In the early 1950s, Jack Kerouac left his home in New York City and took a little trip. He traveled across the country while driving with or meeting some of the most prominent writers of that era, including William S. Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. When he finished his vacation and began to write, referring to stacks of notebooks he had filled during the epic journey, he found traditional typing too slow to keep up with the racing thoughts in his brain. So, he taped stacks of tracing paper together into one, continuous, 120-feet-long piece of paper, fed one end into his typewriter, and filled it with stream-of-consciousness thoughts without punctuation, paragraph breaks, or margins. It took his editor four years to turn the mess into a publishable book. The end result, however, became the classic novel of the “Beat Generation.” That 1957 book, On the Road, chronicled his frenzied travel adventures fueled by jazz music, manic energy, and mind-expanding drugs; it became a key document for the counter culture during the decade that followed.
Kathleen and I recently embarked on a more sedate version of Kerouac’s odyssey, minus, of course, the jazz, the energy, or the drugs (unless you count Kathleen’s blood-pressure medicine). We traveled down to Florida for a week’s stay in Punta Gorda, stopping along the way in Champaign, Marion, Illinois, Huntsville, Alabama, and Perry, Florida to visit with friends and relatives. We had some great visits as we meandered south and enjoyed watching the temperatures rise, the grass turn green, and the daffodils appear in the woods along the road. Kathleen handled the driving, so I was able to start and finish two books, both set in the area of southwest Florida where we would be staying. One was written by Randy Wayne White, whose Marine Biologist-slash-private detective named Doc Ford operates out of a sleepy fishing village on Sanibel Island. The other, a novel called Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey, follows the continuing misadventures of Serge Storms, a native Floridian who loves arcane historical landmarks and hates those who damage them or the fragile tropical environment of his home state. He leaves a string of bodies in his wake, with all of the victims murdered in some painful and creative manner. I hope we are able to visit some of the places he mentions in this and other hilarious books featuring Serge.
Another thing we tried to do on the trip down here was to get off of the interstates as we drove. Twenty-five years after Kerouac’s novel, William Least Heat-Moon wrote another book about travels across the country. In his 1982 non-fiction, best-seller, Blue Highways, the author lost his job and his wife and set off on a soul-searching journey. His theory was that the interstate highways gave travelers the impression that all of the US was a never-ending parade of sameness, with similar chain restaurants and gas stations at every exit. Thus, he chose to drive along the back roads, marked in blue on the old Rand McNally maps, feeling that only there would he see the true America. He met with interesting characters and reached some intriguing philosophical conclusions along those roads less-traveled by. I read and was inspired by that book when it first came out, but I never had the free time to apply its main premise to my own travels. Now I do! Kathleen and I set out on our trip determined to get off of the interstates whenever possible. We have the 2020 version of the Rand-McNally Road Atlas, although it was not easy to find. Apparently, we are the last people in America to use actual maps, rather than the GPS app on their phones.
We avoided congested Nashville completely, leaving I-24 at Clarksville and winding our way down to Huntsville. We stayed off I-65 when we continued south from there and drifted through some scenic areas of hills and lakes in western Alabama. When we crossed into southern Georgia, however, the scenery ended—along with pretty much everything else. For 150 miles, from Columbus, Georgia to the Florida state line, there was a complete lack of humans or anything of interest. A couple of tiny towns were bypassed by the road we were on, leaving nothing to see but scrub pine, rusted and crumbling shacks, and scary-looking mobile home parks. There were no gas stations, restaurants, fast-food places, or any other businesses. One billboard we saw read simply “Trump” on one half, while the other half advertised a store where automatic assault weapons were available. At one point, we turned off of our road in search of food. While we slowly rolled through a depressed-looking, sleepy town called Cuthbert, no actual people were out and about. I suddenly remembered that every horror movie involving forced imprisonment and torture started with the words, “Hey! Let’s check out this little town and see if we can find something to eat.” We circled back to our main road and eventually stumbled onto a Huddle House restaurant. I’m glad we did, because we didn’t see another business of any sort until we reached Florida. In that state, we continued to drive on side roads whenever possible until we reached Punta Gorda.
So, was our Blue Highways experiment a success or a failure? On the one hand, we decided that it was a relaxing drive, with much less traffic or stress than on the interstates. Most of the roads we found were divided, four-lane roads that allowed speeds of 65 MPH except when passing through an occasional town. Therefore, we discovered that we didn’t lose any time by taking the more-direct, diversionary routes.
On the other hand—southwestern Georgia. When you can drive for several hours without seeing an actual town or a gas station, your mind immediately goes into worse-case-scenario mode. If we ran out of gas or had mechanical problems, it might take hours until a AAA tow-truck could arrive from the nearest city. That is, if you can even get cell phone reception in such out-of-the-way places. I’m sure I’ll be having recurring nightmares about having to walk up to one of those decaying homes and knocking on the door to ask for help while a toothless kid plays his banjo on the porch swing.
In the next installment, I’ll talk about our wonderful house in Punta Gorda and Florida in general.