Transmogrification of The Soul: The Reliable Rebirth Narrative of the Great American Road Trip

The drive from Dallas to Amarillo is among the most boring in the entire country. It is like any of the other prairie traversing routes, only you get the hypotenuse of the leg and not just the base. This makes it exponentially (heh) more boring than the typically boring straight lines through Nebraska or Kansas. (Yes, that was a math joke.)

But the prairie zone is a rite of passage we all must undergo when crossing from the old world to the new. And its punishing repetitiveness serves the dual purposes of purging the cultural sclerosis of the East and at the same time making the entry into the promised land of California that much sweeter for the contrast.

Yes, there is a desert here too that is coming up, but I think the prairie crossing itself is even more apt of an analogy to Moses’s wandering through Sinai. The old ways must die off and the new ones prepared in the middle ground between what we knew and what we will yet discover.

The Rockies give you the first taste of newness, really, but with a brashness that is more adolescent than the plush full-bloom comfort of the coast itself. The desert is more of a place of contemplation of your soon to be reborn self, rather than the soul cleansing rosary of the plains.

But Texas being Texas, the passage through this prairie corridor is even harsher here than in the true prairie states. The land is hard. The people are hard. The remnant culture is hard and shows a deep, gruff indifference to modernity, not so much in terms of technology, but in terms of aesthetic.

There are hills, but they are not rolling hills. They are reluctant hills. As if they were wishing to be flat and closer to the earth, but some tectonic abomination forced them into the vain seeking of heaven. No one wants to be better than anyone here, and the hills are no different.

The howling wind, the endless scruff of the terrain make it inhospitable in almost every way. Romping through the beach or forest in bare feet has a certain carefree charm to it. But to imagine such “romping” here gives thoughts of nothing but scratches, gashes, and deep bleeding. Even the cows, who have never been anywhere else, seem to know something is up and they were given a raw deal in life’s buffet of grazing pastures. If the word hardscrabble wasn’t invented in the Panhandle of Texas, then I can’t imagine where else it might come from.

I’ve reached Amarillo (by morning, as it were) and am making the transition West through what will be one of the most subtle but marvelous transitions in scenery. As if Bruckner had composed an 80 measure building crescendo leading to the second subject of New Mexico. Slowly and indiscernibly the expanse of grass retrenches and coagulates into tufts. The dirt dries into sand, and the trees disappear almost completely, dwarfing into pinion and sagebrush. The altitude gains on you imperceptibly so the transition of consciousness from terrestrial to sublime sneaks up from behind like the delicate come on of a mushroom trip.

And before you know it, you’re there. There in the vast mind space that the southwestern desert evokes so well. Like its own limitless zen temple, it has an unforgiving austerity, but with a magical, colorful overlay that invites imaginative exploring more than primal fear.

But it’s still a few hours to get there from here. Amarillo and the excruciatingly long trip to the western border holds out hard against the transition west. It wants to keep you here the way the spirits want to keep you right before the exorcism is complete. Maybe it’s envy, maybe it’s loneliness, or maybe it really does think things are just plain better over here. Who knows? But a few more hours of deeply pained and hard won soil gives me one last chance to let go of the pre-prairie trappings I will have left behind completely by the time this passage is done. It happens every single time.

The cross country journey in America is its own poem, its own song of a nation, and its own spiritual rebirth. Like a native labyrinth, no matter what your state of being, it will show you a new you and change you in unforeseeable ways when you reach the ending. And you will not even know who you were before. Time to press onwards through familiar terrain into the next unknown. . .