Apropos of nothing, I was suddenly moved to write this. I’ve done a lot of distance traveling by car and tour bus in these United States.
It became a writing experiment— I really started with a barely coherent thought, and decided to see if I can make it into something a person might hypothetically want to read. All writing, composing music, and art in general, is like that. You know you’ve engaged it correctly when you start feeling a compulsion to continue your crummy little nothing thing, and to finish it. You’re really doing it when you start cutting things you liked at first.
It’s not hard adding more words, the question is: am I adding real substance, or just saying nothing in a long way? Or saying nothing in a cutie-pie way? We don’t want that.
Anyway, the thing— I bear no responsibility for your enthusiasm for it:
Portland and its South
Interstate 5 is the major north-south arterial between San Diego and Vancouver, and driving it is like getting a job at the post office: a mediocre experience, and unlikable for the duration. You are a cog in an economic machine, being bureaucratically moved to the next place via the straightest line possible, in defiance of any human interest or appeal— maybe if one were an over-achieving assistant manager and exceptionally moved by efficiency.
Here in Portland it offers a nice view of our unexceptional skyline, the Willamette river, and its bridges— all decaying earthquake-bait, built during the Taft and Hoover presidencies. Crossing the major freeway bridges we are treated to views of Mnts. Hood and St. Helens. For a good few minutes we are grateful we live in the Pacific Northwest.
There is a ~4 mile sidetrack on the west side of the river, Interstate 405, which carves a reasonably graceful concrete channel through downtown, rejoining I-5 on the east side via the modern, elegantly arching Fremont bridge. I-5s bridge over the Willamette is the Marquam, to the south— a grim double decked slab affair on which we are terrorized by total maniacs urgently needed in Gresham on the top deck, or by total maniacs urgently needed in Beaverton on the bottom deck.
It is worth commenting on the distinct character each of these types of motorists. The Gresham bound driver is resentful of your unearned place in traffic ahead of them, and is irrationally possessive of the patch of road they consider to be their personal property, which extends a minimum of 150 feet in front of their vehicle, whether there is other traffic already present there or not, and will respond with hostility if you trespass against them by merging into that lane because you need to go that way. Beaverton drivers seem to be on an urgent mission to receive a prize of some kind, apparently for being uniquely special and deserving people, with an absolute right of priority.
I-5 also has a 37 mile long auxiliary to the east, Interstate 205, which parts from the 5 south of the outermost suburbs, and rejoins the 5 in Washington, north of Vancouver, passing through the eastern part of both cities. Apart from the initial wooded stretch loosely following the Tualitin river, and the grandly serpentine Glen Jackson bridge over the Columbia, it is unremarkable and unlikable, and traveled by people who hate you.
I never enjoyed the drive from Portland to Eugene, passing through the Willamette Valley, cradle of much of the world’s grass seed. It’s visually attractive enough— very green farming country, with some charming forested hills and some small amount of cattle and sheep ranching. The most boring road in the state is not that boring. Proceeding south from Eugene to Grants Pass the terrain becomes more sinister, with a vibe of depression and ecocide— the mountainous, forested terrain, though heavily punished by the timber industry for many decades, looks ready to reassert itself and swallow up whatever human outposts linger there. It’s unsettling.
As you move south the Douglas fir trees, the dominant plant of the region, become gradually more anemic, and interspersed with more Mediterranean varieties of trees, with increasingly thinning undergrowth. The real transformation into a California-style landscape begins at Grant’s Pass, and is completed in the mountainous area south of Ashland, into California— the landscape takes on a scorched appearance. There is a definite feeling of entering the land of an foreign tribe, enhanced by the pest exclusion checkpoint, for the prevention of gnat-tainted fruit entering the state. Stranger, don’t bring your dirty crops into our land.
South of Mt. Shasta, and the cinder cone of Black Butte, the drive becomes dull, after Red Bluff descending— both literally and metaphorically— into hexavalent chromium production / almond-and-misc nut farming country. I-5 snubs San Francisco outright, bypassing it by about 75 miles, instead taking us, cruelly, through Stockton, with its airborne manure particulates and overwhelming reek of murdered cattle. My major impression of this area was driving through it late at night with Rush Limbaugh (I later realized, he wasn’t well known then) on my Buick’s AM Radio (my only listening option) and him repeating “I am right. I am right. I am right.” into the darkness.
Oh yeah, Sacramento is also in there somewhere. If a town were a gas, Sacramento would be inert.
The succeeding 275 miles south through the San Joaquin valley are experienced as a monotone of featureless terrain, piercing sunlight, mechanical failure, seeping asphalt, airborne agricultural particulates. This is industrial scale farm country, seemingly dedicated to producing billions of tons of waste straw for no purpose. It is harvested and immediately plowed back into the earth, to serve as meager fertilizer for next year’s crop, ad infinitum. Crossing that pan is very long and very dull, and a kind of rite of passage. I once made it with exactly one cassette tape in the car, the Repo Man soundtrack, which I played about ten times in a row. Finally hitting Bakersfield and then The Grapevine, both horrible places, are a massive relief.
