Cross Country by Robert Sullivan

Author:Robert Sullivan [Sullivan, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-01-14T23:00:00+00:00

THE REAL AMERICA

MY WIFE BEGINS A GUIDEBOOK ANALYSIS of our trip as we pull out of Hudson, as we enter Wisconsin way too late for any self-respecting cross-countriers, as I say, on this fourth day across the country, a setting out that is now coffee-fortified but also our second setting-out in less than an hour. A pattern is now established: one day traveling a lot, one day not traveling a lot. Nonetheless, we must make up some miles today—we are about to go crazy with being on the road. In addition to planning on driving late into the evening, we are changing guidebook zones, switching from the maps and books that navigate us through what AAA calls North Central—Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—and moving into the maps and book that cover Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, the heart of the cross-country trip. As a result, my wife has the half-finished TripTik in one hand, the Rand Mc-Nally Dist-O-Map in her lap, and, in her other hand, a fresh, never-before-opened, newly printed AAA TourBook, the best guide to highway-side accommodations and a distant relative of what is thought to be the very first travel guide printed in America, Appleton’s Hand-Book Through the United States.

A planned two-part series published in 1846, Hand-Book only ever had one part published, the New York part, which referred to New York City as “the metropolis of the United States.” In the mid-1800s, touring America was an oxymoron, and Appleton’s Illustrated Hand-Book of American Travel, published in 1857, was written for Americans “accustomed to European habits.” The early guidebook Picturesque America; or The Land We Live In: A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, Forests, Water-Falls, Shores, Canons, Valleys, Cities and Other Picturesque Features of Our Country, was the first coffee-table travel book of America; aside from being illustrated by some of the great American artists of the day—S. R. Gifford, Worthington Whit-tredge, and Thomas Moran—it featured the writing of William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, each of them arguing for America’s scenic advantages over the scenery of the rest of the world, all seeing America’s visual splendor as part of its nationhood, a regional exceptionalism that was its reason for being a nation and its reason for being God’s chosen nation. “On the two great oceans which border our league of States, and in the vast space between them, we find a variety of scenery which no other single country can boast of,” William Cullen Bryant writes in his opening. Bryant even instructed tourists how to look at America, how to see it. “People in search of the picturesque should understand the importance of selecting suitable points of view,” he said. “No indifferent glances will suffice.” Viewpoints such as those we see on the side of highways today—the kind marked by little blue camera signs—were what he called “sacred places.”

In 1914 a Boston company published the See America First series, and throughout the twenties the federal government

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