A Sentimental Journey

A couple of weeks ago, I made a slightly weird trip to America, to my home state of Georgia. It wasn’t exactly an impromptu trip, but it was unexpected in some ways, even extraordinary.

In the past, I usually traveled to my native land with my family during the summer, when the kids were out of school, back before they were all grown up. This time I went alone, and this time it was in autumn, a season in which I have found myself in America only once in the past quarter-century.

As odd as the timing was, the route I took was also unusual. It was convoluted, you might even say highly impractical and in some small way adventurous. I hope to share some impressions from that trip in later posts, hopefully before they fade. We’ll see.

Ever since my father died in 2006, I have had some unfinished family business back in Georgia that I’ve kept putting off, especially as my visits back there became less frequent. I am even now a bit shocked to realize I have been to Georgia only twice in the past ten years, and the last time was over five years ago. I guess that’s how things go.

Anyway, feeling that I finally couldn’t put off making a short trip to Georgia any longer, I jumped at the chance when I saw that SAS was offering super cheap flights to the States this autumn. Only, none of these flights was to Atlanta. The closest destination was, in fact, Washington, D.C.

Still, I convinced myself that Washington, on the edge of Dixie, is not that far from North Georgia. And, I’m always certainly up for doing a little road trip, although doing one solo was a completely new experience for me.

Anyway, that’s how I found myself in the States, road tripping on my own some 500 miles (800 km) to Georgia, not exactly on holiday, but driven by a need – a need tinged with profoundly bittersweet expectations – to wrap up some personal affairs.

One item on that agenda was the bringing back to Finland of an heirloom, my father’s guitar. That was a small challenge in itself, considering how we are long past the golden age of passenger-friendly air travel when you could bring all manner of luggage onto planes without incurring extra charges.

I was also acutely aware that wrapping up things, finally, at the old homestead meant I might not be coming back again for some time. Or maybe I will. Who knows? In any event, when you leave any place there is never a guarantee that you will ever return. 

So, my quick trip Stateside had all the makings for a very sentimental journey, and it was. 

I was able to re-connect with some places from my previous life. I was able to spend time with close relatives I don’t often see, though sadly only a few, so short was the time. And I was able to get some superficial feeling for what’s going on now in that part of America – on the ground, as they say.

It seems I should be able, after such a trip, to sit down and reflect on all the places I went and all the things I did, process it all and then discover one or two gems of understanding, of revelation, of self-awareness that sums up the whole experience. If there are such "gems" to discover, that is.

The best I can come up with is this:  We should try as hard as we can to hang onto family, no matter how distant and different we might be. The passage of time is relentless. It can be a brutal reality to face. The past really is past – sometimes a hard, but necessary, truth to grapple with. And the landscape of my own past life, still familiar from so many memories, is moving on without me, making me feel less and less a part of it. 

With each long-delayed visit back there, America seems increasingly to me to be a weird place in some ways. More than ever, the country I grew up (especially the South) and I seem to be diverging, moving further apart. Traveling to my hometown, I felt more than ever like a mere visitor there, a foreigner. I guess that's natural after so long. 

To quote the writer Thomas Wolfe, whose own hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, I paid a quick visit to during this trip: “You can’t go home again.”

Tell me about it. 

Selfie somewhere deep in the woods of North Georgia. 
I do miss the sunshine.

Yrjö

In October, I wrecked our car on one of those all-too-rare Finnish autumn days when there’s just too much sunshine.

The sky was clear, for a change, really clear, not just a lighter shade of gray. It was near sunset. We were driving west. Because of Finland’s location at 60 degrees north, sunset here at certain times of the year can last a long time. The sun just seems to sit forever on the horizon, right above the pavement if you happen to be driving in the right direction. This is why I was practically blinded when I hit a temporary barrier in a construction zone and crashed our Honda, leaving it hanging on the lip of a ditch.

A couple of weeks later we bought a used Nissan Qashqai, a smallish crossover SUV. To find ourselves unexpectedly car shopping made me think of how many cars I have owned, alone or with my wife, since the first one, a beloved light-blue VW beetle that my father and I bought from a relative for $800 ($3850 in today’s money) and an outboard boat motor.

