After breaking camp and eating breakfast at the Cedar Pass Lodge, we headed toward the Interstate, stopping once by a nature trail to take pictures. The morning sun had burned off the mist by now. A young couple walked by us, back-dropped by a moonscape of sandstone towers, and the woman said laconically, "So what's there to see?" A little girl walked by and commented excitedly of the scenery, "It looks like an earth-shake!" A magpie, big and black as raven but with white hash marks, slouched and waddled Groucho-style up and down in front of the parked cars, turning its head towards the cars as if inspecting license plates. It stopped in front of a Jeep Cherokee, hopped up on the bumper, plucked a cooked and juicy grasshopper from the grill with its beak, and hopped back onto the sidewalk to eat its breakfast. We reached Minnesota by mid-afternoon, and stopped at the Mall of America towards evening, just to see the biggest shopping center in the world. A family-oriented bistro promised a live show, titled "Way Out West: Our Western Myths Revisited in Song and Comedy". We crossed the Mississippi River by eight that night; effectively back in the settled East.

*****

My wife and step-son and I had begun our trip ten days before at five AM in New Jersey, taking the Turnpike to Interstate Route 76; the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We drove through rolling farmlands that quickly became steeper as we threaded and curved our way into the heart of the Appalachians. Gangs of cows would huddle in the shadows of roadside signs. Frequently, a flock of birds would pass overhead, like a cloud of pepper on a sneeze of wind. Around a sharp turn, we entered the Blue Mountain and Kittatinney Tunnels in quick succession. Thirteen miles farther along, the Tuscarora Tunnel, and then the Allegheny Tunnel about eight miles beyond that. Passing through these tunnels gave a finality to the fact that we were leaving the settled East behind and entering a new world; the West.

The mountains grew rugged in western Pennsylvania as we left the Turnpike and continued on Interstate 70, through thirty miles of West Virginia, into the green rolling hills of Ohio. In central Indiana, we became stuck in traffic in the middle of a cornfield that seemed to have begun at the Ohio border and looked as if it stretched to Illinois. I looked to my right and saw a sign that read "Bayliss State Ditch". What was so extraordinary about this particular ditch to give it such a title?

We stopped for gas at Vandalia, Illinois at eight forty-five PM, under the brooding glare of a purple/granite-gray thundercloud. In advance of it, like a wolf bearing its teeth, came a thin white cloud with a jagged edge. I hadn't seen so dark a thunderhead since leaving Illinois almost twenty-one years before. We got back into our van and started out onto the Interstate again. The cloud seemed to loom ever closer to our right, while on our left the sky remained clear.

Suddenly, the wind came up, and an invisible hand seemed to slip that dark cover completely over the land. Raindrops the size of raisinettes pelted the windshield faster than the wipers could whisk them away. Lightning popped like a flashbulb, teasingly illuminating the area for a second. Visibility was so poor that I had to pull over to the shoulder and wait out the storm. Wind and leaves screamed by, and the van rocked dangerously. Were we in the path of a tornado? There was no way to tell. The darkness and the rain-glaze on the windshield was broken only occasionally by the pinched faces of stray leaves slapped onto the windshield and then torn away again. The storm continued to strafe the van with machine-gun sprays of raindrops, and then as suddenly as it began, the storm exhausted itself, and a gentle rain fell.

An hour later, we crossed the Mississippi River into St Louis. Gaily-lit riverboats moored on the Missouri side promised casino gambling, and the arch rose above city and river, a gray loop touching the sky. Thirty miles west of St. Louis, in a suburban sprawl, we reached the one thousand mile mark and decided to stop for the night. There were no rooms available at the two motels we stopped at, so we went farther west and tried our luck at three other places. Again, no room at the inn.

It was getting on midnight now. My wife drove for a while, as I napped. When I took my turn at the wheel again, we drove another hour and decided to try one more place. The motel office was closed. Fighting sleep, I pulled in front of a row of rooms and tried to make the van look as inconspicuous as possible. My stepson had fallen asleep, and I napped briefly at the wheel. After fifteen minutes, a sense of insecurity slowly came over me and I awoke. My wife had not slept at all. I said to her, "I do not feel safe here". She had felt it, too. We got back onto the Interstate. Farther down the road, I stopped for coffee and gas. There would be no more stopping until we reached Kansas.

At four AM, we crossed the Kansas River and rolled into Lawrence, where Kansas State University is, and booked the last room in town and, twenty-four hours after setting out, we slept.

Click here to go to the next page.