This is a diary I kept of what we did and saw and listened to — I’ve got over a dozen recommendations for you — on our drive across the country. This one’s a bit long, so you might need to click “Open in browser” above to see the full email.
Day 1
5:30 am departure from L.A. Leaving California and crossing over into Arizona: Peach sunrise and the snowiest peaks we’ve seen out west (precipitation from last week’s “Pineapple Express” storm, I assume). I finally see Joshua trees, along a more rural and mountainous cut-across road, because a chunk of Highway 15 is closed. Lucky.
1h35 in, I say to Lawson, “Being out here, it really makes you understand the political state of our country.” Before I can elaborate, he says, “...One hour in.”
We listen to Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher as we get onto Highway 40, which is quite the vibe to start out with. The landscape flattens out like God pressed her hands to the earth, ridges rising between her fingers and sloping valleys caving in under them.
Then we put on new Brittany Howard, and turn it up so her harmonies carry us. Howard is so good at building a delicate, layered soundscape and then dropping it into something hearty and a little weird — this knack is perfectly exemplified in the drummy opening track, “Earth Sign.”
PHASOR, the new album from Helado Negro pulls us through the Mojave. I’m in the passenger seat, dodging the direct desert sun, flipping the visor every 10 minutes as we shift our direction.
The first rest stop, four hours in, is a former World War II training area-turned-bathroom in the desert. We glean this from a plaque (it’s not often you encounter a memorial at a rest stop). We take a picture of ourselves against the mountains with my phone’s self-timer, stretch and get back in the car.
An audiobook of Matthew McConaughey’s autobiography, Greenlights, is on as we enter Arizona. Two friends recommended this book to me, and the introduction had me rolling my eyes — I can’t accept platitudes from dudes. Then he starts telling stories (floating nude in the Amazon, bar fights, a weird foreign-exchange host family) and I’m in. Plus, the audiobook is voiced by McConaughey.
In Yucca Valley, we stop for gas at Crazy Fred’s, a combination gas-station-and-$11.99-all-you-can-eat-Indian-buffet. It is 10:30 am Pacific, so we get gas and go. But apparently the joint was full of Indian truck drivers. Crazy Fred’s is providing an essential service: hot chicken curry, fresh roti and rice in the middle of nowhere.
Then it’s miles and miles of trees covered in clumps of snow, the banks along the road looking like the creamy curvatures on a Dairy Queen cone. We see a bald eagle soaring over a field of snow! Everything is beautiful. This is a great country.
For lunch, we pull off in snow-covered Flagstaff and duck into the quirky Toasted Owl Cafe for a prosciutto-and-fig sandwich and a veggie scramble, respectively. Icicles hang off the edges of homes and buildings. I am a sucker for a picturesque snowy moment and imagine myself moving into the apartment next door to Toasted Owl. We buy a couple of huge iced coffees from a local shop as fuel and get back on the road. (Over lunch, Lawson told me he would drive a few more hours — til we got out of the snow — and then I could take over, so about an 80:20 split on driving, for whoever’s keeping score.)
Within 10 minutes of leaving Flagstaff, we drop 1,000 feet in elevation and are in a flat, bone-dry desert climate. The white-top mountains are clear in the rearview mirrors. I put on D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar album and play it all the way through. We recently heard “When We Get By” playing in a store and the earworm’s been stuck in our heads ever since. The earth stretches out beige as far as the eye can see.
I finally get my shot at driving and take the wheel for a few hours til it’s too dark for me to see clearly with my bad vision. We talk on the phone to a friend. Then we listen to Conan interview Jordan Peele, then to some head-bobbing rock, and then to Usher’s halftime performance (I ask Lawson to describe the visual performance to me as I listen, and he does — Usher peeling off his mesh top, skaters taking the stage, H.E.R. coming out).
Lawson drives us the last hour to Santa Fe. I find out from Annie that Beyoncé is dropping new music — country??!! — next month, and freak out. Once I calm down, we listen to Ariana Grande and Solange as I marvel through the window at how many stars are visible out here. Then I receive links to the two Beyoncé singles that have already dropped, “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” and “16 CARRIAGES,” and listen immediately. 16 CARRIAGES is something special, a real appetite-whetter for whatever is coming in March.
Day 2
At 5:55, we awake with cottonmouth in a room at a 3-star hotel, having only really caught a bit of good rest in the last hour or two. The room feels like the inside of a vacuum because we ran the heater overnight and ran out of bottled water. We quickly get dressed, I inspect a rash-looking thing on the left side of my forehead and hope it isn’t bed bugs (I checked the mattress, but this is one of my recurrent fears). Probably just hormonal skin flare-up, I tell myself.
