From San Francisco to Washington

January 28, 2011

San Francisco is enshrouded in fog as my plane takes off at 10 AM on Friday, January 28, bound for Washington, DC. Only the immense television tower on Mt. Sutro pokes its red and white top through the undulating gray carpet. After a gradual bank eastward, the green Berkeley Hills interrupt the expanse briefly, whereupon it continues to the Sierra Nevada, which are snowy as their name suggests. 

It has been a wet winter in California. The rain began in mid-November and continued with few interruptions until early January. Water courses out of vast canyons and collects in serpentine lakes behind unseen dams.  

Then the mountains show themselves under a think blanket of snow. I know from experience that Yosemite Valley is probably visible from the south side of the airplane. I’m on the north. Yet the canyons and valleys I see are a spectacular sight in themselves. 

After a few minutes, the Sierra slide effortlessly by and I am over the light brown and apparently lifeless expanse of the great high desert to the east. Since it is winter, this table land is now marked by what appear to be trickles of water that must be raging torrents brought to life by snowmelt. What in the summer would be dry riverbeds and mostly invisible are now dark blue or gray undulations in the earth’s surface. 

We follow Interstate 80, which seems to attract secondary roads and railroads that converge and diverge from it. Then the interstate moves off to the northeast and for about half an hour there is no evidence of human habitation, not a road, not a house, not a power line. Finally a tiny smokestack appears, a single road leading to it, but there are no buildings anywhere near. Who works here? How do they get here? What do they make here - mine and refine something? What else could it be? 

An occasional broad, brown valley streaked with wispy strips of snow divides the ranges of white mountains from one another. I imagine that this high desert is something like Central Asia, a territory best crossed on the back of a camel or accompanied by a caravan of yaks. 

Ice crystals form on the window. The tiny television screen provided by Virgin America informs me that we are at about 35,000 feet and it is 60 below zero outside, Fahrenheit. Cloud cover. I pick up my new traveling companion, Travels with Herodotus, by Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of my literary heroes and namesake, were I Polish. I bought the hard cover at Copperfield’s in Santa Rosa for eight dollars. He begins with his first brief travels outside of Poland in the 1950s, to India and to China. Only after these first chapters does he say much about Herodotus, whom he began to read when he was still at home in Poland, trying to write about countries he had never visited during those years when communist governments were loathe to allow journalists to travel abroad: 

“Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among the matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks.” 

Kapuscinski follows this with an essay on memory and Herodotus as the first journalist, who relied upon living informants, for there were almost no others: no archives, no records, no books. In those days, if one wanted to know about a distant place, as Herodotus did, one either had to go there or talk to someone who had been there. Or talk to someone who had talked to someone who had talked to someone . . . who had been there. Or so he claimed. 

Land emerges from under the clouds again and I put the book down. This bleak landscape is transformed by snow into something beautiful, especially when the sun picks up the yellow, red, and orange of these canyons below. I focus on one great canyon in particular, bright red, dusted with snow, and sprinkled with tiny trees or perhaps sagebrush. The whole landscape looks like it could be bent into a Christmas tree ornament or a holiday confection covered with powdered sugar. Here and there a line or two in the snow marks a highway, a railroad, a telegraph line. There is an occasional copse of trees, a pond, an isolated farmhouse connected by a line in the snow to another line. 

Meanwhile Kapucsinski, by way of Herodotus, ponders the nature of difference and conflict. Herodotus lived in the 5th Century BC, at a time when the Persians twice invaded Greece, unsuccessfully, yet remained the superpower on the Greek horizon. What caused the hostilities between Greeks and Persians? Or among the Greeks themselves, or all the hostilities since? Why do these people hate us? Why do we hate them? Why do the nations so furiously rage together? One might say that Herodotus walked to the ends of the earth to find an answer to these questions. 

The Persians with whom he spoke maintained that the East-West conflict of the day was all started by men stealing women. A man stealing a woman was certainly the legendary cause of the Trojan War. Something had to start it. Someone crosses a line, sometimes a literal line in the sand, or soil and embarks upon a war of aggression; or someone crosses a metaphorical line, a line demarking decent behavior from indecent, beginning a long chain of stroke and counterstroke, aggression and revenge. Kapuscinski writes: “What happened? Simply this: that you have been revenged upon for crimes perpetrated ten generations ago by a forefather whose existence you weren’t even aware of. . . . in Herodotus’s world, (as well as in various societies today) the eternal law of revenge, the law of reprisal, of an eye for an eye, was (and remains) alive and well. Revenge is not only a right – it is a most sacred obligation.” Journalists and historians cover these stories well, for they, not to mention their readers, are drawn to the exceptional and the dramatic. War and conflict also demark both vast periods of time and huge expanses of earthly space from one another, between Persian rule and Roman, between Arab and Turk, between British and American. 

