It's summertime, and the gas prices are sky high.
The Travel Industry Assn. is forecasting only a slight 1% decline in the number of vacations Americans will take this summer as compared to last. But not everyone is so sanguine about the future of American mobility. Some oil industry experts are predicting an end to the classic summer road trip.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, June 04, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 23 Editorial pages Desk 1 inches; 63 words Type of Material: Correction
Publication Dates: In Gregory Rodriguez's column Monday about road trips, the publication dates for Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" were incorrect. Whitman's "Open Road" was first published in an 1856 edition of "Leaves of Grass," not the posthumous 1900 edition. "On the Road" was published in 1957, not 1951, which was when it was written.
That would be a terrible shame. Not just because it'd be a loss of a phenomenal form of recreation, but because taking to the open road has long been Americans' route to discovering not only their country but themselves.
Our love of the road is not simply a product of the explosion in automobile ownership in the post-World War II era. And its attendant literary genre didn't begin -- or end -- with Jack Kerouac's 1951 Beat classic, "On the Road." Way back in 1900, Walt Whitman published his poem, "The Song of the Open Road," in "Leaves of Grass." In it, he explores the almighty American itch to venture forth.
From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
And wasn't that the very desire that launched the great American Experiment in the first place -- to divest ourselves of whatever held us? At the very least, from the founding of the first colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, we like to think that we've never ceased running from hidebound convention and tradition.
As early as the 1780s, Ben Franklin suggested that the westward movement of the population would save Americans from the corrosive remnants of European tradition that had taken hold on the East Coast. From the late 1830s, Horace Greeley began urging the downtrodden to "Go West, young man!" to find fortune. Until it was deemed closed in the late 19th century, the Western frontier was the mythic national safety valve that promised to save us from poverty, stasis and our worst mistakes. There's a reason why Huck Finn decides to light out for the territory.
The contemporary road trip takes the memory of all that, adds faster transportation and a lot of nostalgia. It simultaneously represents two essential -- and competing -- facets of American life. On one hand, taking to the road is a metaphor for rejecting conformity, searching for the new. It's also a way "home."
