The Great American Road Trip
“See the USA in your Chevrolet
America is asking you to call
Drive your Chevrolet through the USA
America’s the greatest land of all”
Commercial jingle lyrics for Chevrolet cars, c.1953
In this country, we like to think of taking a road trip, to borrow a saying, as being as “American as apple pie”. In other words, a dream representing the best of American culture. In retrospect, I remember little about road trips in the heyday of family road trips in the 50’s and 60’s that now seems iconic or ‘best’ of anything. The endless line of billboards alongside the freeways that (sadly) still stand and beckon, bickering with siblings, counting the miles until the next rest stop. And on it goes until you are drawn to stop and marvel at the World’s Largest Pistachio, the River that Runs Uphill, the World’s Largest Walleye, The Thing, the World’s Longest Fork, the World’s Largest Paul Bunyan Statue. Should you start to regret the wasted time and gasoline, you might want to do penance at the World’s Largest Ten Commandments.
But epic road trips did not start mid-century with the launch of the American highway system. Just take, for example, the Crusades, or the ever popular trek along the El Camino de Santiago to Compostela in Spain, to mention a couple of big hitters right off the top of my head. These are trips with some gravitas (even if a little misguided in the case of the Crusades). What can be said today to mark the hours spent on the road jousting with increasingly thick and agressive traffic, or enduring long backups just to enter highly congested National Parks? Does a shoe box filled with curled 2x3 snapshots sitting at the back of a closet do that justice? Or maybe, an endless social media post of selfies taken in front of one of these roadside marvels in a modern spin on our parents’ or grandparents’ road trips?
Do a quick web search to discover the value of a road trip and you will find a lot of what you might have expected, had searching the web been possible in the 50’s and 60’s. A lot of finding yourself, spending quality time with others and creating memories. Words that might have been written by the advertising department of a video game company. Introspective and insensitive to the external environment, totally missing the point.
What if, however, we turn the camera around and find compositions that are not about us, or even the people we might happen to pass by? Does that spark a new appreciation for our world and the state we find it in? I think landscape photographers and some street photographers that are more interested in the effect of people on the environment rather than the people themselves, are onto something important that is too easy to overlook. That’s why, in my road trips this summer I tried to slow down and be more deliberate in the photos I made. You won’t find any snapshot selfies in the gallery linked to this blog. If you have also had the good fortune to travel recently, I invite you to look through the pictures in the gallery and reflect on what you took away from your own experience. I think this is the right time for a truely Great American Road Trip.