On the Road

'The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove'

I'm beginning to think I have a weird affinity with roads. My all time favourite song is Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. One of my favourite novels is On The Road by Jack Kerouac. My Pinterest is full of pictures of carefree pals laughing away in cars as miles of road stretch ahead of them. When I think back to my childhood in America, I recall countless family road trips up to snowy Maine or through the redwood forests of Utah or the sun bleached desert of Death Valley, often listening to the same battered CD on repeat as the vastness of the country rolled out before us. As I was driving back to Bristol the other day to set up a more permanent home in the library in the shadow of my dissertation, with a soothing playlist on to calm road rage and watching the sky turn from a pinky-red to a deep indigo, I felt a wave of tranquillity fall on me.

In the age of instant gratification it's easy to see roads as ugly, stressful and dangerous stretches of tarmac, annoying necessities to reach your destination. The romance and excitement of the road which Kerouac and his gang understood all too well is now mostly lost. For me, roads indicate new beginnings, new journeys. When you hit the road, you'll always be going somewhere, and even if that somewhere is nowhere, even the simple act of driving is going somewhere. There is something about a stretch of road from a car windscreen that makes the sky look much bigger, endless, always promising something at the other end. The road in front gallops out before you, elongating and thinning to a point on the horizon where it meets the vastness of the sky and emphasises, without force or aggression, the size of the world you live in. Not in a daunting way; more in a way that takes the weight of everyday stresses from your shoulders and invites you to come, explore, be a part of the wonderful world you live in.

For awhile now I've dreamt of heading back across the pond with a friend or two, renting an old cadillac and driving the ol' Route 66 across America, kick starting with a few days in Boston and New York and revisiting where I grew up in Connecticut. It's definitely my inner book nerd coming through, but I can't help but fantasise about meeting a pair of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty characters and spending the days zooming across the country and nights in old smokey jazz bars or drinking beers under a supremely starry sky stretching over the Midwest prairies.

Ok so maybe this is all a bit romantic. You're more likely to come across a seedy motel than an old jazz bar on America's interstates these days. But the sentiment endures. There's something remarkably calming about the pulse of street lights as the miles pass silently under your wheels. I think roads offer a rare combination of freedom and security. They lead you towards some new adventure, towards different people, different places, different lives. And even when you leave the road for awhile, it'll always be there when you come back, ready to draw you to a new horizon.

'You going someplace? Or just going?'

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