Since I’m apparently keeping score here, the Qashqai is my ninth car. All have been either German or Japanese makes. Not a lot of diversity there, I’m afraid.

Scene of the accident. And the sun still won't go down.

Of all of these, one that I have special fondness for was my second, a compact, yellow 1974 Toyota station wagon. Although the car was small, by folding the rear seat down I could make enough room in the back to sleep in it, which I sometimes did on camping trips.

I guess you could say that in my early twenties I had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward cars and setting out on road trips. In college, I took my VW beetle twice to Florida on spring break, without the benefit (or so I recall) of bringing along a jack. I probably did have a spare tire. Can’t remember.

Luckily, I had no flats on those trips with the VW, thought I did lose a fan belt once returning from Florida, and much, much later the engine caught on fire on my way to a wedding reception. Good times.

To replace the VW, I paid $1200 ($3900 today, no outboard this time) for the yellow Toyota, and I grew even more attached to it, as it became my companion on many a road trip, both long and short.

Being young and more foolish back then, I could afford a more devil-may-care attitude toward car travel. Maybe that explains how I thought it was a good idea, in the summer of 1980, to take the Toyota on what turned out to be kind of a classic cross-country buddy road trip.

My college roommate Eddie and I had both graduated the previous year from the University of Georgia, where we had roomed with my other best friend Bob. At the time, Eddie was a newly minted high-school teacher. I was working as an unskilled technician in a university laboratory, mostly feeding fruit flies and later dismembering them.

Our friend Bob, on the other hand, had had the foresight to actually think about his future. He ended up with a degree in geology and right after graduation landed an outrageously well-paid job at a uranium mine in Grants, New Mexico.

Bob’s move to the open spaces of the American southwest gave me and Eddie the perfect excuse to undertake a trip that was adventurous, carefree and completely dumb. Dumb because my Toyota station wagon was definitely not up for a traveling across the vast stretch of America that lay beyond Alabama.

I was pretty sure the car could make it as far as New Mexico (an 1800-mile/2900-kilometer trip from Georgia). What I could not be so sure about was the trip back home. With a reckless attitude I have since lost, I figured that if worse came to worse, and the Toyota completely stopped working, we could just abandon it and take a bus home. It seemed so Kerouac.

On a long-awaited morning in June, Eddie and I set off on our journey at daybreak from my parent’s home in North Georgia. After about two hours, we had made it as far as northern Alabama when a tire blew out. This time, I did have both a jack and a spare. After buying a new tire in Birmingham, we pushed on. The trip was uneventful across the rest of Alabama and Mississippi, all the way to the KOA in Louisiana where we pitched the tent for the first night. 

(KOA is a chain of commercial campgrounds, where travelers with trailers or tents can sleep for much less than the cost of a motel room. It was our kind of place.)

Besides the blowout, the only hint of car trouble had been in Jackson, Mississippi, where I had looked under the hood to investigate a funny sound.

Everything looked fine, except the alternator (generaattori, in Finnish) was vibrating in an odd way.  Not to worry, though. The noise didn’t seem to get any worse on the drive halfway across Texas on Day Two.

Likewise, all was well as we entered New Mexico on the following day and made a crazy all-night drive from Carlsbad Caverns National Park up through the desert in inky blackness, with jackrabbits scurrying away from our headlights and lightning storms flickering in the distance, a non-stop drive that finally brought us to Bob’s house-trailer-in-the-desert at dawn on the fourth morning.

We had a fantastic couple of days in Grants, visiting lava fields, the cinder cones of extinct volcanoes, and other natural sights we didn’t have in Georgia, such as ice caves (where an accumulation of winter ice never melts, due to the superb insulation qualities of volcanic rock).

In his jeep, Bob took us up the dustiest road I’ve ever seen to the top of Mt. Taylor, an 11,305-foot (3,446-meter) extinct volcano where we found bits of turquois, presumably left as some kind of offering by the local Native Americans, for whom the mountain is scared.

