Drive Into the Sun: Road notes from a western-bound road trip
Written by Kelly Stohr
This January, my partner and I drove south from New York in a van he’d just converted. We kept quiet about how long the trip might be, or when we’d return. It wasn’t until weeks later when we’d made a grand loop from the northeast to New Orleans to the west coast and back, logging roughly 8,000 miles, that the words “cross-country road trip” even materialized. Up until then, it was pure shock.
When we started the trip, I had only a skeleton of the ‘classic U.S. road trip’ as a reference point, images from old western movies and Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places floating around vaguely in my mind. What I found—other than myself face-to-face with those quintessential landscapes from U.S. films and photo books—was a shift in perspective.
I journaled as often as I could along the way, but nothing came close to the real thing. Reading my entries from start to finish, I could tell when words started to fail me as we drove deeper into a country I’d always called home but had barely seen.
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1/15 -
New York’s suction
New Jersey’s groaning wastelands
Abandoned overpasses brimming with weeds and spindly vines
New York tends to hold you in place, and as we left the city for the open road, I could feel it trying to keep me there. It was a physical sensation, a suction in my chest as we left the city limits, pulling me with slow and calculated force backward down Harlem River Drive, back towards Brooklyn, and back into the familiar pulse of things. The suction wanted me back on the sidewalks of Crown Heights, waiting for the A train, and at my desk in my comfortable, warm apartment. It wanted me to stay and be content.
Then somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, I felt a pop, like a bubble bursting, and the suction was gone.
It wasn’t a road trip until hours after that awful sawtooth skyline sank in the rearview mirror. I wasn’t relieved exactly; I love New York like I love an old friend, but as I’d later say out loud somewhere in Texas, my friendship with New York had fallen flat for no particular reason other than time and the air between us, leaving me to question where we stand. Now I realize I needed to be in Texas to make that observation. I needed to look at my life from a distance—preferably from a vantage point that felt nothing like home.
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1/17 -
The clouds draped over the Blue Ridge Mountains, right where the glaciers once were. It made me feel, for a moment, aware of another land somewhere between the earth and the sky. The sun’s occasional rays point this out to me as if to say ‘look, it’s been here the whole time.’ It’s not something I can comprehend, nor am I sure I want to right now. Trying to gather, group, or package it would be a pitiful misunderstanding of its cold significance.
On day three, we had already hiked Hawksbill Peak in Shenandoah National Park and it was becoming clear that we needed to keep driving—not because we wanted to leave, but because we wanted to keep arriving. Every bend in the road was another chance to be astonished and humbled. Would the next mile send us through a sheer gap in the mountains, or into a sunken valley strewn with rural poverty? Both sights left us in long bouts of silence. Sometimes I felt like if I spoke, I’d miss the point.
That day along the Blue Ridge Parkway, we pulled over at a scenic overlook. As soon as I stepped out of the car, a silence cut through me and I felt like I was being taught a lesson in nothingness: Stop. Look. Listen. I walked towards the edge of the road and saw what would later become an image I’d conjure up again and again in my mind: a valley of endless hills blanketed by clouds, which took turns glowing as a single sunbeam passed over the entire scene.
I found myself frustrated trying to write about this in my journal, and I’m feeling a similar way now. This entire experience—the scenic overlook, the clouds, the grim valley below—did not want to be labeled or categorized. The sunbeam had passed over the Blue Ridge Mountains long before I was there to witness it, and it would continue to, day after day, until the end of time. It wasn’t meant for a vignette in an essay or a quick post on Instagram or some other form of reduction. It was meant to keep slipping through my fingers, escaping me, living on as a mysterious smirk in the back of my mind, as our van cruised onwards towards the South.
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1/26 -
Marfa, Texas. White stucco and ornate tiles. Do Your Thing coffee. Work gridlock + frustrations. Robot mode. Shook it off. Old movie theater reminded me of Wenders + Soth. Prada Marfa. Acorn. Detour to Guadalupe. Shock. Dark ride to El Paso. Joshua Tree bound.
Our van moved so quickly along Route 10 that I found myself writing in fragments. Desert homes crouched in the pale sand. Roadside attractions. Little indulgences in the form of good coffee shops. It all blistered by the passenger-side window in the dry heat.
We started our day in west Texas and ended it somewhere in Arizona, but in between, something caught our eye and we dipped off our planned route. As soon as it appeared on the horizon I was suspicious of its overwhelming nature. Even as a distant outline framed by clouds, it felt like something—which held even more weight in a place where everything was something, where each passing mountain felt like it would take a lifetime to comprehend. But this was especially past comprehension: It was Guadalupe Peak.
