Where's the Northwest Passage?

Nearly every sitcom or cartoon features a road trip episode. Rachel and the gang drive to go skiing but run out of gas, leading Ross to swoop in and rescue them. Spongebob gets lost and winds up in the frightening Rock Bottom. Hijinks and mishaps ensue.

So, my friend Emmett and I set off from the quiet town of Bedford, New York on our way to the fabled American West. As we left, I wondered what kind of place we aimed to carve out in pop culture and American comings-of-age.

Even if the scenery is new, road trips are always familiar. For one, we’ve all spent hours of our lives wasting away in cars. For two, the well-worn structure of road stories fills us with preconceived notions. Upon exiting a remarkably long Allegheny tunnel to look out into more-impressive-than-expected Pennsylvania mountains, we stopped at an ordinary gas station. I thought to myself, “Ahh. This must be the part of the trip where we get gas!” When we stopped to use the bathroom in West Virginia, I thought “Ahh, this is when we take a rock with us to prove we’ve been to West Virginia!”

I’d imagined I would spend my days eating in quaint truck stops, my evenings making friends with patrons at small-town bars, and my nights in surprisingly comfortable neon-lit family owned motels.

All in all, none of our stops could be called discoveries. This was not for lack of trying, but rather because so many places in this country are worth visiting that we felt neither willing nor able to explore the tier below the vaguely familiar. Some of our stops, like the Four Corners, occurred for the mere sake of their own notoriety.

We drove 30 minutes out of the way so that we could pay $10 to stand in New Mexico and jump between Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. The lonely entrance tollbooth satisfied our itch for absurdity. Not quite Prada Marfa, but still alone and out of place. The building might not be so alone, though, as one park visitor center warned that the top half-inch of desert soil is a veritable rainforest of microbial life and that their feelings are very important, so please stay on the paths.

The four corners has sat unremarkably on this Navajo land and was, forever, indistinguishable from any other piece of desert. Only by chance do four arbitrary state borders, superimposed by the US government, intersect here. Without this stroke of pen, this plot of land would have remained in obscurity. As the sovereign authority on this land, then, it is the Navajo and not the US government who collects entrance fees from tourists, even though the site is more or less a monument to an externality of the US government’s displacement and mass-murder of indigenous peoples. The place makes little sense.

The culinary side of the trip combined the renown with the hidden gems and the depressing. Starting from the bottom, we found that none of the restaurants in Springdale, Utah, outside Zion National Park, were open on an out-of-season Wednesday night. Thankfully, our motel room had a microwave capable of heating Hot Pockets to mouth-destroying temperatures. Eating Hot Pockets in bed wasn’t so bad, though, because the motel owners had oriented our beds perpendicular to one another rather than parallel. You’d be amazed the difference this makes. Slightly higher up is the fact that the first day of the trip, we had so focused on driving 1008 miles to St. Louis that we didn’t really stop for food, but we burned at most 26 calories, so it was fine.

The hidden gems included a handful of diners, most notably one outside of St. Louis where they used a whole bowl of chili as a topping for Emmett’s “little girl” sized three egg omelet. The six, nine, and twelve egg sizes had progressively more masculine names. My biscuits and sausage gravy really hit the spot, however, and they continued to make themselves known for hours thereafter. A tacky tiki Hawaiian themed joint in Monterey also delighted us, though we might have just been claiming to tolerate spice better than we did.

Somewhere in between lies Frontier Restaurant in Albuquerque. A friend of Emmett’s deemed this barn-shaped Mexican joint near New Mexico State University one of the best values in the state. $13 bought me tortilla soup, chicken enchiladas, a junior burrito, a cinnamon bun, and all the tap water I could drink.

As for the renown, Arthur Bryant’s BBQ in Kansas City, MO takes the cake. The walls are covered in clippings of famous people who have eaten there, dating back to then-incumbent Jimmy Carter. A photo of Stan Musial and Mickey Mantle at the 1960 Kansas City All Star Game harkened even further back to when elite athletes smoked a pack of cigarettes and drowned their insides in fat, grease, and sauce without compromising performance. A cartoon on the wall featured an angel escorting the original Arthur Bryant towards the Pearly Gates, confirming that Mr. Bryant had brought his famous sauce in his suitcase. I ate the ribs, Emmett ate a brisket and burnt ends sandwich, and even the cole slaw tasted spectacular.

In Moab, Utah, we spent two nights at our favorite and cheapest motel, the Arches Gateway Inn. I cannot recommend it highly enough; just call and don’t tell the receptionist that I sent you. Utah liquor laws are such that draft beer cannot exceed 4.0% ABV, but canned beer can be as high as anybody can stomach if sold by properly licensed purveyors. Moab Brewery’s 9.6% FMU IPA therefore tasted remarkably good to somebody who can normally tolerate neither the taste nor the alleged caché of IPAs. Two consecutive dinners here informed me that we had landed in a part of the country where bars execute pork burritos more deftly than cheeseburgers.

