An Unplanned Road Trip: "The Day of the Tractors"

As I get my English 216 students to consider their own required road trips for the course, as irony would have it, I had to make my own.

Thus, I get to kill two birds with one stone: giving them a model for their project as well as writing both for the class blog and my Tractorpunk blog.  The impetus for the trip was simple. Our used but "new to us" Allis-Chalmers 6410 would be delivered by rollback to Buckingham County, then a John Deere 1250, the same tractor/backhoe that nearly killed my father-in-law, would come to Goochland where much work awaits it.  For more than a decade, I've worked on my in-law's old homestead to renovate an 1850 farmhouse and clear old fields and roads.  This trip to the farmhouse (shown above) would be a turning point. We no longer needed a backhoe to move mountains of dirt.

Plans like that rarely go smoothly. That mine did turn out well says a bit about the virtue of advance planning in spite of heavy weather. Driving up from Richmond on VA 6 and US 15, I'd made it as far as the little town of Dillwyn, VA, to await the truck carrying my tractor. As I made progress, the clouds thickened and the radio issued warnings with assuring words such as "horizontal rain" and "damaging winds."

Ignoring such loomings, down the road I went. I turned up my road-trip music, Gillian Welch's "Time (The Revelator)." Yes, take time enough, or just wait and pay enough attention, and all things will be revealed. I still buy CDs and crank them, rip them, and make my own mixes. But this recording of hers, while not about the Road, merits start-to-finish listening. There's not a weak song to be had.

Reaching Dillwyn, inspired by my road-hero William Least-Heat Moon, I ducked into two local places for sustenance. First I went to the window at Dairy Freeze, a drive-in of the 1950s sort that serves up decent cheeseburgers, good shakes, and oddities of Southern backroads such as Pizza Burgers, Bologna Burgers, and even a church flash-mob in 2012, dancing in the parking lot. I'm as suspicious of any organized religion as Least Heat-Moon in Blue Highways, but the video of the mob did make me grin.  That looks like a fun thing for God's followers to do.

God was not on my side at Dairy Freeze, however; they opened at 10 and it was 9:45. The obese lady getting ready to open, a woman who has often filled my orders with much haste and little mirth, shook her head and mouthed the word "closed." The weather looked like wrath-of-God stuff, so I drove my pickup across the highway (to take my shelter with me) and walked into Farmer's Foods for a road-snack. I came away with Lance crackers, a bottle of overpriced but cold water, and an Fuji apple. Not Sal Paradise's amazing deserts, "the pies bigger, the ice cream richer" (15) as he makes his first sojourn to Denver in On the Road, but any snack is welcome when the stomach growls and the sky lowers like an angry blanket.  For later I picked up a wedge of farmhouse cheddar cheese I have only found at this little store, a 1950s idea of a supermarket with decor that would never pass muster in Richmond because of its cartoonish rusticity: smiling cow, cartoon farmer, big pieces of fruit on the walls over the display cases.

The sign touts low prices and lacks letters, yet makes an attempt to be 21st Century with a Web address provided. Never mind that the address is tough to follow because of missing letters. From the Web site, I discovered that a real Johnny Farmer started the firm. A new Food Lion down the road has not put this location under, either. The store's scale and simplicity call to mind Heat-Moon's ideas, in particular his his encounter with a man who tells him "Americans have just got afraid to taste anything" (54). That would include having a taste for local culture that is not artisanal and expensive, as I find in the cities. On the other hand, Farmer's Foods is no mecca for local cuisine. Even my favorite cheese there is at best a decent mild cheddar, not too different from a good national brand. But folks in Dillwyn would not, and many could not, slap down fifteen dollars a pound for the sort of stuff I love.

It's easy to get Romantic about a place one passes through. I've shopped at Farmer's a dozen times in as many years, and I will never be a regular. The clerks know other customers' names. Not mine. They can't tell I'm an outsider from the way I dress when I'm in Buckingham--John Deere Cap, Duluth canvas work pants, work shirt, Redwing boots--that my tastes are different from Dillwyn's. Chalk it up to traveling the world. That opened my head: I want English table-water crackers with that farmhouse cheddar cheese and a craft-brewed local beer, not national swill. It just happens on the road. Travel, not mere tourist jaunts with a guide or in some prettified and sterile "resort," alter the traveler. Heat-Moon quotes John Le Carre, who noted about the journey of death that "Nothing ever bridged the gap between the man who went and the man who stayed behind" (188).  I would not recognize the person who, in 1985, boarded a flight for Europe.

Back then, after reading Blue Highways I learned something. Heat-Moon contributed to my desire to get out of Richmond. Yet my own road ran through the sky to Spain, where I moved for a year before graduate school pulled me back. I'd sold everything save a '74 Buick, dutifully stored in a garage with weight off the tires and stabilizer in the gas tank. I was never certain, however, that I would return for that car until I accepted the offer to attend Indiana University's PhD program. Spain was full of what Heat-Moon, quoting Proudhon, calls "the fecundity of the unexpected" (108). So is urban Richmond and rural Virginia, but I could not see it then.  All I could see in the 80s were Yuppies with more money than sense, bad musical tastes, and the and the ruination of farmland and forest along Broad Street into more of the suburbia I've loathed since childhood.

