America, How I'll Miss You

Once I dreamed of crossing the ocean. Now I wish I could cross the border to my native land.

The Colorado Rockies stunned me with their grandeur.. Charles Partridge Adams painted this landscape in 1890.

Dear America,

Summer won’t be summer without a road trip over the border.

I don’t have to tell you what’s keeping me away—other travelers have given you an earful. How they hooted when that misbegotten meme went viral: “This Is Your Year to Travel to America.” Did you catch the endless jibes about the unexpected detour to a Salvadoran prison? The onslaught of disgust for the wrecking ball swinging at the White House? “I was going to tour the Gulf of Mexico but apparently it has disappeared.”

It pains me that you—whose flag I saluted as a schoolchild, hand over heart; whose artists and heroes fired my sense of purpose; whose palms and sequoias, red rocks and green valleys, crashing surf and woodland streams could keep a traveler exploring for a lifetime—have become, of all things, a pariah. Travel to the U.S. is dropping around the world; the duty-free shop at the Peace Bridge is now in receivership.

Crossing the border used to mean coming home to my native land. Now it means the prospect of my phone being searched and my words exposing me as some gatekeeper’s notion of a threat to the regime. Your president vows to annex my second country and homeland, Canada. Do I really have to ask you: Who is the threat?

For most of my life, I hardly knew you. In southern New Hampshire, where I grew up, the hills cup the fields like gentle palms. My parents, both skittish drivers, insisted on being home for tea. Unlike my classmates, I never saw the craggy Old Man of the Mountains, less than two hours from our door. I was past 60 when I finally saw the Colorado Rockies. How many ways could a peak slash the sky? Every bend in the road revealed another, wave upon wave of “purple mountain majesty.” In schoolroom singalongs, it seemed no more real than the Yellow Brick Road. America the Beautiful: That was you, waiting to be found and seen, as if I was the first in all time to be dumbstruck with awe in the place now known as Colorado.

My class around 1957. I’m directly behind the gingerbread house.

I married a Canadian whose sense of adventure bloomed behind the wheel. Home became a walkup apartment in Toronto, but it was south that we first headed in our used Renault—Paul’s hand on my sun-warmed thigh, our four-year-old nodding in the back seat. All of us mellowed by a stop at ice cream heaven, the converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont where Ben and Jerry brought a whole-earth vibe to the Great American Scoop. Every ice cream fanatic in the line had to take a turn holding the screen door open (it was weathered, and creaked).

Our son turns 54 this year. A metal plaque is all that remains of the original Ben & Jerry’s. It’s been decades since we built a road trip around a free stay at my mother’s. Back then I used to wish we could fly somewhere steeped in legend. How about Paris? We’d wander the aisles of the Left Bank bookstore where Sylvia Beach used to tell the young Ernest Hemingway, “Promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.”

A multitude of travelers, including ourselves, have visited Shakespeare and Company, haunt of the Lost Generation. A lucky few remember the Lobster Lane Bookshop. If hobbits lived in South Thomaston, Maine, this warren of low-slung shacks was just the sort of haven they’d design. Festooned with lobstering gear, it invited us to get lost in a maze of aisles just wide enough for one reader whose idea of enchantment is dusty books held by many hands of the living and the dead.

What reader could resist the late, much=missed Lobster Lane Bookshop in South Thomaston, Maine?

Since those first road trips on the cheap, we’ve traveled far and wide. We’ve rung the massive bell on the watch tower at the Alhambra. Bent an elbow at Samuel Johnson’s favorite pub, walked in emperors’ footsteps at the Forbidden City, wondered what was up in Dublin with the parasols and boater hats (turned out we’d arrived on Bloomsday, when celebrants of James Joyce dress as characters from Ulysses). With less than five years till we’re 80, our “someday” trip to Budapest and Prague is approaching the cliff of never. And yet where I most long to go is not across an ocean but across a border two hours’ drive from my door.

A native country is more than a physical place. In 1960 John Steinbeck loaded up a camper van and set off, with an aging French poodle, in search of the American soul. “[W]e do not take a trip; a trip takes us,” he wrote in Travels with Charley, his bestselling yarn about the quest. He did not tell the story as it happened on the map and the calendar, but rather as he felt it at 58, between novels and low on inspiration. America, he wrote a lovers’ quarrel with you—the muse who tantalized, confounded and betrayed, your remembered beauty eroded by “traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry.” In New Orleans he watched white mothers howl outrage at Black children for daring to integrate a neighborhood school. He called the spectacle “bestial and filthy and degenerate… a kind of witches’ Sabbath.”

If Steinbeck were on the road today, he’d find plenty of heedlessness and hate to deplore. But I doubt he’d contemplate a move to some other country. America, he loved your soaring promise more than he dreaded your demons.

Steinbeck with Charley, a steadfast comforter on the road.

Steinbeck nailed it in Travels with Charley: The trip takes the traveler. When Paul talked me into the journey of a lifetime, just over a dozen years ago, we discovered the hidden treasures of towns on nobody’s bucket list. The Great Art Road Trip—49 American museums in five weeks—skirted the familiar east coast temples. From Detroit we meandered to L.A. and back home to Toronto, where our own art museum can’t compare to what we found in Toledo, Ohio. The Rust Belt city shows a woebegone face to the road and a sparkling art collection, free of charge, to those who pull up at the museum. I still think about a Degas portrait that riveted me in Toledo, and would hold its own at the Met. I still replay our conversation with the volunteer who asked, when we heard we were wrapping up an art road trip, “And what do you think of our museum?”

It warmed me to tell this man, who had the cheerfully rumpled look of a professor finding his groove in retirement, “You’re up there with the best.”

America, why didn’t I tell you before now? I thought it went without saying, as if anything ever does. Of all our travel destinations, you were the best.

When I think of you, America, I miss Americans—my family, my friends, the many strangers who have made me welcome on my travels. I think of readers I’ve met on Zoom and wish I could meet in their favorite café. “Come see me in Toronto,” I tell them. “Let me show you the hidden treasures.” I know exactly where my American friends should stay—a new suites hotel soon to open around the corner. From my living room, I can see the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. The brass lamp waiting for a reader. I can picture a friend waving to me. The lilacs are coming into bloom, and it’s a fine day for walking.

Okay, friends, you’ve heard about my most memorable road trip ever. What’s yours? I promise to answer. John Steinbeck, visiting America (or not)… over to you.

America is often on my mind these days, as you’ll see from “A Tale of Two Countries” and “The Green, Green Grass of Gettysburg.” Feel free to share any post at Amazement Seeker. Your friend could be my next new reader.

Nothing goes without saying, so I’ll say it again: You are all my inspiration. And if you happen to pass this way, my dog and I give a friends-only tour of public art in Toronto’s under-visited East Downtown.