Of course there are often vast periods of peace in between conflict. This vast land below, compared in terms of history to Europe, is remarkably uneventful. The conflicts of Europe have been well-chronicled for at least eight centuries and chronicled in some fashion for two millennia before that. There is no shortage of written records and old buildings and walls to sift through. The center of the American continent under the clouds below has been the subject of history for at most a few hundred years. There has been one major conflict, the Civil War. There has been essentially one government. 

More clouds stretch out below. I doze off. When I awake, the rocky, arid west has been left behind and we are over the well-marked fields and roads of the Midwest. As far as the eye can see is farmhouses, roads and fields, with occasional stands of trees. We are in the east; east of the longitudinal line through the heart of North America that marks the border between farming and ranching, west of which there is often neither farming nor ranching, nor much of anything growing at all. Despite being east of this line, we call this the Midwest, the land of Central Time, where I grew up and came to manhood, the limitless grassland where, midway through Ole Rolvaag’s novels, the heroines go stark raving mad. 

I poke some buttons in front of me and the little red airplane appears in northern Iowa near the Minnesota border. Usually the plane follows Interstate 80 most of the way across the country. Some weather and wind pattern must have made the pilots wander a couple hundred miles north. A carpet of clouds again gains command of the landscape. After a few minutes the first shadows of evening appear on the undulating surface as we traverse Lake Michigan, whose waters accentuate the blueness. 

A few seats in front of me an infant begins to cry, gurgles, then carries on as if it were being wantonly strangled. Then just as quickly as the fuss began, it goes back to sleep and all is quiet aboard the jetliner. 

As the clouds below carry on their dominance, I return to Herodoscinski and his Niebuhrian meditations on the nature and madness of man, about Croesus and Cyrus settling their differences and embarking upon the conquest of the Massagetae, who lived east of the Caspian Sea. Cyrus wanted to rule over this land, cooking up some story of Massagetaean trespass from generations earlier to justify his invasion. What must the two kings have talked about as they rode along in a golden carriage drawn by horses while the soldiers plodded along, often driven by the lash? Did they talk at all? This Cyrus, whom the Greeks dreaded and despised, whose son and grandson the Greeks despised even more, was nonetheless beloved by the Judeans. Isaiah referred to him with great praise and many commentators claim that Isaiah believed Cyrus to be the Messiah. 

Cyrus, for all of his faults, was a monotheist and took pity on the Judaean monotheists his Babylonian enemies had taken captive. On the theory that an enemy of his enemy was his friend, he returned these captives to Jerusalem along with a check for their temple restoration and neighborhood rebuilding fund. I’m not making this up. 

The years of Persian domination, roughly 500 – 320 BC, were good years for the Jews. They were good years for the Greeks as well, but in spite of the Persians, not because of them. The Persians ruled Judea benignly. It was after Alexander took over on his way to conquer the world that things really deteriorated in the lands of the Bible. Alexander died of drink – and various other excesses – before he was thirty, leaving a vast empire for his generals to quarrel over. Quarrel they did. Civil wars resulted. Nonetheless, great cultural exchange and development ensued. In the middle of it, Jesus of Nazareth lived and died. Thanks to Alexander bringing the West to the East, his message spread around the world through the common language of the day, Greek. 

Cyrus’s expedition ended in disaster. He and his army were slaughtered near the banks of the River Oxus, in the heart of Central Asia, by the Massagetae and their warrior queen, Tomyris. She found his corpse on the battlefield afterward and shoved his severed head into a wineskin filled with blood, saying, “I warned you that I would quench your thirst for blood, and so I shall.” 

An occasional glance at the many tiny television screens aboard reveals news of demonstrations in Egypt. Kapuscinski takes me there on a brief trip in 1960: “My initial glimpse is in the evening, as my airplane approaches Cairo. From up high, the river at this time of day resembles a black, glistening trunk, forking and branching, surrounded by garlands of streetlights and bright rosettes defining the squares of this immense and bustling city.” He explains recent Egyptian history: “In 1952, Nasser, then thirty-four, led the military coup that overthrew King Farouk; he became president four years later. For a long time he faced strong internal opposition: on the one hand Communists fought him, and on the other the Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial organization of fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists. To combat them both Nasser maintained numerous police units of all sorts.” 

Kapuscinski reports in magical realist fashion what it was like to live in this police state. He arrived with a bottle of Czech beer, drank it his first night there, then faced the disposal problem: what to do with an empty beer bottle in a country where alcohol is strictly forbidden? He dared not leave it in the waste paper basket in the hotel, for it would be discovered and reported. He decided to walk out in the morning, bottle wrapped in a paper bag, and drop it into the first garbage can he could find. Unfortunately, there was someone eyeing him at every corner, lurking in the vicinity of every garbage can, watching everything that moved. 