Then on a Saturday afternoon, as Bob left for another week of working the night shift in the mines, Eddie and I continued our trip, heading further west for the Grand Canyon and ultimately Las Vegas. As it turned out, we were already pushing our luck. 

We were about 80 miles into the drive, some 20 miles past Gallup along the path of the famed Route 66. We had just crossed the state line into Arizona, happily humming past colorful sandstone cliffs right out of a Roadrunner cartoon, when the Toyota’s alternator fell off.

Immediately, we knew something was wrong. I pulled over on the shoulder of the road for a look. The metal arm that had held the alternator in position was broken, the alternator itself was sitting at the bottom of the engine, and shreds of the fan belt were everywhere.

As luck would have it, we were within sight of an Arizona weighing station, where I figured I could find a pay phone. Looking back, it’s hard to remember that there was a time when I didn’t carry a cell phone with me everywhere. No one did. 

As I walked up to the weighing station office, I was amazed to see that one of the rigs parked in front had license plates from my home county in Georgia. I still can’t get over this coincidence after all these years. My home county had a population of about 10,000, most of whom were not truckers, yet here one was.

Inside the office, I asked the drivers waiting to clear their paperwork which of them was from Ellijay, Georgia. I didn’t know the poor guy at all, but since we were practically neighbors he probably felt he had no choice but to help this clueless kid from back home. 

After looking at my engine, he realized that our only chance was to head back into Gallup and have the alternator fitted back on. He explained to us two uninformed motorists that it’s actually possible to drive without a working alternator, but you can’t go far without a belt to run the fan, especially in Arizona in summer.

This Good Samaritan trucker took some nylon cord we had among our camping gear and jerry-rigged a belt that would run the fan well enough to get us the twenty miles back into Gallup without having to be towed. I gave him ten-dollars for his trouble, but knowing how valuable time is for truckers, I’m sure it wasn’t nearly enough. We parted ways and limped back into Gallup.

“We don’t work on no damn foreign cars,” was the response we got at the first service station we came to. Checking the yellow pages at a phone booth, we managed to find the only place in town willing to work on non-American cars. It was just closing for the night. There was nothing to do but check into a motel and wait for morning.

We were there bright and early, just as the owner was opening up. He was a crusty transplant from back East with a colorful and profane way of expressing himself. I remember saying to Eddie, “Looks like we got a hard ass.”

In between pumping gas and making politically incorrect comments about the local Native Americans, he welded the alternator back onto the broken metal arm and replaced the fan belt.

The only problem with this quick-and-dirty repair job was that once the new belt was on, its tension couldn’t be adjusted since the alternator was welded firmly in place. There was no way, if needed, to move the alternator back and forth to tighten the belt. No problem. The whole thing only cost 40 dollars, the belt was tight enough at the moment, and the alternator was working again. We were back on the road by noon.

We spent two days camping near the Grand Canyon, soaking in the scenery and getting sunburned. As we aimed the Toyota toward Las Vegas, there was only one unsettling development. The fan belt had started to screech, at first just a little, but then louder and louder as we crossed Hoover Dam and neared Sin City.

By the time we hit the Las Vegas strip, there was a full-fledged banshee scream coming from under the hood. The sound was worrisome – not to mention annoying to our fellow campers at the Las Vegas KOA as we screeched our way to our tent-site after midnight, returning from watching the over-the-top “Hallelujah Hollywood!” topless review at the MGM Grand.

Clearly, this wasn’t good. The screeching would drive us crazy before we ever got back to Georgia. But I had a plan. I noticed that by pushing the metal arm down just a little the belt tightened enough to stop the noise.

At a hardware store, I bought some metal wire and needle-nose pliers. The next morning, I slipped under the car and attempted to pull the metal arm down by looping the wire tightly around it and one of the engine supports.

It didn’t work. The wire was too stiff – I couldn’t make it taut enough to hold the arm in place. Then I had another idea. I tried instead using a bit of the same nylon cord we had used for the makeshift fan belt. I ran a loop of the cord from the metal arm to the engine support. Then, using a piece of wood that happened to be lying on the ground next to me, I twisted the loop in the middle, like a turnbuckle.

