(Flyover) America, the Beautiful
Some thoughts on an All-American cross-country road trip.
Our family recently took a multi-day cross-country – well, 2/3 of the country, at least – road trip as part of our relocation from New Jersey to Colorado Springs. We packed the baby, the dog, and as much of our stuff as possible into our Hyundai Palisade and took off from the East Coast for the long drive to our new abode in the Mountain West. That drive, ironically enough, was exactly 1,776 miles, a fact that got me thinking about the history, people, and incredible beauty of this amazing country as we started the three-day sojourn across eight states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. Over the course of the approximately 28-hour drive – with plenty of stops for baby breaks and dog defecations, naturally – I pondered those ideas and saw them reflected in the places we passed through. I also took away one key lesson that will remain with me for the rest of my life: the pejorative coastal elite label ‘Flyover Country’ is an absurd misnomer.
As someone who has lived his entire life up to this point – all 34 years of it – along the northeastern US I-95 corridor, I certainly bought, at least somewhat, into the idea that non-coastal America was simply inferior to our highfalutin’ big-city lifestyle. The hustle and bustle of Manhattan (in which I spent 4 years in its beating heart, Midtown), the Jersey Shore boardwalk experience, and the history of Boston (where I attended college for 5 years) were simply unmatched in my eyes. Florida was a haven for surf, sand, and entertainment. New York was the bright lights of Times Square, the glittering skyscrapers of the Big Apple, and the classic scenery of the Catskills and Adirondacks. New Jersey, for all its faults and (somewhat deserved) bad rap, was home and nothing would ever compare. Plus, it has the best pizza, bagels, and Italian food in the nation, and, yes, I’ll fight you on that. The center of the country was just open land that was boring to look at, especially out an airplane window, with small pockets of interest, namely big cities like Chicago. Everything else was just random fields of corn, right?
Boy, oh boy, was I dead wrong. And I’m more than happy to eat the plentiful plates full of crow that I’m sure my Midwesterner friends would be lining up to serve me with a knowing grin. ‘Flyover Country’ is nothing of the sort. It is precisely what makes America great. Indeed, it is what makes America, well, America.
Something that returned to my mind over and over again as I drove through America’s Heartland at a brisk 70 miles-per-hour was the patriotic hymn America, the Beautiful. During our road trip odyssey, I came to realize that this paean to our nation – a song that I firmly believe should be our national anthem[1] – was about nothing more than the landscape through which I was navigating and the profoundly American attitude that blazed the well-trodden path I traveled.
We all know the words to the poem’s first stanza: “O beautiful for spacious skies; For amber waves of grain; For purple mountain majesties; Above the fruited plain!; America! America!; God shed his grace on thee; And crown thy good with brotherhood; From sea to shining sea!” What I didn’t realize is how incredibly and profoundly true those words were and still remain.
One thing I really had no concept of as a lifelong Northeasterner is how absolutely enormous the skies really are west of the Appalachians. Especially as we sped through Kansas and eastern Colorado, the sky felt like a massive dome stretching unbroken from horizon to horizon. The bright blue hue reached for miles and miles, seemingly endlessly. Nothing felt cramped or claustrophobic, as it sometimes feels in the densely-packed suburbs of New York City, where the skies – when they’re not totally gray – are broken up by buildings, trees, and the crisscrossing contrails of commercial aviation traffic. But out here, man, is it different. The words “spacious skies” hit differently now. I get it.
The prairie grasses of Kansas, the farmland of Illinois, and the hills and vales of Indiana are stunning vistas for a weary traveler. That’s to say nothing of the mighty Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the thoroughfares of so much early American commerce. There really are “amber waves of grain” layered like so many city streets across the midwestern landscape. And contrary to my bored airplane-window-gazing ideas, this is actually quite pretty. The colors are vibrant, the layout meticulous yet natural, and the variety nearly endless. The biggest shock, in an extremely positive way, was eastern Kansas. The drive from Topeka to Salina is truly spectacular. The rolling hills look to me just as they must have to the pioneers who traveled this unblemished countryside nearly two centuries ago. As I sat behind the wheel of my modern SUV, I felt like I could have been in a covered wagon in 1850, staring at herds of roaming buffalo traipsing across the expansive grassland. It was surreal.
And this part of the country is replete with classic Americana, the kind of stuff that is just about as American as it gets. Whether it’s the long line of ‘World’s Largest’ items, the local travel stops – including the unfairly maligned Breezewood, PA, which is actually quite picturesque – or the random roadside attractions, the Americana never ceases to amaze. This is the Land of Lincoln, the cornfed countryside that kept the Union strong in its darkest hour. The I-70 corridor, stretching from Maryland to Denver and beyond, hosts the home bases of some of our nation’s most impactful and interesting presidents, including Harry Truman and his successor, Dwight Eisenhower – perhaps the two men who did more to create and define Cold War America than anyone else. It is rich with all sorts of history, from the aviation capital of Dayton, Ohio, to the Bleeding Kansas battles that foretold our Civil War, to the site where Winston Churchill coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’[2], to the pioneering past of American Manifest Destiny.
That attitude of risk-seeking, hard-working, liberty-loving confidence is reflected in America, the Beautiful’s second stanza, which celebrates the “pilgrim feet; Whose stern impassioned stress; A thoroughfare of freedom beat; Across the wilderness!” I was ever-conscious of traveling in the grand footsteps of those amazing Americans and am glad to be carrying forward the tradition of moving to a new land for a better life. In my case, this was much easier given the conveniences of modernity – no one in our party died of dysentery or typhoid, for instance – but it was also challenging given the relative paucity of such moves today as compared to the past. We have lost some of that entrepreneurial spirit, but it still lives deep in every American soul if we are willing to look.
Katharine Lee Bates’s 1893 poem popped into my mind one last time, as we crossed the border from Kansas into Colorado, began to climb in elevation, and neared our final destination in Colorado Springs. Slowly, but surely, the glorious Rocky Mountains began to appear, shimmering in the distance. I always found the “purple mountain majesties” line a tad silly, that is, until I felt the same inspiration that Ms. Bates did 131 years ago. She wrote the poem after a trek up Pike’s Peak – America’s Mountain – which is the dominant feature of the Colorado Springs skyline and something I am blessed to be able to look at in awe every single day. That peak, an image of which graces the top of this piece, is staggeringly beautiful. It is absolutely majestic in its appearance and presence over everything here. And, in the right light, it actually does look purple!
I’ve seen mountains aplenty before, especially having been to Switzerland multiple times, but the peaks here just feel different. There’s something peculiarly…..American about them. I don’t know how else to describe it in words, which is something I don’t often have the occasion to say. Not only does Pike’s Peak look quite American, it was named by a man with one of the most American names possible: Zebulon Pike. And that is the epitome of the Heartland through which we traveled on this road trip. The ridiculously-named ‘flyover country’ is nothing of the sort. In fact, it is about as gorgeous and as deeply American as any part of this enormous, spectacular country. And, for that, I absolutely adore it. You should, too.
[1] Well, that or Battle Hymn of the Republic, but I’d be happy with either.
[2] Fulton, Missouri, for those who were wondering.