Goin' Cali
Wednesday, April 3, 2024 Entry #77
As far back as I can remember, I have loved road trips. I imagine this attachment, like so many of our most visceral passions, began with positive associations from my childhood. On family car vacations, we would often set out late in the day. My siblings and I would change into our pajamas in the restaurant bathroom after eating dinner on the road. Then we would lay comfortably (no seat belts!) on blankets that our parents had set up in the “back-back” of our good old station wagon as daylight faded and the roadway kept rolling by. I would talk with my parents late into the night, eventually falling asleep. I can totally remember the groggily secure sensation of my dad carrying me from the car to a hotel off the highway or to our final destination.
And on it went. In my teenage and young adult years, I loved the sense of freedom and adventure that came with driving long distances to Northern Minnesota where I was a camp counselor, to and from college, or to visit friends all over the map. There is still so much from those trips in my mind’s eye. Seeing the sun set and then rise in all-night drives. Cruising past marvelous mountains, under glorious full moons, and alongside enticing beaches. Cranking tunes, swapping stories and laughing with my passengers (though I also greatly enjoyed riding solo). Stopping spontaneously off the main road to explore. On one unforgettable trip, I caught a glimpse of the Northern Lights through my open sun roof. Putting aside any other plans, I pulled over to the highway shoulder, sat right on top of my car, and watched nature’s colorful show until dawn. I even spent a fair share of my youthful road trip nights actually sleeping in my car.
Flash forward and some of my favorite memories with my own children have been special trips in our trusty Toyota SUV; to visit grandparents, attend post-camp, hit the beaches of Florida, and tour Presidential Libraries (thanks Gabe!) all over the land.
The point is, I come by this love affair with long distance drives honestly. I bring all of this up because as I was on my latest road trip adventure that I have been documenting in the last few blog entries (with many more to come), I flashed on Bruce Springsteen’s 2016 memoir, and suddenly remembered that he described a number of epic cross-country drives of his own. Back at home I found the relevant passages and reading them so soon after my own road trip adventures gave me a thrill of recognition and affirmation. As it turned out, Bruce’s remembrances of his journeys by car and motorcycle and the way he expressed his feelings about them hewed very close to my own memories and impressions. I knew I wanted to include some of those passages in this blog, but first I wanted to establish that I came to my own love for road tripping way too early and read his book way too late for that particular passion to have been influenced by Springsteen, despite my obvious reverence for him (though his songs have certainly been part of the soundtrack to my long-distance drives seemingly forever).
In his book, Springsteen describes three formative road trips as a young man. The earliest of those was his first trip to California in 1970, for some West Coast gigs that had scheduled for Springsteen’s early rock band Steel Mill. In addition, Bruce planned to visit with his parents and younger sister who had moved to San Mateo a year earlier while Springsteen, though still a teen, opted to stay and play music on the Jersey Shore. With great attention to detail, Springsteen even recalls that he went to see the iconic road trip movie Easy Rider (with its epic hippie cross-country motorcycle journey, it is no surprise that the same film became one of my favorites when I saw it a few years later when I was a teen) the night before his departure:
“We held one final concert at the surfboard factory for seed money, built a plywood box that would sit tucked inside Tinker’s flatbed…and set up a separate station wagon with mattresses and water for the drivers’ rest and recouperation. With these two vehicles, a hundred dollars each and a prayer, we would make the great crossing in three days…With the exception of Tinker and our short trips around the Southeast, none of us had ever been out of New Jersey.”
Just as I did on my own recent trip to the West Coast to see the Boss in concert, Springsteen and friends decided to take the southern route to to try and avoid as much snow and ice as possible. He was clearly excited to reach California:
“The morning came, the truck was loaded, the station wagon prepared; I was twenty-one, and we were going west. West…dream time, West, California. That’s where the music was. The Haight, San Francisco, Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, and Moby Grape…I’d heard about the deserts, the palm trees, the weather, Seal Rocks, the great redwoods of Muir Woods, the Bay, the Golden Gate.”
As Springsteen described it, the group had a very limited budget. There would be no extra money for motels or camping gear, so sleeping in the cars would be de rigueur. They were seven people in two cars who had three days (same as it took me to get there just now, but they started from further away!) to drive three thousand miles from New Jersey to California. The plan was for the band members to drive in rotating shifts around the clock, pausing roadside only for food and gas (no excursions to Santa Fe and the Grand Canyon for this crew!).
Here’s the surprise kicker: As Springsteen puts it, “I didn’t drive…at all. I had no car, no license; my transportation was a bicycle or my thumb…When I say I didn’t drive, I mean I DID NOT KNOW HOW!” Remember, this is the artist who was just a few years away from being known as one of the great chroniclers of the American road, composing great songs of the highway such as “Born To Run,“ “Racing in the Streets,” and “Drive All Night.” But, for now, Bruce Springsteen thought he was going to be merely a passenger on his first journey through the open roads.
However, at some point, the two vehicles got separated (no cell phones yet!), and Springsteen was pressed into service after an emergency driving lesson:
“Once we realized it was impossible for me to start from a dead stop, Tinker would get the transmission in first gear and get the truck rolling, and then we would switch seats in the tight cab…and I would take over from second gear through fourth for as long as the highway held.”
Once he settled in, Springsteen quickly found the poetry in road travel and he was transformed forever:
“The country was beautiful. I felt a great elation at the wheel as we crossed the western desert at dawn, the deep blue and purple shadowed canyons, the pale yellow morning sky with all of its color drawn out, leaving just the black silhouetted mountains behind us…Morning woke the Earth into muted color…and everything stood revealed as pure horizon lowering on two lanes of blacktop and disappearing into…nothing-my favorite thing. Then the evening, with the sun burning red into your eyes, dropping gold into the western mountains, It all felt like home and I fell into a lasting love affair with the desert.”
I smiled when I saw Springsteen’s listing of the states he traversed on that first trip. “On we soldiered, through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to the California border.” It was the exact same course of states, highways, desert vistas and mountain passes I had just trekked myself fifty-four years later, so it was delightfully easy for me to picture Springsteen and his friends on the road.
In his song “Goin’ Cali,” Springsteen seems to reference this exact road trip. In it, he dubs his Golden State destination the “promised land,” a term that I will revisit in a forthcoming blog entry. As Bruce Springsteen and I, along with untold millions of travelers have discovered over and over through the years, reaching California from the road is a very special experience:
“For seven days and nights like a black-top bird he sped, maintained radio silence ‘cept for his head, and just like his folks did in ‘69, he crossed the border at Needles and heard the promised land on the line.”-Bruce Springsteen “Goin’ Cali”
Day 3