I got to Carlsbad Caverns National Park early, and in time for breakfast. But I had awoken pre-dawn in the Guadalupe Mountains and climbed out of my car, and up on top to watch the sun rise. I was parked in a small asphalt lot at the base of a dramatic limestone escarpment, formed eons ago -according to the nearby NPS placard- as a

coral reef at the shore of a vast prehistoric sea. But today it was a vast dry plateau, and I was thousands of feet up, looking out across Texas and to Mexico beyond.

I had no qualms about sitting on the roof of my car or standing on the hood, since I didn’t feel any further denting could diminish its appearance, so I would tromp up there from time to time, surprising idle passersby with my automotive insouciance. But here I was, all alone in the Southwest one chilly autumnal morning, standing on my car and watching the sunlight move slowly down the cliff face, unstretching certain shadows to appropriate daytime lengths, and here I witnessed an epoch moving, and eroding away. It was the moment that many of us have, from time to time, when we are there to catch a sincerely beautiful awakening dawn, and always shocked at the inevitably arising notion that this event happens every day, and all along, while we were usually sleeping.

Later, at the Caverns, more heavy-handed symbolism. Not knowing what to expect, I paid the entrance fee and drove up to a typical-looking Visitor Center wondering where the caves were. It was a nondescript building of little architectural detail, and standing in an otherwise boring hilltop locale -uninspiring desert pasture in every direction, and as far as the eye could see. But the building was a holding center, a gateway, and little more than a doorway to an elevator that would take you 750 feet down to the famed limestone palace hidden in the earth.

As a kid, I had always wanted to see the place, with its glistening stalactites and stalagmites, and I was not disappointed. I spent hours wandering the caverns, examining the rocks, and mulling over the circumstances that brought about their creation. I ate lunch in the underground commissary, which was reminiscent of a fifties bomb shelter with its threadbare, concrete design and stale sandwiches, and then I emerged from the actual cave entrance, which most visitors avoid due to the necessary hike involved. I wandered back to the car. I sat, and pondered in my journal how the place was “like our hearts -looking boring and normal on the outside, but on the inside having extreme beauty that’s undiscovered and untold.”

This is the kind of thing that repeats itself in the journal of my great adventure across America. Loathsome, tiring, sappy cliche after cliche. It is awe-inspiring to read in its ineffectiveness, and yet, there is another story.

In the margins and on the backs of pages, I kept notes about what was actually going on. I note how I stopped the car about fifty miles outside of Carlsbad Caverns to pop open the hood and try to find the source of some deranged rattling that was getting me worried. And then I mention how I was constantly paranoid that I was going to get caught sleeping somewhere illegally, or get robbed, or stuck, or hopelessly, irretrievably lost.

Evidently, I drove the next couple thousand miles with anxieties like this. On one page, I am pulling off an Oklahoma road and into a deserted Drive-In theater, where I park amongst the weeds and rhapsodize about dying cinema, my dreams, and various other half-baked yet overwrought metaphors. But on the back of that page, I am at Denny’s in

Amarillo, Texas, buying the cheapest thing on the menu, not leaving a tip, and then standing desperately at a pay phone near the Men’s Room calling home, calling my friends, calling anyone just to hear a voice I can brag to about my auspicious locale.

Some time later I am at a rest stop pulling the tires off the car, trying to find the source of the grinding noise, which has now evolved to sounding like a spoon in a garbage disposal. I write that I am praying -always praying- that the car makes it to Chicago, where Mark is. As a result of my fears of breaking down, I drive long hours, not just without stopping, but without slowing, speeding, or even turning unnecessarily. I don’t stop for historic sites, viewpoints, or landmarks. I give up on it all and just drive, drive, drive. I move furiously -but at a steady pace- toward the shores of Lake Michigan, intent on making it without suffering folly. But when I get to St. Louis on a cold, sunny Sunday morning in late October, and I see that great, soaring, stainless steel arch glimmering astride the Mississippi, I have to stop.

It is October 28th, 1990, and happens to be the day of the 25th anniversary of the dedication of the Arch. Admission is free, and I am impressed by my own good fortune! I park the car and stroll across the park, in my leather jacket and Stetson. I doesn’t matter that I haven’t showered in days or that I’ve been sleeping in my car and subsisting on PB&J, Doritos, and Cokes for the past week or so. All I can think is, “My, what a beautiful day” and “Damn, look at that neat arch.” And it was neat, to be sure, but something else happened to me that day.

If you haven’t been there, you might not know that that impressionable steel icon was part of something called “The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial” which was designated some 30 years before the arch was built. The park was established near the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was just up the river a bit. And right near the arch is what is known as the “Old Courthouse,” which was the site of the Dred Scott case of 1857, the ruling of which aggravated the fragile times that led to the Civil War.

I’d heard of these things in school, so they were familiar, but when I stepped down into the Museum of Westward Expansion and perused the exhibits, I began to feel as if I was stepping onto some sacred ground, some origin of story, some place where real history was made, put down in texts, and then printed and sent out west to my dumb high school.

I had never been east before. I had never seen anything over the age of a hundred years, or so. I was a naive California boy, through and through, and anything older than adobe was ancient history to me. But here I was on the banks of the famed Mississippi River, where goddamned Lewis and Clark actually got on their goddamned rafts and paddled into the unknown, into the west, and beyond the Continental Divide, out to my house! I found it stunning. Overwhelming. That THIS is the place where history actually happened. That THIS is why they built that big, hard, metal thing outside. That THIS was significant.

It may have been the first time in my life where I actually took a museum seriously. The walls had quotes from famous men throughout history, and they spoke to me, all of them speaking of the desire and need to head West. To journey to the frontier, claim the land, and settle it. To explore. The displays celebrated the Louisiana Purchase, and all the uncharted lands that would make America great. All those uncharted lands that I had just charted in my little piece of shit Honda. I suddenly felt like somebody. Like here I was, heading east, in the opposite direction, on some quest to find the source of some profound river of knowledge. And that this was no silly metaphor, but an actual, real quest to discover a nation I’d only really imagined in some vague, sleepy study hour. 

I was 20 years old, young and dumb. And learning for the first time that all that stuff you learned in high school? It was actually true. Here was the proof. And I was going to have to start taking things more seriously.