The drive from Boerne to El Paso was long, but incredibly beautiful. I don’t think any of us on the bus had ever seen anything quite like the stark, arid beauty of that long stretch of Interstate 10. The mountains off in the distance were magnificent, but the thing that really made that place a wonder to behold was what came later, at night. And here I apologize, because my trusty little Exilim camera doesn’t have the horsepower to capture what we saw then.
After the sun had completely set, the stars came out. And because we were on a highway that had taken us perhaps hundreds of miles away from anything resembling populated civilization, there was no light pollution to be seen anywhere. When I stuck my head out the window and looked up, I was treated to the first completely unimpeded vision of the night sky that I had ever experienced in my entire life.
Somewhere around midnight, still racing to get Max to the airport on time the next day, we pulled over for five minutes or so on the shoulder. As John changed a filter in the veggie oil system, the rest of us stood outside and quietly directed our gazes upward. There are so many more stars visible with the naked eye than I had ever imagined from living in suburbia and then New York City. I had never seen the Milky Way before, but that night I did.
The next day, Max said that he now intended to live in the southwest at some point in his life, based almost entirely on what he saw in that night sky. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it goes without saying that everyone should experience a sky like that at least once. I’m not sure where else you can find one like it in the whole country, but it’s worth the trek.
I-10 has one of the highest speed limits in the country at 80 miles-per-hour, but weren’t able to take advantage of the added speed while driving to El Paso — poor old Anne Marie has a top speed of 55, maybe 60 mph, if you’re going downhill. Still, we made pretty good time getting to the El Paso airport, and saw some pretty amazing sights along the way. We were fortunate that 10 runs right alongside the border with Mexico — it’s a truly remarkable thing to be able to go along the border with another country and individual homes in their cities. We took advantage of our proximity to eat some truly great Mexican food, reluctantly deposited Max at the airport in time for his flight, and then hunted for a Wal-Mart to spend the night at.
Another sign of how close we were to Mexico: Maybe a solid fifth of the cars in the parking lot where we stopped had license plates from Chihuahua, Mexico. I heard as much Spanish within the Wal-Mart as English — possibly more.
Spending the night in El Paso was a lot like spending the night in Sulphur, Louisiana — in both places, we met many more friendly, generous people than could ever be reasonably expected. Case in point: the bar and grill where we stopped to fill up on vegetable oil, and where one of the bar patrons, after roughly ten minutes of talking to Peter, offered us a place to crash for the night. Because we needed to get an early start, and because it was such a hassle to move the bus from a Wal-Mart to a residential area, we declined.
Then there was our neighbor, Roger. He pulled up alongside our bus in an immaculately maintained school bus of his own, which he said he used as a mobile home and base of operations in his capacity as a professional trucker. Roger was a 62 year-old Burmese Vietnam vet, with some of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard — over the course of the night, he gave a brief lecture on computer science, told us about the time when he worked with Bill Gates, and the few times he met Barack Obama back when he (Obama) was in the Illinois legislature. Best of all was his description of the elephant he still owned back in Burma, but had not seen in 45 years, an apparently affectionate pachyderm by the name of Cha-Cha.
To be honest, I have no idea how much of what he told us is true. It’s all unverifiable, and completely outlandish, but with just enough supporting detail so that it doesn’t sound like a lie. We’ve met a lot of people like that. But it isn’t whether or not what these people tell us is true, but how much it matters if it’s true. Either way, the stories we hear on this trip captivate all of us.
We were well into West Texas when we found the town of Boerne, a strange little gem surrounded by what seemed to be miles and miles of relatively nondescript rural Texas. The local coffee shop granted us thirty gallons or so of their waste veggie oil, and so while John filled up the bus, the rest of us, one after the other, all sheepishly retreated into the coffee shop’s air conditioned confines.
The place wasn’t exactly what I had come to expect from a rural Texan community center. Most of the towns we’ve rolled through of Boerne’s size (about 6,000 people) have had fried chicken shacks and other kinds of greasy diners for their public houses. But here, incongruously, was a place that reminded me very much of the sort of hip little cafés that spring up around New England college towns. The business cards on one table in the center advertised local arts and crafts, there was free wi-fi, and a large menu of all sorts of elaborate drinks that ostensibly had some sort of coffee content to them.
I talked to the two baristas there — local girls, born and raised — and tried to get them to explain to me how a tiny little artistic enclave like this with a music shop and used bookstore came about in one of the more isolated areas of the United States of Cormac McCarthy. They just smiled and shrugged, apparently amused that this credulous Northerner was excited to be in sleepy little Boerne.
At least one thing I did learn about the town was that there was a heavy Austrian presence, culturally speaking. We were lucky enough to stumble upon the coffee shop the day of the week that the Austrian Economics Club met in one of the back rooms — I wasn’t able to attend, but I asked the manager, a member of the club himself, about it. He described it as a club where like-minded individuals gathered to discuss the value of free market economics and brush up on their Friedrich Hayek. Their closed-door discourse on capitalism lasted well after the café’s closing time, but they still broke in time to go to a park about a block away. As we drove by and off into the west, we caught a glimpse of a group of costumed musicians playing traditional Austrian polka for a crowd there.
