A cross-country road trip can make a friendship or become the windshield against which it splatters.
In 1996, Baltimore writer Doug Donovan and his buddy Sam King offered their services as drivers in exchange for a Jeep Cherokee that a wealthy Beverly Hills woman needed shipped to the East Coast.
“Toward the end of the trip Sam took a swing at me, but we’d been drinking, and a lot of tension had built up on the road,” said Donovan. “When it was all over, the trip strengthened our friendship.”
In a “drive-away” deal, the agency representing the vehicle’s owner prescribes the route and an allotted number of miles to traverse it.
“We ignored that and went hundreds of miles off course,” said Donovan, connecting the following dots on their Rand McNally.
San Diego to Las Vegas; Sin City to Dallas; the Big D to the Big Easy; New Orleans to Atlanta, where they took in the Summer Olympics; Hot-lanta to Raleigh, N.C., and finally, the Tar Heel State to the City of Brotherly Love.
“Somehow, embarrassingly, we missed the Grand Canyon,” said Donovan.
Just a few years out of college, the friends had dreams of becoming writers and like many Americans, particularly young men, reckoned that driving across North America was one of the things you had to do to make it.
“It seemed mandatory,” said Donovan. “I thought that if I visited the places cited by writers like Steinbeck and Kerouac and got as drunk as I imagined they had, that somehow — magically — that would make me a writer too.”
Donovan would go on to become a big city journalist with a desire to break into fiction and screenwriting. He kept a journal during the trip but can’t find it. King is now an attorney in New Jersey.
The journey from San Diego to Philadelphia — in which Donovan and King encountered an America increasingly homogenized into one big gift shop — was an important bridge for both of them.
“I wanted to be able to say that I did it,” said King. “Looking back, there’s a unique historical aspect we couldn’t appreciate at the time. We did it without GPS or access to the web or a cell phone.
“It’s a story I’ll proudly tell my daughters someday. I think I’ll save it until they’re teenagers, and I’m desperate to win their admiration.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected].
