OPublic Road … you express me better than I can express myself.” I first read Walt Whitman’s “Sone of the Open Road,” in Leaves of Grass, as an Ohio schoolboy. The great democratic chant struck me hard, a lightning bolt of simple, authoritative words proclaiming that only in motion do people have the chance to turn dreams into reality. Even as a fourteen-yearold I already suspected this. After all, my favorite reading, be it Jack London’s Alaska stories, Mark Twain’s Mississippi River tales, or Jack Kerouac’s highway antics, had adventurous escape as a subplot. What sense did it make to be trapped in Perrysburg Junior High School reading Huckleberry Finn when the white bass were running in the Maumee River? If Huck had the good common sense to discover his river, then why shouldn’t I be exploring along the banks of mine? As London wrote in John Barleycorn about his own youth, “I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew.” Although this was obviously an immature perspective on what constituted an education, it is also true that I learned more about American history by taking a field trip to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in nearby Dearborn, Michigan, than in a traditional classroom setting.
In large part my parents are to be thanked for planting in me the impetuous travel bug of history. Every summer of my childhood we hitched our cream-colored Coachman trailer, the “Buckeye Buggy,” to our Pontiac station wagon and took off on an eightweek odyssey. The objective: to learn about our American heritage.
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