We embark on The Great American Road Trip of 2026 in less than 48 hours. My first real road trip was in the 1970’s when I was in grade school. We inherited a pop-up trailer from my aunt and uncle. My parents were teachers and, while we didn’t have a lot of money, we had the luxury of summers off. And that is why, I suppose, we thought it would be a good idea to drive from Mountain Home, Idaho, to Atlanta, Georgia, to visit my mother’s youngest sister and her family, returning via DC and the Dakotas. I have several core memories etched into my brain from that trip.
Having spent most of my time camping along the North Fork of the Boise River or off Forest Service roads in Idaho, my experience was that a campsite was like a blank canvas - you made your own adventure with sticks and rocks and a nearby creek. Pack it in, pack it out was the default. Imagine my delight when we stopped at my first KOA campground somewhere in Arkansas or Tennessee. It had a pool, and showers, and a snack bar, and playgrounds, and summer programs, and it was packed with other kids. My first non-government campground! I don’t think my parents were impressed, but I loved it. The campsites were set out in a mowed field, each with its own little picnic table and trash can. An open trash can at a campsite! I’d never seen anything like that, having grown up in bear country. And then, as the sun set and the temperature cooled, I noticed small, faintly yellow-green flashing specks of light rising from the grass and fields and coming out of the nearby stand of trees. Fireflies! I was enraptured.
Then there was South Dakota. Anyone who has traveled on I-90 through South Dakota in the last 50 years will know what I’m talking about: the incessant Wall Drug billboards that march along the highway for hundreds of miles. When we passed through, these were paired with signs for the Reptile Gardens. My parents rarely ever stopped at tourist traps. Besides the fact that they were often expensive, we would sooner trundle off to a far-flung fossil bed before wasting time at a roadside attraction packed with sweaty tourists. I remember watching these types of places slipping silently past, my face pressed to the window, my parents scoffing at the people wasting their money and time on that ridiculousness. So I was surprised when we pulled off the freeway. I played tic-tac-toe against a honey colored hen who played for food pellets and tapped her beak on a board in her cage at the Reptile Gardens (I lost every time). I had what was supposed to be the original Dr. Pepper - prune juice mixed with seltzer water - at Wall Drug. It was just as awful as it sounds. I walked around the outside of the Corn Palace, examining up close the ears and kernels of corn and bought a postcard of a jackalope. And, of course, Prairie Dog Town. What’s not there to love about dozens of prairie dogs zipping around their mounds, popping out of their tunnels, standing on their hind legs as lookouts, grooming their babies, and chittering at each other over territory or a mate?
But by far my most vivid memory was an experience I’ve never had the chance to repeat, and probably never will. At the first part of our trip, we drove through West Texas. The landscape became flat, and the temperature rose. It was even more barren and dusty than our home in the high plains desert, and that’s saying something. I don’t remember how we ended up at that rest area to camp, but I distinctly remember being startled awake in the middle of the night. The air was filled with a distant clanging, the screeching of metal against metal, and rhythmic whooshes. I got up and found my dad sitting atop a picnic table looking out at the landscape. We had set up our trailer at a primitive rest stop perched alongside a highway that cut straight through Texas. Nothing but a cinderblock bathroom, picnic tables, and a parking lot. And dotting the plains around us were a thousand oil wells. “Pumpjacks”, their weird horse-shaped heads rising and falling with their own clanks and clangs, nodding in place to the beat of their own strange rhythm, but out of sync with each other. I crawled up on the picnic table next to my dad, who was surveying this weird, post-apocalyptic scene, and looked up at him, and then back at the strange army of oil wells. We were from Idaho, and where I grew up the land was still fairly untouched, except for alfalfa fields and logged mountainsides. Even when shaped and hacked away, those places still felt natural. This was alien and scary. Eventually, my dad turned to me, giving a little sigh and a grimace, and said: “That’s the sound of money, I guess.” We joined my mom in the camper and tried to go back to sleep.
Somewhere between Everett and Saint Augustine, Natalie will find her own version of pumpjacks filling up the night - some strange moment from the trip that she returns to now and again.
