Our country’s highways are pathways to adventure and discovery
It wasn’t itchy feet, that wanderlust urge, that set my mom and dad (and me) on a cross-country travel trip in 1945. It was a trip to visit my father’s parents who had moved from their life-long home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to El Monte, California, to be near their daughter and dad’s sister, my Aunt Marie. My grandmother’s health was also failing so off we went from Towson, Maryland, in a new Dodge with a water bag strapped to the front.
The first memory from my domain in the back seat was meandering westward on Maryland’s U.S. Route 40. I can still imagine the fields and rolling hills in the twilight evening of our journey—a scene that hasn’t changed much in 80 years. At some time and somewhere the next day, we switched to U.S. 30. We stopped on top of a mountain—well, really a foothill—and looked down upon the construction below of what was planned to be a major, new highway…the Pennsylvania Turnpike. (Years later, we would follow that route on our annual trip to Michigan to visit my relatives on both sides of the family.)
The Turnpike went to Pittsburgh and, for me, felt like an eternity until we stopped and started through the city. After Pittsburgh and into Ohio, we found a roomy house (with sulfur smelling water) to stay over. It was the beginning of what would become bed and breakfast spaces decades later, in the town of Maumee, Ohio.
In 1945, motels were new, but I don’t remember staying in one as we trekked through middle America. To amuse me, my father suggested I count and record the animal fatalities we saw. Somewhere, we picked up U.S. Route 66. And then our first motels. I remember a semi crisis with a big blood sucking bug of some kind on a visitor’s neck in Flagstaff, Arizona. Dad helped save the day.
In the morning, we followed Route 89 to a place called Sedona. It was only a small gas station back then with amazing red rock formations that have been engraved on my mind ever since…the most vivid and memorable experience of our trip across America. My father took pictures with his little Bantom Kodiak camera of me standing on a rock in the stream that meandered next to us in Oak Creek Canyon. That camera only took eight slide pictures at a time. He mastered the camera and recorded our trip and captured our memories.
For the first time I saw Native Americans. They were gathered along the highway selling handmade pottery. My mom bought a small pot. I still have it, though it is in pieces. The road passed through an ice cave, which was scary and dark, then lava fields, where I picked up a piece of black basalt pierced with holes. It captured my curiosity. Many moons later, my own children took it to share in elementary school and it never returned. But I continued my fascination with geology.
I know we visited the Grand Canyon and hoofed one mile down, searching for the blue of a river. We parked at the Badlands and petrified forest national monuments to explore the painted desert. In the petrified forest a rainbow tree crossed a gulley and I walked across it. Several years ago, I revisited this area, now part of the National Park system. The petrified rainbow bridge tree still exists but is surrounded by fencing to prevent anyone from walking across it as I did. Sedona in 2021 was no longer a single gas station, but a thriving tourist attraction city. The red rocks are still there. But the visual impact I experienced in 1945 is very different.
In Los Angeles, my cousin Dick, a marine who had fought on Iwo Jima, took me on a roller coaster ride at Long Beach. This was the highest and scariest roller coaster. I had only done the small one at Gwynn Oak Park in Baltimore. Thank goodness I had my cousin as my protector. At Long Beach, I also saw an ant circus. Or was it fleas dressed up that we viewed under a magnifier? I haven’t seen anything like it since.
My grandparents, after a lifetime in Michigan, would both be buried in an historic cemetery near Los Angeles—the oldest American non-sectarian protestant cemetery, dating to the 1850s, for the new people coming West to California.
Returning east on U.S. Route 50, we traveled through Kansas, which was having a bumper crop of wheat. Grain was piled high outside of silos all across the state. Kansas was not a boring driving state then, as some declared it to be. In small towns on later travels, I always found interesting antiques that I brought back home.
Over the years, I would drive back and forth across this great nation of ours, with my kids, a dog, and a babysitter visiting National Parks. Sometimes we camped or took horse trips over the mountains in Washington state or through South Dakota, just marveling at the landscapes and stories that nature and small towns had to tell.
The breath taking vistas are a different experience when you see them for real. Sedona in 1945 taught me that. And the soul riveting vistas of the Grand Tetons taught me that to see and be enveloped in such an environment is to experience the majesty of our given world.
I drove to Alaska in 2015 and promised myself to write a blog…but I never did. I also thought about writing a book on my American highway experience. I was jealous when Blue Highways was published. I could have done that but hadn’t crafted any writing skills then. So, next year I will tell some short stories in this publication about our early U.S. highways that crisscrossed Maryland and beyond. Did you know U.S. Route 50 was designed in 1926 from a once-bustling desert town, now a ghost town, to end in Annapolis?
I may have been nine years old when I first discovered America, but I did get itchy feet and I kept on traveling, curious to explore. I rediscovered parts of Route 66 several years ago retracing part of my family’s 1945 journey. Next year, when iconic 66, from Chicago to Santa Monica celebrates another anniversary, I intend to be on America’s Mainstreet, the Mother Road. How about you?
Editor’s Note: A special “Road Trips” series by Ellen Moyer is planned for 2024, in which the stories of roads and highways with historical significance in Maryland are told.
