Contributor: The Road Trip — Sublime, Profane and (Almost) Reclaimed

Contributor: The road trip — sublime, profane and (almost) reclaimed

Driving the country's highways is one way to define the American psyche and a big, beautiful, flawed nation.

Saving the Great American Road Trip

My faith in the American road trip was saved by a small town in Texas on the Fourth of July. When that faith began to waver, and how far the road trip sank on my leaderboard of American pastimes—well, that’s harder to say. Below Putt-Putt golf, perhaps, and south of riverboat gambling. I knew that the highway had taken on an elegiac torpor. I knew that a line by the poet Louis Simpson filled my head: “the Open Road goes to the used-car lot.” Tha…