22-day USA road trip in 1988 Toyota pickup
In April of 1995, I was between jobs (i.e, I was working a dozen office- and warehouse-temp gigs a month, so in a sense I was always between jobs), about to lose my apartment in San Francisco's Mission District, and pretty much free to go on a pointless adventure… as long as it didn't cost too much. Being a wheels-and-asphalt sort of traveler, I got together with my friend (and future brother-in-law), Jim, and we loaded up his zero-options 1988 Toyota Hilux with camping equipment and hit the road for a wild-eyed 22-day circumnavigation of the United States. I've told the story of the now-legendary "Orange Tape" mix cassette I made for this trip, and now here's the story of the trip itself.
About as basic a motor vehicle as you’ll ever see.< p
In the United States, the Hilux was known as "the Toyota truck" (this was typical of the don't-mess-around-with-complicated-names company that later named its luxury sedan the LS and its sport coupe the SC), and Jim had bought his new after a relentless de-optioning struggle with a San Diego-area Toyota dealer. No rear bumper. 4-speed manual transmission. Carburetor. No radio. No AC. It was noisy and bouncy, but it got decent fuel economy and never broke (he still has it, and will be giving it to his son when he turns 16).
The Toyota never missed a beat in 28 states.
Jim was also between jobs, and he needed to be back in California by the end of April to go to an appointment to get unemployment insurance payments (yes, Millenials, Generation X was a bunch of goddamn screwups in our 20s, so pay no mind when we give you a hard time). Jim had been working for a nationwide anti-nuclear political organization for many years, and so he had connections with radical peaceniks in major cities all around the country; we figured that we'd camp in the country and couch-surf in the city. We'd need to do that, because we had barely enough money for gas and no money for food or motels. We had tents, lots of rice and canned beans, jugs of water, and a couple of old-school Coleman stoves. Both of us were experienced backpackers and so we thought car-camping was quite luxurious.
Our first night camping in northern Nevada was so cold that our beer froze.
We hit the road on the morning of April 2, 1995, with the idea that we'd take I-80 to Nevada, turn left at Nevada State Route 225, and get as close to Idaho as we could before we got too exhausted to drive. We ended up setting up camp somewhere just south of the Idaho line, cooking some pasta, and drinking a few of our carefully hoarded beers. The nighttime temperatures dropped into the teens, but we had a nice campfire to sit by as the coyotes howled nearby. Already, I was enjoying this trip.
19 miles south of Dillon, Montana.
I was fairly serious about film photography at this time and had documented previous road trips, so I had a dozen or so rolls of bulk-loaded 35mm Tri-X film with me. However, not many of my photos of this trip survive, for reasons I'll explain shortly. I did shoot a couple of rolls of color film, including a pair of stitch-em-together-manually panoramas; you can view one that's either western Montana or eastern New Mexico here.
Now referred to as Charging Horse Hill.
Our budget heading into Idaho and Montana was looking better than when we'd left California, because Jim and I had become quasi-accomplished blackjack card-counters in the years prior to the trip (thanks to many cheapskate trips to Reno), and we'd won a few bucks at a squalid Sparks casino with favorable rules and lax pit bosses (sadly, casinos now have eyes in the sky, with computers analyzing your play, and easy card-counting scores ended in the 1990s). This meant that we could drink Henry Weinhard's instead of Milwaukee's Best at our campsites. We'd stop at several Indian casinos along our route; we always made something at the blackjack table, but nothing like our nice score in Sparks.
We stopped at quite a few interesting-looking historical markers in the West, including the site of the Charging Horse Hill Battlefield in Montana.
The South Dakota Badlands are the weirdest landscape this side of Iceland.
By the time we hit South Dakota and headed towards Minneapolis, it was too late to check out Wall Drug. In fact, we came close to checking out the jail in Rapid City, thanks to some overzealous SDHP officers with nothing to do at 3:00 AM. A battered pickup with California plates and a couple of scruffy-looking guys in the cab tends to attract the attention of the law-enforcement community in rural America, and we hadn't been in South Dakota long before the red and blue lights filled up the rear-view mirror. After a bit of skeptical questioning about our destination and reason for being where we were— I told Officer Friendly that we were on our way to visit my grandfather in St. Paul, which was true enough— and the arrival of a half-dozen backup units, we were hauled out of the car, stuffed in the back seat of a Crown Vic, and made to watch as all our stuff got dumped onto the shoulder of I-90. They'd seen my 35mm film cans all over the truck, and assumed we were the world's dumbest drug smugglers.
Sagebrush stuck in the heater controls, junkyard cassette deck in crude wooden faceplate.
After a couple of hours of fruitless searching, the SDHP finally gave up on unearthing the stash of full-automatic TEC-9s and 10-kilo bricks of heroin they knew all Californians packed when traveling. We were told that we'd been pulled over in the first place for having an item hanging from the rear-view mirror and that we really ought to have "a better reason" to be traveling than the one we gave. Many of my rolls of film disappeared, no doubt into the weeds on the road shoulder as each was popped open in a search for Ibogaine capsules. This wasn't the first time we were hassled by The Man on our trip— later, we experienced a Third-World-junta roadblock-style stop-and-frisk rest-stop search in Georgia and a confrontation with angry soldiers on the White Sands Missile Base— but it was by far the most stressful. Shaken, we pulled off at the next campsite, which turned out to be Badlands National Park. Waking up to the amazing, Martian-looking scenery of the Badlands took a lot of the sour taste of our encounter with anti-road-trip policemen out of our mouths.
