Two Trips
September 26th, 2004,We left California in July of this year. Our four-month-old daughter did not travel well in the car, so she and my wife flew to Minnesota, while my mother and I drove. My mother, bless her heart, had flown out to help us pack and to accompany me on the 2,000-mile drive from Davis to my parents’ home west of Minneapolis, where we would stay for a few days before moving into our new place in Northfield.
This trip would be only half as long as the July 2002 trip that brought us to California from New Jersey, where we had lived before. That trip was 4,000 miles long, from Princeton, New Jersey, to Birmingham, Alabama, where we visited Urmila’s parents, then up to Chicago to visit my cousin, then, my favorite stretch, Interstate 80 west all the way to our destination in California.
Of all the highways of this nation that I have traveled, I-80 is the greatest. I feel a special connection to it since I traveled it many times between Minnesota and the East Coast. I want to write a few words about it now and, in the process, consider American and Midwestern geography.
I-80 is bounded by two of America’s greatest cities, New York and San Francisco, and it passes through another, Chicago. It runs through the Appalachians in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, past the southern tips of the Great Lakes, across the corn and soy fields of the Midwest and the ranch lands of the West, through the Rocky Mountains, across the western deserts and salt flats, over the Sierra Nevada and the California Coast Range, and to the Pacific Coast. Much of its western portion follows the route of the first transcontinental railroad, now visible as the Union Pacific railroad, and some of it follows the Pony Express route. It also traces the trails that settlers used to reach Utah, Oregon, California, and other western locations. These emigrant corridors include the Platte River of Nebraska and Wyoming, the Humboldt River of Nevada, and the Truckee River, which leaves Lake Tahoe in California and empties in Nevada.
When traveling west on I-80 from Chicago in 2002, I had been struck by the ever greater dryness and elevation as we moved west. From the lush farm fields of Illinois and Iowa, we came to the dry, treeless rangeland of western Nebraska and Wyoming, then the stark deserts of Utah and Nevada. This growing aridity is symbolized by Nevada’s Humboldt River, which is fed by northern Nevada’s mountain ranges, meanders westwards as a small desert river, and finally peters out in a “sink” near Reno. The westering emigrants called it the “Humbug River” for this evaporative quality.
The trip two years ago trip gave me a new appreciation for the greenness of the Midwest and the abundance of its waters. Eastern Iowa, gently rolling, struck me as the most beautiful place in creation. We camped on a lake near Grinnell, Iowa, where the land seemed straight out of a Grant Wood painting. I could hardly believe it: there before me were Wood’s round hills patched with crops and trees and houses. He was more of a realist than I had thought.
I noticed that as we moved west, the western part of one state began to look like the next state. So, flat western Iowa began to look like Nebraska, rolling, rocky western Nebraska began to look like Wyoming, and so on. I also felt inspired by nearly every view. Only one region seemed less than enchanting: after the green Midwest, Wyoming struck me as harshly treeless and desolate–a cold, windy, and inhospitable plateau.
On our trip east two years later, only a few weeks ago, I had very different impressions. My mother and I drove up and out of wonderful California, catching our last glimpse of its dry, gold-grass hills, past sparkling Donner Lake in the Sierras, and down along the Truckee River into Nevada. This trip began in the rainless California summer, and the western deserts were now less strange to my eye. We motored on cruise control through lonely northern Nevada and eastern Utah, the natural landscape broken only by the regular sight of mineral and mining operations, some of them looking like operations out of a James Bond film. After passing through these deserts, Wyoming this time seemed positively green, not desolate. I must return here, I thought; I will only be a two-day drive from it. And there in eastern Wyoming I encountered my first rain in months.
Beautiful eastern Iowa was not on the itinerary this time. We turned north on I-35 at Des Moines, leaving I-80. It had been an unnaturally cool summer in the Upper Midwest, and it was cool and rainy as we drove north to Minnesota. After the regular 90-degree temperatures of the California Central Valley summers, I was very aware that I was in a new place and felt some apprehension about the weather that lay ahead.
And then there we were, entering Minnesota. At the Minnesota welcome center just north of the Iowa border, I paused over the garden of native plants–the yellow black-eyed Susans, the purple cone flowers, the prairie grasses. I was no longer looking at the exotic flora of California. Here was the color of summer that I remembered, here were hardy natives thriving in the soil. It seemed a promising welcome.
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