My brief experience driving a car in the American West had me thanking the gods for ignoring all my childhood wishes of being a pioneer. It takes forever and a day to cross any of those states in an automobile on the freeway. I can't imagine what it would be like with a covered wagon, which goes at about the speed of a wheelbarrow.

But it is beautiful country, some of it, and the experience of being completely isolated is also worthwhile if it doesn't come as too much of a surprise. It's just a bit mind-numbing to drive for hours on an interstate, so make sure you are fit for that kind of driving and don't try to drive late at night when the road is full of trucks whose headlights are just at your eyelevel. Take music to sing along to, and stock up on water, food, a blanket, flares, all those things that us city folk never really dream of doing.

But besides that, there's really no other way to do it, is there? There's something about the 20th century, and perhaps even earlier, in America that one can only understand by driving long distances. It's worth doing while the 21st century is still new.

What a brilliant question Natallie! I was starting to answer it and then thinking about it, it opens up more and more. What it brings up is the following question: What activities in life are open only for pairs and not singles?

Starting with a road trip – I can’t imagine taking a road trip alone. I agree with your analysis of it. I think that if one is alone it makes sense to tour some place, go hiking, or even taking a boat to sea, but a road trip seems out of the question. I would characterize the problem as that of “What for?” If you find yourself a reason, like driving to meet your grandmother 3000 miles away, then you can do it. I knew people who when moving between the coasts rented a car to move their stuff and drove alone, while stopping on the way at different places they wanted to see. As long as there is a goal, a pretext, that’s possible. But otherwise, what’s the point? When couples do it, or friends, it’s mostly to simply spend time together. But for time alone? That doesn’t seem the thing to do. Even if you just like to drive, there needs to be a reason. Hiking is a much better opportunity to be alone and reflect.

What then if you want to see the Midwest? You’d need to find friends. I can’t imagine doing a canyon trip on my own. They are beautiful but are simply not approachable alone somehow. It will take me a while to figure out why. As I said, if you are on your way somewhere and stopover to see them, I can see that as fun and possible. Why then not on their own? Maybe it’s the space in between them, and the question – why go? Perhaps an answer could be that alone – one is enough. Alone you can take your boat to sea and see nothing but blue around you; you can hike up a mountain; you can go to the Sahara desert; but the moving from one place to another seems futile somehow. I don’t claim to understand what I am saying, just trying to react to an eerie feeling your question aroused.

For some reason the picture I have in my head with regards your question is a bad movie by Sophie Calle, No sex last night. An independent woman, artist, photographer, why does her road trip involves a man?

 
Returning then to the question from the beginning: what activities in life are open only for pairs and not singles? One which immediately comes to mind is sex, and the question of doing something together came up in Is sex personal (especially in post). One can masturbate, but that’s not the same kind of activity. Similarly sports games – basketball, soccer, tennis. Perhaps the difference games-competition is a good line to look at. There was also Ellen's question of whether it is possible to practice religion without any connection to a larger community of acolytes (post).

To move to a more philosophical line. If many consider that our life is always in need of another to mirror the world for us, even god needing man as a witness to the world (post) , we have here a strange example of a kind of interaction with the world which needs another.

It would be interesting to develop and think what is it here that needs another.


But all this is the more theoretical answer. The practical one is that it is scary. Friends of mine almost got stuck in the mud in Utah where they wouldn't be found for days (they had water and some food at least). It's the wilderness without the benefits.

Really interesting question, Natalie, that raises obviously many points, when examined philosophically. can't get into all of them, but want to open a few. The first would be concerning the general relation between traveling and being alone. What is it to travel? it is, classically, to leave home, and thus to leave oneself, to leave everything about oneself that is familiar. As such, traveling is, ideally, an event of maximum decontextualization where everything that made one fit or belong in a context is to an extent gone. As such, by definition travelling is that which exposes one to maximum aloneness if this is to be defined as losing any contextual relation one has. To be alone is to occupy a space that is in excess of any existing relation to anything or anyone. At the same time, to be alone in this sense is also the state of being the most open to others, or exposed to others as unforseen possible new encounters, liberated from any preexisting connections one has to people and things which have been automatized, and become habit.
To live a life of automatized habit means that one has constructed an existence where the self is completely at home with itself, completely in itself, and as such, fully alone, yet in a different way then the previous one. This aloneness is not the aloneness of not belonging to any context and being exposed to the unforseen and strange, but the aloneness of being so fully within a context so that there is finally no outside, nothing which is not yourself. To travel is thus to try to exchange one aloneness, an aloneness that is also a maximum opening to others, for another aloneness, where one is maximally with others, familiar others, in such away that one is completely oneself with no outside. thus, to travel is to be alone in such a way as to be at the same time the most together with others, understood as possible encounters and liberation from being glued to oneself.

the second question in relation to this coming out of your description, is what is the difference between traveling alone in exotic dangerous places, versus going on a road trip, which is nothing but a voyage with no immediate sense of the dangerous or of a strenuous task to be accomplished. Is it that the dangerous voyage is something that intensifies this double sense of being alone/maximally exposed to others or is it something that actually is a defense against this, by giving one always things to DO, tasks to ACCOMPLISH, so as one still feels oneself as occupying some kind of familiar territory, that of oneself as a doer. I don't know. it might be that the road trip is something that makes you face your aloneness, precisely by not involving you with tasks, in a more forceful way, and as such, requires another defense, that of doing it several people together, a defense that one perhaps didn't need when one had dangerous tasks to accomplish.