Roads: Driving America's Great Highways

by Larry McMurtry

I recently reread War and Peace, skipping all of the Freemasonry and most of the philosophy of history.

Conversely, just as there are passages in Tolstoy of which I never tire, there are stretches of road whose beauty I can never exhaust, an example being the wonderful stretch of rangeland south of Emporia, Kansas, on the 35, where dun prairies stretch away without interruption to very distant horizons, with not one tree to violate one’s sight line. Here there are even bovine overpasses, bridges over the 35 that lead to no highway but just allow cattle to graze both sides of the road.

Generally I’d rather be heading south, toward warmth, or west, toward bigger skies and stronger light.

To a plainsman born and raised, as I am, that lovely unbroken Kansas prairie tugs at the heart and the memory, because it is rare now to see that much grazing land not pierced by oil wells or torn by the plow.

It’s worth noting, also, that most of the great travel writers were compelled only by one landscape, almost always a harsh or difficult landscape: the deserts, the mountains, the rain forests, the poles.

Conrad and Melville wrote powerfully of the oceans, but their works don’t exactly bring one into an intimacy with the world of the waters. In Conrad and also in Melville the sea is too powerful, too often the environment of crisis, to be merely appealing.

Reading Conrad or Melville has never made me want to get on a boat and venture out on the prairies of water, but that’s the impulse reading Ommanney produces.

I am not one to do much breast-beating about environmental change or even environmental destruction. The human species is clearly a species that uses up its habitats, recklessly and greedily, just as big agriculture is now using up this desert and the finite waters that can make it flower. What feels wrong about it as one crosses from El Centro to Yuma is the scale. The tribal peoples of the desert, the Piman peoples, have always found ways to water the desert, else they couldn’t have survived in it. As desert agriculturalists they worked with great skill, but on a modest, intimate scale, whereas today the scale of agribusiness in this desert is immense; the fields between Yuma and Gila Bend are as large as any in the midwest. Driving through them produces a nagging sense of dislocation. What is all this cotton doing here? Isn’t it in the wrong place?

I remember feeling something of the same dislocation—of sadness, even—when the Texas panhandle, the great range where my father and my uncles used to go dashing in their days as cowboys, began to be plowed, irrigated, and turned into cotton fields. I wanted those prairies to be left alone, though for no better reason than that my family had been formed on them. But we’re a grasping species; nothing of value is likely to be left alone. If the land can be changed so as to be made to yield more money, it will be; though eventually, when it no longer yields money, it may slowly go back to being what it once was. The water may play out, both in the desert and on the plains; the one may go back to being sand dunes, the other to being prairie.

All human intentions are, in their way, short term—in the context of today, this...

What is forgotten is that all these major players are aging men; what they have so competitively gathered together may, in only a few years, scatter again, break back into fragments. The entities they have created are for a day, not forever.

Starting one’s day with brightness falling from the air—as in Thomas Nashe’s poem—is tonic to a sun lover.

There is a certain relaxation that comes when one drives an often-traveled road, especially if it’s a road that goes through beautiful country,

The beauty of the high desert is nowhere better revealed than along the 40 from Kingman to Albuquerque,

The point may be that it’s always tricky to go near writers whose work you really like. They may turn out to have bad furniture, or tacky women, or both.

Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one’s youth.

Sometimes the desire to see both ends of a road nags at me.

Though I can live happily almost anywhere for a few months, my attachment to the plains landscape is irreplaceable.

Being alone in a car is to be protected for a time from the pressures of day-to-day life; it’s like being in one’s own time machine, in which the mind can rove ahead to the future or scan the past.

As it is with women, so it is with roads. There are too many nice ones.