“The street now turned, but beyond the turn everything was exactly as before. I couldn’t throw the bottle out anywhere, because no matter where I tried, I encountered someone’s gaze turned in my direction. Cars drove along the streets, donkeys pulled carts loaded with goods, a small herd of camels passed by stiffly, as if on stilts, but all this seemed to be taking place in the background, on some plane other than the one on which I was walking, caught in the sightlines of perfect strangers, who stood, strolled, talked, most frequently sat, and all the while stared at what I was doing. I grew increasingly nervous, and as I started to sweat profusely, the paper bag in my hand was getting soggy. I was afraid that the bottle would slip out of it and shatter on the sidewalk . . . “ 

Eventually, he returned to the hotel, bottle still in hand. He went out again late that night, whereupon, under cover of darkness, he quietly deposited the sanctioned bottle in a garbage can, returned to his room and fell exhausted into bed. 

Why did Kapuscinski read Herodotus, whose information was so dated? He provides numerous clues throughout his journey. Perhaps the most intriguing comes at the end, when he quotes T. S. Eliot from a 1944 essay about Virgil: 

“In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turns and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together . . . ” 

Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled in order to escape the provincialism of space and read Herodotus to escape the provincialism of time. 

The sky fills with color as we approach Washington. We descend through the clouds and the lights of suburban Virginia appear below. There is snow on the ground. The streets glisten, framed by bare trees. The plane makes one big turn as it approaches Dulles Airport, once considered impossibly far from Washington, and we feel the reassuring impact of the wheels hitting the runway. We have traversed in five hours what Herodotus in his day could not have completed in a lifetime.

Washington to San Francisco

In Search of a Sense of Place
Washington, DC to San Francisco Bay.
Summer, 2001.

By Richard Allen Hyde


1. Washington to South Bend
2. Lake Michigan and Chicago
3. Across the Prairies and Plains
4. Over the Rockies: Fort Collins to Salt Lake
5. Through the Desert: from the Salt Lake to the Sierra
6. The Golden Hills of California


Washington. July, 2007.

I drove across the country six years ago, in July of 2001, from Washington, DC to Berkeley, California. Having made the trip before and knowing that long periods of boredom awaited, I decided to make an informal study of the different places I noticed as I went along.

How many distinct places are there along this route? People talk about East Coast, Midwest, South and the West Coast. Clearly that is not all, but what else is there exactly? I knew that I would start out in Washington and end up somewhere else, but where exactly does the Washington area end and somewhere else begin? How many “somewhere elses” would I notice? And how would I know? Since I did not have a lot of time, I decided to keep the study simple and rely for clues upon what I could see from the road, hear on the radio and read in the local newspapers. This is the trip that began my search for a sense of place.


1. Washington to South Bend, July 2001.

I start out on a warm and sunny July 1st, 2001 driving slowly up Connecticut Avenue, where I came to get a tire fixed before departing. I have only lived in Washington for two years, but have been a frequent visitor for much of my life and have long considered it my second home. Shouldn’t a nation’s capital always be a second home to its citizens? I wrote my doctoral dissertation about the National Mall. For the better part of five years I read books and monographs about the city, its history and its monumental core. I spent several months walking around it and interviewing visitors to the three monuments at its westernmost end, the Lincoln, Vietnam and Korean Veterans Memorials. Finally I moved here. During all this time, I lived in the vicinity of Connecticut Avenue, rode the subway line underneath it, shopped along it, and visited friends nearby.

I wind around Chevy Chase Circle and know therefore that I have left Washington for Maryland, although no sign informs me of this fact. The transition from the city itself to the suburbs at this point is seamless. But I soon reach the clear line of transition, Interstate 495, more often known as “The Beltway.” Although it did not exist until the 1960s, it is now a physical, psychological and proverbial barrier that separates Washington insiders from the rest of the country and the world.

The late morning, traffic moves along quite well and I am soon on Interstate 270, heading northwest towards Hagerstown, a name I hear every day because Hagerstown is one of the locations of WETA, my favorite NPR station in the Washington area. I hear its name every day. There I will link up with I-70, then I-76, then I-80 in a gradual west-northwestern movement that will lead me to South Bend, Indiana.

I listen to WETA’s classical music and news on the hour until I get somewhere north and west of Hagerstown, where the interstate climbs and loops into heavily forested hills and I am clearly not in Washington any more. I have left a place, people, roads and buildings that have become familiar and wander in the unfamiliar again, winding along shaded valley floors, skirting wooded hills and rising over the gaps between. Soon I lose the signal in scratchy and piercing atmospherics. I spin the dial, hit the scan button actually, dials having long since disappeared from radio faces, and find only loud rock and roll, a few other loud and obnoxious musical genres that I cannot quite categorize, even louder advertising jingles, and a smarmy evangelist, so I turn the radio off and give my attention to the transition between the East Coast and whatever part of the country you might call this. I am not on the coast – there obviously is no ocean anywhere near here. Where am I then?

