Highway

I love a good road trip. Even when it is a hellish 32-hour drive from Boston to Austin, in a luggage-crammed car with stinky-breath dogs panting in your face, it has its charms. It’s not so perverted as flying. Flying requires being strapped into an unnatural, desiccated can that displaces you abruptly, jarringly. Only the views of the miniaturizing ascent and descent that frame the alien cloudscape give clues that you are actually traveling from one place to another. Not so with a road trip.

Ours took us across ten states and more than a dozen Cracker Barrels. The road trip was an evolution of sorts. Over time, the accents got longer, the hair blonder. The roadside flowers went from exotic to familiar (though consistently breathtaking). Over four days, the terrain flattened, the trees grew scrubbier, and the sky got bigger. Road kill morphed from raccoon to possum to armadillo. When we were just an hour from home, we could see a huge, grey storm cloud smearing and flashing over faraway pastures. It made me cry to see a good old-fashioned Texas thunderstorm again.

[Image from: http://www.stormeffects.com/2006_chase_images.htm]