That worked, but only if the piece of wood stayed in place. By taking a second piece of cord, I was able to also tie down the stick well enough to make the whole cockamamie thing function. We drove out of the KOA later that day without a hint of screeching. 

We still use the same improvised nylon-cord-and-stick turnbuckle system 
to straighten up our fruit trees. 

That was as far west as we went. From Las Vegas we started a meandering trip home through southern Utah, the four-corners country of Monument Valley – where Eddie and I planned to stop by the side of the road and do our infamous impersonations of John Wayne – and then up into Colorado. At least, that was the plan.

Three days out of Las Vegas, with southern Utah behind us, we were in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona and just about to turn toward Tuba City on the way to Colorado, when the alternator light came on and stayed on. 

We decided this was not good and aborted the trip to Monument Valley. Instead, we decided to rush back to New Mexico and let our trusty mechanic in Gallup take a look. We stopped only once at the Petrified Forest National Park visitor center to take one more look at a cute female ranger we had noticed on the trip out. Hey, we were in our twenties.

In Gallup, the mechanic’s assessment was that the alternator was kaput. Since I didn’t want to spend any more money for repairs on this trip, the only advice he could give us was to avoid using the headlights by driving only during daytime. We decided to do this all the way back to Georgia. 

We crashed (in the sense of stopping to sleep) once more at Bob’s in Grants before starting the epic flight home. Despite having to have the battery charged at least once, in Oklahoma, the daylight driving strategy worked. Mostly. The main problem was that we were limited as to where we could stop for the night, since we always had find a place well before sundown.

At first that seemed like just a small inconvenience. On the first day, we made it as far as the KOA in Amarillo, Texas, before darkness overtook us. So far, so good. The following day, we were nearing Memphis when twilight forced us to start using our headlights and stop for the night with no KOA on the horizon. We’d have to shell out money for a motel.

The lone motel at the first exit we came to had no vacancy. We continued on to the next exit, draining precious electricity for the headlights. Here, just on the outskirts of Memphis, there were several motels. No problem, we thought. If only that were true. We were surprised to find they were all full up, even the Holiday Inn, which was a bit upscale for KOA campers such as ourselves. 

The receptionist at the Holiday Inn told us there was a big square-dancing convention in Memphis, and we wouldn’t have much better luck further down the road since practically every place along the way was full.

It didn’t matter anyway. It was already too dark. We couldn’t risk going any further to look for a place. We had to stay put. We spent the night trying to sleep sitting in the car in an out of way spot in the motel the parking lot.

After spending two weeks in the dry heat of the arid Southwest, the humidity of Dixie was hard to get used again. Keeping the car windows rolled up was suffocating, but keeping them open invited the Mississippi River mosquitoes to join us inside. And those are big mosquitoes.

All night long, we were rolling the windows up or down, depending on what was the source of our misery at the moment -- the heat or the bugs.

As soon as there was a hint of daylight, we took off. In a small town in Tennessee, after we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer, we parked on the street to take a nap, giving rise to some suspicious looks from the few locals out early on a Sunday morning.

We made it through Tennessee as in a trance. At a rest area only about 60 miles from home, the battery died, and the two of us had to push the car back out of the parking spot (running over my foot, in the process), then across the rest area in order to jump it off. 

It was a once-of-a-lifetime trip – maybe for good reason. Bob didn’t stay much longer in Grants. Eddie became a pastor. We never talked about another drive cross-country.

I got a new alternator put on the Toyota and took it on a similar trip West a couple of years later. This time it was with my future wife, who christened the car “Yrjö”, the Finnish name for George and a slang term for vomit. She said it was the color that inspired her.

Me and Yrjö, Independence Pass, Colorado, June 1982.

On that trip we traveled across the southern tier of the US, all the way to California, braved Tijuana traffic for a couple of hours, wound our way up the Big Sur coast to San Francisco and then headed back east toward Georgia. We stopped in Las Vegas, but only to cool off after traveling through Death Valley without air-conditioning.

