Back Roads America [antikvár]

PrologueTRAVELING ACROSS THE COUNTRY is an American dream. To climb aboard a bus or a train, or hop onto a motorcycle, or slip into a car and go-justg^ois a basic romantic impulse. Movement is freedom, and to travel the breadth of the country is to proclaim that freedom in a bold and ebullient way.The geography of the United States is now well mapped, and the regional cultures well chronicled. Yet the variety of people and places is so rich that a cross-country traveler is bound to discover something new. As the miles pass, the sense of explorationsomewhat atrophied in our modern daygradually reasserts itself.The dream can take shape at any stage of life. Mine began on a Sunday in central Illinois when I was a crew-cut boy. My parents had gathered the children together for a drive south to a town named Paris. Mother had heard that the flat farmland began to roll and rise in hills near there. After two hours of driving we reached our destination, and all around us was cropland, flat as a tabletop. Thinking we hadn't gone far enough, we continued down the road, but another hour of driving didn't produce one hill or swell of earth.During that day my midwestern imagination had not been content with gently rolling countryside; it had become landscaped with mighty bluffs, plateaus, and mountains. When my parents finally turned the car toward home, my mind continued to travel, passing rivers and towns whose names I had read on maps, until I reached mountains that rose like thrones. I pictured myself being invited into a smoke-scented cabin for a meal of venison and berry pie. How unfair of my parents to have stopped south of Paris, Illinois. The rest of the country, I believed, was just down that road.I found the road again, for it can appear anywhere and be designated by any number; you need only realize that it can carry you across the country. This time it stretched north from Washington, D.C. It was February 1979; a blizzard blew. Assigned to write a book about traveling through America, I had the opportunity at last to follow the road.In nine months I covered 20,000 miles in a van outfitted and stocked for roaming. I had no plotted route, no sheaf of reservations, no address book of contacts. My editors in Washington had simply instructed me to stay away from cities and interstate highways.So I wandered the back roads, stitching my route from small town to small town, most of them with a population of fewer than 3,000 people. Photographer Ira Block followed in a van of his own some two to four weeks behind, catching up occasionally for certain events. We were looking for people and for activitiesa longhorn cattle rancher in Texas, an ice harvest in Vermont that were emblematic of their geographical regions; that owed their vitality to the open land and to the close-knit community feelings that back roads life can offer.In 1926 Will Rogers said: "Americans are getting like a Ford carthey all have the same parts, the same upholstering and make exactly the same noises."Now, half a century later, the homogenization of America has intensified, leaving Main Street and the man on the street looking and sounding much the same across the country. Nevertheless, following