We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. —John Steinbeck U.S. Route 50, west of Eureka, Nevada
THE GREAT EMPTY
A lonely highway reminds us what wild country looks like
BY JOHN RASMUSON
T
o take a trip on an airplane nowadays is to run a gauntlet, suffering for hours before emerging at the baggage claim carousel, battered and bedraggled. These trips take us between crowded, lookalike airports at disorienting speeds. Lay over in Kalamazoo? The airline decides, not us. Steinbeck would have objected to the encapsulation of air travel. He wanted to see the sights along the blue highways, eat lunch in diners, and hobnob with the residents of rural towns across America. Accompanied by a poodle named Charley, he drove 10,000 miles on a road trip that generated a best-selling travelogue in 1962. Travels with Charley in Search of America was on my mind as I planned a December trip to San Francisco. Without business to conduct and no particular timetable, I decided to forgo the airplane ordeal, eschew the tedium of I-80 through Reno, and drive across Nevada on “the loneliest road in America.” I chose Highway 50 not because it was the antithesis of frenetic air travel, but because I have lately come to think of trips and destinations as being conjoined. In other words, the over-
24 | Vamoose Utah • March 2020
riding concern was not so much where I was going as it was how I would get there. And at what pace. Another factor in the decision-making process was an upswell of nostalgia for the iconic American road trip of the mid-20th century (as experienced in the back seat of my father’s lumbering, green Buick.) For the jaded frequent flier, the stretch of Highway 50 from Delta, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, is an ideal, introductory road trip. It is short. 500 miles. It offers travelers a history lesson, desert scenery and solitude. It is called the loneliest road because not many choose to drive it—especially in winter—and not many still live in its isolated, 19th century mining towns. Any of them linked by Highway 50 could serve as the setting of an end-of-an-era movie like The Last Picture Show. In the salad days of 1919, the same towns celebrated the arrival of an 80-vehicle, Army convoy dispatched from Washington, D.C., and bound for San Francisco on the 6-year-old Lincoln Highway. That first transcontinental highway, which was built with private funds, was almost impassable west of Nebraska. Utah’s des-