After a couple of days spent in a state park outside of Austin, it was time to get Max to the airport. He had to get from El Paso back for Connecticut in three days, and we still had 600 miles of ground to cover for that to happen–plus, we were low on fuel.
The result was slow going at first. We were just entering west Texas. We found plenty of grill and barbecues spots, but waste vegetable oil was scarce. It took us a whole day of only marginally fruitful searching for fuel to get us to San Antonio for the night. 100 miles down, 500 to go.
Now we were in west Texas, the hardcore Texas of legend that made our ridiculous secession fib seem semi-plausible.
In the San Antonio Wal-Mart parking lot, we ended up parked next to Richard, a guy living out of his car in the same parking lot who spent three hours or so hovering around the bus, telling us about the ministry he used to be a member of. The conversation frequently turned to the Bible and bits and pieces of Biblical trivia when he was around — for example, Richard’s assertion that the pyramids at Egypt couldn’t possibly be as old as “science” told us, since the earth is only 6,000 years old.
The temptation to argue any one of these points was strong, but I resisted. Richard was obviously pretty lonely, as anyone occupying a Wal-Mart parking lot alone on a nightly basis would be. I didn’t want to tarnish what was probably one of his few recent lengthy conversations with other, attentive human beings. So, in a minor lapse in my adherence to the blogger code, I managed to keep my mouth shut.
We get an early start the next morning. We had little fuel, and two days to travel 500 miles. It was going to be one of the more frantic sprints of the entire trip.
We have this practical joke we do on people we meet. I should probably be less proud of it than I am. But with the understanding that you’ll probably never see most of the people you encounter on the road comes the desire to take advantage of it, just by messing with them a little bit.
It generally goes like this: When people ask where we’re going, one of us well say, well, we were looking forward to going through Texas, but we don’t have our passports, so now we probably can’t. The other person will express confusion, and we’ll say, wait, haven’t you heard? Texas seceded earlier today. Then, since I’m the sole politics junkie on the bus, I’ll usually provide a bunch of convincing corroborating details, like what John Cornyn had to say about it and the fact that Rick Perry’s the new president of the Republic of Texas.
It’s interesting seeing how people react. The weird thing is that most of them buy it. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly good liar, but we’ve gotten this one prank down to a science. Very few people feel terribly strongly about the secession, since it often doesn’t affect their lives that directly. When we were in Austin, Texas, we switched it up from Texas to Vermont, and the people who we told it to toasted the new Republic of Vermont.
Sometimes we let people in on the joke on our way out, in which case they’re invariably amused. But sometimes we don’t. I’m pretty sure there are at least a couple people who, two weeks after we bid farewell, still believe that America is comprised of 49 states. One person who we told it to ran inside his house to check Google News, and when we realized that he was onto us, we convinced him to play along to fool the rest of his friends. I’m not sure what it says about people that he was so willing to sustain the joke — or, for that matter, that other people that they keep believing it so willingly. It’s probably best not to worry about it; it’s all in good fun.
Dylan’s drawing got me thinking about the roles hospitality has played in this trip overall. Certainly none of us expected the amount of hospitality, free food and other forms of assistance that we’ve gotten on the road. It has occurred at such an unprecedentedly high level that it’s more or less permanently altered my view of human nature. I have to admit, it’s also sort of baffling — at one point we were given free cans of food, which we did everything in our power to refuse, from a married couple who were living semi-permanently in their truck. Surely they needed that food more than a bunch of middle-class college students on a summer road trip, but they insisted we take it.
In a way, there’s something sort of Bronze Age about the whole hospitality thing, something that harks back to the way in which the Ancient Greeks (or really any other culture in the past) treated visitors. They weren’t just being polite; it was one of the highest moral obligations they could think of. It made sense in a society where long-term travel carried so many risks, and I suppose it sort of makes sense still — although I think that the dangers of this trip tend to get exaggerated by people who aren’t on it. I’ve never felt genuinely unsafe, or that a scarcity of resources threatened my health in any way. All things considered, and heat/hygiene aside, we’ve been pretty comfortable. Yet wherever we go, people give us canned food and tell us to “be safe.”
I think what it comes down to is that we’re extraordinarily lucky to be on this trip. People give us these things in part because they want to have some connection to the trip, even if they can’t be on it for the whole way. When people give us these mementos like the one Dylan gave to us, we usually don’t have much to give back, but I think — hope — that they feel like they’ve been repaid with a good story to tell their friends about the time they met those crazy hippies on a school bus.
One recurring theme in a lot of the conversations we have with strangers about the bus is this assumption that we’re “for something” or have some sort of implicit, hidden agenda. Usually that manifests itself in the form of either vehement agreement with this nonexistent agenda or a kind of wariness, as the people we speak to wait for us to shove a fistful of pamphlets about global warming in their face.
