3 More for the Road: Robert Sullivan's "Cross Country"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three more of my favourite travel books – Anthony Bailey's Along the Edge of the Forest (1983), Robert Sullivan's Cross Country (2006), and Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia (2010) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Cross Country.

This book is a masterpiece. I first read it in 2006 when it was originally published. I enjoyed it immensely. Now, seventeen years later, I’ve just finished rereading it; I find myself relishing it even more, if that’s possible. It’s an account of a six-day, 2,900-mile road trip that Sullivan and his family (wife and two kids) took from Portland, Oregon, to New York City in 2004, driving interstate highways almost all the way. The key word here is “interstate.” Sullivan is an experienced interstate traveler. He's crossed the country close to thirty times. Now (in the summer of 2004), facing the prospect of yet another cross-country trip, he feels anxious, “imagining all that could go wrong, remembering all that has gone wrong in the past.” Yet, he also feels “really good, as if we were heading out for the very first time. That is what the road and a full cup of coffee in your hand on the road in the morning will do to you.”  

For Sullivan, the interstates are America. He says, “It seems to me that the real America is the farthest thing from people’s minds when they are stopping for some fast food on I-5 in between Los Angeles and San Diego, much less driving from the East Coast to the West. But there it is, the real America, right there.” He’s an aficionado of all things interstate. He notices everything – restroom towel dispensers (the enMotion towel dispenser is “a thing of on-the-road-recycled-paper-towel-dispensing beauty, or at least the nicest restroom towel dispenser I have ever seen”), plastic coffee lids (“There are variations on the peel-and-lock system, the variations mostly being in the design of the sipping hole shape, and in the configuration of the lock …”), concrete traffic barriers (“The Jersey barrier is a poured-concrete barrier that is anywhere from three to five feet tall and that is designed such that when a car’s wheels hit the low-sloped bottom, the wheels turn back toward the driving lane, the car tilting up as its wheel rides the barrier, to minimize scraping”), and much more. 

He’s also acutely aware of interstate history (“In the roads of America is the history of America”). He thinks about history as he’s driving, and he lets us (and his wife and kids) in on his thoughts. He’s constantly on the look out for road-side historical markers (“In between two dusty green hills on the Forgotten Trail, past the town of Dayton and just before the Forgotten Trail crosses the Snake River, our rental car pulls up beside a large Lewis and Clark roadside historical marker, the marker nearly as big as a pool table, the car blinker blinking, ticking, timing us”). He frequently draws parallels, sometimes humorously, between the historic Lewis and Clark cross-country expedition (1804–1806) and the cross-country “expedition” that he and his family are on (“We are commuters in the grandest sense, wagon train commuters, stagecoach followers, riding in the round-trip dust of Lewis and Clark”). And, as he drives, he tells fascinating stories about the origin of various interstate fixtures such as motels, gas stations, drive-through restaurants, traffic signs, hamburgers, even the rumble strip (“And now, I am about to swerve, ever so slightly to the right. I am about to hit the so-called rumble strip. Or at least I think I hit a rumble strip, the rumble strip having been developed by the state highway department of Indiana, on rural roads, out where a person might miss a rural Stop sign”).

As Sullivan drives across the country, he sees places that remind him of his previous cross-country experiences, including the worst one he’s ever had, when he attempted to drive a giant rental truck packed with all his family’s furniture and belongings from the West Coast to the East Coast, towing the family car on a trailer, and the truck broke down just outside Saint Paul, Minnesota, and he had to get another rental truck, and do a load swap, and leave some of his furniture behind in Saint Paul because the substitute rig was smaller than the one that broke down, and then, driving this substitute truck, with his car in tow, made his way to New Jersey, to the town where his parents live, and there “proceeded to experience the worst moments of the worst cross-country trip”:

As I began to drive through the town I spent my high school years in – the town I learned to drive in, even – the automatic-pilot part of my brain suddenly took a route that was off the main street, a route that I would have taken had I been in high school or even later, a route that I would have taken millions of times, instinctively, a route on which trucks are not permitted. As I drove down this road, I relaxed, having hat happy feeling of absolutely knowing deep in my driving bones precisely where I was going. I don’t think I was even thinking that I was driving a truck at all. As I remember it now, I must have been looking at the railroad overpass for at least ten or twenty seconds, my face likely smiling, my brain recognizing it as my brain would have recognized it when I was a high school driver with a station wagon that could easily clear twelve feet. I only began to read the railroad overpass as a guy driving a huge truck with a car trailer attached a few seconds before I reached it. When I did. I slammed on the brakes as much as I could slam them given my twenty-five-foot long vehicular condition, and I stopped about ten feet from having sheared off the top of the truck. Then I shouted a profanity, because I was upset, because I had traveled three thousand miles successfully through territory that was to me, a novice trucker-with-a-trailer attached, like territory at the middle of the map Lewis and Clark had set out with – blank, unknown, potentially treacherous, in light of my trucking skills – only to become trapped in the place I knew so well, perhaps better than anywhere, my teenage terra cognita.