Yrjö finally did make it to Monument Valley and into Colorado on that trip. The only time I had to tinker under the hood was to remove the air filter cover to help (so I figured) coax the car over 12,095-foot Independence Pass in the Colorado Rockies. I would say two cross-country trips for a car that old and poorly maintained ain’t bad.

Anyway, that was a different era. Today’s cars are too complicated for most laypeople to tinker with. We get ours serviced regularly, by pros. I don’t anticipate ever again having to resort to using a nylon cord and a stick in some kind of slapdash repair job. Or, for that matter, to take to the road without the benefit of a jack in the car. 

But, you never know. I just recently realized that the Qashqai didn't come with a one -- or even a spare tire. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Russia

I once saw a map in Winterthur, Switzerland, that made a big impression on me. It was in my late sister-in-law’s apartment, a few short blocks from the Hauptbahnhoff, and it covered an entire wall in her sitting room. This was more than just a single map, however. It was several maps, collected together into one over-sized topographical collage of the western Soviet Union.

My sister-in-law’s Swiss husband, Moritz, is a linguist, specializing at the time in Finno-Ugric languages. These include some tongues spoken by small groups of people scattered all over the northern tier of Eurasia – in other words, somewhere in Russia. I suppose that’s why Moritz had assembled this full-wall geographic display of what encompassed the homelands of the Komi, Mari, Mansi, and other isolated groups of people speaking something distantly related to Finnish.

Seeing it scaled up that way, I was amazed how huge and apparently endless the territory of Russia really is, in fact the biggest country on Earth. And I recall thinking, as I studied the map up close, how cool it would be to venture out across that vast country someday, exploring it by car. Of course, such a road trip was impossible then, in Soviet times, and maybe only marginally more feasible now.

My interest in visiting Russia probably peaked not long after that trip to Switzerland, and in some ways, I feel bad about that.

Lately, with Russia again front and center in world affairs, with Vladimir Putin putting on polar-opposite displays of Russian pride in Sochi and Crimea, I find myself thinking it’s too bad I haven’t gotten better acquainted with the big country next door. 

I’m sorry to say that, in all the years of living here, only a couple hours from the Russian border, I’ve traveled across it only once, in 1984, on a weekend bus trip to Leningrad (when it was still called Leningrad). At the time, it felt like quite an adventure – a completely different world behind the Iron Curtain. I somehow even recall selling an old pair of Levis on a street corner, but that is surely a false memory. I did later sell a travel article about the trip. Of that I’m sure.

The Winter Palace, home of the Hermitage Museum. Photo: Dezidor

Since that trip, I haven’t been back. That’s despite the fact that modern St. Petersburg, a city of nearly five million people and monumental cultural landmarks, lays only 385 kilometers (240 miles) away by car.

I did make a quick visit to Estonia soon after it was no longer a Soviet republic. I spent a day in Tallinn in late October 1991, some five months after Estonian citizens had held a referendum on independence from the USSR and just eight weeks after they had faced a possible showdown with Soviet troops during Moscow’s “August Coup”.

(That was the putsch during which Soviet Communist Party hardliners placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and tried to take over the government. It was the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which apparently haunts some people in Russia, Vladimir Putin not the least among them, to this day.)

From my "archives" of old newspapers.

On that visit to independent Estonia, the recent past still lingered. Soviet authorities still manned passport control in Tallinn’s harbor, and the local currency was still the Soviet ruble. It wasn’t easy to find an open restaurant, and the one I did find was practically deserted. (To be fair, October is way outside the tourist season anywhere this far north, let alone in a country just recently opening up to the free world.)

Still, when it comes to possible travel destinations, I’ve always ignored the giant country that Estonia left behind, Mother Russia. I’m not quite sure why.

It’s not as if I haven’t had the opportunity. Last autumn, a friend of mine on his way to Shanghai tinkered with the idea of a more adventurous alternative to flying to China – taking the Trans-Siberian railway. He asked if I wanted to join him. It sounded exotic, and I was a bit tempted. But, with the prospect of sitting on a train non-stop for the week or so it would take to reach Beijing, I never seriously considered it.

