ON THE ROAD—The road sings, just like it always has.
I’m driving west. The high plains of Nebraska lie behind me, and the mountains of Wyoming are just ahead. Beyond those high peaks, Utah and Idaho await.
I don’t know how many times I’ve done this drive — or one like it. Something about feeling the miles that make up this big country of ours roll under my wheels has always relaxed and rejuvenated me.
I like the experience of stopping in places I’ve never been and talking with people I don’t know. It’s taught me about all the things we have in common — and about the various ways place shapes us to make us different.
I remember walking by an elementary school in New Mexico with a friend who lived there. There were signs on the school grounds warning the students to look out for rattlesnakes when they played at recess.
I looked at my friend. He smiled.
“Out here, playtime can be dangerous if you’re not watchful,” he said.
When I was young myself, I didn’t get to do much traveling. My parents were of modest means. What vacations we took were always to see family and never out of state.
But seeing more of America always was an itch, one that became aggravated in college, when I read Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for the first time. It set me off on a lifelong binge of reading American road narratives. Along with Kerouac’s gem, John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” and William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” became books I revisited every few years, often while motoring to some distant corner of the country.
That also began a habit of reading my way into the landscape, devouring books set in or about the places in which I roamed.
I traveled to the West Coast for the first time when I was 23. My buddy Jim and I signed up to drive a Volkswagen Beetle from St. Louis to Seattle for a businessman who wanted it delivered to his daughter.
Jim and I had a rollicking time. We got stuck in a spring blizzard in Wyoming. We discovered that, at least in those days, when authorities in mountain country closed a road, they didn’t just put up signs to that effect.
They dropped a big log across the road so nothing less than a tank could move forward.
We had dinner that night at a place with a sign that asked everyone who planned to drink to check their guns at the bar.
Before we left St. Louis, I’d picked up a copy of Ivan Doig’s glorious “Winter Brothers,” a luminous exploration of how two men in two centuries came to know and love the Pacific Northwest. That book triggered a fascination with Doig’s writing.
He taught me what a marvelously flexible thing the English language could be. In one of his books, he described how the land “knolled up” in a part of his native Montana, evoking that place perfectly in the sparsest language.
A few years later, I met Doig on yet another road trip to Seattle. I told him about how he’d taught me not to let proper usage get in the way of describing a place or telling a story.
He smiled.
“That’s the fun of it, isn’t it?” he said.
Before he died about 10 years ago, Doig had succeeded Wallace Stegner as the acknowledged dean of Western literature. In his books, all of which were set in the West, Doig made the country a character in the narrative, a living, breathing presence on the page.
I haven’t read much of him in recent years, but on this trip I bought one of his early novels at a bookstore in Laramie, Wyo. When I stopped for lunch later that day, I started thumbing through it.
A woman my age or a little older at the next table asked me what I was reading. I showed her. She gushed that Doig was a favorite of hers. His final novel, “Last Bus to Wisdom,” she said, had reduced her to tears.
We chatted about how no one else made the countryside spring to life on the page the way he did. When she finished her meal, she told me to enjoy the book and said she was going to reread “Last Bus to Wisdom.”
Yeah, the road still sings.