When I’m abroad and having business meetings, the conversation inevitably turns to the subject of dream vacations: Ethiopia, I say; Mongolia; Uzbekistan. Oh, yes, say these acquaintances in Italy, France, Japan, England, who then add one of their own: driving across America.
That long trip — chronicled in books, films, television shows and visual art — combines the American love of the car with the wonder of the country itself: its vast, lonely tracts of land; its changeable and diverse topography; its history, recent and old. I’d imagine most Americans have at one point, by necessity or for pleasure, taken a multiday drive — it’s both rite and birthright. When I was 6, my family made the move from Baltimore to Irvine, Calif., in a pair of rattling, un-air-conditioned VW Rabbits; four years later, we drove in a Toyota van (now with air-conditioning) from our small town in East Texas to a small town in southern Vermont so my father could attend a summer seminar. I remember those drives well, the ache of watching green landscapes shade into brown ones; the miles in which we’d pass no one, as if we were the last people on earth, and the twinned sensations of fear and awe that fantasy would induce.
For the T writer at large Aatish Taseer, who spent 10 days driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, Calif., the American road trip represented something greater — a reckoning with his adopted country, the place where it was becoming increasingly possible he might live the rest of his life, after having been banished from his native India. Taseer attended college in Massachusetts and now lives in New York, and he was, he writes, always reluctant to expand “my worldview westward, almost as if it would spread me too thin. It wasn’t rational, but these things rarely are.”
On the Covers
His trip, taken in the month before the 2024 election, is a new citizen’s reckoning with this country’s unique ahistoricism. “I had always noticed a kind of breeziness in America’s relationship to the past, a casual disregard, which I found at once unsettling and liberating,” he writes. Here there was “a palpable impatience with history, as if people were afraid of its power to bog you down.” Yet an impatience with history doesn’t mean there isn’t history, and Taseer’s drive forces an understanding about a country that had once seemed impenetrable to him, too large and new to ever be known, and too faceless for him to ever call it home. Yet, he concedes in this beautiful and wise story, he was wrong. “I was lucky to have landed in a country with a long tradition of making room for newcomers, and I had every reason to feel it would make room for me too,” he says at the end of his trip. May it ever be so.
Cover fashion credits: Styled by Vanessa Reid. Hair by Oummy Youssoufa. Makeup by Kenya Vallet. Models: Assa Sidibe at Ford Models Paris, Nyajuok Gatdet at Next Management. From left: Loro Piana top, price on request, skirt, price on request, shoes, $1,100, and hat, $875, loropiana.com. Loro Piana coat, $8,400, vest, $7,825, skirt, $8,525, shoes, $1,100, and hat, $1,375.
Hanya Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T Magazine.
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