One gentleman at a bar in Limon, Colorado was a bit too eager to chat with us about how he liked all music except rap, which he just couldn’t get behind despite “giving it a chance.” Despite this, ahem, open-mindedness, Moab was where we felt most able to chat with strangers. The series of outdoor guides at the bar in jeans, slightly too technical quarterzips, beanies, and trail runners seemed familiar enough. We never spoke to them, though, because people don’t do that anymore.

Those familiar with road trip lore might expect that Emmett and I conversed long enough to develop our own language and to articulate the purest truths of life. Had this been the case, we would not share this wisdom. However, such is not the case, because we listened to two books on tape. One tried to impart truths on us, but we didn’t listen attentively enough. The second was a juicy novel about a Bennington College stand-in. Any heights our conversation did reach will remain in the Civic and along the public trails of National Parks.

As for the parks, we discovered that winter might be the best season to visit. While we planned poorly enough to bring camping gear to snow-covered, sub-20 degree deserts, visiting a handful of renown parks during the winter proved a fantastic decision.

At Goosenecks State Park, our first park after the Four Corners, we saw just one other car, which left as soon as we showed up. All alone, at the remote end of a winding, dipping road, we ran in circles laughing about the absurd beauty of a sun setting into a striated, snaking canyon. The park’s name comes from the Goosenecks, the series of narrow promontories left behind as the San Juan River carved and eroded its way through a series of inefficient S curves along the Colorado Plateau. The permanent inefficiency in nature seems like a teachable moment.

To reach the hiking trail we had planned for Arches, we drove along a 15 mile two-lane road. The scenery on either side dazzled, and a dry, clear blue day granted us infinite visibility. We felt alone in a vast, alien world and could only guess at the sweltering summers with their endless lines of cars creeping toward already-full trailhead parking lots.

Similarly, Bryce Canyon even waved our entrance fee because we visited out of season. The canyon, really an amphitheater, and its famous Oh, the Places You’ll Go! hoodoos stood out even more sharply, just as in arches, because of the snow’s white contrast. As we concluded our hike in Bryce, we approached the 8000’ elevation at the canyon’s rim to find what I had jokingly suspected we would encounter at each of our emptiest, most remote turns: a busload of incongruously fashion-forward Chinese tourists. Out of season, and potentially in the summer too, the town of Bryce had depressingly few food options, so who knows where they ate. We didn’t see them at the Big Fish Family Restaurant in the town of Penguitch. Even in Utah, Family Restaurant does not imply that they don’t serve beer.

Departing the Big Fish, we drove through Zion National Park to reach the perpendicular-bed motel on the park’s opposite side. Despite the dark, the 129 deer and some tight turns led me to believe we drove through some remarkable landscapes. In the morning, we dropped our jaws at the looming red canyon walls.

Our hike to Observation Point brought us along some chillingly sheer cliffs and through a claustrophobic, narrow slot canyon until we returned to the snow covered high plateau. A ranger had suggested, as at both Bryce and Arches, that we buy $25 crampons to help us cheat death on the icy trail. Though we had scoffed at this suggestion earlier, we went as far as to hold a pair each in our hands this time. Not to be parted with any cash, we backed off from the precipice and risked it, trusting our mountain-goat spryness.

The drive out of Utah went straight downhill. I-15 took us through the Virgin River Gorge, one of the most expensive sections of interstate built in the entire country. As we emerged from a handful of mountains into the northwestern corner of Arizona, I saw a handful of those psi-shaped cacti that I always imagined dominated Arizona. I decided that road trip snobs who bemoan interstates are wrong.

In Nevada, we passed an Inn-n-Out Burger, the harbinger of all things Californian, and I began to feel sad that our trip might end without much of the horrifying or hilarious. We drove down the Las Vegas strip but elected to keep our money. Some eight roadside signs explained California’s esoteric laws as we crossed a no-man’s land between the Nevada border and some very real, state trooper-manned toll booths. California is ready to secede from the union. In the California Republic, gas and motel prices skyrocketed, forcing us to find our worst deal and grimmest motel in the Barstow Econolodge. As a silver lining, the ragged wooden dresser had metamorphosed into a beautiful bottle opener. Motel 6 outposts typically have bottle openers on the bathroom vanities, but the two in this town were too expensive.

The next morning, we hit the California Coast just south of Big Sur, our final park. The sharpness and finality of the Pacific Coast lent our arrival more of a sense of accomplishment than I had anticipated. Considering that all it took was some small movements of our wrists and right feet, the real beauty here was this unearned sense of accomplishment. Each time we reached new, higher elevations, we felt that we were somehow winning, and it felt great. Being the only life visible in a given vista, too, helped us feel  that we had pushed the boundaries of something, even though we spent the rest of the trip thinking about how trips like ours were supposed to go.

Lots of other stuff happened too, some of it noteworthy. We saw a great many things we never expected to see, and a handful that we never could have known existed. While the Civic was not Ken Kesey's refurbished school bus Furthur, neither Carlo Marx nor Dean Moriarty showed up, and we several times exercised in our motel room, we did our best to maximize the idea of the road trip in a world where risk, consequence, and safety matter. We put over 4,100 miles on the whip, and we never even argued.