I’d been buying car parts from jc whitney since age 15, and here i finally got to see jc whitney headquarters in chicaco.< p
After that, we made it to the Twin Cities, where I come from originally, and stayed with relatives there before heading south to visit more of my proud Luxembourg-American relatives in Winona (we no longer consider Dennis Hastert to be a Luxembourg-American, by the way, which leaves Chris Evert as the most famous Lux-Am now). After that, we dropped by Milwaukee before spending a couple of days enjoying Chicago and sleeping on friends' couches. As a big J.C. Whitney fan, I was excited to see the company headquarters in person. We then visited more friends in Indianapolis before getting back into Freightliner Fever mode and blasting east across Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
It wasn't until somewhere around Indiana that we used up our Nevada blackjack winnings, and gas was a buck-ten a gallon in 1995, so we were looking forward to going to actual bars in New York City and using our surplus budget to buy restaurant food and drinks that cost more than bottles of Henry's chilled in a campsite stream and/or shots of Kessler bummed from couch-surf hosts. I had to do all the driving in Pennsylvania, because Jim had an unpaid parking ticket from a PA speed-trap years earlier and believed that he had warrants out for his arrest in that state, but we made New York by April 14. One night in Brooklyn, one more in the Bronx, a tour of important sites in Manhattan, and then we drove straight through to the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, area, where we stayed at the beautiful arts compound in the woods owned by a couple of my mentors from my performance-art years in Orange County. The pace of this trip— one-to-three-day stops with close friends in cool locations alternated with crazed dashes across many states— turned out to be just about ideal.
Someone did an oil change on the ground at a campsite, which pissed me off so much that I shot this photo
While we were enjoying our stay in North Carolina, some asshole blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One of the initial reports about the suspects included the words "two white men in a blue pickup truck," which made us a bit nervous. Jim's unemployment-check deadline in California was looming, so we got back on the road and headed west. Approaching Atlanta, where I'd be moving in a few months, Freaknik was in full effect, which meant that we ran a gauntlet of cops so rattled by the menace of possible terrorist attacks that highway rest stops were frisk-a-thons of drunk college students and panicky police. We decided to jog north to Tennessee, rather than take our California license plates through Alabama and Mississippi.
As we entered a new state, we’d add it to the list on the label for our main traveling cassette tape.< p
Afraid of being taken for an unholy mashup of Timothy McVeigh and Charles Manson— or whatever notorious murderer Texans most associate with California— we thought about going around Texas entirely, but as Thelma and Louise discovered, there's no easy way to get from the Deep South to California without going across Texas (unless you go via Omaha in your Chevrolet). We also considered getting a PO box in Oklahoma and then getting OK plates for the truck, but we decided that our fears of Texas were unfounded… and then drove all the way across it in one insane 20-hour shot.
Once we were in New Mexico, I became obsessed with visiting the Trinity Site.
We splurged for a $15 motel room just on the New Mexico side of the border, and then I came up with a really bad idea: given that we were coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Trinity test, which was (sort of) on our way across New Mexico, why not go visit the site of the first atomic explosion? Jim had spent all of his adult life up to that point as a ferociously committed activist for the cause of global nuclear disarmament and had been arrested at the Nevada Test Site for protesting 1980s atomic tests, so he admitted to having a fascination with the spot where the downward spiral to certain Armageddon began. We looked on the road atlas (yes, kids, we used paper maps back then), and it appeared that we could take small highways to a little dirt road that would take us straight to Ground Zero. Hooray!
OK, so I shot this photo near the Trinity site in April 2015. You’ll learn why soon enough.< p
Well, it turns out that the Trinity Site is buried deep within the top-secret confines of the White Sands Missile Range, something that Rand McNally didn't make particularly clear in our Road Atlas, and that a couple of random dudes bouncing down an unmarked dirt road in a Hilux several days after some asshole blows up a major government building might tend to looks sort of suspicious to a few Humvees packed with jittery soldiers. After a very strained conversation with a couple of sergeants packing a dozen canteens apiece, we were allowed to turn around and go back to the highway. I knew I'd be back… and 20 years later, I was (more on that later).
Stopping for the obligatory Eaglesque
Time was really running out at this point, and so we pushed straight through to Needles, California, where our relief at being back in the one state in the country where California license plates don't scream "BUST ME" was overwhelming. Naturally, we had to stop for the obligatory camera-timer self-portrait on a corner in Winslow, Arizona (because we didn't have time for a detour to Tucumcari, called out in a song we listened to obsessively). I hear Winslow now has a park based on this musical reference. Could Lodi be next?
Back in California!
After that, Jim got his unemployment check and then began a successful career as a municipal planner, marrying my sister in 1998. Their son is now 12 years old, so he'll be driving a 31-year-old Hilux when he gets his first driver's license. I moved to Georgia, got my first automotive writing job, and here I am now (with an even deeper Toyota obsession).