Rain was spitting as I got back to the truck, and I just made it. Soon the vehicle was shaking and shuddering in high wind, and only now, that I think back, do I recall those Weather Channel videos of cars being tossed around like Hot Wheels as a tornado strikes.  I wondered where my tractor might be, or more precisely, which ditch had swallowed it and the truck carrying it.  Then, on cue, the sky cleared and I picked up my smart phone. This happened to be my first-ever road trip with one of them. I phoned Ricky, the trucker hauling my rig, and he said was passing BB&T. That put him just down the rustic strip of quasi-suburbia from me. I only hate it less because downtown Dillwyn, a slate-mining town of nice brick storefronts, remains intact with only a few vacancies. Yet there is not a single place to eat there; for that, food has moved south to the strip and what it offers. I'm just pleased that Dairy Freeze packs in more folks than the McDonald's up the way.

Amid these somewhat morbid thoughts, I watched as Ricky's rig pulled in with my orange and "new to me" tractor. I was delighted. Ricky drove the fifteen minutes to our farm-gate and not a foot more. Our road in was nearly a half-mile of mud, at spots a foot deep. I had run it that morning, looking for downed trees, and I had to use four-wheel drive all the way. There was no way a service vehicle would make it. Luckily, by the time I got back with my John Deere backhoe, Ricky had unloaded the new tractor, and I drove it on through the mud all the way to my barn.

The unexpected had occurred again. There was not as much as a sapling down across the road from all that wind, despite the soil being saturated with water from the melted snow and the rain that melted it.  Weather works that way.

The next day my wife and I were there again at the homestead, with the Blue Ridge visible from the road at the top of our hill.  it would be an overnight mission, to cut some fallen pines and use the trunks to border our raised-bed garden.

Nancy had me stop the pickup at the top of the road, where a local man named Sam lives, a nice gent who once gave us his tiny phone book so we could look up a number. Sam told us "y'all keep it! Who am I gonna call? I know their numbers already."  My students probably will never again use a phone book, but I suspect they'd envy the view from Sam's front yard the visit stuns a visitor in clear weather. Our gently sloping mountains, largely protected from cancerous development, run across the entire Western horizon like a group of old friends coming to visit us. Nan  said "THAT looks like Virginia." She was right. If you love a place enough and are lucky to return and not be restless, there's a thrill of recognition of a place that looks like home.

In the shadows of those mountains local industries flourish: craft-breweries and cideries, ski-slopes (cutting tree and adding condos), vineyards, kayaking liveries, small-herd sheep and cattle ranching.  Each one beckons a short road trip far from strip-development, tract-housing, and big congested roads. I suspect that Heat-Moon was a bit pessimistic when he wrote Blue Highways. While disasters like Wal-Mart have devastated a great number of family businesses, there's been a concurrent and sustained interest, since the 1990s, in local food, local business, even a voluntary simplicity movement among consumers.

My hope is that these prove harbingers of a nation of blue highways or, at the very least, a space for tinkerers, homesteaders, nay-sayers, and gentlemen farmers like me.  Will my hope come to pass? Rolling home Sunday, for another week of education at the hands of my students, I realized that time would, indeed, be the revelator.

Works Cited:

Heat-Moon, W. L. Blue Highways: A Journey Into America. Boston: Back Bay, 1999.

Kerouac, J. On The Road. New York: Penguin, 1976.

If You See Salles' Film: It's NOT The Book, Fine. Not Beat, Not So Fine.

We should have expected it, really. When Walter Salles, director of the outstanding road-trip film The Motorcycle Diaries, set out of adapt Kerouac's novel, I had high hopes. I felt that if a director could get under the skin of pre-revolutionary Che Guevara and make that stick for an audience that included many who hate Guevara and what he became, he'd handle Dean Moriarty well.

Then I saw the film, and I left this review at the New York Times page that reviewed the film.  Students, here it is. The film get 3 of 5 stars from me.

"Missing One Big Element--Being Beat"

I have taught the novel to college undergrads four times now, and the book never fails to surprise me. We finished work on Kerouac's novel last week, and I'd passed on the chance to teach the film. When I saw it, I realized I had made the right decision.

The acting and cinematography impress me mightily, as does the film's energy. I don't mind skipping parts of a dense novel brought to the screen, though some included elements, such as Sal's romance with Terry, fall flat. Sal was really influenced by this, and other than one shot late in the film, viewers never get any sense of how Terry changes Sal.

The key failure of Salles' film is not its dutifulness to the source. It is the failure, thematically, to capture two important points.

First, as Mr. Holden correctly notes, "The movie doesn’t bother to evoke the conflict between the lives of these bohemian wild men and the square America of the 1940s and ’50s." I wanted more of that. There's a nice set-piece shot of Sal walking past a billboard for a new subdivision, way out in the desert. We don't get enough of that, let alone Kerouac's characters showing--and telling--us why they are rebelling. At one point in the novel, Sal describes America as a place where "everyone does what they are supposed to do." All that, in the shadow of The Bomb. Salles' film misses the reasons why Sal and Dean and their circle go mad.