The Grapevine is a wild mountainous stretch of road, the final ordeal en masse for all who desire to enter Los Angeles— it’s ugly, but there’s some energy there, a sense of real danger— the road is steeply graded, regularly plagued by wild fires, and is punishing to vehicles already stressed by the long hot drive getting there. There is a lurking terror of getting plastered by one of the frequent helplessly careening, out of control semi trucks, an unstoppable 80,000 pound brick of canned Alpo, with brakes burned out on the excessive grade. Passing at last through Valencia, with its distant view of Magic Mountain, though not quite contiguous with metro LA, we really feel we’re on the fringe of the megalopolis.
In Los Angeles itself I-5 is aloof from the normal life of the city, passing through Burbank, threading the needle between Griffith Park and Glendale, then passing east of downtown— no one uses it except to continue to points south, or if they happen to live in Burbank or East LA. All of the traffic for Los Angeles proper peels off to take the 405 or 101, abandoning I-5 to the truckers, outsiders, dwellers of those peripheral communities, and other inconsequential life forms.
The quintessential LA freeway is US Route 101, known on that stretch as the Hollywood Freeway, arrogantly slashing across town from the Hollywood Bowl to Skid Row. In the San Fernando valley it shears west to the coast, Santa Barbara, Oxnard, continuing north for the entire length of the west coast. To the south, there is a mystery stretch passing east of downtown, with a view of the cement trough of the Los Angeles river, before rejoining I-5— again, driven rarely by Angelenos.
Another major LA freeway, Interstate 110, then California 110, runs from Pasadena to Long Beach, making a direct north-south beeline through the city— serving the same functions I-5 does in Portland and Seattle: ruthlessly direct north-south travel and the disruption of Black neighborhoods. The stretch from downtown to Pasadena, as one of the first roads of the interstate freeway program, has a different, very quaint character; it is scaled for much slower traffic, with very tight curves, no shoulders, and impossibly short 15-5 mph exits. It reeks of Eisenhowrian naivité, and is frustrating to modern drivers, who are accustomed to a terroristic style of driving ill-suited to it.
The long drive from downtown to Long Beach passes through some communities whose names were marketed to white America mainly as places to get immediately murdered for no reason— Watts, Compton, Crenshaw— an image American media cultivated relentlessly in the 80s and early 90s. You can watch the Michael Douglas movie Falling Down to get a contemporaneous idea of the average white American’s idea of what would happen to you if you stopped there and talked to someone. The University of Southern California, my alma mater, is at the northern border of that area, clings fearfully to the 110, giving its wealthy students and elite faculty a quick exit from that community.
The other major LA freeway is Interstate 405, which I only know for its savage airport traffic congestion, and reek of car exhaust and asphalt. I can’t summon any other image of it. It diverges from I-5 in the north San Fernando valley, and takes us through Sherman Oaks, Westwood, Marina del Rey, rejoining I-5 south of Irvine. Its passage through the hills give us a Topanga-like vibe of wild fires and Manson Family activity. Its proximity to Brentwood, Westwood, Santa Monica give it a certain elevated class, but it’s a rotten road.
POINTS EAST
Returning to Portland, Interstate 84 begins at the east bank of the Willamette river, and approximately follows the meandering path of the Oregon Trail in reverse, peeling away from the Columbia River at the civic nonentity of Boardman, Oregon— a barge stop, a collection of corrugated grain silos— continuing east through Boise, Idaho, then southeast to Salt Lake City.
In Portland itself, it runs alongside the tracks, through Sullivan’s Gulch— a grim demilitarized zone dividing true Southeast and Northeast. It is usually jammed with frenzied exurban people fleeing to their crummy homes and/or horrible families in Gresham and other awful places. Troutdale, cleansing the palette with its clean-sounding name, is at the eastern limit of the Portland metro area, heading into the Columbia Gorge. The 150 mile stretch from Troutdale to Boardman is very scenic, with a fascinating transformation of the landscape from rainy Douglas fir forest, to high desert pine forest, to rolling hills and endless farmed wheat.
From there it is uneventful. Pendleton is an attractive little western town. There is very little in Ontario, Oregon, on the Idaho border, but it feels like we’re on a journey to someplace unknown, departing the Northwest, into the regular “West.” We begin seeing Sinclair gas stations, with their brontosaurus logo, an allusion to geologic time. Idaho is largely a non-experience, until we hit the vast saline pan between Boise and Salt Lake City, which is the true border region of the northwest.
From Salt Lake City I-84 becomes Interstate 80, which passes the length of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa, ending in Chicago. Wyoming on that stretch is neither scenic nor dull. It feels like buffalo country. When we finally arrive at the sprawling Little America travel center in the southeast corner of the state, it feels like the true exit of the western USA, and gateway to midwestern mediocrity. From here the landscape becomes very flat, grubby, miserable, passing at great length through Omaha and Des Moines, before arriving, blessedly, in Chicago.
