Book: The Longest Road by Phillip Caputo

Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

The author, his wife and their two dogs take this long road trip in a 19 foot, refurbished, 1962 Globetrotter Airstream which they towed behind a Toyota Tundra. If you like travel tales, you will probably like this one. I definitely liked the following from near Columbia, Tennessee:

"Man, I tell you what, we were hot and sweaty and ready to go home…and there we were, setting' at that red light, and here they come, all in a line, seventy, eighty school buses all painted in funny colors, with stovepipes sticking' out the winders, and we wondered. What in the world? We didn't know what was going' on. We thought somebody was invadin' us."

It WAS an invasion. As the author recounts: "Bud was witnessing, that afternoon in 1971, the end of a cross-country odyssey of 320 hippies disillusioned with the self-indulgent scene in San Francisco. Led by Stephen Gaskin, a balding, bearded ex-marine who preached a fusion of Christianity and Eastern religions, the pilgrims had searched the nation for a place to establish a settlement based on the principle of nonviolence, respect for the earth, and communal living….They named their property "the Farm" and soon went to work turning it into one. "

My sister Eunice lived on the Farm for awhile and had a couple of babies, who were delivered by their competent midwives. I would follow her life from a distance, and one time visited the Farm. In some ways, this experiment in communal living was successful as there are now third generation families there.

The author asks Noah what he asks folks all along the trip: "What holds us together as a nation?" and Noah replies "I think it's greed and the quest for material possessions that holds the country together. What our leaders want is us to be good little consumers and keep buying, buying, buying." His friend Cedar gives his opinion, "One of the big things is complacency…We're used to it this way, the quote free market unquote. What people need to do is wake up and say, 'As a nation, we're not happy. We don't love each other.'"

So that was one story in this book. There are many such vignettes...bits of history, weather tales, dog adventures, small towns, campgrounds, cowboys and Indians, a visit with Jim and Linda Harrison in Montana….just about what one expects in a road-trip book. And they finally arrive in Deadhorse, Alaska on Prudhoe Bay where they were escorted around in a tourist bus. Branden, the driver told them, "Stay inside folks, I'm calling my dispatcher to find out where the bears are."

And then back again to Breckenridge, Texas, having driven 16,241 miles….

"In the end…the journey had been the destination. It had never been anything else."