The truth is, though, this trip would be nowhere near as rewarding if we were just going around trying to spread the word of Jesus, L. Ron Hubbard, or even Al Gore. There’s nothing that kills a road trip like a bunch of smug undergrads who just want to take you aside and speak painfully sincerely about why everyone needs to put wind turbines in their backyards.
After all, the old cliché is true, at least with regards to road trips: It is about the journey, not about the destination. It takes a certain amount of arrogance to leave your sheltered life, travel to new places, meet new people, experience new things … and then decide that the whole point of this trip is to educate the people you meet, as if your limited life experience is sufficient that there’s very little learning left to do on your journey. To borrow a term that’s recently seen some use in the political sphere, it takes some pretty big brass ones for some sheltered yuppie-spawn to travel across the country on a teaching tour instead of a listening tour.
So we’re not about that. Everyone’s got their own reasons for being on the bus, but the only real unifying purpose or agenda is that this seemed like a fun way to spend a summer.
As far as anything deeper goes, I can only speak for myself. And I consider myself on this bus to learn, not to teach.
On our last day in New Orleans, we received a new bus passenger: Max’s friend from Hampshire College, Audrey Nefores. Then we headed west again, shooting for Houston, Texas.
Before we made it there, we had an intermediate stop in a Wal-Mart parking lot in the lovingly named Sulphur, Louisiana. And there, as in so many Wal-Mart parking lots in so many other small towns, we were approached by groups of friendly people who were curious about the bus and sympathetic to the urge which got us on the road in the first place. One of the guys we talked to was a laconic young man by the name of Dylan. He took a photo of the bus, listened to Max and Ali play some music, then showed us videos on his cell phone of him and his friends setting off firecrackers.
“Thanks for letting me hang out with you guys,” he said right before he drove off. “I’m sort of a loner, so I don’t hang out with very many people. It’s nice to hang out with some new people every once in a while, y’know?”
We did know. Hanging out with new people has been one of the best and most important things about this trip.
Not too long afterward, I headed back to the bus to get some sleep. I was just drifting off and listening to some music on my headphones when I felt someone tap me on the top of the head. I looked up, and Dylan — bulky, black-shirted and shaven-headed — was silhouetted in the doorway.
“Um,” I said.
“I brought you guys this ramen,” he said, and handed me a plastic shopping bag of what must have been twenty single-serve cases of ramen noodles. I sat there, holding the ramen, still fuzzy from impending sleep. Then he handed me a picture he had drawn, too. Said picture now holds a position of honor in the back of the bus:
It’s pretty remarkable how many times some kind stranger has given us free food, or other items — a skateboard, for example, or something they drew themselves. The least we can do is display this stuff proudly.
I’ve already mentioned Masters, one of the first true characters we’ve encountered on the trip, but I neglected to relate one of our favorite anecdotes about him. Fortunately, Peter just uploaded a video he and John took of me telling the story—along with some footage of the story itself.
I suppose someone, somewhere down the chain neglected to mention that we were driving around in a giant school bus. Either that, or our gracious hosts Johannes, June and Asia assumed that it was a VW Bus or something like that. Because when we rolled up to their house near Tulane, they were justifiably flabbergasted. Although, to their credit, they took it in stride, pointing out where we might be able to park a vehicle of that size and then inviting us inside. We were talking to the three of them and their friend John for all of ten minutes before Johannes announced that they were about to leave to spend their Independence Day weekend in Saint Louis, and asked if we wanted a key.
Now it was our turn to be flabbergasted. After two weeks in which we hadn’t so much as set foot within a house, we suddenly had one—with AC and three beds, no less—all to ourselves for the weekend. Offered up by almost supernaturally hospitable perfect strangers.
This neighborhood could very well have been in a completely different city from the one where we had stopped at the Wal-Mart: it was predominantly white, and filled with shops where you could make bracelets or purchase overpriced smoothies. There was a Whole Foods within walking distance. College students jogged or biked by, and the next-door neighbors were bros who listened to Bruce Springsteen, drank beer and barbecued hamburgers with limited success. We had stumbled into the yuppie portion of New Orleans.
Strangely enough, by late afternoon, the Whole Foods seemed to be the only thing in the neighborhood that was actually open. The streets were quiet, almost to the point of being comatose–this was clearly not the New Orleans of pop culture legend. What millions of tourists come seeking every year lay in the French Quarter, one long trolley ride away–and we would catch a glimpse of it until the next day, on the Fourth of July.
I'm Ned Resnikoff, a writer for Campus Progress. I, along with some of my high school buddies, will be driving a school bus turned veggie oil-fueled makeshift RV across the continental United States over the summer. We'll keep you updated on our trip and what we see along the way.
The drive from Boerne to El Paso was long, but incredibly beautiful. I don’t think any of us on the bus had ever seen anything quite like the stark, arid beauty of that long stretch of Interstate 10. The mountains off in the distance were magnificent, but the thing that really made that place a wonder to behold was what came later, at night. And here I apologize, because my trusty little Exilim camera doesn’t have the horsepower to capture what we saw then.
