The Great American Road Trip

In the spring of 1995, during my sophomore year at the University of Illinois, I learned that I was going to win a leadership award that came with a $500 check. I called my friend Jeff Pinzino, who had graduated from Illinois the year before and was now suffering through a Master's program at the University of Chicago, and popped the following question: “How about seeing how far this money will take us in my Oldsmobile this summer?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone. Back then, most of our conversations were about post-colonial literature, and I could tell that I had taken Jeff aback with a rather modernist question. But he recovered admirably. “Let’s go,” he said. No two ways to interpret that.

Not surprisingly, our parents weren't thrilled. Had they worked so hard to send us to good universities so we could blow a summer tooling around the country? Wasn’t there an internship “doing computers” that we could get to put us ahead of “the competition”?

But when we insisted, they offered remarkably little resistance. My mother even packed several days worth of Indian food for the journey (which caused the Oldsmobile to smell like Hyderabad within several minutes). And so we pointed the Oldsmobile south on I-57 heading out of Chicago, rolled the windows down, and began our travels whooping like little kids on a roller coaster.

People track their lives in different ways. Winter storms, Thanksgiving dinners, county fairs, Grateful Dead shows, Final Four tournaments.

I mark mine by road trips.

I’ve learned as much about America from midnight conversations with gas station attendants outside of Tulsa as I did in AP American History.

Road trip literature was my window to the world since I started reading serious books. I can still recite whole paragraphs from William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

I’ve road tripped with several people across several countries, but in no place more lovingly than America, and with no person more often than Jeff.

Each trip, we share our favorite music and literature discoveries of the past year. He introduced me to Ani Difranco and Walt Whitman, I introduced him to Phish and Rabindranath Tagore. We spend the highway miles trying to weave the random moments of the past year into a coherent narrative.

That first road trip lasted seven weeks – we went all the way down to Atlanta, up to Boston and then back to the Midwest. We learned that rest-stop McDonalds are good places to find clean bathrooms, and that making your own hummus sounds good in theory, but it takes more than mashing up chick peas and mixing them with garlic cloves. (“I think something’s missing,” Jeff pondered as he slowly chewed the fruits of that particular labor.)

A few years later, Jeff and I took ten days off and followed the Mississippi down to New Orleans. A couple of years ago, we met in Los Angeles (where Jeff’s brother Dave was working on a screenplay), rented a car, and drove it up Highway One to San Francisco.

The more trappings of middle class life we’ve acquired (wife, baby, job you can’t quit), and the more gas prices have gone up, the shorter the trips have gotten.

This year, we’re going for one night to Madison. It’s a far cry from having $500 and a whole summer in front of you. If there’s hummus in the cards, it will most likely be purchased.

But Jeff’s put together a compilation CD of his favorite music from the past year. I’m bringing Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection.

There are lots of stories to tell between here and Madison. I’m smiling just thinking about it.

Check out Jeff's music blog,

By Eboo Patel  |  June 29, 2008; 11:08 PM ET  | Category:  The Faith Divide
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