I decide that I am in the Appalachians, the low hills and mountains that mark the end of coastal cities and their related sprawl. These low mountains certainly are a region of their own, stretching the length of the Appalachian Trail from Lookout Mountain, Georgia to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. One might say that the East Coast is a region united and bounded by the ocean and the mountains, and still divided by the Potomac, the northern limit of the Confederacy.

After a few hours, I stop for gas and discover a small farmer's market in the parking lot: table upon table covered with apples, pies, cookies, bread and muffins. The white labels on the plastic-wrapped goodies list the ingredients under a horse and buggy logo with the words "Amish Baked Goods." I can't think of a clearer way to mark the transition into central Pennsylvania, a region of which I know little, except that it is farm country and that it is a distinct region of which the locals are proud. I have read that Pennsylvania is the state containing the highest percentage of residents who were born there.

But I have no time to linger. I return to my car and continue west-northwest, enjoying my Amish baked goods as I drive. Soon I leave the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 76 for Interstate 80, a seamless connection. I have left the radio off since eastern Pennsylvania, listening instead to Seamus Heaney read his new translation of Beowulf on tape. It is not long before I lose interest in this tale of ancient warriors and monsters – perhaps I would find it more interesting if I were sitting by the fire of a cold winter evening - and turn it off before it ends, noticing when I do that I have curved north around the Pittsburgh area without thinking of public radio, or even noticing that I was anywhere near Pittsburg.

Somewhere near the Ohio border, the hills and woodlands flatten and thin. The land stretches away to a more distant horizon and I am in much more open country, the vast farmland that stretches from here to somewhere beyond the Mississippi: the Midwest, America's heartland. There is a book of that name – The Heartland - that tells the early history of this region, the stories of the explorers and the explored, Marquette, Joliet, Hennepin, Pontiac, whose names are left behind on the cities, counties and automobiles of the region. I am surprised that it takes only five hours to leave the crooked inlets of the winding roads of the eastern mountains to arrive in the broad, flat farm country of the Midwest.

Soon I come near enough to Cleveland to pick up a pre-game show that airs before the Indians play that evening, but cannot find a public radio station. Another 100 miles pass and I pick up good classical music from a small Christian college station near South Bend. The sunshine and music continue until the sky in front of me turns orange, then red, purple, and deep blue. I pull into South Bend, to have dinner with two of my favorite Notre Dame graduates, about 9 o'clock. It being Monday night, nothing is open in downtown South Bend, so we have to drive out to the periphery, where much, if not most, of South Bend's commerce takes place, Monday or any other night, at a series of undistinguished strip malls. South Bend often looks closed after dark; tonight it just looks, and is, more closed than usual.

I skate around the campus the next day. Inline skates take up little space in the car and provide a great way to get some exercise and more direct experience of a place. Notre Dame is not as complete a complete Gothic playground as Yale, the University of Chicago or Princeton. Most of the buildings are a plainer, yellow brick Gothic, the bricks of local provenance. Yet the buildings arranged in several quadrangles create a sense of intimacy that embodies the nature of the university quite well. There are many statues and objects of art distributed here and there, not to mention the famous grotto, which is a copy of the one at Lourdes. It seems to belong here, even though there isn’t a real cave within hundreds of miles and the stones had to be hauled in from even further. The most famous statue, of course, is the lady on the golden dome, facing south along the central axis of the campus towards the main entrance. If the campus were a cathedral, the Our Lady would be on the high altar looking down the nave.

2. Lake Michigan and Chicago

After a few peaceful days at Notre Dame over the Fourth of July, my next goal is Chicago. The drive is short and easy, under four hours, along highways I know well. I stop halfway at the Indiana Dunes at the southern tip of Lake Michigan for a swim. I have known the beaches and trails here since childhood. I grew up in the Midwest, in the suburbs of Minneapolis and Chicago. Although I have spent most of my adult life in New England, California and now Washington, this region will always be home.

The Midwest, contrary to what many suppose, is not entirely flat. Most of it is broad, rolling hills, even this part along the southern border of the Great Lakes. The land I see along the interstate is a steady succession of fields divided irregularly by trees in shallow valleys. The blessing of the Midwest is the Lakes, which cool the region somewhat in the summer and moderate it in the winter. Like the ocean itself, these fresh water seas mirror the season's moods: dark, gray, turbulent and dangerous in the winter; soft, soothing and cerulean blue in the summer.

I spend a few hours on the beach at the Indiana dunes State Park, wait for the traffic to die down and complete my journey to Park Ridge, a suburb just north and west of Chicago, near the world’s busiest airport. Although I was born in Minnesota, I spent most of my childhood in Park Ridge, now made somewhat famous because Hillary Rodham Clinton grew up there. Her brother Hugh was one of my campaign managers when I ran for student council president at Maine South High School. I have not seen him since, and could not recognize the overweight man in the newspaper photograph after he was accused of influence peddling in the waning days of the Clinton Administration. In high school, he was a handsome, muscular football player full of energy and enthusiasm. My brother lives in the area, in Naperville, some twenty miles west of Chicago. My mother still lives in the small, split-level house I grew up in.

