Road Scholar Road Scholar Consider the city in ...

Consider the city in summer: a creepy, crawly, crustaceous thing, impacted with anger and fear, oozing a signature brand of neurotic, necrotic sludge. Why cling to it? Why the abject devotion to stress and pile-driving anguish? In July, outside this plate in the head called New York, are there not regions gingered with silence, peppered with stars and in bloom?

Last summer, my girlfriend Claudia and I rented a car for five weeks to drive to the Pacific and back to find out. I had made the same trip in 1975, right after graduating from high school. A generation had been born and reared in the interim, and though I had visited much of the States since then, that's not the same as spinning the literal wheels from coast to coast. 27 years was long enough for all bets to be off. What had remained of America, and what had changed? Was America even there anymore?

First, the good news. The Great American Road Trip, having mutated from Neal Cassady's Knowledge of Time through Divine Right's Trip and into its present form as the Divine Right to Waste Your Time, still has a built-in narrative structure. One begins in anger, tailgating through the small settlements?all very innocent so far?then onto the stunning expanse of the prairie and Plains. Nothing could possibly happen now, except that the flat mother compass of a globe is suddenly implicated: The Badlands curdle and scoop the dust in a lunar mirage. The earth has plans, the likes of which are soon revealed in the Rockies, triumphant as ever, lonelier than simile can say. And then the denouement: slaloming down to the sea, cooling to dappled Californian aplomb. Congratulations. The earth is still round.

Congratulations, or maybe condolences. Distinguishing between one's own age and the age of the world is probably a fool's game. Then again, nobody really has any choice, so this is where the jeremiads come in.

In 1975, my merry sojourners and I stopped at a parking lot in Bonners Ferry, ID, and encountered some barrel-chested hippies on a flatbed truck who were inviting any and all to join them in what they called Crazy Days in Bonners Ferry. This consisted of swimming the Kootenai River (with its vigorous current) and then heading back to the hills, where our hosts were living in creosote shacks, growing pot on government land, using pickup trucks for target practice and, from what I could tell, hollering at the top of their lungs pretty much all the time.

In 2002, we found the aforesaid parking lot in epic turpitude, a newspaper headline proclaiming the Crazy Days Street Fair and, later that night, a campground where the only creatures more terrifying and silent than the grizzlies were the hunters asleep in their cars by eight. Who knows, but some of them were those same Paul Bunyans of yore.

The Vegas leg had changed in a different way. Remembering the abandon of crossing the Mojave at night, I pushed for a repeat experience and got mired in a traffic jam from L.A. all the way to Nevada?two hundred miles of Bleecker St. with cactus. Why the Midwest, home to a jillion head of cattle, can no longer offer real milk for coffee is simply beyond comprehension.

But that's the extent of my serious complaints. In fact, I believe I had more fun in my dotage than I did as a teenager. Where I once sought beer with interesting backdrops, I now pursued something far more mysterious, at least to me.

Somewhere around Minnesota, I started to become obsessed with signs of human permanence in the otherwise untended wild and, rather than using my camera, took graphite rubbings of picnic-table graffiti, water caps, electrical access plates. I became fixated on the indecipherable code marks on cereal boxes. I studied the flush mechanisms of countless urinals and decided that Sloan Royal, whoever that may be, most certainly rules the planet. I believe I was trying to find the least amount of information that constituted some form of attention.

Whatever it was, it worked quite well. After the first week, we had mastered the basics?the propane converter, the payment routine with the rangers, the morning pack-up?and I was able to concentrate on a stray speck of dust for days on end. It helped that Claudia, a German, had never been West before. Overcome with the newness of it all, she took care of the joyful outbursts. I echoed them, and got stoned on the decayed meaning of "A + A," as seen carved into the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge.

My obsession hit paydirt, literally, when I learned about cryptobiotic mass, a living organism that covers much of the desert, but to the untrained eye looks like nothing more than sand and rubble. Think about that long enough and you could start an alphabet all your own.

Eventually, and inevitably, I also recognized a paradox that escaped my younger self. Immersing oneself in nature is, quite simply, an exercise in artifice. It's all very well to pull into the random town and consider living there, or to eulogize the smell of bacon by starlight, but it only works as long as the money holds out. Even hunters stalk prey that is carefully controlled by human tenders. To get beyond the dreaded constructed experience is probably impossible.

One of my most vivid memories, case in point, is of a bison blinking at us from the roadside in Yellowstone. Where he stood, he was an object of much esteem. Had he trotted beyond the park border, however (with no fences, a mere decision of the wind), he would have been a statistical error and a menace, and thus fair game. The same can be said for the grizzlies and the wolves, who are seeded into specific areas, untouchable and mighty?until it doesn't work out. (And while we're at it, we might add the artists roving this very metropolis into the equation. Let a few of them thrive for the public enjoyment, so goes the plan, but keep a close watch on Page Six and, if necessary, pump them full of Wellbutrin.)

So the entire world has become a zoo. But to put it differently: So what? If I'm lamenting the loss of infinity, it only means the stress demons are back in force, preaching the lure of mazes and the promise of immortality into my ear. Meanwhile, the desert is still there, waiting for everything or nothing, whether we like it or not.

Go then, is my advice. Not to blaze new trails?there aren't any. Go for the sake of your brain, which is a great and worthy wilderness in its own right.