In recent years, my wife – perhaps trying to break us out of our rut of traveling only to the US or central Europe – has been suggesting that for our summer holidays we should think about visiting Russia, especially the more remote areas where those various linguistic kinfolk of the Finns live, somewhere close to the Ural Mountains.

The Komi, distant linguistic cousins to Finns. Photo: Irina Kazanskaya

Maybe I’m not open-minded enough, but I haven’t been keen on the idea. Partly, it’s the thought of visiting a part of the world that looks essentially like Finland, but is even more remote and with even fewer amenities. And, the ethno-folkloric nature of such a destination doesn’t much appeal to me, either. Don’t get me wrong. I like watching folk dancing and shamanistic drumming as much as the next guy. I just haven’t been interested enough to spend precious holiday time seeking it out.

I’m no Ville Haapasalo, you might say. Haapasalo is a burly Finnish actor who is something of a celebrity in Russia due to his appearances in numerous Russian films, in which he apparently often plays the role of “the foreigner”.

Fluent in Russian and obviously a great admirer of the Russian people, Haapasalo has hosted several popular travelogue series for Finnish television, all premised on the idea on spending 30 days in this or that part of Russia.

In the first one, Venäjän halki 30 päivässä (“Across Russia in 30 Days”), Haapasalo travels by train through Siberia from Moscow to Vladivostok (like I might have done last autumn if I were made of stronger stuff).

This was followed by three similar month-long journeys:  Silkkitie 30 päivässä (“The Silk Road in 30 Days”), Suomensukuiset 30 päivässä (“Finnish Kinfolk in 30 Days”), and Jäämeri 30 päivässä (“The Arctic Sea in 30 Days”). In the last two, Haapasalo passes through the forest and tundra homelands of Finland’s various linguistic cousins – just the kind of secluded corners of Russia my wife is pressuring encouraging me to visit. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll follow in Haapasalo’s footsteps. I’ve noticed that the Komi Republic is a jumping off spot for guided packages to the Ural Mountains, so there might be some potential there after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3GDBnoQ0KQ

One of the drawbacks of traveling to Russia is that they don’t make it easy. Unlike Sweden or Estonia, which Finns can visit on a whim by just hopping on a boat, a plane, or (previously in the case of Tallinn) a helicopter, Russia requires prior notice. And a visa.

The application process can take a couple of weeks and requires a letter of invitation of some sort, even for tourists. In practice, this is provided by the Russian tourist agency arranging your trip (so I understand). Apparently, you must also inform your complete itinerary beforehand. There’s no following your nose.

You also have to shell out some cash. For Finns, the non-refundable application fee is €35 (about $50) for the normal single-entry visa, double that for expediting the process (which means a visa in one to three working days). For Americans, it’s pricier, €106 (€145) for the normal processing time, €190 ($260) for the fast track. And that’s just to enter the country.

It doesn’t exactly lower the barriers to would-be tourists. I have heard, however, that in summer the St. Peter Line offers cruises for one- or three-day visa-free visits to St. Petersburg. I should check it out.

In any case, I should give up on my cartographically inspired daydream of ever being able to make a road trip across the back of Mother Russia as easily as driving from Boston to LA. Not that I didn't also have an opportunity (theoretically) at least to try it.

My friend trying to make his way to Shanghai also invited me to join him on an even more adventurous scheme he briefly considered, that is, going across Russia by car. Again, I was tempted. Well, not really, since I have some idea – from watching “Long Way Around”, the account of actor Ewan McGregor’s motorcycle ride around the world – of how rough Siberian roads can be, where they even exist.

If Russia’s primitive road system almost defeated a young Obi-Wan Kenobi on a BMW all-terrain bike (with a support team), then it’s certainly not something that should be attempted by two "middle-aged" men on their own who don’t speak a word of Russian. Again, that's just too bad. 

More historic headlines from my "archives"

"Congratulations, Dear Comrades!" 
"Under the Banner of Lenin" 
Pravda, November 7, 1982 
(65th anniversary of the October Revolution)

Musical Connections – On the Road

No doubt like most people, I have vivid associations between certain pieces of music and some particular place, associations that sometimes go way back. It’s often a totally random thing. For some reason, a tune that I might have heard hundreds of times before simply resonates with the place or situation when I happen to hear again, often when traveling somewhere.