The large prairie houses of my home town look like they have been here forever, certainly since long before the city of Chicago grew out to make Park Ridge a suburb. Walking these streets, Chicago does seem far away, even though it is never more than a couple of miles.
In the Chicago newspapers, aside from national news and the usual local murders, fires and disappearances, the big news this summer happens to concern the lakefront, specifically, what to do about Soldier Field, the enormous stadium just south of the three great museums on South Lake Shore Drive. The lakefront is accessible from the city's southernmost boundary on the Indiana border to the northernmost, where the city of Evanston begins. It is a most impressive long ribbon of public space, allowing you to sail into the great metropolis and find it fringed as far as you can see with a sandy beach and a greensward dotted with trees. Only after several hundred yards of open space do the office and apartment towers rise up. I have never sailed in, but have flown in countless times. The flight path often takes you over the lakefront north of the loop, west along the Kennedy Expressway and slowly down into O'Hare Airport. It is a feast for the eyes, even in winter. How good would Chicago's famous architecture look without the park and lake border?

Many things make Chicago a great city - its size, its cultural institutions, universities. My favorite part of Chicago, however, is Lake Michigan. For most people it is just "The Lake." The ocean remains for me a strange and mysterious place. I am still not accustomed to having so much living matter in the water with me, nor am I accustomed to how powerful the waves are. But I am learning: being picked up by a wave and hurled toward the shore on a small piece of molded plastic, like being on the cow-catcher of a locomotive, is a thrill beyond compare. It is also nice to have company in the water in the form of seals and sea otters even though that means that there might be an occasional shark. Swimming in fresh water - however tame in comparison - is its own delight. Since your body is not as buoyant in the fresh water, you are more a part of it. The lake water takes you in, softly envelopes you, then releases you into the warm, humid air, an only slightly less dense form of itself. Afterward, your skin feels light, almost diaphanous.

I spend my last evening in the Chicago area at Lighthouse Beach in Evanston, just north of Chicago. At dusk while cicadas sing, a surprising wind springs up, driving sand into my face even though I am close to the water. I take refuge in the beach grass on the low dunes. Despite the wind and proximity to the lake, it is still warm and humid. Thanks to an hour of swimming in the lake, I feel comfortably cool for the first time in days. My skin seems to breathe. There are no bugs in the air. The canopy of trees looms above: great elms, maples and locusts. To the west, shades of blue grow darker as the sun sets behind the horizon, behind the trees, the flat prairie, the pavement, strip malls.


3. Across the Prairies and Plains

I have seen it all before and barely notice my surroundings, so familiar are they, as I drive west on Interstate 88. It is not at all clear why there is another interstate west from Chicago to the Quad Cities in addition to I-80, but I am grateful for this road less traveled. There are few trucks and not many cars all the way to Iowa. I listen to Chicago’s great classical music station, WFMT, for about an hour until the signal fades. WFMT is one of the nation’s last great commercial classical music stations, my constant companion when I was growing up. Eventually I pick up public radio from Davenport, then from Iowa City shortly after crossing the Mississippi; several welcome hours of classical music and NPR news. Then I begin to nod off behind the wheel. Not a rest area or interchange in sight. Dumbly fumbling with the dial, hoping to find something with a beat that will wake me up, I thankfully find the pulsing exuberance of a Rolling Stones classic. I crank the volume up, my heart pumps and my spirits soar. When the song ends, I notice that I am going over 85.

I pull off at the next rest area. The weather news this late July in the Midwest continues to be of unrelenting heat and humidity. Highs are in the 90s, with humidity not far behind. I get out of the car and feel certain within minutes that bugs are crawling on my bare arms.

Stopping outside of Omaha for the night, I walk inside the motel and find the air conditioning positively arctic, yet after a few minutes inside I am not at all cold in shorts and a t-shirt. I go for a swim in an enormous indoor pool, have dinner, return to my room, troll the television channels for something to watch and find CNN’s taped coverage of Katherine Graham’s funeral. It is Monday, July 23rd, 2001. I live just up Wisconsin Avenue from the National Cathedral. It fills my living room window on the 8th floor. At night I can see the illuminated white dome of the Capitol beyond it and to the left. For the past two years in Washington, the Cathedral has been my orienting point. I can occasionally see it from elsewhere in the city. It is where I go outside to read, to attend concerts and to run on the track at St. Alban’s School below. It marks my neighborhood, my playground, my home away from home. Watching a funeral in this building I know so well, of the owner of the newspaper I read (The Washington Post) while I am in Omaha, a place I have never stopped before (I have whizzed past it on the interstate a few times), is disorienting, dizzying. I wonder how I have gotten here, where I am going and why.

