Brian Eckert

The call comes from an old friend who’s splitting with his wife. Will I move into the marital home in her stead, he asks.

I agree.

God knows what I’m in for once I get there. But the drive is enough for now.

For the restless, so long as there there are miles to put away, there is a determination to destroy them; to squelch them between the bituminous membrane of tire and tarmac, a place where potentialities rest for a moment then are kicked back up into the air like a piece of roadside trash.

The Road expects nothing except that you keep going. The Road is catharsis; the Road is escape; the Road is motion that justifies itself. The Road expresses perfectly the form of existence that is continual Becoming without ever Being.

Had I been born a New Englander a few hundred years earlier I’d no doubt have headed West to find my own piece of Dark and Bloody Ground to develop. As a modern Pioneer my body leads the way for my mind; my current self paves the way for the self I hope to become.

The American frontier has always been an existential proving ground. Well before Europeans were giving existentialism a name and describing it in books, Americans were living it out.

Pioneers who set forth South, West, and North to occupy the newly acquired territories were acting as free, self-determining agents. The vast tracks of land they journeyed through and came to call home were blank canvases on which to paint their authentic selves.

Like the early pioneers of my country I move West, looking for a new and better life. Unlike them my journey is undertaken from the confines of a Japanese-built automobile, supplemented by obscene amounts of digital media, sugar-free Red Bull, and medical grade marijuana.

The distance they traveled in a week I travel in an hour; they slept under the stars and told stories around the fire while I sleep under sheets of questionable cleanliness and fall asleep to the voices of cable news pundits.

Such differences notwithstanding, the frontier was and remains central to American life. Whether a physical frontier, a technological frontier, or an ideological frontier, Americans are always in pursuit of the next new thing.

To us, the answers to all problems lie just over the horizon. Here, in the Shining City Upon a Hill, there is always another acropolis to build. Expansion is the cure for any and all ills. Our Manifest Destiny knows no bounds.

South Bend Indiana strikes me as a place where people do a lot of meth. The woman behind the Motel 6 desk is black and in her 40s. I ask her where I might be able to find a place to watch the game and grab a bite to eat.

She directs me to the Notre Dame campus, about two miles away.

“Can I walk there?” I ask her.

“I mean, I guess you could,” she says.

There are few suburban areas in America where you can walk without appearing suspicious. Even where there are sidewalks, walking is primarily the pastime of the down and out and/or criminally insane. If you are traveling by foot down a busy road that has no sidewalks, you are most certainly up to no good, or else already on the lam.

Being the lone walker on a busy stretch of road in South Bend makes you feel like nothing less than a freak…and an un-American freak at that.

It is not a state I have to entertain for very long. About ½ mile into my walk the skies open up and I retreat into an Arby’s for a Reuben.

Watching people eat roast beef sandwiches from my booth near the window is as up close and personal as I’ve ever gotten to life in Middle America. There is something that I find absolutely terrifying about the area between Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Colorado. It’s as if the endless fields are a Nietzschean Abyss. As I stare long into them they stare back.

I have an urge to tarry; to not merely pass through these cornfields as if they were a shortcut through a graveyard. I wish to embrace one of the possible instantiations of self represented by these towns that stream by at highway speeds.

But where? Surely not here. The storm gathers strength. Tornado warnings are issued. I must drive clear of the deluge. Iowa is reachable by tomorrow afternoon. Madison County, only a short detour off the interstate, seems as suitable a place as any for my brief existence as a Plainsman. The forecast there calls for sunny skies. It is decided.

***

Interstate 80 is the second longest road of its kind in the United States. It roughly parallels parts of early pioneer routes such as the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, as well as the Lincoln Highway, a roadway project that inspired the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, an undertaking that would eventually build nearly 50,000 miles of roads, including I-80, which can take you 2,900 miles—from sea to shining sea—in under a week.

A highway patrolman pulls me over somewhere west of Chicago. Not only was I speeding, but, “Here in the state of Illinois motorists are encouraged to drive with their lights on in inclement weather,” he informs me.

Jesus…is it obvious that I’m hopped up on enough THC and caffeine to swim across Lake Michigan?

The key to the cop heart is a gross appeal to nationalism. With his Rottweiler-esque head perusing the contents of my backseat, he asks me my business.

I tell him that I am on a journey to reconnect with America. I just got back from China, officer, and let me tell you, it’s good to be home, sir. What’s it like over there? You mean, aside from the mobile execution vans and communism? They’re not like you and I, officer…

He lets me go with a warning and a “welcome back.”

Winterset, Iowa—perhaps best known as the setting of the film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County—is also the birthplace of John Wayne.

After watching the sun set I follow a winding, dirt road to the top of a ridge. At an intersection a long, flat highway dotted with farms disappears into the Eastern and Western horizons. It signifies the way back and the way forward. From up here, I can hear the Road calling…pulling at me with a primordial urge.

Back in town I park and stroll through the quiet, sweet-smelling streets. I pass a statue of John Wayne. The light from a street lamp glints off of his bronze, defiant sneer. Though I’ve never seen one of his movies, I feel quite certain that were the Duke in my position he would get back on his horse and ride, fearless, into the night.

And that is what I do. The miles disappear effortlessly beneath my black steed’s feet; 350 clicks of the odometer pass by in a manic, ephemeral burst. I am a Vampire of the Open Road, feeding off of the slumbering sublimations of thousands of people asleep in their beds in small Plains towns.

At around 1:00 I stop at a Pizza Hut in Gothenburg, Nebraska. Surrounding me are dark plains and highway travelers.

Gothenburg sits 150 miles from the geographic center of the contiguous United States. In terms of historical progress as well this town, founded by a wayfaring Swede who’d worked on the Union Pacific Railroad, stands at the halfway point between colonial and modern America.

Sipping a Budweiser in a worn-out booth, watching big rigs roar in from the interstate, I feel the weight of America pressing in on me from all angles…from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon aboard the Arbella to George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech from the USS Abraham Lincoln…the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico…Shawnee Indians to Cleveland Indians…Plymouth Rock to crack rock…Industrial Revolution to Sexual Revolution…Puritans to Pioneers to Punks…Patriots to abolitionists to communists to terrorists…oxcarts to railroads to motorcars…

More than 500 years of frenetic history, of perpetual motion, of scrambling after Providence—a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—are compressed down to a single point here, in the dead center of America.

I feel that anything is possible, but that to be an Übermensch—a Superman—is, in the end, to be a Nothingman.

Pulled in all directions at once, I focus on the reality around me: the country music splaying through the speakers…the bleached blonde kissing her boyfriend in the parking lot…the trucker in an adjacent booth shoving pizza into his tired-looking face.

But there is one reality that rises above them all: the Road, palpably rumbling in the distance.

The Road is an Ocean, the waves of traffic never ceasing. The Road breathes; the Road writhes; the Road speaks of what may yet reveal itself. The Road is the thing in itself.

Pardon me, miss, can you box up the rest of this for me…and bring the check…

I drive down the main drag en route to the I-80 intersection. There’s a sign at the beginning of the city limits that reads, “Welcome to Gothenburg: We’ve been waiting for you.”

And I believe it wholeheartedly.