This story of Sullivan’s “worst cross-country trip ever” is unforgettable. I remember it from my 2006 reading of the book. The above scene, traumatic as it is for Sullivan (and the reader), is not the most traumatic part. The situation gets even worse. Sullivan describes every excruciating detail of it, including the car trailer falling off the back of the truck and Sullivan not being able to move it by himself. He writes, “It was at this point in the worst cross-country trip I have ever taken that I broke down, as in wept.”

Sullivan is a superb describer. Here, for example, is his depiction of the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Montana:

Here at the golf course, we walk simultaneously through lush green landscape, a re-creation of Scottish splendor, an idyllic ideal of a life-giving glade, and a denuded site, a scene of industrial detritus, of raw earth used and discarded and left for dead. It’s a vineyard and a graveyard. In view is the remediated, or at least partially remediated, Warm Creek, a stream once involved in smelting copper, now used to frame a fairway. Ahead I see the green of the greens as they fade into varying shades of less-watered green, and finally unwatered green, native plants and dried grasses, this last layer then surrounded by rubble from the roughed-up hills, the beat-up mini-mountains. I see the paths of slag, the dross of the mining process, an industrial waste, a metamorphic condition that from a distance could be a volcanic beach in the South Pacific.

And here’s his description of the Kum & Go convenience store and gas station in Miles City, Montana:

At Kum & Go, with coffee in hand, I pull up to the gas-pumping island, as people insert credit cards, open gas tanks, squeeze pump handles, as they say nothing at all. I look around to see that Subway sandwich shop that is built into the Kum & Go has a special on buffalo sandwiches: “delicious roast bison.” It is an example of diversity within monotony, a nationally orchestrated regional nondelicacy. I see the morning light hitting the diesel gas pump back where the truckers are fueling and wish, as usual, that I were a landscape painter – to capture the pure light that causes the entire convenience store and gas station to appear golden, like a promise!

Note the recurrence of that “I see” (“I see the green of the greens”; “I see the paths of slag”; “I see the morning light”). Cross Country is a tremendous act of ongoing attention. Here’s another example, a description of the Holiday Inn Express parking lot in Beloit, Wisconsin:

Outside, the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express this morning is like an old friend who has aged badly: a vast concrete steppe marked by fast-food restaurants that shoot up like grooves of leafless trees, by tumbleweedlike bits of trash. I see now – as I lug the bags to the trunk and remove the rooftop pack that I believed would ease our trip but did not – that the drive-through restaurant where I watched a group of young people accost drive-throughers last night was actually farther way than I originally determined. Indeed, between my rented Impala and the McDonald’s is a drive-through Wendy’s, a Wendy’s I completely missed, a Wendy’s where, at this moment, a garbage truck is taking away the garbage – a tidal movement that makes me look around to suddenly see all the Dumpsters in my vicinity, and causes me to conjure all the Dumpsters at all the fast-food restaurants along the forty-three thousand miles of interstate highways. I stand alongside the car, the Impala key safely around my neck, and also notice a truck filled with fencing materials, a cargo of demarcation that pulled up alongside our rented Impala as I lay sort of sleeping last night. In this panorama that I have faced every morning over the past few crossing days, I see little variations of sameness, a view of the identical places differently arranged: Country Kitchen, Arby’s, Econolodge, and next to McDonald’s, a giant billboard as big as a motel swimming pool that says, “Mmmmm …”

I see little variations of sameness – right there, I think, is one of the book’s main themes, perhaps even its governing aesthetic.

One of my favorite moments in Cross Country happens as Sullivan and his family cross into Ohio. Sullivan tells us what he sees:

A large billboard marks Ohio’s very first “WELCOME TO OHIO,” and as I see it and scan the horizon, I glimpse suddenly laundry flying on a line, a stunning view, a kind of mundanely breathtaking view: the first emphatic sign of pure non-road-related life, of life not solely based on a car, that I have seen for hundreds and hundreds of miles. It is a note of stationary domesticity that is startling in its nontransitory nature, especially alongside a really big road. I pointed to it but I’m not sure anyone else saw it. I’m pretty sure I did not imagine it.

That “mundanely breathtaking” made me smile. Who else would notice laundry flying on a line and respond to it like that? Not many. Sullivan has the sensibility of a great street photographer (except instead of streets, his subject is interstates). He sees the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Cross Country, including its action, structure, description, point of view, sense of place, and sense of people. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Ian Frazier’s great Travels in Siberia. 

Postscript: Robert Sullivan has written some of The New Yorker’s best “Talk of the Town” stories, including “Facing History,” "Say Cheese," "Super-Soaker," "Rabbit Ears," "Shredding Party," "The Crossing," and "A Two-Hour Tour."