Fortunately, I sleep well and am ready to go in the morning. The short answer to last night’s questions is simple: Today I am going to Ft. Collins, north of Denver and Boulder, to spend a rest day in the middle of my journey with a friend enrolled in a summer institute at Colorado State University. At breakfast, I notice that the Omaha newspaper refers to the local inhabitants as “midlanders,” a term I have not encountered before. The sports page, in addition to major league baseball, features the minor leagues, a local golf tournament called “The Sioux Classic,” and anticipation of Nebraska football.

Once underway, I easily find Nebraska Public Radio towards the low end of the FM band, KUCV Lincoln, 90.9, where public radio stations tend to be. As I drive by dozens of immense long watering devices, like so many mechanical praying mantises, I hear Victor Herbert’s “Nakomis Suite” for the first time. My Dad occasionally recited parts of Longfellow’s Hiawatha from memory, so I presume that this is “daughter of the moon, Nakomis.” One section contains the sort of tom-tom rhythm we have come to expect from “Indian” music. Next comes “New England Triptych,” by William Schumann, which succeeds just as well. I was hoping to find a radio station that revealed the character of its region. While none of this music was composed in or about Nebraska, its rhyme with the landscape delights me and I gratefully stay tuned to Nebraska Public Radio all the way across the state and well into Colorado, picking up KHNE at 89.1 from Hastings and KLNE at 88.7 from Lexington. I am all the more delighted for I have never heard this music before. Somehow it seems evocative of America and I wonder how this can be. Is it just because the titles of the pieces have given me a hint? How or why is the famous largo of Dvorak’s New World Symphony so evocative of the American landscape?

I drive almost the entire distance from Omaha to the Nebraska panhandle pondering these questions and enjoying the music without noticing anything that tells me unmistakably that I am not in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, or even Pennsylvania. Only at a rest stop near Maxwell do I finally glimpse the first geographical feature that I could not possibly have seen further east: a distant ridge, a brown, rocky ribbon on the horizon, the first suggestion of mountains and an arid climate. Yet humidity at the rest stop is still intense, the grass soft and green. Only after the turnoff towards Denver (I-76 plays a cameo role here, taking you from I-80 to I-25 and Denver, then bowing out of existence) does the mixture of fields and trees disappear; there is nothing but sagebrush as far as the eye can see, and it can see pretty far over the rolling hills. I am on the open range. I am in the West. What composer’s music would rhyme with what I see – Aaron Copland? Ferde Grofe?

After a few more hours, mountains suddenly appear straight ahead, shimmering like a mirage. If I were in a movie, I would bring up the angelic choir to accompany the appearance of these distant peaks, the first spectacular landscape I have seen in almost 2,000 miles of driving. What a thrill it must have been for people walking slowly beside ox-drawn wagons to glimpse this harbinger of something like the pearly gates.

The mountains fade from sight and reappear periodically for several more hours, as do storm clouds and rain, until about 7:30 I finally roll into Ft. Collins. Low mountains fill the horizon. Rays from the lowering sun light upon the green hills. No sign of a storm save for towering cumulus far to the south.

4. Over the Rockies: Fort Collins to Salt Lake

The Denver newspaper the next morning, in addition to national news, features stories about a Wyoming wildfire, a rich fossil bed being destroyed to make a golf course, a new reservoir south of Denver, a legislative battle shaping up for a wilderness area west of Denver, around James Peak. Land and water; the story of the west. My friend in Ft. Collins tells me there are far too many people in the area for present water resources, yet it remains one of the fastest growing in the country. We spend an afternoon hiking in the hills just west of town. Westward the mountains rise. Eastward the plains and prairies stretch out to the horizon and a thousand miles beyond. The transition from plains to mountains is unmistakably clear.

I head west again about 10 o’clock on a sunny morning, taking a two-lane highway from Ft. Collins north and west up to I-80 at Laramie, Wyoming. The sunshine soon passes, but the overcast sky in no way diminishes the feast for my eyes. The sight of distant mountains of amazing colors makes me pull off the road so many times that I have to promise myself not to do it again or I will never reach Salt Lake City.

Words fail me for the colors and shades of these distant mountains. I am not sure I have ever seen them before. Are they purple, pink, ochre, mauve, magenta, russet, crimson? Even the grass and topsoil in the foreground play color tunes I have never seen: grayish blue, grayish green, and something sort of red. The name of the old warm-up band for the Grateful Dead suddenly pops into mind: New Riders of the Purple Sage. I never got far into a Zane Grey novel, but he sure picked a good title. The color show continues all day, even after I rejoin the interstate. Even there I cannot resist stopping a few more times. I take many photographs in an attempt to capture on film the interplay between sky and mountains, but when I develop them later they do not begin to convey the color and depth of what I see.