The biggest disappointment was how Salles failed to show the gradual estrangement of Sal and Dean. Until very late in the film, Sal follows Dean eagerly. Thus the viewer does not get the foreshadowing that Kerouac provides for the two friends' final parting, or the ways in which Dean proves too wild even for Sal Paradise.

Ultimately, the film is not Beat enough, nor Dean Beat-ific enough to make Sal's parting with him as poignant as Kerouac wants his readers to understand.

Extra Credit: On The Road & "IT"

The professor faces a real challenge when students answer a prompt well. In the case of Kerouac's novel, I got several promising replies about whether or not Sal and Dean find that elusive "it" at the end of their road.

In picking the winners, I had to consider a few factors:

• Does the writer read closely enough to justify the answer? 
• Does the answer address where Sal and Dean end up in the novel's denouement?
• Does the answer consider what twists the Mexico journey took at the end?

So here are the answers. I said six but ended up with seven strong replies. Minor editing for clarity has been applied. Study my replies; I want you to get a sense that multiple interpretations are fine if supported by textual evidence.

Brett: "It" ironically is the desire to stop traveling, cease exploring, and abandon the road. Interestingly the only way to find "it" is to undertake the actions [that makes these actions end]. Sal does find "it" by the end of the book. We see him settle down, find his Laura, and more importantly be happy in this life even in the presence of Dean. Dean hasn't found it and presumably never will. He is always hungry, never satisfied, and no amount of cars, girls, or miles will ever be enough. There's always more for Dean. Note: Brett convinces us with a turn here. At no other time is Sal as settled when Dean shows up, and yet Sal stays with Laura instead of following his friend on the road.

AJ: By the end of the road I think that Sal finds "it," however Dean does not. Throughout On The Road, Sal and Dean have two different "its." Sal's was to find someone that he truly loved enough to eventually settle down and marry. However Dean's "it" is much more complex. His hunger never seems to be filled from the road, and by the end of the book you wonder what is next for Dean. Note: AJ takes a different approach to the same answer. Unlike Brett, AJ claims that Sal's goal all along was to find someone like Laura. Brett's answer implies that Sal comes upon this answer while he travels with Dean. That difference is open for more examination.

Ashmina: Sal finds "it." When Dean invites Victor to travel back to the U.S., Victor refuses because he has family. He says he has a moral obligation toward his family. Sal realizes that this morality is what Sal was chasing after. Dean is still the same madman. However, Sal has found love and settled down. For the first time, he leaves Dean at the sidewalk by himself. Note: An easily defended reading, though there is a problem about Victor; we never see him say the things Ashmina notes. Victor's reply to Dean implies that Victor won't go to the US,  because of his family. Just be careful to note where one can "read this into" a passage. After all, Dean always runs off on his wives and children.

Mike: I believe that Dean never finds "it" in the end. The years of searching and constantly being on the move wore him down. However, I think Sal found "it" in the girl he met in part five of the book.  She was beautiful, innocent, and digging the Beat life. Sal was finally happy.

Andrew: I do not think he found "it." By the end of the novel, Sal had learned a lot about both the nation and himself, but it doesn't seem like he was satisfied after Dean was gone. Instead, I feel like he's sad and forlorn as he reflects on Dean's absence, suggesting that he may get the bug and have no one to travel with. Note:  I "dig" contrarian readings that can be supported. Look at the last paragraph of the book. It leaves the question open, because Sal is very sad to see Dean leave New York.

Hadi:  I think they finally found the land of the Beats. It is evident from Dean's response to arriving in Mexico that he is absolutely excited and tremendously respectful of the people. As Dean says, "the old man is so cool and grand and not bothered by anything...no suspicion here...nothing like that" (278). These people who live in a world different from America. The police are soft on you, as they are on page 275, one can smoke large does does of marijuana, and so on. This land not ruined by wealth and money, as shown by how people were living. So "IT" is the land of the Beatniks. Note: Hadi makes a strong but incomplete claim. To make is stronger, he would want to argue what Sal's falling ill, just as they find the magical city of their dreams, might mean about this "IT." 

Thomas Davant:  I believe that by the end of Part 5, Sal and Dean have found "it" and it is the moment you are able to stop, consider everything around you, and no longer feel the call. IN this interpretation, "it" is the latter half of life, a life off the road. Sal finds it and accepts it as his new life. Dean, however, has been simultaneously searching for and evading it his entire life, and at the end, he walks away. Their dream was to settle on the same street. In the face of it, the boys split. And maybe Dean will never settle for it. Note: As with Andrew's reading, this one is a bit contrarian. It's also subtle: Dean rejects "it" when he finds it. The analysis, if used for a longer paper, would need to delve into this idea. Do we see Dean's finding domestic life and leaving it as a motif throughout the novel?