‘King of Kings’ statue also had its arms up in such a way, it looked like a referee signaling six points in the endzone during a football game. I wasn’t surprised to learn people had started calling it ‘Touchdown Jesus.’
We were among some of the last freeway gawkers who got to behold ‘Touchdown Jesus’ in all his glory. By the end of the day, the statue was struck by lighting and destroyed causing an estimated $700,000 damage.
I refused to take this as a bad sign at the beginning of our trip, though it was hard to let go of the nagging feeling that it was a sinister omen. But what else can you expect in Ohio?
Soon, we were in the South, where The War is still the Civil War, or, my personal favorite, ‘The War of Northern Aggression.’ Battlefield memorials from Shiloh to Vicksburg (both of which we passed) are constant reminders of the carnage this nation went through 145 years ago.
No where is the South’s conflicted history more resonant than in the novels of William Faulkner. We visited Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Miss. after, of course, paying our respects to that other great ambassador of the South, Elvis Presley, at Graceland in Memphis.
Finally, we arrived in New Orleans, my first time there. It’s a spectacular, magical place that seems to be suffering from the same bad luck as ‘Touchdown Jesus.’ First, the hurricane, now the oil spill. These two topics were, unsurprisingly, weighing heavily on the minds of residents in the Big Easy. The hurricane may have been five years ago now, but folks were still talking about it like it happened last week.
I was mostly in the French Quarter, which is on the highest ground in the city, and wasn’t as devastated as other areas.
But despite the bad luck, New Orleans is still a town bent on a good time. The laid back atmosphere is so very different than here in the North. It was refreshing to see people and places different than the ones I see on a day-to-day basis.
Regardless, it was good to get back home to Manistee.
But the next time I find myself deliberately stepping into U.S. 31, I’ll know it’s time for another road trip.