I listen to KUNC, Northern Colorado Public Radio as I cross over the Continental Divide twice – I can’t explain how – once at 7000 and again at 6930 feet. It is cloudy much of the day and I leave off the air-conditioner. As I approach Salt Lake City in the late afternoon, the interstate winds down between towering hills amid signs warning truckers to test their brakes. The sky glows yellow and orange, then deep red under layers of even deeper purple. The descent takes a long time. Finally I emerge on the plain of the city to behold black, ragged-edged mountains across the great lake backlit by a blood-red sky.

5. Through the Desert: from the Salt Lake to the Sierra

I read the Salt Lake City newspaper quickly over breakfast, knowing that the longest and hardest day is ahead of me. The front page features stories about the Navajo World War II Code Talkers receiving their medals in Washington, a local psychiatrist plea-bargaining for writing fraudulent prescriptions, sky boxes for basketball games, amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the vandalizing of dinosaur tracks by a local boy scout. Inside, the paper focuses on preparations for the impending winter Olympics, proposals for a nuclear waste site, and a legal battle between a man and the state of Utah over his pet wildcat. I enjoy this sober-minded newspaper and what little I see of Salt Lake City. But I need to drive over 500 miles today and quickly depart, hoping to return someday.

The journey across western Utah and Nevada borders on the hallucinatory. The great dead lake spreads out on both sides of the interstate to jagged gray mountains on the horizon; no sign of life on either. The lake has receded since I last made this journey, in the fall of 94, when I remember the lake lapping at the edge of the roadway, or at least I think I remember. Perhaps no one else can remember either, for the boundary of the lake appears to be in some dispute among mapmakers. No map shows any water south of the Interstate, but there it is, a good deal of it, mile after mile. Some maps show the lake having spilled an immense distance westward through a gap in the mountains into the “Newfoundland Evaporation Basin.” I can see no trace of water in this place, if I am looking in the right place, if one can call this inhospitable expanse of rock a place, as I hurtle along at 75 miles an hour, if not 80, well past where the lake has given out, as far as I can see, as I traverse the 77 exit-less and service-less miles between Rowley Junction and Wendover, the last town in Utah.

Then I see a salt mine – it must be a salt mine, what else could it be? -- a gray factory structure next to six small mountains of white powder. It is not just an expression? There really are salt mines? I guess the stuff has to come from somewhere. What else could it be? I search through my limited knowledge of geology for answers. Zinc? Gypsum powder? Diamond tailings? Uranium dust? Magnesium crystals? I run out of possibilities as the factory recedes to a speck in the rear-view mirror. Whatever.

Aside from the Nevada Badlands Salt Mining and Manufacturing facility, the only structure of note is the railroad track, which becomes my constant companion for the day, running alongside the highway, crossing under it, coming in and going away at odd angles, running for all I can tell, from nowhere to nowhere. Yesterday's subtle colors are nowhere to be found. The sunlight is a harsh, pale yellow under a whitish-blue sky. Pass one row of gray, craggy mountains and another row slides monotonously into view. What sort of music could accompany this landscape, I wonder. Something for electronically enhanced xylophone and synthesizer, perhaps.

The dry air is not exactly cool, but at least not uncomfortably warm and I leave the air-conditioner off until after noon in order to lessen the stress upon my aging automobile. I stop for gas at the town of Wells, which is written in slightly larger print on the map, indicating a town with some amenities, perhaps? I find only two fast food places, something that may be a bar or casino, or both, and a road wandering off north towards God only knows where or why. I tank up quickly, set the cruise control at close to 80, and eat lunch while I drive in order get out of the state as fast as possible

I periodically troll the airwaves for signs of life. Several times the scanner moves across the dial and starts over again, picking up absolutely nothing. For the better part of 250 miles, I find only an occasional country music station or evangelist threatening me with eternal damnation, which I decide must be something like living in Nevada. Finally, in mid-afternoon and well towards the California border, I find a public radio station from Reno. The program is “High Desert Forum,” which features interviews with Nevada authors. The station fades in and out, but I learn something from a Nevada historian about Sarah Winnemucca, after whom the town along the interstate is named, a woman from one of the Indian tribes who learned English and wrote about the region. So there is some history and public-spiritedness in this weird place after all.

After about an hour the signal fades, I hit the scan button and am surprised to pick up “All Things Considered,” on Sacramento Public Radio. How does this signal make it over the mountains? Am I hearing it because of a lucky bounce off the ozone? Hearing this familiar voice is like glimpsing distant mountains. I know that I am within range of my destination. I stop for gas in Reno, buy some groceries – bread, cheese, cherry tomatoes, juice, some fruit and some chocolate -- and I am on my way. In less than an hour, I know that I am entering California as the road divides into lanes that funnel the traffic to stop at what look like toll booths or the sort of border crossing facilities one routinely finds in Europe. California really is a place unto itself, for nowhere else in America does one ever encounter anything like this. One encounters this because the most fertile agricultural environment on earth is vulnerable to invasion from just about every other life form, animal or vegetable, on the planet, and the state of California has to inspect your car and its contents for bugs.

