12 Week Trip Around The United States March 11 to June 3, 2019 Mark Seliber   © Copyright 2024 by Mark Seliber

Photo courtesy of the author.  II started my trip in Boston and halfway through was at the other end of the longest US highway in the country - US 20, 3,365 miles from Boston to Newport, Oregon, on the beautiful Oregon coast.

I had almost as much joy planning the voyage for about a year as I did taking it. I started out focusing on national parks and presidential homes and libraries. I compiled a list of many other sites as I read or thought about them. And I filled in my days with attractions highlighted in the AAA state books that were still being printed (but not anymore).

During the trip, I did not lose my car, keys, cell phone, wallet, credit cards, driver’s license, eyeglasses or suitcases. I did not get into any accidents, did not receive any speeding or parking tickets and did not jaywalk (excuse me, did not get any tickets for jaywalking). I believe I deserve some kind of cognitive function award from the AARP.

Writing and sending out a blog every night in my motel was also a highlight of my trip. I usually pretty much worked out the narrative (including my editorial comments) in my head during the day. The time-consuming part was picking out the 10 or 12 pictures among the 100+ plus I snapped each day. As for the song of the day, I compiled a list of songs before I started the trip, often involving some time on Google looking for tunes about, say, Montana. But I came up with a different or additional song about one-third of the time as a result of my visits. And speaking of music, the fully-loaded iPod my son gave me kept me awake throughout all my driving, as I made it through the whole alphabetical list of albums, with a few on the second time around.

Here is the essay part of my report, with the following working title:

America – the Beautiful, the Stolen, the Resourceful and the Generous

THE BEAUTIFUL

This is a great-looking country and I am glad I got to see so much of it in person. The 48 contiguous states have a total land area similar to that of Europe, Canada, China, Brazil and Australia, but I suspect more diverse terrain and features than all of them. The mountains, canyons, plains, deserts, lakes, rivers and coastlines are amazing.

THE STOLEN

A couple of years ago, I read an op-ed, and I can’t remember the writer, so you can accuse me of plagiarism. It attributed a large portion of the United States’s historically great economic production to two thefts - stealing the land from the indigenous peoples and stealing over two centuries of labor from African slaves. I certainly saw much evidence of this in my travels. The latter, from the many civil rights sites I visited – in particular, the Underground Railroad Museum in Cincinnati, which laid out in great detail the history of the slave trade in North America, going all the way back to the first group of slaves sold by Portuguese traders in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. The story of European and later United States appropriation of the ancestral lands of our first inhabitants also started in Jamestown. I followed this thread throughout my travels – the French and Indian War and conflicting loyalties during the Revolutionary War; the Trail of Tears as native tribes were sent west of the Mississippi once the new United States expanded beyond the Appalachians; the further relocation of most of the tribes to Indian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma) when the Homestead Act made the land in the Great Plains valuable; and finally the discovery of gold in the only remaining sovereign native land (the Black Hills of South Dakota), which led to Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee and Indian reservations and boarding schools for native children where the teaching of their culture and language was forbidden.

THE RESOURCEFUL – NATURAL RESOURCES AND GREAT INVENTIVENESS

The land of the United States certainly was blessed with abundant natural resources – salt, coal, iron ore, natural gas, oil, the fertile soil of the Great Plains, gold, silver, copper, uranium, borax and all kinds of other minerals. And the American people quickly learned how to use all these for economic advantage.

And here is a partial list of the great ideas invented or further developed by the ingenious and entrepreneurial minds of our countrymen and women:

Steamship – Cotton Gin – Canals (like the Erie) – Railroad – Mechanical Farming – Mining – Anesthesia (at Mass. General Hospital) - Telegraph – Electricity – Telephone – Phonograph – Automobiles – Assembly Lines – Airplanes – Radios – Radar - Nuclear Power (for better or worse) – Television – Space Exploration (including that moon landing whose 50^th anniversary we commemorated in 2019) – Everything related to computers, the world wide web, the internet, smart phones and artificial intelligence.

THE GENEROUS

In the last hundred years as the most powerful nation on earth, the United States has been generous in supporting democracy around the world. Entering World War I helped end the stalemate on the Western Front. The United States supported Great Britain’s solo stand against Nazi Germany through the Lend-Lease program in 1940-1941 and then of course joined World War II after Pearl Harbor and turned the tide in Europe with the D-Day invasion of 80 years ago. Then after the War, the Marshall Plan enabled war-ravaged Europe to rebuild itself and NATO and the United Nations managed to end the first Cold War.

But I witnessed on my trip the benefits of great things that our government has done to improve our lives over our history. Again, I will list them:

Public Education (starting with my two alma maters, Boston Latin School and Harvard) – Land-grant Colleges and Universities – Homestead Act (not so good for the native peoples, but good for settlers heading west for economic opportunity and independence) – Transcontinental Railroad – National Parks – Canals and Dams – all the building done by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the New Deal – Social Security and Medicare – The GI Bill for Education and Low-cost Housing Loans after World War II – The Interstate Highway System.

Individually and collectively, the people and government of the United States of America have done amazing things in the last nearly 250 years. I remain confident that we have many more wonders in our future.