Eastward Ho!

This story was written in 1977, shortly after Kath and I arrived in Kill Devil Hills, NC. Since then we have both made numerous more trips, together and separately, by plane and by car. But this particular journey was the biggest one of all—the one that changed everything.

This trip took place in February 1977. Married just two months and unable to find work in Long Beach we had packed all our belonging—a sofa, a table, a desk and a lot of other stuff, and headed east.

 

   In 1804, President Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore and create a trail to the West Coast through the newly purchased Louisiana Territory.  In 1806, some 28 months after they had left civilization behind, they completed their journey.

   Settlers traveling in wagon trains later used the trail they created.  They made the same journey—under favorable conditions—in a matter of just months.  Later, the railroads would cut the time even more.  But even as the length of time was shortened, one factor remained the same.  The country still had to be crossed.  It had to be seen, felt, endured, and finally conquered.

   Such is not always the case today.  Such was not the case in 1972 when I took my last cross-country jet flight.  Under the auspices of the United States Army, I was flying at half fare.  Everything in the military is either half-rate, half-mast, or double time, but that is another story.  The point is that with the Army paying and American Airlines flying, I was afforded the opportunity to cross the country in nearly five hours.  Lewis and Clark spent more time feeding their horses—the first day.

   That is how it is today.  Businessmen joke about leaving a Holiday Inn in New York and flying to Los Angeles where they stay in another Holiday Inn.  They don’t miss a meal and they don’t lose any sleep.  And never once do they see a road sign, stoplight, or detour.  It’s like going to the opening day baseball game and then six months later reading in the paper the final standings and missing all that happened in between.

   It was for this reason that my wife and I looked upon our upcoming journey with particular excitement.  We were moving from Long Beach, California to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.  Possibly no one else in the history of mankind had done such a thing.  But more important than the destination or the fact that it was a cross-country trip, was that we were doing it cross-country.

   Like a Depression era documentary being shown in reverse, we were loading our treasures into a trailer and crossing the country to what we hoped would be a better future.

   We could have possibly flown—gotten a ride to the airport, kissed our friends good-by and five hours later been sitting in our new living room.  We could have, but I’m glad we didn’t.  A move of such magnitude requires time to think, time to adjust.  Maybe not the time needed by the early settlers.  After all, they went into a land totally uncharted and uncivilized.

   It was vital that they sneak up onto the Great Plains.  And it was just as vital that the great plains, in turn, sneak away, keeping with it civilization.  Further on, the settlers would draw the strength they’d need in their new homes from meeting and surmounting the Rockies.  But it all had to come in due time.  Theirs was a new world entirely and it had to be taken slowly and deliberately.

   North Carolina was not going to be quite such a new environment for Kath and me.  Although neither one of us had ever been to the state; we had read about it.  And for a year prior to the move we had even subscribed to the Coastland Times—the Journal of the Walter Raleigh Coastline of North Carolina, published continually every Tuesday and Thursday since July 4, 1935.  Yes, we knew a little bit about our new home and would not need months for the journey; not even need weeks.  We decided eight days would be ample time.

   We had planned our journey with great care—choosing the sites we wished to see and calculating how long each would take to reach.  Our destination when we pulled off the interstate near the end of the first day was Lake Havasu, Arizona, the unlikely second home of the London Bridge.  But sometimes all the planning and caution is not enough.

   We had passed the last gas station quite some miles back thinking we had plenty of gas.  Now we were both silently suffering because we had miscalculated and with Lake Havasu still some twenty miles away our gauge read empty.

   But we were still very much westerners—daring and fearless—and even though we were low on gas we were still high on adventure.  We scaled every little hill, rounded every bend with our eyes peeled for an oasis in the desert.  We needed gas the way the early settlers needed water.  And then we saw Lake Havasu in the distance and when we found water, we found gas.  That brought our first day to an end. We camped that night on the American side of the bridge.

  The next day we got an early start on the second leg of our journey, destination—Grand Canyon.  For weeks, Kath had spoken of the splendor of a Grand Canyon sunset.  I didn’t doubt her.

   I have only heard people speak of the canyon in majestic and even divine terms.  It would be enough that a mere mortal such as myself be allowed to stand at her edge and gaze at the sun sinking behind the west ridge.  This was all I wanted to do.  So we pushed on.  Our little Toyota pick-up (a true indication of our western heritage) tugged and pulled our twelve-foot trailer up the steep inclines, higher and higher.

   But it was hard, awfully hard to make time.  Our speedometer dropped steadily as we climbed—fifty…forty…thirty…twenty-five.  The roar of the grinding gears was deafening but not loud enough to distract us from the setting sun, dipping ever lower, ever faster.

   “How far do we have to go?”

   “Twenty minutes.”  Back home on the freeways everything was twenty minutes away.

   “The sun will be down by then.”

   “How far now?”

   “Ten minutes.”

   “How about now?”

   “Five minutes.”

   “It’s gone.”

   “I know.”

   “I’m sorry.”

   “It’s all right.”

   And it was all right.  The Grand Canyon was still a magnificent sight—even at night.  Eerier, more mysterious than anything I had ever seen.  The lights I saw from distant campers appeared to be stars.  If the universe had been tipped over on end at that very instant I could not have known it.

