Ten Days Across the Country

The first day was all eastern Washington. At Vantage the interstate drops into the Columbia River gorge, and a line of steel horses runs along the ridge above the water. Spokane was the first night's stop.

I crossed Montana by way of Missoula and stopped in Bozeman, where the Cannery District keeps its old water tower.

My motel was the Sapphire, a motor lodge the same family has run for fifty years. The lounge has a vintage TV and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em set, and a framed newspaper on the wall tells the family's whole story.

Devils Tower rises out of the Wyoming grassland like something set down from another world. Bison graze in the meadow below it, and the prairie dog town along the entrance road was busier than the trail. Up close the rock splits into giant columns, with birds riding the updraft along the wall.

I came into the Black Hills through Deadwood, the old gold rush town that still wears its 1870s storefronts. Mount Rushmore the next morning, first the famous view and then the trail underneath, where Washington shows up through a gap in the rocks. The gift shop sells vanilla ice cream from Thomas Jefferson's own recipe, which felt like a required purchase.

A few miles away the Crazy Horse Memorial has been under carving since 1948. From the visitor center the white scale model lines up with the unfinished mountain behind it.

The Badlands loop road winds between banded rock and green prairie, and bison graze right at the roadside. The sky stayed hazy all day, which softened the whole place into pastels.

From Sioux Falls I followed the Missouri River down to Sioux City for coffee, then bent south to Winterset to see the covered bridges of Madison County before rolling into Des Moines.

Des Moines was a surprise. The Pappajohn Sculpture Park sits right downtown, and the State Capitol looks over the city from its hill under a gold dome that is even better from the inside. East of the city I stopped in Kalona, an Amish town with hand built rocking chairs lined up on the store porch, and pushed on to Peoria for the night.

Columbus, Indiana is a town of forty thousand people with an absurd concentration of modern architecture. Eliel Saarinen's First Christian Church and its brick clock tower stand across from I.M. Pei's library, and his son Eero's Miller House keeps its Alexander Girard interior intact, conversation pit and all, behind Dan Kiley's ruler straight allée of honey locusts. I spent two days just walking from one building to the next.

I broke the long drive east with a night in Columbus, Ohio, then climbed into the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania for Fallingwater. Photos of the terraces do not prepare you for how low and close the rooms feel inside, stone floors and built in furniture pushing you out toward the water. After the tour I just stood at the overlook for a while, listening to Bear Run under the house.

A final run across the Appalachians brought me home to Fairfax. Ten days, fourteen stops, just over three thousand miles.