On and Off . . . The Road to Somewhere
I’ve been driving legally since I was 15. Back in those Iron Age days, a mere learner’s permit was all that was required to haul my indolent arse to a minimum wage ($3.10/hr.) gig at the local multiplex. Since then, I figure I’ve easily slapped on over half a million miles on the myriad vehicles I’ve owned, leased, or rented. Unlike the romantic, quintessential literary version of the “American writer” finding himself on this country’s back roads and small, rural routes, my traveling experience has come wrestling with the brutality of our ill-paved, Eisenhower-era highways.
In the 21st Century, trekking across America’s deteriorating thoroughfares is harsh business; not only on the machine itself (hello $175 front wheel alignment + labor!), but on the psyche as well. I crossed this vast country twice in my 20s; both winter trips made solo in a standard VW with no heat, power windows or steering, armed with only a mix tape of Steel Pulse tunes to keep me anchored in reality, sanity, and emotional warmth. Continuing my numerous East/West, North/South adventures since, I’ve withstood a relentless barrage of psychological warfare and propaganda dished out via billboards and AM Talk Radio. Propaganda which either tried to bully me into consuming chemically tweaked burgers, fries, and other mechanically separated chicken parts, or decreed my certain damnation unless I embraced the power of Jesus and cleansed my soul like some glazed-look Aye-aye in urgent need of salvation.
You can imagine my vindicated sense of brotherhood when I read James Reeves’s generous offering of his own, similar experiences in The Road to Somewhere. Aha, I screamed: finally a fellow writer who shuns romanticizing America’s highways in favor of the truth.
“What does it mean to be a man in the 21st Century?” is one of the questions Reeves asks in this personal and emotional memoir, and love/hate affair with The Road. And does one really find anything within oneself on the savage highways of America, like Kerouac and Cassady did back in the ’50s?
Examining Reeves’s account and literally witnessing his vision of our country through wonderful, personal photographs (Reeves is an educator, a photographer, and a designer as well) as it enters the new millennium in a chaotic, almost dismembered condition, only further obfuscates the (declining) force that is a complicated America. And that is a good thing. It’s one of the truths evident. Through his search for his own answers, contemplating family history and expected societal roles, James reveals the partitioned state that is our country, at times unveiling its Philistine, fundamentalist tendencies for maintaining status quo, at others underscoring its inventive, modern, innovative, and optimistic drive into a new era. At the core of these dueling forces we find . . . people.
Reeves personalizes The Road with profile slices of those who inhabit it, who hitchhike it, who love or loathe it, who defend it. In reading this book I found my America quickly slipping away from me; I found I know no more of it now than I did thirty-two years ago when I came to it as a refugee from a totalitarian regime. And as strange as it may sound, that should stand as a credit to this country — rapidly moving either forward or tragically backward.
Within his expansive, several-thousand-mile journey, James reveals the profile of a young, travelling man fighting to understand ideas passed down through his culture and familial rituals, and how they intersperse with the mentation of his own experiences, in his own time, as a man in America. I love this book because of its balanced helping of melancholy and brutal truth of what The Road means and how it has defined this country—both in the past and present. I love this book because it presents The Road as it is: a laborious, 15-round bout with Ali or Frazier; a ferocious ballet.