I-80/84’s sister road is Interstate 90, running roughly parallel 300 miles to the north, beginning in Seattle, to Spokane, forking with Interstate 94 at Billings, Montana, leading to South Dakota, and eventually Chicago, via Madison, Wisconsin. 94 takes you through the horrible land of North Dakota, to Minneapolis. The only stretch of I-90 I am familiar with runs from Missoula to Madison, and its emotional high point is the passage through northeastern Wyoming, with the Devil’s Tower monument visible from the freeway, and through the western part of South Dakota, the plains, and the Black Hills. That area has a violent past, most famously passing by the Little Bighorn site, Wounded Knee, and no doubt numerous slaughters of native people. There is also the town of Deadwood, of television fame in recent years, and Mt. Rushmore. And “Sturgis”, that’s there.
As with all roads, it becomes mediocre as you drive east.
In Los Angeles Interstate 10, running from Santa Monica, California, to San Bernardino, Palm Springs, and beyond— is a grim affair, overcrowded with angry motorists at all times. Purely functional— barely— with no redeeming aesthetic value. The major vibe is of gridlock and freeway shootings and wishing we were someplace else. A great weight is lifted as you emerge east of metropolitan Los Angeles. The entirety of Arizona is refreshing, true American desert.
Crossing the wind scoured plain of southern New Mexico, the main interest is the frequent bill boards informing you of your present distance from “The Thing”— a tourist trap placed in the middle of the only interesting terrain feature for hundreds of miles, with some featured mystery item for you to view, along with the usual tourist trinkets. When my family stopped there in 1970 The Thing was the dessicated remains of a person who died in the desert; a friend from Austin later saw a car claimed to be Hitler’s Mercedes-Benz— collected by some local millionaire psycho. These southwest tourist traps are warm and attractive, though, with their displays of Mexican jumping beans and characteristic smell of piñon.
After getting batted around the road by the fierce wind in New Mexico, we arrive in grubby El Paso, Texas, with its view of grubbier Ciudad Juarez, perhaps 100 yards away, and then settle in for 550 miles of grubby, bullshit-smelling west Texas before getting to San Antonio. I can’t comment on the stretch east of San Antonio, which takes us to Houston, New Orleans, and then, with increasing unpromise, to Mobile, Talahassee, ending at Jacksonville, Florida.
Outside of Los Angeles, again, Interstate 15 splits from I-10 around Rancho Cucamonga, taking us to Las Vegas. We pass through some pleasing grassy hills, then the not-quite-desert region around Barstow, then, cleansingly, to the very flat, sun bleached Mojave desert. “Bat country”, of Hunter S. Thompson fame, it’s a charismatic passage, if not the world’s most scenic. Las Vegas is what it is, but it has an Oz-like quality, approaching it by car.
Beyond Vegas the I-15 continues northeast to Salt Lake City, but we leave it well south of that— where Interstate 70 splits from it, taking us east to Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, ending at Pittsburgh, where it vaporizes in a wild spray pattern, into several 70-something named roads leading to points of mediocrity north, east, and south. I-70 from its beginning to Kansas City is an 800 mile symphony of decline from grandeur into boredom— past Arches National Park, through the overwhelming mass of the Rocky Mountains, then to Denver, and the plains of eastern Colorado… and finally the unending cornfields of Kansas. Kansas is home of conservative people of deep religious conviction and the grossest rest area men’s room I have ever seen in my life— quite plainly a very active site for illicit quasi-romantic activities of every description.
Those corn fields really are unending, to the tune of 400 miles of them. Corn ad Nauseum is literally the state motto, it’s right there on the state flag. Or should be. In fact all that corn gets made into high-fructose corn syrup and directly transmogrified into pure American fat and finally to society wide adult onset diabetes and heart failure. It’s like viewing the source of the Amazon. The drive is so tedious that they have installed regular speed bumps not to slow you down, but to wake you up. You hit them about once every thirty seconds, approximately the rate at which they believe their own state is trying to bore you to death.
Interstate 40 is what the old US Route 66 was, and is one of the country’s great roads. Breaking from I-5 at Bakersfield, it passes through the gap between Las Vegas and Phoenix, serving a generally sparsely populated region, through a number of Indian reservations— Navajo, Hopi, and several other nations. And through, or close to, the Mojave desert, Sedona, the Grand Canyon, the Peterified Forest, Meteor Crater, and all the towns of Route 66 fame. Four Corners, Shiprock, Monument Valley, Santa Fe and Taos are not too distant side excursions. We went this way twice when I was young; once on vacation, once when my family moved from San Antonio to Eugene, Oregon.
The rest of this foul land
Through five national drum corps tours I have traveled extensively by bus through the Midwestern, Southern, and Eastern United States, and have virtually nothing to say about any of it. The primary distraction is to observe and catalog the crushing industrial-Stalinist banality of the place names. Glassville. Cementville. Cementon. Steelton. The only mental image I can conjure is of Ohio, with its general swampiness, crumminess, with a lot of marijuana growing on the side of the road, fugitives of war time hemp plantations. Maybe we saw some kudzoo in the south, but that could have just been a movie. Oklahoma was striking for its uninterestingness compared even to all the rest of those places.
And, that ought to do it. More drum stuff coming.