   Yes, it was more than I had ever seen and yet, because of five minutes, it was less than I had dreamed of seeing.  I was disappointed.  The early settlers must have felt the same disappointment at times when what they saw was better than their dreams, and yet also, was not their dreams.  How could one feel differently after crossing the Rockies to find the great California desert awaiting them?  What do you say when dreams collide head on with undreamable reality?  “Wow!”

   We drove to Flagstaff that night—stronger for what we had already accomplished and strengthened by what we had been unable to accomplish.  The remainder of the journey would be easy, we thought.

   The pages in our Automobile Club Triptik book flipped slowly like long sunrise-to-sunset days on the Great Plains.  In Texas, a CB’er settled a long-standing debate by telling us we were both right; that there were, indeed, two panhandles—one in Texas and one in Oklahoma.

   In Oklahoma City, we visited the Cowboy Hall of Fame, a beautifully structured modern building erected as a shrine to both the early settlers who pioneered the trails we rode on and to the modern day cowboy—the rodeo stars.  My only thought as we wound our way past the displays was, why did they leave me out (and all modern travelers for that matter).  Weren’t my ties to the early cowboys at least as strong as those on the rodeo circuit?  I guess I wanted a plaque somewhere with an automobile and a luggage rack on top.  I suppose that is being left to some later generation to erect.

   There was, however, one exhibit that I found most appealing.  It was a large topographic map that used lights to depict the early settlements.  It showed how these settlements were eventually connected by what have since become Interstate 40 and other great highways. The link, which existed between the early settlers and myself, was reinforced as the lights flashed on.  Many of the cities they struggled to reach we had already left behind while the cities they left behind were now our goals. 

   One such city was Fort Smith, Arkansas, which we eventually pulled into around 11:00 that evening.  Around midnight we went out for a late night snack.  We never found food.  Instead, I managed to get the U-haul more twisted than a Texas sidewinder.  And when the brakes locked, our situation looked even more hopeless.  I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back and if this were not enough, it began to rain.  Now, common sense told us we couldn’t move a one-ton trailer that didn’t want to move anymore than the early settlers could lift a Conestoga wagon out of the mud once it had sunk in.  But sometimes the impossible can be done.  With a little help from some strangers we pushed and pulled and strained and connived and we did get it out.  And in the process we made some new friends.  Not people we know by name or will ever likely see again but just friends.

   With Fort Smith behind us, we continued east.  Our next destination point was Memphis and the Mississippi River.  You have to cross the Mississippi.  That’s all there is to it.  You can’t fly over it—be told to look down and see it.  You have to cross it, every inch of it; because it is here that you make the change.  This was our Rubicorn.  When we had crossed to the other side, we had left the west behind.

   Tennessee is an eastern state.  Her roots lie not in missions built by Spanish Conquistadors, but rather in settlements founded by English farmers.  She was born, not overnight, the result of gold or land rushes, but was instead taken one foot at a time, hewed out of the forest like a fine work of art.  This was the eastern heritage.  And driving through it, now, it was becoming our heritage. 

   The cities were closer together and between them were smaller towns scattered every few miles.  Our mileage was counted in increments of eight, ten, and twelve miles—from one town to the next.  Out west, we had knocked off whole chunks at a time—a hundred miles of desert going in a two-hour sprint.  But now it went in little pieces.

   And all the time, while little changes were occurring, bigger changes were also taking place.  It had been several days since we’d last seen a California license plate.

   The Great Smoky Mountains became another turning point for me just as the Rockies must have been to the early settlers.  The highest points along the highway were now two thousand feet—mere foothills compared to even the lower sections of the Rocky Mountains—and yet where a few days ago I used a five hundred foot drop to build up steam for the next climb, now I found myself leery of going too fast.  In this land of rolling hills a thousand feet was now high.  A change had taken place and I’m not sure where it happened.  But it might have been along those long plains.  Just as with the early pioneers, they had come slowly, faded suddenly, and taken something with them when they left.

   Somewhere in the middle of the Great Smoky Mountains we crossed into North Carolina.  Our journey was now nearing an end.  We felt the way the pioneers must have felt setting foot in California.  We were tired—worn out by the sound of the gears and the glare of the sun.

   It was at this stage of our journey that I realized the great advantage I held over my predecessors migrating west.  They started off each day not knowing what lay ahead of them, not knowing where they would sleep each night.  But we picked our cities at will and when we left Hickory, North Carolina on the morning of February 25; we both knew we’d sleep that night in Kill Devil Hills.

   By this point we were counting backwards and forwards—finding out how far we had already traveled and what we still had to go.  The cities passed—Winston-Salem, Durham, and Raleigh—like walking through a long checkout counter only instead of watching other people’s food being rung up, we counted their homes going by.  And as the big cities passed so did the smaller towns—Tarbore, Zebulon, and Fuquay Varina—and as they passed they became ours and we became theirs.

   And late that evening, Manteo became ours and after crossing the Washington Baum Bridge, Nags Head became ours and a few miles further up the road we drove into Kill Devil Hills and our journey was over.

   In eight days we had covered 3300 miles.  But we hadn’t just covered it.  We’d done what we had set out to do.  We had seen, felt, endured, and finally conquered every mile.  It was now all ours—not to own but to share.  You can only share the land.

   We had become partners in an ongoing concern; one whose meetings are held under the open sky and whose “big board” is as large and as great as the country itself.  And sitting at it are the likes of Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, the men who built the railroads, and the people who rode the railroads and the Conestogas before them.  But also there, in a remote corner comparing notes, are my wife and I.  Yes, we are there, too.