Ribbon of Highway

In early December, I put the car in gear and traveled east, while my friend Lauren left her New Jersey home to head west, our paths intersecting in Altoona, Pennsylvania. We’ve been collaborating on a book on retirement for women in ministry, sharing ideas and manuscript files by e-mail, and we needed time together to tie up some loose ends on the project. We hoped the book project would serve as a valid cover story for a girl’s getaway.

I was grateful for the ease and speed of the interstate, especially since I got a late departure from Ashland on my ride eastward, but I chose a different route for my journey home. The backroads allowed for a brief visit to my daughter-in-law’s hometown of Jerome, Pennsylvania, nestled in the Laurel Mountains near Johnstown, one of the many small coal-mining towns that stretch into Kentucky and West Virginia. From there I headed home, traveling through small town Pennsylvania and Ohio. What beautiful country, with signs of both poverty and wealth spread across the miles.

The car pointed in the opposite direction this week, as Larry and I traveled west for his brother-in-law’s funeral in Kansas. Again, the interstate provided a swift and simple route: I-71 to I-70, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. While most of my passenger time was spent with my eyes on the pages of Louise Perry’s Inspector Gamache mysteries (a new-found reading companion), I saw enough of the passing landscape to see similar sights. Miles and miles of farmland and forests, hundreds of rural towns, and the suburbs and cities of places like Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Kansas City.

Travel, especially by car, provides an opportunity to think about the land we are passing through, its history and economy, its landmarks and its people. As we sped along the pavement, I thought about those who traveled these miles at a much slower pace, on foot, on horseback, in wagon trains, and even on the early railroads that belched noxious smoke into the air. I thought, too, of those who made their way to our destination in Kansas on the treacherous underground railroad, hoping to find safety among the new state’s abolitionists.

Driving through Johnstown, I thought about the 2200 people who died in the great flood of 1889, and those who lived on to rebuild that community. I thought about the miners in Jerome who carried canaries deep into the coal mines, desperate to hear the continuous song of the caged birds that signaled enough air to breathe.

My recent travels have reminded me of the vastness of our country, and of the great moments and the many sorrows its history bears. While we long to capture our hopes for the future in catchy sound bites, the reality is that when 324 million people live together in a land with huge differences in landscape, resources, and culture, we will not be able to find our way forward based only on proclamations from on high or in wishful thinking. Yet by revisiting the values held dear in the early days of our republic, we can find the common denominators that bind us together as Americans.

If we are anything, those miles reminded me, we are resilient. As a land populated primarily by immigrants, we left behind all that was familiar for the hope of a new life. Together, we built a nation, imperfect as it may seem at times, that stretches from coast to coast. While I didn’t make it to either ocean on my trips, I saw enough of its multicolored ribbons of highway to be reminded of Woody Guthrie’s words: “This land is your land, this land is my land.”

It’s a wonderful song, often sung by Peter, Paul and Mary, and a favorite at elementary school concerts. But one of its seldom-recorded verses from the prophetic troubadour asked a troubling question in the context of poverty, hunger and exclusion: “Is this land made for you and me?” It seems to me that we answer “yes” to Guthrie’s question by moving ahead just as our ancestors did, with resiliency and courage, one step at a time.