Some months back I spent the better part of a week driving to Austin from New York state, at the wheel of a rented, very large moving truck. The cargo of said truck was the contents of three storage lockers, spread across two small towns you have never heard of. Both are just down the road from a place you definitely have heard of, where once was hosted a little music festival called Woodstock. The cargo was all that remained of a friend’s fabulous life and career in New York City, wrecked by Covid shutdowns plus a health crisis. She’s still alive, I hasten to add, even if the life those remnants represented is no more.
It was part mission of mercy, part adventure, part what-the-hell. I had never been to that part of the world before, and am always up for a road trip. Work was also pretty slack at the time. So basically there was no excuse.
A wise man once said that you never know how much stuff you have until you move. He wasn’t kidding. Thirty feet long by eight point something wide and nine and a fraction high is a lot of cubic feets, and every bit of it was filled with stuff. Eight tons worth.
The beast I was driving was one step down from a full-on semi, forty two feet from stem to stern, with a cargo space maybe two-thirds the size of a standard semitrailer, powered by a 9 liter inline-six turbodiesel.
You do not casually take the wheel of such a thing. To get there you must first grab a convenient handrail and hoist yourself up a long step. This is followed by a couple more steps nearly as large, and concludes with an awkward swinging pivot into the driver’s seat while holding yet another handrail. The effort to do all this is considerable, and when finally you settle in, likely as not you will detect that your heart rate has gone up some. From your vantage point ten-plus feet above the pavement, you look down on all but the largest vehicles. The rental company wisely recommends that you do not drive this thing unless you have had relevant prior experience. Fortunately, I had a good bit of that, as I happen to own a bus-type, diesel-powered RV of similar dimensions.
The trip almost ended before it even started. At my friend’s direction, we turned onto a back road on the way out of Calicoon, our last stop before heading for home. A shortcut to the highway, she explained. Suddenly and without warning I slammed on the brakes. “What’s wrong?” she asked, puzzled. In the slightly dazed manner of someone who had narrowly averted disaster, I pointed at the sign on the bridge we were seconds from passing under: “Clearance 12 feet 6 in.” I then pointed to another sign on the dash: “Vehicle height 12 feet 7 in.”
It’s a long drive from New York to Austin, but if you are in a hurry there are multiple routes that are almost entirely freeway. The first leg, however, is pretty much the opposite of freeway, a four-digit county lane that is all narrow, winding, up and down mountain road. The scenery would be riveting were you able to observe it. But to pilot this large and lumbering craft safely in such conditions requires your full attention, every second. Just short of nine feet wide where the rubber meets the road, the truck uses every bit of lane and then some. There are no shoulders and pull-outs are few and far between. There are blind curves every half mile or so, and each feels like a roll of the dice. There is fun and there is not-fun, and this part of the journey is very much the latter.
Before you get too far along, you must make a decision that will affect the remainder of your journey. If, like most people, time and money are a thing, you will likely choose one of three routes that are roughly comparable in mileage. There’s a northern route, which skirts the inland flank of the Appalachians before bending westward at about latitude 35 degrees, a middle route that bisects the southern tier of states, and a southern route that parallels the Gulf coastline. I chose the northern route because it was the second-shortest, yet promised abundant scenery.
After twenty or so white-knuckle miles, the four-digit county road turns into a slightly less onerous three-digit state highway, which after a time joins with US Highway 6, which is a definite step up, with wider lanes and sometimes even shoulders. A few miles hence you reach Interstate 81. At which point your stress level drops back into the normal range, because this is a real road, two or three luxuriously wide lanes each way with a median at least a hundred fifty feet across between you and oncoming traffic. Generous shoulders flank the inner and outer edges of the roadway. Rest stops await every thirty or forty miles.
I-81 lasts all the way to Knoxville, six hundred miles distant on the easternmost edge of Tennessee. Along the way you will pass the full width of Pennsylvania, a bit of Maryland, a slice of West Virginia, and a chunk of Virginia. The physical landscape changes constantly, the cultural landscape gradually. At Knoxville you leave I-81 for Interstate 40, a busy coast-to coast freeway, which takes you, eventually, to I-30, I-35, and finally your front door. It’s long but not particularly challenging for the most part. Lots of time to admire the passing scenery and think.
For nearly a thousand miles, the Appalachians are our constant companion, finally petering out somewhere in Tennessee. As mountains go, they are middling at best, topping out at just under 7000 feet of elevation. This was not always the case. A quarter-billion years ago they would have rivaled the Himalayas.
What we call “continents” are actually blocks of comparatively light rock, thirty or so miles thick, floating like rafts upon the denser, semi-molten rock of the Earth’s interior, which churns constantly, if slowly, driven by the heat of the earth’s deep interior seeking to escape to space. This churning motion pushes the overlying land masses about, at roughly the same rate as your fingernail grows.