One such connection that sticks in my mind is from my high-school days when I had gone out to see a movie with some buddies. Where I grew up, that meant leaving the county, since my hometown had no cinema of its own. The closest place to watch a film was the drive-in theater in a neighboring town, 16 miles (26 kilometers) away. The closest indoor theater, where you didn’t have to hang a clunky speaker inside your car’s window, lay in another town just a bit further in the opposite direction.

It was from that theater that four or five of us were returning late one night in my friend’s Chevrolet or Buick or whatever it was. In any case, it was one of those big pre-Oil Shock creations of Detroit. Like lot of roomy automobiles of the day, my friend’s car had a long, sloping back window, almost like a skylight for those passengers in the backseat, where I was sitting.

As we sped up the road, probably feeling pretty good, being young and free of our parents, I remember laying my head back, under the rear window, looking straight up at a sky full of stars. That’s when this song came on the radio – seemingly perfect for the combination of teenage freedom and spectacular sky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9muzyOd4Lh8

Myself, I would have never associated Nights in White Satin with Paris in broad daylight, but we all have our different experiences with music.

Another night drive is linked, in my mind, to an equally evocative and classic piece of rock music (maybe the best) by my hands-down favorite singer-songwriter.

This time, it was after my junior year of college, and my parents were along for the ride. Our family had made a long-anticipated trip to the American West, my first time beyond the Mississippi, in a marathon drive to the Yellowstone country of Wyoming (almost 2000 miles in just over two days). After a couple of days in Yellowstone itself, we were staying in the Great Tetons National Park, and had driven down to the cowboy town of Jackson for a steak dinner.

On the way back up the two-lane highway to the Tetons, our headlights slicing through the darkened sagebrush prairie of the sprawling Jackson Hole valley, I remember we were listening to this song on the eight-track player.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pzeYdkSr8s

To me, the song released a powerful nocturnal energy that perfectly matched the feeling of cruising through the vast emptiness of Jackson Hole at night. Hearing it still takes me back to Wyoming, even today.

(On that long drive we also listened repeatedly to Jackson Browne’s album, “Running on Empty”, which is almost custom-made for endless road trips.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoBACfnp0RI

Another Neil Young song evokes for me a general feeling of “western” nights spent under the stars and among the sagebrush, especially the steel guitar solo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_ZXM5aaPLk

I seem to associate this with a chilly summer night in a KOA campground, probably in Panguitch, Utah, where a friend and I stayed on our way back from Las Vegas in 1980. I can’t hear this without thinking of nights in the high desert.

One very different song makes me think of a high bridge. I was 19, and we were again traveling with my parents, this time to the more familiar environs of Jekyll, one of Georgia’s barrier islands on the Atlantic Coast. We were returning from the nearest bigger town, Brunswick, where we’d gone for a seafood dinner (there seems to be a pattern here). As we were crossing the main bridge heading south out of town, this song came on the radio.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gpNqB4dnT4

Again, the song seemed to resonate with the beach-holiday mood and the inky blackness of the night, and forever planted that bridge crossing in my memory. Why I remember the bridge as soaring high above the tidewater of the Brunswick River, I can’t say, since after checking photos of it on the Internet, I realize the bridge barely rose above the level of the water.

Maybe I’ve conflated it with actual tall bridge I crossed with friends one night coming out of Jacksonville, Florida, where we’d eaten at a Polynesian restaurant. (Again with the dining out, but no song associated with that crossing.)

Or maybe I just got carried away with Heart’s newly release hit – after all, at the time I probably had a major crush on one or both of the Wilson sisters, temporarily eclipsing my long-standing infatuation with Linda Ronstadt.

I guess making those kinds of overblown musical connections is easier when you’re young, romantically minded, and maybe a tad bit impressionable.  

Road Trips

I’ve been back in Finland from our holiday in America for well over a month already and am only now getting around to posting anything about it.

