I was born to drive. 

Being on the road is almost a forgotten idea at this point. It seems to hold little to no allure to Gen Z, and most millennials are busy raising children. Cars are expensive. Gas is expensive. Traffic is heavy. The Great American Road Trip just isn’t what it used to be. National Lampoon’s Vacation is a relic of another era. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? Medieval. 

But for me the road keeps calling. There are few things that bring me more joy than loading up and taking off on some sort of adventure across America. That started at an early age. Maybe it started before I was even born.

My grandfather, Tom, was a cowboy and, before that, he was a truck driver – driving groceries across Nebraska, where his father settled after he left Indiana. Eventually Tom hit the road, too, for Oregon and California. He’d come back to Oklahoma and head down to Louisiana. Before it was over he’d live in Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma, again, where he died a few months shy of 90 years old. 

My dad didn’t care for flying. He had worked marine rescue duty in the U.S. Air Force and worked at least one commercial flight that missed the runway – Air Japan II. A Midwesterner by birth, given the choice, he would much rather drive. 

Around the same time Air Japan II dipped, he hit the road with some friends to show them Mardi Gras – they took turns driving around the clock from San Francisco to New Orleans. He made that trip (to Shreveport) a few other times to visit his family. It was an epic trip. Like father, like son, I guess. 

We usually only took one long drive per year in my childhood – and that was from South Florida to East Texas for our family reunion. It was a two-day haul up the narrow peninsula and across Interstates 10 and 20. 

With my Walkman headphones in I watched the view outside the window change from the tropical palms of the Treasure Coast to the heavy pines of the American South. Mobile, Ala. was exciting – with the U.S.S. Alabama docked in the bay and the George Wallace Tunnel dropping us below the skyscrapers downtown. Louisiana was mysterious – with Cajun homes dotted across the water of the Atchafalaya Basin. East Texas was stately and sturdy – with its tall pines and red clay. 

I made this drive every year until we finally moved out to East Texas when I was 13 years old. That last drive was especially memorable. I rode with my cousin, Monty in his 18-wheeler, listening to him talk on the CB and reading from the Reader’s Digest magazines he kept on the dash. 

My high school years in Texas didn’t involve much traveling. My parents divorced and I mostly studied, hoping to get out of East Texas. The only chance to hit the road was playing soccer – we’d take off for a few hours down to Houston or over to Dallas to play some other school, passing around our CD binders and telling dirty jokes. Smelly vans but good memories. 

By the time I was in college I was ready to hit the road for real. Within a few weeks of touching down in Fort Worth I took off for Austin with a couple of friends – well, first to College Station to pick up a few other friends and then over to Austin. I’d repeat the trip with a couple of friends a few years later, this time from our hometown, Tyler. This was before iPhones, so we traveled by atlas and called it “living by our wits.” 

I’d make the run down to Austin many times from Fort Worth, but it felt more like a commute than a road trip. A road trip is an adventure. And an adventure is what happens when something goes wrong. 

Oh, and another trip my freshman year – a friend of mine, Jesse, was playing in a Christian rock band and they had a short tour planned across Louisiana. I volunteered with my friend Casey to be a roadie and merch table guy. We drove from Ruston to Baton Rouge in the middle of the night through a torrential downpour while I played Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on the iPod until my passengers begged me to turn it off. I still remember those Baton Rouge roads and a static-riddled version of Fats Domino’s “Walkin’ to New Orleans” on the radio in the early morning hours.

A couple of years later I took perhaps the most important road trip of my life – with my friends Nate and Ryan.

Inspired by the Paul Simon album and feeling a little boxed in by the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, I convinced the guys to go with me up to Memphis and see Graceland over Easter break. Each of us were aspiring writers and we vowed to use the experience to write an essay about ourselves. This trip had a purpose.  

The entire trip was an adventure. We only had a few hundred dollars between us and we pooled it to stay in a cheap Motel 6 outside of Little Rock that was dirty and, quite frankly, a little scary – the attendant took our money from behind bulletproof glass and truck drivers and lot lizards banged on the doors outside all night. We hit the road for Tennessee early.

In Memphis we stayed near Graceland in another cheap motel. We drank Jack Daniel’s and toured Elvis’s home, which was bizarre and glorious. We went to the National Civil Rights Museum and the Stax Museum. Both transformed me. Standing in the same room Martin Luther King Jr. did moments before he was shot on the balcony, with Mahalia Jackson’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” playing softly on the speakers, I was moved at a core level. The experience would completely change the way I saw race, the South and myself. I still haven’t gotten over it. 

On the way back we got a flat in rural Arkansas, argued with each other about splitting costs and failed to write the essays we had each said we would write about the experience. 

Well, here is mine, about 18 years late. 

A few years later and again I was feeling the itch to hit the road. My friend Andrew was going to grad school in Arizona and wanted a co-pilot. We drove across West Texas and into lonesome New Mexico joking about the billboards for “The Thing,” which ended up being a cheap tourist attraction just inside the Arizona border. What was it? I’m still not sure. Some kind of plastic skeleton. In El Paso and Tucson I got my first taste of the eerie twilight of desert life. Not for me, but worth seeing. I flew back on the plane next to two middle-aged drunks who made out the entire flight. 

