Saving the Great American Road Trip

My faith in the American road trip was saved by a small town in Texas on the Fourth of July.

When that faith began to waver, and how far the road trip sank on my leaderboard of American pastimes—well, that’s harder to say. Below Putt-Putt golf, perhaps, and south of riverboat gambling. I knew that the highway had taken on an elegiac torpor. I knew that a line by the poet Louis Simpson filled my head: “the Open Road goes to the used-car lot.”

That’s a grim mantra, particularly if you take—or occasionally teach—the American road trip. I’m afraid I do both. In a syllabus I’ve peddled, mostly proudly, for a decade, I offer the road as a mobile entrée to generational angst (Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) and racial hierarchies (Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad). I introduce dads in search of salvation (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road) and young women escaping abuse (Thelma & Louise).

This transcontinental whirlwind of texts implies that road trips are uniquely qualified to capture a country so enormous, beautiful, and flawed. That wanderlust is a defining facet of the American psyche. That we’ll find ourselves just over that hill.

For years I believed this, and with all the fervor of a convert to the cause. I could opine on the Interstate Highway System and the drive-thru window. I ascribed meaning to the car that NASA left on the moon. My course, just one of so many on the topic, gave my musings purpose, and joy.

But when my family and I drove from Oregon back home to Indiana in 2023, I had doubts. The West burned in our rearview, and our Camry’s combustive hum felt like another agent of ecological despair. We’d rolled up the windows and maxed out the AC until our sedan became a portable living room—all cars today are portable living rooms—that mostly succeeded in keeping the world at bay. Here were our snacks, and there were our pillows. Each passenger could pacify themselves with a screen.

This is where the road trip fails us—or we fail it. Ready access to digital detachments (and directions) have brought sameness to an experience that should be built on surprise. A good road trip is a series of discrete episodes (I did this, I did that) held together by the flimsiest of threads: I did them by car. It’s the smorgasbord of travel, the choose-your-own-adventure of American life.

Planning (and plot) are beside the point, as anyone who’s read On the Road knows—though that didn’t stop my wife and I from planning our cross-country trek. We visited the Mojave (lunar-like and Looney Tunes) and the Grand Canyon (OK, it’s breathtaking). We spied Jesse Pinkman’s house in Alburquerque and ate fudge from—forgive me—Uranus, Missouri. I loved alternating between the sublime and the profane. I loved the fudge, too.

But this felt more like sight-seeing than road-tripping, a notion that returned whenever I returned to the car. Sameness haunted that interior, but sameness stalked us down the highway too. This is an old complaint, mind you—old as Howard Johnson, old as Humbert Humbert—but corporate lodgings and chain restaurants flatten the road trip with their predictable cheer.

My reading, though, had taught me that people (not place) define a road trip. The Easy Riders and the Cheryl Strayeds. The Misfits or the Brad Pitts bouncing shirtless on a bed. And that the people of the road change constantly, stretching one’s fixed idea of these States. Unfortunately, this is where the worst of my road dread began: the American demos itself.

There’s no way to say this that doesn’t sound cynical or misanthropic, but I was over meeting the American people. With the promise of their unacknowledged insight. In the hope that they’re stockpiling some nuance lost to the polls. I’d date this disillusionment back to November 3, 2016—and simply note that I’m sorry.

Let me tell you then about Shamrock, Texas—or really the Shamrock Country Inn in Shamrock, Texas—where my bottomed-out belief in the road was restored. At least temporarily.

The Inn is just east of a famous art deco filling station that looks like a nail stuck in the ground. Shamrock sits at a symbolic crossroads where two border-to-border interstates converge. (We’d come along I-40.) Everything from the vape shop to the towing-agency-cum-pizza-parlor bore the name of Historic Route 66. This all lent our evening in the town a whiff of kismet, of cosmic truth.

A South Asian family lived on site and owned the motel; they were the warmest hosts we’d known all trip. A middle-aged woman led us to our room, one hand finding my wife’s shoulder as she unlocked the door. A man, the woman’s husband presumably, watered new flowers ringing the Inn’s sign. An elderly woman walked the breezeway, stretching her legs, collecting trash as she strolled.

They asked about our travels and noted the forecast, doing so with an air of protection that felt ancient, as if “shelter” meant more than clean sheets and cable TV. This quiet grace reminded me of the Latin word hospes, which can mean inn-keeper or stranger, but is the root for hospitality too. As we talked, the sunset gathered strength in the west.

I’m a poet and thus programmed to find meaning in the unlikeliest of places. But that evening, it arrived easy as fireflies. I could hold its small light in my hand. Take the Inn’s name, the town’s too, which is more than a token of luck, or an emoji. It’s a reminder of earlier immigrants who, following persecution, folded themselves into the U.S.

I thought of the Irish as I looked at the motel’s walls: white atop red, blue doors with a star, newly painted to evoke the Texas state flag. I thought of assimilation and acceptance. I wondered if my hosts had sought—and perhaps found—either, or both. I wondered if whiteness, a trait that had aided the Irish, would stand in their way.

As darkness fell, my family and I stepped into the breezeway. Fireworks had started rising like exclamation points in the east, each burst briefly muffling a legion of bullfrogs. Then one came hopping toward us, warty and enormous, to our son’s great delight. We coaxed it toward our motel room, one more gift—wholly undeserved—from a natural world we degraded each day.

A few guests arrived as we stood there. Good ole boys in pickups. A vanload of Swedes headed to the Grand Canyon. And our hosts remained, too, watching the sky as they fired up AC units for those who’d arrive later. In the morning they’d serve us breakfast: eggs, biscuits, and Texas-shaped waffles.

“I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like,” Walt Whitman writes in “Song of the Open Road.” It’s a line that I’ve loved for years without ever believing it held any broad truth. I know full well that I—a white guy who’d not heard of The Negro Motorist Green Book until researching for my class—should have been the likeliest reader to agree. On that evening, as sleep overtook me, I got close.

For a few hours there, I loved the American road trip. As the dreams of dissimilar people, dazzled and drowsy and dwelling together, filled a motel in rural Texas. As fireworks resolved into a sulfurous breeze. But sleep would also illustrate the tenuousness of that union. Soon we’d drive into the heat of tomorrow, and this evening—like the promise of our country—would disappear into the past.

Originally published on Zócalo Public Square. Primary Editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary Editor: Sarah Rothbard