By Richard Dalton

Eastward Ho!

Carol, one of a group of good friends we had dinner with on our last night in San Francisco, brightly said, "It will be an adventure!" And so it is.

We leave the beautiful city we have explored, claimed, and loved near midnight. This is to get a jump on the bridge traffic that has gotten measurably worse with each of the decades we have spent in the City's seductive arms. Liz, our doughty cat, is particularly skittish as she explores the first of our overnight stops along Interstate 80, the cross-country racecourse we will use to reach the Atlantic and our new Cape Cod home.

We climb the steep Sierra, passing Ray and Mary who are clearly identified by a sign with names and pictures on the back of their gleaming white Gold Wing motorcycle. We will see hundreds of these new age pioneers in their matching outfits and tidy little trailers following the two-wheeled cruisers.

Traveler's Remorse

First stop is an old haunt: Donner Lake, a small, old-timey resort at the Eastern foot of Donner Pass where we have spent many happy weekends hiking, skiing, and loafing in the penetrating mountain sun. We eat at our favorite breakfast joint, the Donner Lake Kitchen. Since I may not see Mexican food for a long while, I order Number 20, a tasty kludge of beans, cheese, onions, and steamy salsa. This is a mistake causing unscheduled pit stops throughout the day.

Descending from the Sierra, we enter the long, dry extent of Western Nevada. There's precious little to distract a traveler through here. Even the radio stations begin to fade and disappear like ghosts of the California settlers who passed this way, headed West to the Pacific. We are helping to balance the emigration statistics.

Adventure is an Attitude

In the midst of a reverie, it suddenly hits me. Linda has lived all over the country, in Utah, Michigan, Illinois, North Carolina, and, of course, New England, where she was born. I have been a Californian almost all my life. I haven't even crossed the country by car since I was seven, 53 years ago. I'm familiar with much of the rest of the globe through business travel and vacations. All of these trips have been by air, that peculiarly placeless form of travel. The adventuresome aspect of the trip opens up for me and I begin to appreciate even the sere Nevada landscape. I may not see this again.

Slowly, almost grudgingly, Nevada changes. We encounter deep green hay fields near Lovelock. As we climb out of the baked terrain we see the beauty of high desert in June with its velvet gray-green hills. And finally, there are the surprisingly tall Ruby Mountains off to our right, some still showing snowy peaks.

Continental Cultural Divide

We arrive in Wendover on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats, having consumed quantities of Gorp and gummy worms, courtesy of our friends at St.Johns Church who contend that travel requires junk food. Utah gives us a briefly vertical break, after a spin on Salt Lake City's rat maze freeway system. Then Wyoming sprawls out its high plains and monotony erodes the attention span.
As our Interstate travel evolves into predictability, highway culture preoccupies our dulled senses. Gasoline brands change slowly, region to region (Sinclair's Dinosaur logo is a nice break from Mega-Oil sameness), but Burger Kings and Pizza Huts are an accretion that has collected around nearly every off ramp. Beyond California, however, you can't depend on gas stations offering multiple flavors of coffee or French Vanilla coffee creamers. Life is Spartan.

Flat Earth Society

We drift imperceptibly downward into the Midwest crossing, as AAA says in its newsy manner, "the well-known Corn Belt." The Missouri River separates Nebraska and Iowa. Iowa's just as corn-fed but the land begins to undulate as soon as we cross the river. This has been a long day of high-speed driving. Liz has been amazingly forbearing, dozing in her sturdy cat carrier.

We give her and ourselves a break as we pull off at Grinnell. The initial impression isn't promising: an undistinguished motel that manages to overcharge us because of the tourist pressure caused (we are lead to believe) by some obscure local horse show. Too tired to argue, we explore the limited eating options and discover a major find, the Depot Crossing Restaurant.

This refurbished railroad station has the aura of a big city eatery: wood paneling, white linen, and an imaginative menu. But we're in a college town with a population of less than 10,000 so the substance doesn't match the style. Still, we're heartened by this non-chain culinary oasis and by the pleasant, archetypal Midwest small town containing what U.S. News & World Reports calls one of the 10 best liberal arts colleges in the country.

Reduce Speed; Construction Next Two States

The next morning we awake at 5:00 as we have every day on the trip. This time, however, we're greeted by a truly terrifying ground fog. Our normal 80 mph pace is reduced to a tentative 50. The 18-wheelers press on, passing us, then disappearing into a fog our headlights can't dent. A demonstration of the fine line between bravery and foolishness.

By 9:00 the fog has dissipated enough for nearly normal travel. We make a major judgement error by pulling off at "The World's Biggest Truck Stop" in Walcott, Iowa and sit down to breakfast at a place called Grandma's. Folk wisdom says you should never play cards with a guy named Doc or eat at a place called Mom's. Add "Grandma's" to the dining advice.

Sans fog, we dash through Davenport (Yippee, the Mississippi!) into Illinois and then Indiana when we aren't prevented by construction projects cunningly timed to take advantage of the heavy vacation usage of Interstate 80. Doubt anyone who tells you our highway infrastructure is in great shape.

Land of Stumpy Mountains

Eastern Pennsylvania is a pleasing surprise. The relaxed smoking restrictions are a jolt to hyper-healthy Californian lungs (rescued about a decade ago from my own two-pack-a-day habit) but the rolling Pocono Mountains lull me back into a state of humbled tolerance.

OK, the Appalachians aren't the Sierra. That's because (as I weakly understand it) the former have been ground down glacially-think of your dentist-and eroded by eons of rainfall. Western mountains are more recently upthrust. At my age, I don't dare hold seniority against anything.

At Home on the Cape

Besides, all that glacial pounding and rain have caused the landscape to be festooned with greenery and regularly punctuated with lakes, ponds, rivulets, and other mosquito-harboring bodies of water. It's the green that's most remarkable to a Californian. Eastern green is so intense in the creepers, shrubs, and interlocking trees that it's hard to separate from the nurturing humidity. Things begin to look damp and feel green.

We cross the Cape Cod Canal and spin through the Bourne Bridge rotary managing, after 3100 miles, to exit this strange Massachusetts highway phenomenon the right direction, headed toward Falmouth, our new home. It is July 2 in the midst of the Fourth of July tourist frenzy which we hardly register. We exhaustedly make the final turn down our street lined with 60-foot Pin Oak Trees. For the first time we see them with stunningly green foliage.
Two days ago after we arrive we have our first rainbow following a fierce and brief Summer thunderstorm. That night a small rabbit hops across the lawn in front of our headlights. The adventure goes on.

Afterthought: An Identity Crisis

Personal identity is packaged in unexpected parts of our lives. I was granted a Massachusetts driver's license yesterday. After that odd process, a mixture of bureaucracy and personal attention was complete, I found myself in a funk. It took a few beats to recognize that I was grieving. I had carried a California driver's license for 44 unbroken years and I had just surrendered that icon to the Great Shredder.

That was the license that proved I was 21 in a bar and would have proved I am eligible for Senior Discounts in a couple of years. It had been offered innumerable times to establish my identity: at car rental and airline ticket counters, in tense exchanges with highway patrol officers. Now I am an official Massachusetts person and my I.D. says so every time I pull it out the new document.

Is this evidence of a biological turnaround-a transplant trying to reject its host?

Richard Dalton can be reached at rdalton@iftf.org.