Once we find the car — packed to the brim with duffle bags, an air mattress, towels, blankets and a box full of vinyl records — and see it hasn’t been broken into, we breathe easy. Then we realize we left my grandma’s pothos vine plant in the car overnight, and the weather got below freezing. I picture her frozen, wilted corpse in the pot on the floor of the backseat. I don’t have the nerve to look, but Lawson tells me she looks normal. We crank the heat to melt the windshield ice, and get two drive-thru iced coffees, because we’ve still got a little L.A. in us.
Then, we’re off. Another gorgeous sunrise against the hills and mountains, the dawn here looking more like dusk — blue and orange and grainy. In our immediate surroundings are frosty hills with greenery with some houses popping out. But the space between the hills conjures the otherworldliness New Mexico is known for: snow-capped mountains, pointy and appearing to glow pink in the early morning light. We gasp everytime they disappear and appear again as we drive down the highway. It’s like no place we’ve ever been.
We listen to my playlist, Hello baby, as the neon yolk of the sun blinds us. Thankfully the roads are empty. The caffeine hits my bloodstream as Michelle Branch’s “The Game of Love” comes on, and I destroy the Santana solo on air guitar. Yesterday Lawson said I had barely done any bits in the car, so I recommit.
A digital sign near Wagon Mound, NM — which looks like the snow-covered edge of the earth — says, “Elk in Roadway 6 miles.” We are hopeful and keep looking out for them with each mound we crest. We never see them. I am bummed.
We drive through that vast icy tundra for miles and miles until we reach Clayton, the last New Mexico town before crossing through the edge of the Oklahoma panhandle and into Kansas. We had hoped to stop for breakfast at a small-town diner but all we see in said small towns are empty, ancient storefronts, which makes me sad. Instead, we stop for gas and bathrooms, and load up on snacks that will have to hold us over for a while: those protein shakes the gym bros drink, chips, peanut butter-cheese cracker sandwiches, and another liter of water (I’m afraid of running out). I’m concerned about having the shake for breakfast because sugar in the morning makes my brain go all weird, and I won’t stop wanting more sweets the whole day. But this is road life, baby! You’ve got to buckle up and eat whatever comes your way.
We listen to Debbie Millman interview a very talkative Ethan Hawke as we enter Oklahoma.
The next few hours of the drive are mostly uneventful and aesthetically plain — lots of flat, barren fields. Though at one point (I was driving) I had to dodge a million potholes while going 65 mph. “This is like playing Guitar Hero,” I told Lawson. My neck and shoulders tensed up as I gripped the steering wheel. People make fun of this part of the country because it’s so boring to drive through. But I choose to see Kansas as the great palate cleanser. Life can’t be all golden hour hilltops and winter wonderlands. Sometimes you need eight hours of relative emptiness. We listen to Normal Gossip, the Splitting the Dog Vote episode, and talk on the phone with some family.
I drive for about 4 hours, then we swap roles at the Stafford rest stop. This rest stop was incredibly clean and well taken care of. There were handwritten signs in the restrooms urging people not to smoke and not to…spit on the walls (?? this was in the men’s bathroom). It made me wonder who the angels are that clean our nation’s highway rest stops. They deserve raises.
We drive another bit to a Sonic and have a quick meal. There’s a map on a corkboard and lots of pins in it denoting where patrons of this Sonic are from. The area around Kansas is packed. There are a few from our hometowns, too. While there, I get an email with my film digitals that I had dropped off before we left L.A., and they’re amazing. The color is so rich, almost better than when I saw the things pictured with my own eyes. I go through them, text some to friends and family. Then we see on the TV playing the Weather Channel that a “major snowstorm” is expected to hit the Northeast, including Pennsylvania (the location of our supposed next stop).
We quickly come up with a plan B, and then hit the road for the next 2h45 to Kansas City.
In KC, we chow down on brisket, ribs, burnt ends and pulled pork at a barbecue joint. Mac’n’cheese and apple slaw on the side. It is the day after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win, but things are pretty quiet. A bridge on the highway’s illuminated yellow and red, but it sort of looks like a McDonalds ad.
Once at the hotel (this time I bring in my plant, who has some wilted leaves hanging from her bowl — sad!!), a decadently hot shower and soft bed lull me to sleep around 10:30.
