Road Trippin’: Life Lessons on Interstate 87
Published November 13, 2007
By Max C. Bookman
Fully loaded with snacks and supplies, we sailed down Route 7, leaving behind UVM, Burlington, and everything associated with that little swath of America aside Lake Champlain. The grey Shelburne sprawl of fast food, car dealerships, and motels slowly melted into that vista of orange sun, green mountains, and blue sky that is so typically Vermont.
We rolled through the brick clad Vergennes town center after turning onto Vermont 22-A, beginning the forty-mile drag that flows straight into Whitehall, New York. Immediately after crossing the border that separates the Empire State from her rural neighbor, grazing cows were replaced with ancient billboards, breathtaking green hills with utterly brown expanses, and well-kept farms with dilapidated above-ground swimming pools.
From there, the agenda was to fly down to Jersey, cross into Delaware, skip through Maryland, and arrive in the District of Columbia by daybreak. Ten hours, give or take a pit stop or three. The mission: Face melting, hippie-laden, antiwar protest in the nation’s capital. Our friends called us crazy, reckless, flat-out dumb.
But they didn’t understand the importance of a road trip. And let me tell you, we had ourselves quite a trip.
* * *
Life is often likened to a physical journey. We understand unforeseen events as “bumps in the road,” when we screw up, we have “made a wrong turn,” and when we rectify our mistakes, we “get back on track.” From innocence to adulthood, ignorance to understanding, home to college, the itinerary of our life’s journey is unknown.
Similarly, it is impossible to anticipate the events of a road trip. After four hours of driving, about an hour north of New York City, we discovered that the protest we were to attend would not actually take place until Monday. It was a Friday night.
Oh, shit.
Four hours, two grape Dutches, one Red Bull, and a tank of gas for nothing? News of our ill-fated protest was devastating. But we couldn’t let the story end there. Road trips aren’t simply a means to get to an end. They are adventures in their own right.
We decided to spend the night in New York City. New York is a far cry from Washington, but it was a surprising relief to be away from Vermont. The Green Mountain State is an exceptional place, but if you rarely venture past Al’s French Fries on weekdays and Stowe on weekends, you begin to cultivate a terribly skewed worldview.
I had forgotten that fair trade and compost are not at the forefront of everybody’s mind. There are people who actually can’t afford a snowboard, and there are others who just don’t give a shit about skiing. Believe it or not, there are actually places where stores are open longer than 19½ hours.
Nobody was talking about diversity. Absent was the hollow idea that if we speak about diversity enough, we’ll forget that 93% of our peers are white. New York is diversity. Forget token posters, the streets were filled with black people, Hispanics, Asians, Indians, speaking languages I’ve never heard before. I think I even met a green person.
Gays and lesbians everywhere! And they weren’t burning red crosses or incessantly reminding people of their orientation. They were actually free to be themselves, going out to bars, hooking up, and having fun- as people, not as homosexuals.
There were plenty of police, but these cops had bigger fish to fry than illegal underage drinkers. Although the NYPD isn’t on the warpath against nineteen year olds throwing back a few Heinekens, New York seems to get along unbelievably fine. UVMPD take note.
People were smoking cigarettes five, three, even two feet away from buildings! Fear not, ResLife, I still smoked twenty feet away, even though I was smack in the middle of the street and in the face of taxis that would have had no problem running me over…I couldn’t let my evil smoke happen into an unsuspecting nonsmoker’s nose. Funny, though, I did not see one person die from an asthma attack that night.
The next morning, armed with venti espressos (no heady Green Mountain Coffee) and some bagels that put Alice’s to shame, we hopped onto Interstate 87 northbound, and bolted back toward Vermont.
We never got to protest in Washington, DC. But the road trip was not a failure. It was a meaningful experience, regardless of our final destination. The open road is a place to contemplate, to meet strange new people, to bond. You never really know your friends until you spend six hours in an aluminum box with them. You never truly understand yourself until you see the world with your own eyes.
As we returned through the grand backdrop of the Green Mountains, I understood how small and temporary we are. I wondered how many road trips those mountains have silently witnessed. Neither here nor there, we dashed back to Burlington, engine roaring, Chili Peppers blasting, back to our life aside Lake Champlain, ready for the next bump in the road.
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