I am having too many delusions of road trips from my literary excursions lately, and I feel it may be time to detox once I finish The Grapes of Wrath. Yes, a Depression-era novel that inexplicably leads me to want to hop in my jalopy and head across the dusty West, and set up tents in tent cities and fetch water with can-do spirit to wash the travel dust off my face, and then watch a turtle for hours in the dust. But perhaps with more employment and less weird breastfeeding. (Yes, someone wrecked the ending for me).
I don’t know where the theme of weird American Road Novel came from in my literary reading for the past six months. But, upon doing a survey of dog-eared books next to my bed, I have regretfully come to the conclusion that I am a little obsessed with the roads that travel through the US. See: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (read in nearly one sitting; will probably place in top five books eventually), The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (book club thingy; enjoyable but exposed me as an English teacher with no working knowledge of Hamlet), Cold Mountain (never wanted a road journey to finish so quickly; ditched novel halfway and would almost put self through a Renee Zellweger movie just to find out how it ends), Water for Elephants (Depression as road motif works well, I see), Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods, Into the Wild, and Looking for Alaska (the last three for some element of snow and nature, I see). Even though I bought it years ago, I have unsuccessfully attempted Kerouac’s On The Road several times, finding it impossibly boring.
So there is a boyfriend who should guard his passport against the inevitable day where I have planned, at some impossibly unspecific time in the future, to drive around North America for a year, living out the back of a car, probably some Subaru Outback-type deal. I have envisoned this little fantasy on several occasions, you know, on the off-chance that at some point in my life I would have enough money to be even able to have the funds for the petrol for such a wistful but hearty and adventurous deal. Yes, I know I have been to the US on two separate but equally loved occasions, and I have already done the Steinbeckian Stagecoach-y pioneering, bison-shootin’ east-to-west coast thing years ago, but I want to do it again and drag my poor Dan along with me. There will be hiking, and camping, and campfires, and Merino-fibre clothing, and snow, and photography, and laughs, and incorrect navigating, and car singalongs, and affection, and bad food. And then I will write a damn book about it.
(Other recent literary sub-genre of note: the literary stripper; see Diablo Cody, Belle Du Jour and In My Skin. Desire to become stripper not ignited.)
