Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And very, very American. Among other things, my path through the nation has made
me far more admiring of the nation.
I'm not speaking only of the scenic highlights, though the Columbia River gorge, Gla-
cier National Park, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi
River, and the Great Allegheny Passage in the full flush of autumn are more than enough
to make a patriot out of a cynic.
This was a journey by a New Yorker who became more of an Oregonian, more of a
Washingtonian, Idahoan, Montanan, North Dakotan, Minnesotan—you get the idea—as
he went along. By virtue of absorbing upwards of four thousand miles of thrilling land-
scape, inch by inch, I learned more about topography and how it figures in the identities
of thousands of localities and millions of citizens than I had ever understood.
Is there any way for a cyclist, especially one from a vertical metropolis, not to be awe-
struck by northern Montana? It took me two weeks to cross its astonishing expanse,
from the dauntingly immense Rockies in the west to the endless, wind-whipped flatland
of the east, where the towns are dots on the highway dozens of miles apart, pulsing on
the prairie like blips on a colossal oscilloscope. As I sit here, it feels like there are more
lightbulbs in my apartment building than there are in the entire state.
Easterners, city dwellers, and certainly Manhattanites tend to view the West with a
kind of dismissive interest in its vastness and little interest at all in its variations. But
it was striking to me how equally remote regions are hewn by different forces. In the
Palouse of eastern Washington, where the golden wheat fields were so blanched by the
summer sun that they seemed to reflect the light, life revolves around the heat and the
harvest. A month after I left there, I passed through the flood-riddled plains of eastern
North Dakota, where crops had been compromised and grazing land for sheep and cattle
submerged, and everyone joked unhappily about a cloudburst gathering beyond the ho-
rizon. Worrying about storms is something we rarely do in New York, where threatening
weather is relatively anomalous, 1 but I got the sense of what it must be like to always
have one eye cast fretfully upward, even on sunny days, scanning the heavens for the
next bad news.
In the heartland—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio—day after day I traversed
enormous farms, and the sheer acreage of corn and soybeans, not to mention the huge
grain silos and mammoth tractors and hay trucks, testified to the unending labor of farm-
ers. They were always out working in the rain, and as I rode by, sodden myself, they
always waved.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search