Roads: Driving America's Great Highways by McMurtry Larry

Author:McMurtry, Larry [McMurtry, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

MAY

San Diego to Tucson to Archer City

on the 8, the 10, the 20

IT MAY BE that the availability of speedy travel has mainly worked to make the human animal—or at least the American animal—more impatient. This opinion can be confirmed by walking through any large airport on a bad travel day. Getting places quick is a habit so rarely thwarted now that when it is thwarted the shocked travelers almost immediately go to pieces.

I decided, on a very soupy Sunday, to fly out to San Diego and drive home. I had had enough of the beautiful but murderous plains—what I wanted was the desert, more than one thousand miles of which lay between southern California and central Texas.

If there’s one place where speedy travel is almost always available, it’s the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport—DFW for short. The airport is situated on a broad plain, where the visibility is almost always good; it receives and dispatches more than two thousand flights on a normal day. Only once in my life have I been delayed more than an hour or so there, and that delay occurred when a hurricane was making its way up the eastern seaboard.

There was no hurricane in progress when I arrived at the airport on this warm, rainy spring Sunday, but the east coast was experiencing weather severe enough to snarl air traffic nationwide. I knew this, and did not expect an on-time departure; I came prepared to wait awhile. Even so I was surprised by the size of the crowd that had jammed itself into the airport by the time I arrived. Something like 150,000 people were temporarily stuck, every one of whom, it seemed, had been expecting—indeed, had been counting on—an on-time departure. Though most of these Sunday travelers had only been waiting about an hour, it was clear from their desperate behavior that they had already assigned themselves the status of stateless refugees. This was made more evident by the fact that all the TVs in the American Airlines lounges were tuned to CNN, which persisted in displaying the miseries of the real refugees who were in the process of being shoved out of Kosovo.

Though all this rain delay really meant was that a lot of people would be a couple of hours late getting back to Newark or San Jose, the people being asked to accept this brief delay looked, if anything, more bleary, more resigned, more despairing than those thousands on the Albanian border whose lives were being destroyed. Thanks to CNN it was impossible not to compare the two groups: those Americans who were certainly going to get home, though a little late, and the Kosovars who no longer had homes. Both groups sat amid heaps of possessions—in the Americans’ case, whatever they had taken on this particular trip, or bought during it; in the Kosovars’ case, all they now owned in the world—but on the whole, the Kosovars looked less defeated than the Americans. They looked alert and resilient, prepared, since

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