I got a job and a little money in my pocket. That meant another trip to Memphis. This time I was enthralled by Big Star and the Jim Jarmusch movie Mystery Train. Memphis continues to fascinate me, and in some ways, it's the ultimate road trip destination – a rugged mid-century American city if there ever was one, all of our failures and triumphs in one very complicated, gritty place, a station between the 20th century highways and the 19th century steamboats of the Mississippi River. Memphis is always at a crossroads. 

Eventually, I talked another friend, Patrick into going back to Florida with me for some spring training baseball games. The first year, we flew standby. That was its own adventure, but the next year we added our friend Philip to the mix and decided to drive. 

Those trips were epic in scope, and for about five years they were a big part of my life. We planned long excursions that took us to New Orleans and down deep into Florida – to Miami Beach and Tampa and all points in between. We made special playlists, packed snacks and set off for adventure. There were late nights and story after story, inside jokes and more than a few mishaps. Living by our wits. 

The night of my 10th high school reunion I was three states away. 

Patrick and I bought tickets to a Mike Cooley show in Birmingham – someplace we’d never been and where we knew no one. Back onto the road in his Toyota. We spent the night after the show with locals, drinking beers and talking about the similarities and differences between the Ark-La-Tex and Alabama. It was a magical trip and we’ve never had that much fun in Birmingham since. 

I’d also take off a few days in the fall and take my mom down to Florida, again driving. She’d visit her mother and sister. Sometimes we went off on sidequests, too, like to Stuart, where I was born, or to Cedar Key, where her grandmother was born. Oftentimes we skipped I-10 in the Panhandle and opted for Highway 98 across the rolling sand dunes of the Gulf of Mexico and through Panama City, mom’s hometown. I fell back in love with Florida and in a few short years, I’d covered almost all of it a few times over. 

More years, more miles. I went out to Big Bend National Park and Marfa. I took a few trips out to California and shakily learned how to drive on those golden hills. Patrick moved to Oregon and we went up there. We decided he needed to say goodbye to the South and took him on a long journey from Shreveport to Birmingham to Memphis and back again. 

I took a couple of big trips – the first was to move to Jacksonville. Loaded up in a Penske truck, I said goodbye to Texas with my entire life behind me. I still think about that trip a lot. I think about the hopes and dreams I had at the time and how they ended up. I think about how I felt and what life looked like through the windshield. A few months later, I repeated the trip when my mom moved to Tampa. 

A decade flew by outside my window. I got a job as a consultant and spent a fair amount of time flying to remote spots across the country, but also occasionally driving across the Carolinas or Virginia. Then the pandemic hit. Life got pretty complicated. The movement stopped and I felt stagnant and still. 

Lately the main journey I make is down to visit my mom in Tampa. It’s a few hours from here and it’s become a familiar road – across to highway 301, down to I-75. I think about Elvis a lot on the trip, mostly because of his movie Follow that Dream, which was filmed in the area. I think about Tom Petty, who was born in Gainesville and loved a good road trip himself. His lyrics – ”Runnin’ Down a Dream,” “American Girl” – are dotted with highway references. As a kid Petty met Elvis on the set of Follow that Dream. A few years later he was on his way to Los Angeles (with a detour through Tulsa), where he would become a rock legend in his own right. The road leads you where you are meant to be. And if it’s in America, you’ll find music and food and stories and legends and graveyards and a feeling in your soul that maybe can’t be put into words. 

So, what’s the point of this post? Here it is. 

When I was in journalism school the New York Times reporter Adam Clymer visited our class. Someone asked him for advice for a young journalist and he said we should get out and see America before it becomes completely homogenized. From his perspective, this was still a weird, wild and wonderful land. I don’t remember much else he said, but that stuck with me.

And while the road can feel like one Wendy’s after another these days, nearly 20 years after he gave that advice, the country is still pretty heterogeneous, whether anyone realizes it or not. Yes, people are glued to their phones everywhere. Yes, Walmart is everywhere. But the geography and the topography still rules. History still haunts. When you go to West Virginia and California and Florida and Oklahoma and Arizona you see just what a vast and magnificent country this is – or perhaps what a magnificent country it was. You start to see there are many, many Americas. There is no one America for you to find. There is just an ever-changing landscape, physical, emotional, spiritual. There are so many Americas still to see.  

Two thoughts and I’ll let you go. Years ago I read an interview with country legend Merle Haggard and two things he said stuck with me. First, he said, “I’m living at the end of what must have been a wonderful country.” A few paragraphs later he said, “They've left the redwoods up alongside the highway so we'll think they're all there. But go up in an airplane and you'll see that they've clear-cut everything behind.” 

I suppose I’ve been blinded by the redwoods. Too close to the country to see what is lost, holding on too tightly to those last remaining trees. But Haggard spent most of his time in a bus running the roads right up until he died. He could see the light in between, too. He had no intention of getting off the road. He couldn’t stop them from clear-cutting the forest and I sure can’t either. So, what else was there to do but keep going? Keep seeing what’s left of this wonderful country. Write about it. I’ve said it before and I still believe it: America is roads. Get going.

Which, I guess, brings us back to Jack Kerouac. “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”