Coming to Terms with the United States While Driving On The Road During the Pandemic
As I’ve gotten older and have seen the mess of the United States around me — a place I call my home and yet a place where I feel like a complete stranger — I have strongly believed that traveling the United States by car would help give a lot of perspective. If only this was considered more normal.
With the opportunity to work remotely due to COVID-19, I decided that I was going to take advantage of the opportunity and experience the “grand American road trip” — an insightful journey across the country.
Prior to COVID-19, many corporations did not think that people would be productive if they worked remotely, and hesitated on this type of idea. If I were to have done the “road trip of my dreams” in the old days (pre-March 2020), it would have required quitting my job.
I know it’s not the best time to travel right now (obviously, there’s a reason why we’re working from home — there’s a pandemic going on), but I thought that if I travel exactly the way I’m living right now — staying in a clean place, working, not really going out and about unless I’m walking, washing my hands all the time, sanitizing all surfaces, etc — that it might be okay.
The goal of this journey was two-fold:
- Stay safe first and foremost. After all, we’re still in a pandemic. I’m extremely aware of the privilege I carry by being able to do this road trip. I stayed in four-star hotels (because of the pandemic, they tended to be dirt-cheap: sometimes $50–60 a night, but sometimes also more). I stayed at unique and interesting Airbnbs. I was paying to spend the night somewhere that was not my normal home, and occasionally was up-charged for extra cleanliness. I am very aware that this is an extreme privilege. I struggled with this fact, but ultimately decided that I was going to do it because I was grateful for the insanely fortunate situation I was in. I just so happened to be working for a company that was doing financially well during the pandemic and that was allowing us to work from home full-time. It could have been significantly worse. At the same time, I was not being ignorant of those in which COVID-19 uprooted many lives personally and professionally. As a result of social distancing, my trip was quite lonely at times. I mainly worked in my hotel room and walked around in solitude. Sometimes, my mom was with me, and we were able to bond a lot — more than we ever did in the past. But still, it was lonely.
- Discover the good, bad, and ugly of the United States. I wanted to embrace its beauty and further come to terms with its ugly truths. I’ve always struggled with my relationship with the United States and hoped that these travels would make me more comfortable in understanding and expressing that perspective. There are multiple factors of my life-long identity crisis that has contributed to this struggle — from my ethnicity, to my upbringing, to the schools I attended, to the people I’ve fallen in love with, to the companies I’ve worked for, to the cities I’ve lived in, to the history that I have always been fascinated by, and everything in between — and all throughout these experiences, the United States stood as not just a backdrop but a reality I could not ignore.
Along the way, I was able to first-hand see a lot of things that I thought I already knew — or maybe didn’t even know at all. Some of these things included:
The history books we learned in school desensitized facts. If we think about the United States as a whole, the country isn’t really that old. The things we read about that happened at the dawn of the 20th century up until the 60’s and 70’s — well, many of those people are still alive today. Even the things we read about in the 18th and 19th centuries weren’t really that far away. So while we talk about “the past,” we need to realize that the past wasn’t really that long ago, and we haven’t made as much progress as we’d like to think. This was clear in all the Historic Districts and Main Streets that I walked through.
The American ideal of manifest destiny was pretty darn toxic and unhealthy. We think about the United States being 50 states (what a clean, even number!) for granted as we fly from state to state and coast to coast, as we cast our ballots every four years in elections that come down to the antiquated electoral college requiring 270 votes, and in so many other parts of our daily lives. We learn about the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the acquisitions of Alaska and Hawaii — but as we live our lives, we don’t really think about the repercussions and implications of just how much these wars and purchases have led to the country we now know today.
Imagine if these colonial land-grabbers (and I’m talking to you as well, French and Spanish) weren’t so power-hungry. The land west of the Mississippi River, the entire West Coast, Florida, Alaska, and Hawaii would have had a very different makeup.
The United States is a hypocrite. The country loves to boast “patriotic” icons, such as the Statue of Liberty and the Declaration of Independence. To put things in context, sure — the United States certainly is more developed than other countries. Yet that doesn’t mean that we should be complacent when we have certain boastful, prideful ideals about freedom and don’t actually fully deliver on them.
The Civil War wasn’t that long ago, but it remains a major divider of our country today. While slavery isn’t unique to the United States, the fact that United States so strongly boasts freedom and human rights and yet almost half the country believed that darker-skinned people did not deserve those same human rights is downright hypocritical.
