Letter from the Editor: On the Road

I had occasion recently to go on a Sunday afternoon drive. Sunday afternoon drives used to be a fixture of American culture. I remember them from my childhood in southern California, when my parents would load my sister and me in the car and just take off. Driving today is a purely utilitarian activity: You do it because you need to get from one place to another. My parents went on Sunday drives because they enjoyed it. They didn’t necessarily have any place to go, they would simply go until they found something worth looking at, and we would all get out and behold it.

My most recent Sunday afternoon drive was conducted after a birthday party for my grandson in Lexington, Kentucky, heading back to my new home in Louisville—a drive, when done on the interstate, that takes a little over an hour. But I set my Google Maps to avoid interstates and I took off.

I turned onto the old Route 44, roughly paralleling the interstate. The landscape was somewhat stark, since it was winter, and the trees were without their leaves. The grass was mostly brown; snow would have made it better. I cracked the window, lit up a cigar, and turned on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, read by the inimitable Will Patton. Having driven as much as I have, I’ve gotten used to the disrepair into which much of rural America has fallen. Old farmhouses, neglected cattle pastures, broken down windmills—sometimes one must take pleasure even in the ruin of great beauty. And, of course, there’s enough of the old America left to remind you what it was like before.

I turned around a bend and there was an antique railroad trestle passing high over the road, and just past it the road turned onto an old bridge that crossed over the river alongside the tracks. On the promontory overlooking the river valley was the Wild Turkey Bourbon distillery. It had a striking, time-worn beauty. What a pleasant surprise to stumble upon something I had heard so much about but had never seen. How nice to see it as a surprise rather than as part of a plan.

I used to do this a lot—take country roads—since for most of the last twenty-five years I lived over an hour from my office. Instead of turning right toward the interstate out of the little country road I lived on, I would turn left and take the old KY-55, a beautiful country drive. This route is maybe only five minutes longer and is actually a much straighter path—or that, at least, was how I justified it to myself (and my wife). But that wasn’t the real reason. I could listen to books—I probably listened to hundreds of books over those two and a half decades—or I could just think, and I could do it surrounded by the natural beauty of the Bluegrass region of Kentucky.

When I moved closer to my office, a fifteen-minute drive in traffic was all I got. I realized it wasn’t even the same kind of thing. I realized, on those last few drives back to our country house, that I would miss the long treks. I realized that that drive gave me time away from the mechanistic obligations of life. It was good for my soul.

Among the many thoughts I had on those journeys was that the best way to think is to do it in a beautiful place. There is something stifling about ugliness, something that is actually, I believe, bad for you. I do most of my thinking now (my best thinking anyway) in my library, which I have tried to make beautiful, or on my front porch in the nice little neighborhood I now live in.

We talk an awful lot more about the True and the Good than we do about the Beautiful. We need to rectify this. It will involve a long journey from the way most of us think now.