Heartland and that All-American Road Trip

America's had a love-affair with its roads for a long time now, ever since the first pioneers set out west for Oregon Country.


I stuck the keys into the ignition for the second time, listening to the engine splutter before roaring into life. The car was dying, and I knew that I had been way too hard on it for the past few months, but I had no other choice.  I could buy a new car and sell this one to some small-town commuter who never ventured beyond the borders of his state, but that would mean another couple thousand from my bank account, and I needed that money to pay for those nights I did not want to spend in the car.

The afternoon sun was slowly sinking towards the horizon, but I still had plenty of time. I plucked the road map from the seat beside me and opened it up. South Carolina—South Dakota—Tennessee. The page was wrinkled at the edges and faded from too much exposure under the sun, but I could still see the faint letters of the towns and the twisting roads and highways.

Tennessee. It was much closer now than it had been when I was in Massachusetts, and coming this far had taken me several months. It was just as well. I did not know where I would go from Tennessee. I could keep on going into Dixieland, or turn back up to Heartland and then continue to the West Coast. I had been leaning towards Dixie at the start of my trip—after all, I had already been to much of Illinois and Michigan, and I wanted to see the Texan ranches—but right now, I had a sudden urge for going down the Mississippi River in a raft, ridiculous as that sounds. It would be much more logical to start such a trip in Minnesota, rather than Louisiana.

I shoved the map aside and turned up the radio, listening to the local traffic station. Beth at the Cherry Diner promised me a free dinner if I stayed for another day, so I decided to stay another day here. I needed as many freebies as I could get. Gas prices were skyrocketing. I had known that it would happen, but I had no conscious idea of how much it would impact me until I started pumping gas every other day.

There was plenty of time left, so I drove to the drive-in theater first. It was too early, before dinner-time, and no one was here yet, so I had the lot to myself. I stopped the car and came out to breathe some fresh air and to stretch my legs.

"There's nothing here until at least after seven," someone called out behind me.

I turned around and saw a boy in his early twenties walking towards me. The lot was empty except for my car, so I assumed he was a local.

"I know, I just like the empty space."

"I haven't seen you around here before," he said.

"You must have missed me then," I said. "I come here every Friday when I'm in town."

I left out the words, I've never been in this town until yesterday. But he could figure it out himself if he really wanted.

"I must have," he said. "I don't live around here, so maybe that's why. I'm staying with my aunt for the family reunion for the weekend."

"Oh, where are you from?"

"Rhode Island. My family lives in Providence, but I go to school in Massachusetts. It's way up north."

"I know that," I said. "I've been there before."

"Really? Providence, or Massachusetts?"

"Both, actually. Providence is a nice city, although I didn't stay there for long. Massachusetts was too—I don't know. It had an air of something."

"It's different from here," he said.

"Well, yes. I would be surprised if these two places were exactly the same."

"I mean, maybe you just weren't used to it. It's quite a bit of a cultural shock, going from this place to somewhere like New England. I feel the same way, except in reverse."

I smiled. "If you go slowly enough, you won't ever notice the difference."

. . .

I drove into Cherry Diner's parking lot before the sun dipped below the horizon, but that did not help much, as I was near the westernmost edge of the time zone. I was twenty minutes late for dinner, and Beth looked surprised when she saw me walking through the door.

"I thought you wouldn't show up," she said, as she passed a plate of turkey and mashed potatoes to a customer sitting by the bar area. "Thought you'd be out of state by now."

"I was thinking that," I said, "but I couldn't pass up a free dinner. That doesn't happen every day."

"If I were your parents, I would've never let a girl like you out on a trip like this."

"Don't worry about me, Beth. Besides, my parents don't know where I am. I told them I'd be going, but not where."

"Don't worry about you," Beth said, now piling baked potato wedges and pork chops onto another plate. "You make it sound so easy. Don't you think your parents worry?"

"They probably do, but I'll give them a call someday. Just let them know I'm okay. I don't want them to come after me."

"You decided yet then?" Henry, one of the regulars at the diner, or so I had been told, interrupted us. "South or west? If I were you, I'd go to Florida. Nice, sunny place. And at this rate you're a-going, you'll reach there by winter, and I've been to the mid-west, and you don't want to be stuck there during winter."

"I've thought about that. Minnesota freeze and everything. I'm not sure my Northeastern training's adequate for something like that."

"When it's cold up there," Henry said, "it's cold. Nowhere else compares, 'cept maybe Alaska, but we don't know, do we?"

"That reminds me—thank you, Beth—I still haven't figured out how I'm going to get to Alaska or Hawaii yet." I unwrapped a fork from the napkin bundle and dug in to my plate of mashed potatoes that Beth had handed me. "I could probably drive through Canada to reach Alaska, but I'd have to take a plane or a boat to go to Hawaii."

"That car of yours won't last if you want to go to every state," Beth said. "This whole idea of a road trip is just so—so—"

. . .

And then I sort of stopped, but I'm reading Blood Done Sign My Name right now, and I sort of realized that, yeah, I've lived in the south and I've lived in the heart of Heartland, but I was never from there, and Clemson isn't really Dixie-like since it's got such a predominant college-town air, and downtown Chicago's the furthest thing you'd find from Fitzgerald's Midwest, except maybe NYC. So I can't really tell you what the Beths and Henrys of wherever this place is, halfway between Massachusetts and Tennessee, are like.

I can say, however, that I've never really found that much of a difference among the different places, perhaps because I wasn't ever in the heart of those places, or perhaps because I had never cared about grown-ups in my world except my family and Penny, who would come by my house every Saturday and help my mother learn English while preaching the Bible.

I'll never know, but if I do, I'll write an ending to this story.

Ain't you glad, ain't you glad, that the blood done sign your name?