The United States didn’t even believe that the people who were the indigenous inhabitants of this country deserved the same level of human rights when they sent Native American Indians on the Trail of Tears towards Oklahoma and Arizona. Driving through Navajo Nation in Arizona and the other Indian Reservations in Oklahoma really put this into perspective for me.
When people say “this isn’t who we are” — they’re wrong. This is very much who we are, who we’ve been, and what we’ve been founded on — and pretending it’s any other way aligns exactly with who we are, as well.
The Texas and Mexico border does not need a wall. Sorry, Trump, but have you even been to the border? Driving on I-10 towards El Paso, you can see the Mexican state of Chihuahua from your car window. You have multiple natural and man-made dividers already in place: a mountain range, a river (the Rio Grande), and a major freeway (I-10), as well as lots and lots of empty land. You have an immense number of border patrol driving around, occasionally and nefariously hiding in the bushes along US-90. You have border patrol stops on I-10 itself, when you’re not even entering another country. It is already difficult enough to cross the border, and those who are doing so are on the brinks of desperation. A wall is expensive, cost-ineffective, and inhumane. I already knew all this, but actually seeing it in person made it even more clear and obvious.
Speaking of borders, state borders are the original gerrymandered lines. When you’re driving by car across the United States, time goes by more quickly when you’re counting down the interstate mile markers until the next state. But once you’re in that state, nothing really changes. It’s an invisible line.
I once drove 45 minutes out of the way to see the intersection of three states — Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana — and was both disappointed and intrigued to see that it was just a rock by a tree. Everything else around me was grass, trees, and road. There was no indication that I was in Texas, Louisiana, or Arkansas. Nothing changed when I circled the tree. This was by far the most obvious area I visited that showcased just how irrelevant state borders are.
Of course, as you keep driving across the country, you’ll see eventual changes in topography — changes that are truly breathtaking and amazing. But it’s the topography, the mountains, rivers, hills, trees, forest, deserts — and not the state lines — that actually signified to me when I was entering another part of the country. All along the way, I saw railroads, which helped put into perspective why certain cities even existed in the first place (for example, I learned about Cheyenne versus Denver, two cities that are less than two hours apart, in different states — with one that became more prominent because it was built along a more popular railroad). But the fact remained that many states were divided by rivers, if not arbitrary land, further showcasing that borders are nothing but man-made interpretations of the forces of nature.
My journey across the United States in 2020 covered over 70 different cities and towns — some I just stopped by for a mere 30 minutes, while others I spent days in.
Alabama: Birmingham, Mobile, Montgomery
Arkansas: Bentonville, Fayetteville, Hot Springs, Little Rock, Texarkana
Arizona: Flagstaff, Phoenix, Navajo Nation, Page (Horseshoe Bend), Scottsdale, Sedona, Tucson/Saguaro National Park
Colorado: Boulder, Colorado Springs/Manitou Springs, Denver, Estes Park/Rocky Mountain National Park
Georgia: Atlanta, Buckhead (not Atlanta), Helen/Chattahoochee National Forest
Kansas: Lindsborg, Topeka, Wichita
Kentucky: Paducah
Louisiana: Baton Rouge, New Orleans
Maryland: Baltimore
Mississippi: Gulfport, Tupelo
Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
North Carolina: Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem
Oklahoma: Catoosa, Oklahoma City, Tulsa
South Carolina: Columbia, Greenville
Tennessee: Gatlinburg, Knoxville, Memphis, Nashville, Pigeon Forge
Texas: Austin, Beaumont, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, Katy, Luling, Marfa, San Antonio, Sugar Land
Utah: Alta, Grand Staircase Escalante, Ogden, Park City, Salt Lake City
Virginia: Charlottesville, Norfolk, Richmond, Roanoke, Suffolk, Virginia Beach
Washington, D.C.
Wyoming: Cheyenne, Laramie
I plan to write about each of my experiences in these places in the future.
I am glad that one of the bright sides of the pandemic allowed me to be able to do it. The best news? I didn’t catch COVID during my travels. This wasn’t easy to do — it involved a lot of planning, cleaning, and preparation.
Overall, I feel incredibly enriched from this experience, learning about all the different elements of what makes the United States. While I was perhaps incredibly negative in my critique above, the additional understanding and perspective that I have gained has proven invaluable.
