Like a big turquoise-blue convertible’s fat tire tracks in impressionable mountain mud, about a thousand years ago “On the Road” imprinted my soul with a strange and persistent daydream of endless drives across America and Mexico.

Despite the impression it made on me, on a walk last week a friend and I each admitted we’ve never been tempted to re-read Jack Kerouac’s self-indulgent masterpiece. But bits and pieces of it stick with me, somehow capturing truths about the highway as uniquely endowed for fundamental experiences. Something about setting out and temporarily cutting ties with whatever lies behind — if only for a week-long 500-mile-a-day expedition to Disneyland — is vital to our national personality.

I remember trivial incidents from the road with intensity that belies their surface importance, things like my black cairn terrier rolling in pale gray Mount St. Helen’s ash at an I-90 rest stop after I drove out of Gig Harbor in 1981 to start university courses. Why would anyone remember such a thing? But I do.

At home, a person eventually forgets to really see familiar furniture and possessions. They simply become like twigs in its nest must seem to a bird, part of a necessary but nearly meaningless background. So it also is with our natural surroundings: How often have you cursed an enraptured tourist driving 20 mph under the speed limit, hypnotized by Columbia River scenes? Seeing this place for the first time is a transforming experience, a symphony of beauty. But live here awhile, and these sights fade into faint static, just as someone who lives by railroad tracks learns to ignore the passing trains.

Setting out beyond normal boundaries, suddenly we are the meandering slowpokes holding up traffic, pausing to look at spring valleys and people we’ve never seen before, imagining the mysteries contained in each. Meanwhile, the picturesque farmer on his tractor wonders what the hell we’re looking at.   

Although the pandemic is nowhere near as over as we’d all like it to be, this weekend (three days for many people) brought a fresh little flood of tourists to our beach. After the sad, scary and sometimes angry days of 2020, 2021 and 2022, the thought of more Americans getting back on the road exploring our country gives me a warm feeling in an era sadly and suddenly lacking comforting notions.

Sitting in the backseat bores you to tears when you’re six, as your dad tries to squeeze another 50 miles into an endless asphalt day. But in hindsight, these Great American Vacations seem like a mighty fine dose of family time, looking at new horizons and drinking unfamiliar soda pop. Now I cherish those mundane bygone days spent wondering (out loud, many times) “When are we going to get there?” and “When are we going to be home?”

In the end, maybe getting home is the best part, seeing accustomed scenes anew, fresh batteries in the flashlights of our minds.

Hitting the road sometimes is the only cure for the sodden forgetfulness of routine, the leaden numbness of over-familiarity. Maybe there are other ways to break life’s wet net, of living even ordinary days as though they are land-yacht voyages down unexplored country highways, but I don’t know of any.

Thank you for your support of the Chinook Observer. We love sharing this trip through life with you.

So in the meantime, see you out on the road, out in America, out beyond the life we know.