At some point on the trip, along Colorado Highway 13, I think, among the empty (and I do mean empty) red-and-green landscape of Rio Blanco County, I had a pang of homesickness for Helsinki.

What I was feeling had more to do with family than any real longing for the cool, leafy corner of the Finnish capital that I call home. My wife, daughter and I were rolling at 65 miles an hour toward a rare family reunion later that day, and the only thing missing were my two sons back in Finland.

Still, we had been away from home for a while. It was Day Nine of our trip to America, and it was starting to feel like a long one. Maybe it’s a sign of aging that my desire for traveling begins to have a shelf life. (Who knew?)

It wasn’t always so. When I was about to set out on my first "buddy" road trip out west back in 1980, I recall my father advising me that I would find out that a week or so of that kind of traveling is more than enough. Beyond that, it’s no fun to be so far from home.

He might have been drawing on his experience from a hunting trip he made in 1963. For my father, this was no ordinary hunting trip. He and a few friends had driven along two-lane highways across the Great Plains to hunt elk in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado. I was too young to remember the details, but it feels like he was away a couple of weeks, though it might have been only one.

The most lasting impressions of my father’s trip came from the elk-head trophy that later towered over our living room and the grainy 8-milimeter home-movie footage he brought home from the trip. I even recall the night that the film was shown at the little community center near our home. It felt like a big deal, and for the time, it was.

I’m sure that the trip to Pagosa Springs had been a worthwhile adventure for my father and a great success, though tinged with some sadness (on the trip, a companion was stricken with the first signs of an illness that would come to kill him). With three young children back in Georgia, though, my father probably felt more than enough homesickness to put him off straying so far from home again without us. He didn’t go out West again until the road trip the whole family took to Wyoming thirteen years later.

In 1980, I was 23 and single with really nothing, or nobody, to miss back in Georgia. At least, not for a couple of weeks. So, I didn’t heed my father’s warning about over-extending my first own cross-country road trip, and in fact, homesickness wasn’t a problem.

My friend and I drove some 1600 miles (2500 km) to visit our college roommate in Grants, New Mexico, and then continued on to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and finally Las Vegas before turning back toward Georgia. I don’t recall feeling homesick even once.

It was the same, two years later, when I made a similar trip, this time for three weeks, though by then there would have been some cause for homesickness, or at least bittersweetness, if I had thought about it.

I called this my “Goodbye America” trip, because I was soon moving to Helsinki and was unsure how long it would be before I returned. I also wanted to show my Finnish girlfriend something of the American West. My battered Toyota station wagon carried us from Georgia across the southern tier of the US to Los Angeles and San Diego (and, for a couple of ill-considered and nerve-racking hours, even Tijuana).

We followed the coast up to San Francisco before hitting a series of national parks (Yosemite, Death Valley, Zion, Grand Canyon) on our way back East. We slept in the car in the hills above LA, took refuge in a Las Vegas casino after crossing Death Valley without air conditioning, and stopped to check out Aspen (where my future wife bought a Moomintroll book for me, as a kind of early introduction to Finnish culture).

In some ways, the trip we made this summer relived some moments from those epic road trips of my youth. We drove to the South Rim for the first time since 1980. On our first visit to LA since the “Goodbye America” trip, we toured some of the most memorable spots from before and tried to recognize others we only half-remember. We stayed at the same ski resort in Utah (and hiked to the same 11,068-foot peak) as we did on another epic road trip we took with the family almost a decade ago. And we met relatives and friends we haven't seen in far too long. There were certainly some nostalgic moments. 

We also broke some new ground and stumbled upon some unexpected finds, like dinosaur bones exposed in a wall of a naked stone, a street-side painting in a Utah ski town left by guerrilla artist Banksy, and an archeological dig, once frequented by the legendary Louis Leakey, now almost forgotten. 

Even the routes and spots we did retrace and revisit all look new again after so many years, so it didn't feel as if we were simply rehashing the past. Not the whole time, anyway.

I hope to eventually post more about parts of the trip. But if my writing output since returning to Helsinki is any indication, it might have to wait until the next big Southwest road trip, hopefully this time in something less than 30 years. ¶

Photo: Taiga Korpelainen