In hindsight, Guadalupe would have taken at least a week to properly marvel at, and we only had a few hours to spare. I felt myself trying to compensate for our short visit by opening my mouth a little wider and letting my eyes linger a bit longer. I sat in the van at the mountain’s base while my partner used the last bit of sunlight to go trail-running (I decided to stay behind due to my lack of winter coat), and for the first time, I thought about what exactly I’d been doing and how lucky I was to be doing it.
For a moment, I wondered if by desperately, ravenously consuming my surroundings from a passing car I was doing this land enough justice. In the end, I don’t think the land cared.
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1/28 -
Today I am belly-down on the rocky sand in Morongo Valley, an area 15 miles outside Joshua Tree National Park. The staring sun is helping me forget how cold it felt pulling into this site last evening after dark (I was wrapped in blankets trying to be present for the conversation we made with Brad, the private camp’s landowner, who told us about his small business making LED cornhole boards and told us it kinda sucked living here sometimes). I feel my bones begin to warm. The warmth is a luxury. I want to smoke a joint and try bouldering the rocks in Hidden Valley later. I want to photograph the landscape like a child. I do not want to think about time, or schedules, or any patterns other than natural ones.
I ended up smoking that joint and bouldering those rocks, but what I left Joshua Tree with was aching for the Morongo Valley community, or at least the slice of it I saw.
First, there was Brad: tan and lanky, with the relaxed energy of an off-duty lifeguard. He’d quit his tech job to start his own business, and he wasn’t always satisfied in Morongo, and he told us this casually and freely before leaving us at our campsite with a pile of firewood waiting to be burned.
The next day, I saw an old white car parked on a side street that I insisted we pull over to photograph. Something about the car’s luster gave it a divine quality as if it had crash-landed in the burnt yellow boulders from heaven. As we drove closer, my partner pointed out that someone was sitting in the car. Before I knew it, I was walking towards the driver’s side window. An older woman with short bleached hair and an interesting desert elegance sat behind the glass. I pushed past my fear and embarrassment just long enough to lean down and speak to her. I told her I liked her car, which prompted her to open the door and proudly tell me its origin story. Then, maybe recognizing me as a passing traveler, she recommended some hieroglyphs in the mountains (“right over there,” she gestured a thin finger towards a distant cluster of rocks). She let me take two portraits of her leaning against the side of her magnificent car, and afterwards when we shook hands and exchanged names, I felt a pang of sadness. I wanted to stay.
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2/4 -
It was hours after I’d taken my first shower in a place that wasn’t a Best Western that my skin caught up with my body. I felt the crystal-clean ghost of soap on my shoulders and neck. All these simple things felt forbidden in the world we’d been living in—things like warm water, cold water, clean clothes, the dizzying convenience of that life I live back home. Everything was replaced by light and land, by horizon. I felt fed by the landscape, even if it wasn’t appealing to me, I savored it knowing it was special because it had always been right here, and right here, and here, while I existed with my eyes covered to it all. And then in Denver, I found a sense of familiarity which fell into that category of “forbidden things” and I have to remind myself every couple seconds that I’m still on this trip, even though it’s already starting to feel like I’m not, and the road fades away in my mind as I chase after it.
The drive home was unrelenting. Even as we strolled around San Francisco buying records in Amoeba Music and watching the sunset by the Golden Gate Bridge, it was hard to believe we’d run out of land. We decided to sweeten the 3,000 mile-drive back with a quick stop to see my sister and her boyfriend in Colorado.
When we rolled into Broomfield last night at 8:45 pm, I’d written of our arrival, I stood slack-jawed outside the gate to Julie’s apartment as if my open mouth would coax words out—and then later the words came tumbling freely and sometimes randomly and in the wrong order. But even in my disoriented state, Julie seemed to understand. She has a gift for making people feel welcome, and her expressions of genuine curiosity helped solidify our experience as a real, true one.
In Denver, we spent a few hours in a cafe much like the ones in New York. My partner and I both wrote in our respective notebooks, while Julie finished up some schoolwork. I tried to focus, but kept getting pulled into the mini-scenes happening around us: two women talking loudly a few feet away (“I’ve been trying to be on social media, to be more like… social”), laptops opening and closing in every direction, a polished-looking woman smiling repeatedly for her partner’s phone. I couldn’t help but feel like everywhere I turned, there were people whose worlds started and ended with themselves. I saw this, and then I saw myself in it. Immediately, I needed fresh air.
Later I caught myself daydreaming of the retired couple at the top of Hawksbill Peak, a barge on the Mississippi, the young drummer on Frenchmen Street totally enveloped in her craft, Brad the landowner, a lone bobcat crossing a dark Texan road, the guitar player at a Terlingua saloon, and those clouds over the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Where had anyone “made it”? There was no best place to be. No city or town or lamppost was better than another. It was all terrifying magic, whether it shined through the night or hid in the shadows.