05/08: On the Road Again
Category: American Culture
Posted by: an okie gardener
Just returned from a trip to California to the wedding of my older son.
Twice on the trip heard On the Road Again.
Ironically, it became the traveling song playing in my head.
I say ironically, because it is a typical blues theme: I'm headed out again on the road, baby, and you can't come along. The rootless man, always moving on, baby may be gentle on his mind, but he's just gotta keep moving because he was born a rambling man. A free bird, yeah.
Once upon a time in America, the rambling man was an outsider to mainstream culture. Almost all men settled down, married, had children, joined a bowling league, maybe a church, and only occasionally dreamed of the road.
But now, the rambling man is the norm. Not in the stick-out-my-thumb, hop-a-freight, town-to-town fashion. But in the more comfortable form: no ties that bind, one-night-stands, perhaps marry but probably will divorce if married. Everyman's life a blues song, but the sorrow is now supressed far below the surface.
My wife of almost 30 years and I, and our daughter and her husband, were on the road to a wedding. Where my older son pledged as-long-as-we-both-shall-live to a young women. He chose to be a rooted man, keeping his baby in his arms as well as on his mind, to move together if moving on is necessary.
Perhaps my greatest achievement is that I seem to have raised counter-culture children. Praise be to God.
Twice on the trip heard On the Road Again.
Ironically, it became the traveling song playing in my head.
I say ironically, because it is a typical blues theme: I'm headed out again on the road, baby, and you can't come along. The rootless man, always moving on, baby may be gentle on his mind, but he's just gotta keep moving because he was born a rambling man. A free bird, yeah.
Once upon a time in America, the rambling man was an outsider to mainstream culture. Almost all men settled down, married, had children, joined a bowling league, maybe a church, and only occasionally dreamed of the road.
But now, the rambling man is the norm. Not in the stick-out-my-thumb, hop-a-freight, town-to-town fashion. But in the more comfortable form: no ties that bind, one-night-stands, perhaps marry but probably will divorce if married. Everyman's life a blues song, but the sorrow is now supressed far below the surface.
My wife of almost 30 years and I, and our daughter and her husband, were on the road to a wedding. Where my older son pledged as-long-as-we-both-shall-live to a young women. He chose to be a rooted man, keeping his baby in his arms as well as on his mind, to move together if moving on is necessary.
Perhaps my greatest achievement is that I seem to have raised counter-culture children. Praise be to God.
Tocqueville wrote:
"We certainly have no better student [than Wallace Stegner] of the workings of our frontier irresponsibility. Wallace Stegner was born into the failed and still-failing frontier dream of easy wealth and easy escape that motivated the both the westward movement of the frontier and the industrialization that followed. He recognized the powerful influence of this myth on his father, who "wanted to make a killing and end up on Easy Street" but who was driven, first by hope, and then by failure, from one money-making scheme to another, and finally to ruin. This . . . was actually less a myth than a mental condition that Stegner described as 'exaggerated, uninformed, unrealistic, greedy expectation.' In his own early experience, this expectation led to the plowing of the prairie in southwestern Saskatchewan--prairie that was 'totally unsuited to be plowed up.' The same expectation led to the settlement of the American West on the basis not of sound local knowledge but of presumption and pipe dream."
In his later books, Stegner gives much attention and no little grief to the results, human and natural, of the 'feeding frenzy' that inevitably accompanied the entrance of an uninformed and limitless greed into a land that was both abundant and fragile.
"But unlike many recent commentators on our history, Stegner knew also that as a people, we were not conditioned entirely by the inordinate desires and acts of the boomers. There was, virtually from the beginning, a counter theme, the theme of settlement, which always implied the 'myths of preservation and responsibility' that Mr. Schenkkan talks about. . . . Not all who came to American places came to plunder and run. Some came to stay, or came with the hope of staying. These Stegner called 'stickers' or 'nesters.' They were moved by an articulate hope, already ancient by the time of Columbus, of a settled, independent, frugal life on a small freehold."
"If enough of us were to choose caring over not caring, staying over going, then the culture would change, the theme of exploitation would become subordinate to the theme of settlement, and the choice to be a sticker would become easier. The necessary examples would be more numerous and more available. The way would be clearer."
Amen.