Now I am in the mountains, the Sierra Nevada. The transition from the Nevada flatlands to the mountains has not been dramatic, but now I am unquestionably into the mountains. I turn off the interstate and the air-conditioner, roll down the window, take a deep breath, and know that I am no longer in Nevada, or Nebraska, or Ohio, or Washington. The air is cool, dry, yet redolent of a thousand aromas; light, yet complex as a good white wine. I breathe again more deeply and smell pine, fir, cedar, grass, bay, spruce, sage. In another hour, I have checked in at an old hotel and hot springs, well off the beaten path. After two more hours, I have had something to eat and am soaking in an outdoor pool, gazing up at the stars. The only sound is the occasional sighing of the wind through the fir trees. Did the early travelers know that such delights awaited them in California, a land even more verdant, salubrious and productive than the one of which Moses spoke?

6. The Golden Hills of California

After a few nights at the hot springs, I return to Interstate 80 and drive five uneventful hours to Berkeley. It is a road I know well. One minute I am still in the mountains; the next I behold a wall of haze: the Central Valley. Descend a few miles and I am in Auburn and the uninterrupted march of housing tracts and shopping centers begins. Somewhere in the middle of it is Sacramento. Cross the Carcinas Bridge, go up a long hill, slowly descend on what is now a multi-laned freeway and I am now, unmistakably, in the Bay Area: there it is, San Francisco Bay, on the right; beyond it are the hills of Marin County, land’s end. I have found my NPR station towards the bottom of the FM dial, KQEI 88.3 Sacramento, then a few notches up, KQED 88.5 San Francisco, when I descend into the Bay Area.

Trail’s End for this report is Peet’s Coffee at the corner of Walnut and Vine, in Berkeley, California. This was my favorite urban place in the Bay Area when I lived here for the better part of the 90s. The neighborhood is sometimes called the Gourmet Ghetto. Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, the restaurant devoted to fresh, locally grown food is around the corner on Shattuck Avenue, one of Berkeley’s main thoroughfares. President Clinton, weaning himself from cheeseburgers, dined there early in his presidency. For security reasons he arrived on short notice and commandeered the smaller café section upstairs. After dinner the President and his party exited downstairs through the main dining room to squeals of recognition and a standing ovation. The Bread and Cheese Board is across the street, a collective that bakes wonderful bread and sells cheese from local cheese makers and around the world.

Peet’s was the epicenter of the gourmet coffee revolution, starting some time in the late 60s. Mr. Peet himself is still alive and tasting coffee, the man who taught the founders of Starbucks everything they know about quality coffee. Nothing tells me that I am back in Berkeley more clearly than sitting here for an hour or so, savoring the extravagantly strong coffee, watching people, listening to the classical music when it is audible above the hubbub, writing. I sit on the shop’s only seating possibility, a small bench rather like an old-fashioned church pew, which seats two adults, perhaps three if none of them has eaten too many of the offerings from the Bread and Cheese Board. The walls are cream-colored with a lot of dark wood trim, echoing the style of many of the Bay Area’s first architects who favored a lot of wood in their buildings. It not only looks good, but is appropriate for use in an earthquake zone. You get a smaller, stronger cup of coffee here than at Starbuck’s, coffee that is superior in every way. The beans glisten with oil in their bins and smell fresher than anywhere else, except perhaps for Misha’s in Alexandria, Virginia, Flying Goat up in Sonoma County, or other fine local roaster.

I continue my quest for a sense of place in the local newspapers. I begin with the Los Angeles Times, imported from the southern part of the state, “the voice of the west,” which looks sort of the like the New York Times, but is owned by the Chicago Tribune. The story that piques my interest is on the sports page. It concerns the travails of the new football coach at the University of Southern California. He spent his few years as coach of the New York Jets being roasted by the New York sports mavens for his unconventional, attitude-oriented coaching methods. I guess the type of football coach New Yorkers like is a large, explosive personality like Bill Parcells, who, admittedly, was successful; but Bill Walsh was successful, too.

The California dream continues. People dream of a land of even greater opportunity, a place to take some risks away from the set ways and severe winters of the northeast and Midwest, a place to spread your wings, to try something different. From its beginning in the gold rush, it was a place to get rich. It quickly became a place to go for vacation, to visit geographical wonders, to spend time at the ocean, to watch a parade and football game on a sunny New Year’s Day. In the fifties and sixties it finally became a place of cultural and political force, not to mention a major engine of the economy. It continues to beckon Americans, Mexicans, South Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, everyone.

And here I am again.