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, quite charming 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 wide and ten 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 an RV of nearly identical dimensions.
The trip almost ended before it even started. At Stephanie’s direction, I turned onto a back road on the way out of Calicoon, our last stop before leaving. A shortcut to the highway, she explained. Suddenly I slammed on the brakes. “What’s wrong?” she asked, puzzled. In the slightly dazed manner of someone who had just 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 a sign on the dashboard: “Vehicle height 12 feet 7 in.”
It’s a looonnng drive from New York to Austin, but if you are in a hurry there is no shortage of routes that are almost entirely freeway. ”Almost” because the first leg, down a four-digit county lane, is pretty much the opposite of freeway, all narrow, winding, up and down two-lane 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. Every blind curve 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 I had not experienced it before, and because it 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. This 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 generous median at least a hundred fifty feet across between you and oncoming traffic. Wide, smooth shoulders flank the inner and outer edges of the roadway. Rest stops await every thirty miles or so.
I-81 lasts all the way to Knoxville, 600 plus 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 cultural map shifts very gradually. At Knoxville you hit Interstate 40, a busy coast-to coast freeway, which takes you, eventually, to I-30, I-35, and your front door. It’s long but not all that difficult for the most part. It’s also quite scenic for much of the way.
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. But 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 of the great middle expanse of America. It also marks the location of the Keweenaw Rift, a crack in the Earth’s crust running from Missouri to Canada. A billion years ago, the landmass we now call North America almost split in two along this crack, riven by titanic forces of the Earth’s churning mantle. But the currents shifted slightly 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. Nearly every building was flattened over thousands of square miles, and church bells tolled as far away as Boston, a thousand miles distant. The next one, 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 Metropolis is less than a hundred miles away, but it might as well be on another continent; it’s that different. To experience both milieus so 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 excitement, because The City never, ever sleeps.
But the city is also fraught with risk. You are surrounded by people, yet lonely. You are utterly anonymous. You could have a heart attack and no one would be the wiser. They’d find you a month or three later after you fail to pay rent. You must be wary when moving about in public because there are bad operators all over the place. 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, and you end up having to retreat to safety, tail between legs, poorer but wiser.
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 mild. You needn’t be on guard at all times. You know pretty much everyone, and they know you, and you take comfort in that. If you break your leg, neighbors will show up to mow your lawn and bring you groceries. Nobody gets rich, but nobody crashes and burns, either. Yin, yang. The pace of change—”progress” to some—is manageable, within tolerance.
Cities like New York, or LA, or Chicago, or for that matter Austin, are for a certain type of person in a certain phase of life, that part of life 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. The rewards make it all worthwhile.
But age takes all that away. Constant change becomes unbearable, exhausting. You come to crave serenity, stability, sameness. The last thing you want is to have to deal with some urgent whatever every twelve minutes. Why, you frequently wonder, can’t things just stay as they were, meaning the way they were when you were young and at the height of your powers, at least for a little while? Whereas once you dreamed of adventures and conquests, your thoughts now run to cottages on side streets in quaintly pretty villages, and simple cabins deep in the woods.
This journey made me realize that I am now at that point in life. Just as my friend had no choice but to wind down her old life and start a new, possibly final, chapter, I face the reality of soon having to do the same. There’s not much time left, I now understand, and it’s past time to live what’s left of it meaningfully if I can.