The Appalachians formed when three of the planet’s continental land masses, the Eurasian, the African, and the North American, were pushed together for a time. The gargantuan force of this slow-motion collision caused the forward edges of each to crumple, forming enormous mountain ranges. Eventually the forces that once thrust the continents together pushed them apart, and the remnants of their collision were left to weather away. Two and a half million centuries of relentless rain, snow, and ice have removed most of what once was, leaving only the hard, tortuously folded core of coarse-grained gneiss and schist we see today.
At the western edge of Tennessee you find Memphis, where you cross the Mississippi River. The Mississippi marks the topographic low point of the great middle expanse of America. Here it also marks the location of the Keweenaw Rift, a crack in the Earth’s crust running from Kansas to Canada.
The same forces that push the continents about can also sometimes tear them apart. A billion years ago, the landmass we now call North America almost split in two along the Keweenaw Rift. But the currents of the Earth’s churning mantle shifted slightly before the process could complete, and the rifting stopped.
Not entirely, though. Every now and again the Keweenaw twitches. We know these spasms as earthquakes. The last one, in 1811, was so violent that the Mississippi flowed backward for several minutes as it churned with waves the size of houses. Across thousands of square miles, nearly every structure was flattened. Four hundred miles to the southwest, the earth’s convulsions caused a large lake to form. Church bells tolled as far away as Boston, a thousand miles distant. The next seismic event, a “when” not an “if,” is overdue, actuarially speaking. And when it happens, tomorrow or in a couple of centuries, it will redefine the meaning of “devastation.”
I learned a couple of things on this journey. First of all, rural New York is really beautiful. When you think “New York” you typically imagine the Five Boroughs, concrete canyons, Broadway, Wall Street, Times Square. But motor just a couple of hours “upstate,” defined as any inland location away from the Metropolis, excluding Long Island, and you find yourself in another, quite different world, a verdant, largely undeveloped place with rivers and hills and forests, dotted here and there with tiny burgs that look as though they haven’t changed in seventy years.
The fast-paced, ultra-urban world of the City is less than a hundred miles away, but it might as well be on another continent; it’s that different. To experience both milieus close together in time and space is jarring. You realize that the rural/urban divide is a real thing. You further realize that these different domains are sorting mechanisms. Each has its function.
Cities are places of constant change, extreme artificiality, synthetically rapid pace; they are energetic, stimulating, abounding with opportunity. There is constant churn, never-ending excitement, because The City never, ever sleeps.
But it is also fraught with risk. You are surrounded by people, yet alone. You are utterly anonymous. You could have a heart attack and no one would be the wiser. They’d find what’s left of you a month or three later after you fail to pay rent. You are wary when moving about in public because there are always bad operators about looking to fleece you or worse. But try your luck, use your wits, give it your best, find that groove and maybe, just maybe, you’ll make it big.
Or maybe, despite your best efforts you fail, or your life is shattered by some combination of bad luck and societal malfunction, so you end up having to retreat to safety, tail between legs, poorer but wiser. Maybe you’ll go “home,” wherever that is. Or maybe you’ll find safe haven in some backwater outpost upstate, where time moves at an unhurried pace, everyone knows your name, and you are able to find your center once again.
Rural areas and small towns represent continuity. The pace is more in sync with that of the natural world. There isn’t much excitement, and what little there is tends to be on the mild side. You needn’t be on guard at all times. Newcomers don’t stay new for very long. You take comfort in knowing everyone, and they knowing you. If you break your leg or take ill, neighbors will show up without being asked to mow your lawn and bring you groceries. Nobody makes it big, but nobody crashes and burns, either. The pace of change—”progress” to some—is manageable, within tolerance.
Cities like New York, or LA, or Chicago, or Austin, are for a certain type of person in a certain phase of life, that part wherein all is new and bright, and a challenge is an opportunity, not a cause for lament. You have energy to burn so it’s no big deal to get hit with surprises. You deal.
But age takes all that away. Constant change, once novel and exciting, becomes exhausting. The last thing you want is to have to deal with some urgent whatever every twelve minutes. Routines, which you once equated with ruts, are now a source of comfort. You crave stability, sameness, serenity. Why can’t things just stay as they were, you frequently wonder, at least for a little while? Meaning, of course, as they were long ago when you were young and at the height of your powers. You once dreamed of adventures and conquests, of living grandly. But now your thoughts run to cottages on side streets in quiet rural villages, and simple cabins in the woods.
I have come to realize that I am now at that point in life. Just as my friend had to wind down her old life and start a new, possibly final, chapter, I face the reality of soon having to do the same. My recent brush with death and the many health woes that flowed from it have left me damaged and diminished. There’s not much time left, I now understand, and if I am going to live what’s left of it more meaningfully, I need to get on with it.