Day 3
Up at 5:30 after, finally, a good night’s sleep. It’s really cold. I convince Lawson to put my chunky socks on his hands, like mittens. We grab some coffee — no longer iced, as the last of the L.A. heat leaves our bones — and head toward Illinois.
The sun’s rising slowly, still not up at 7 am, on a far horizon. The clouds close to land make it look like we’re driving toward a lake that blends into the sky. I remember my fondness for the Missouri trees, the time my friend, who went to Mizzou, drove me out to a big tree known as the Big Tree near Columbia. And we sat in her car listening to music, feeling so together and so free. I’m reminded of the ladybugs that, for some reason, flooded the tree outside of her dorm room window one fall morning while I was visiting. Thousands of ladybugs circled the tree, climbed the window. It felt like the ultimate luck. I’ve never forgotten it.
When the sun does come out, around 7:10, he is polite, only showing a bit of his bald head, and then hiding behind trees, so the whole curve is crisp and observable. Like a perfect navel orange he shines through the woods along the road.
Billboards advertise “Pyro City” and urge us to “Tour Bridal Cave.” I imagine a bridal store catering to lady truckers — a little gritty. Then I realize this sign is advertising a literal cave. The geography suggests to me that dinosaurs were here, so I Google it and find out a duck-billed dino was found here in 1942, and that Missouri was probably a coastal area because a whole bunch of the US was flooded during the Jurassic era. Cool!
Good news: the snowstorm quickly moved through and our route to Pittsburgh is, once again, clear. As I watch on my weather app, the multicolored feather of the storm sweeping over New England, I am amazed and reminded of how little we control. These brainless, elegant cloud formations are constantly dancing around our planet without concern for what we had planned, what shoes we wore, what urgency we had to arrive somewhere — the patio chairs, those precarious tree branches, the leaky roof, broken heater, empty pantry and undone chores. Yet we take it personally. And we live in the dance in perpetuity.
We stop in Columbia for gas and breakfast at Waffle House, which is to Southerners a beacon of all things good. The waffle might not be as crisp as I wanted, but the staff is consistently friendly and the light is good and the check is decent. At a gas station, Lawson gets out and says, “It smells like barbecue out here. Hope it’s not my tires.” The car has, against all odds, made it more than halfway across the country. It has 291,000 miles on it.
We drive until Indianapolis, finishing McConaughey’s Greenlights and starting Andy Weir’s other sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary. It’s about an astronaut who’s tasked with saving the earth but, after emerging from a medically induced coma alone in space, can’t remember the details of how he got there or what he’s supposed to be doing.
We meet with a family member for coffee and chat for about an hour. When we leave, it’s another round of Normal Gossip (the Black Rose episode) and the drive to family’s house near Pittsburgh. On the way, we pass several billboards advertising the Uranus Fudge Factory — (“the best fudge is made by Uranus,” “Uranus is opening soon”). I declare this the best advertisement thus far.
We listen to Planet Hail Mary and I doze off for a while. McDonalds for dinner. My guts are struggling. About an hour out, we switch to music but even that is unsatisfying. At this point in the drive, content is running dry, the road is getting old.
We arrive around 10pm, chat for a bit, have donuts and tea, then get ready for bed. When I step out of the shower, I see a ladybug. In the bathroom! It’s climbing up the floral wallpaper! A good luck charm, just like in Missouri all those years ago.
Day 4
We “sleep in,” and wake up around 8 am. We talk for an hour over a breakfast of english muffins, coffee, cereal and bananas. It starts to snow flurries.
Our last stops are for the necessities only. First, hot cider and maple glazed donuts. We buy some bread, apple butter and apples for later. Then lunch at Primanti Bros, home to a famous sandwich that can only be described as bizarre: white bread, a burger patty, melted cheese, sauerkraut, french fries, and tomato. I learn this is a local hit, and the sandwich should not be critiqued. “It’s Pittsburgh’s greatest export,” Lawson says as I silently chew. The last stop is a sports memorabilia store with a taxidermy elephant head on the back wall. Unsettling in every way.
In the car, more music — BANKS, Kings of Leon, whatever, who cares — and more audiobook until we reach our new home around 4 pm. It’s turning to golden hour, and the light hitting the homes around ours makes it seem like the town is batting her eyelashes at us.
We were finally home, and on Valentine’s Day.
Rummaging is written by Isa Cueto and edited by Annie Cappetta. To support our work, subscribe.