Travel '76 Rediscovering America

Everybody travels in the States. The railways and the hotels have between them so churned up the people that an untravelled man or woman is a rare animal.

-Anthony Trollope, North America (1861)

We 're having trouble finding a bathroom here in Santa Fe.

-Tourist Mark Mulligan (1976)

Not much has changed in the U.S. during the 115 years that have intervened between the voyages of England's Trollope and Spokane's Mulligan. Americans are still insatiable travelers; it is still hard to find a bathroom in Santa Fe -or just about anywhere else during the travel season. According to a benumbed corps of travel statisticians, more than 99 million Americans -nearly half of the nation -will be taking vacations this year in the U.S. The country cannot accommodate any more tourists than that because, for one thing, there will be an additional 18 million foreigners charging across the U.S. (in exchange for some 23 million Americans who are going abroad). There is also not enough fender room left on the highways. In any case, the remaining 98 million of the nation's population have to stay behind to serve the tourists at motels, souvenir shops, trailer camps and gasoline pumps, not to mention the necessity of maintaining a standing U.S. Army and more than 3,800 way stations of the McDonald hamburger chain.

Clearly this massive and frenetic movement of humanity spells havoc for the summer. On the highways, in the depths of the national parks, in the roadside inns and amusement parks, in the still of the night, 10 million kids are going to upchuck their french fries, 5 million more will smear their cones into Daddy's nose while he is driving, numerous unruly teen-agers will get themselves bitten in the behind by surly bears gone berserk amid the frenzy of Yosemite, dozens of tennis foursomes will never speak to one another again, hundreds of budding romances will expire into a heap, mothers-in-law will weep, the divorce rate will leap, and in the end, home will never look so good.

We entered [the White House]and having twice or thrice rung a bell which nobody answered ... on the ground floor, as divers other gentlemen (mostly with their hats on, and their hands in their pockets) were doing very leisurely ... The greater portion of this assemblage . . . had no particular business there, that anybody knew of. A few were closely eyeing the movables, as if to make quite sure that President [John Tyler], who was far from popular, had not made away with any of the furniture, or sold the fixtures for his private benefit.

-Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)

For all the dubious joys, travelers this year will spend something like $61 billion, most of it, no doubt, on camera film and disposable diapers. But few will regret the cost, for Bicentennial 1976 is truly a glorious season in which to rediscover the U.S.A. The most popular target is Washington, D.C., which has never looked prettier or offered so much (see box next page). Normally the capital receives about 14 million visitors annually; this year 17 million are expected, and already 10,000 tourists are trooping through the White House every day, eyeing the movables. For sheer spectacle, nothing will compete with the Smithsonian Institution's 35 acres of displays, housed in eleven separate buildings. All told, some 100,000 people a day are streaming into the Smithsonian, whose exhibits encompass every imaginable American artifact that can be assembled under eleven roofs.

There are fashions and furniture and banana plants; sailing ships and pickled fish; a collection of 360 tuning forks; George Washington's mess kit; and Abe Lincoln's patented but absolutely unworkable invention, designed to buoy vessels over shoals. The star attraction is the Smithsonian's new Air and Space Museum, which covers the flying gamut from the Wright Brothers' fragile early bird to the Apollo-Soyuz space vehicle and a new "Albert Einstein Spacearium" (Washington's first planetarium), a gift to the U.S. from the people of West Germany. For tourists who are surfeited with sights, there will be plenty of sounds: the La Scala Opera, Elvis Presley, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Rock Hudson. (Yes, Rock Hudson, in the stage version of Stephen Vincent Benet's poem, John Brown's Body.)

Upon this Sunday morning, [in Boston], the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay; the signboards were painted in such gaudy colors; the gilded letters were so very golden; the bricks were so very red, the stone was so very white, the blinds and area railings were so very green, the knobs and plates upon the street doors so marvellously bright and twinkling; and all so slight and unsubstantial in appearance -that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime.

-Dickens, American Notes

The bricks are no longer so very red nor the stone so very white, but Boston is one of the nation's best Bi's. Faneuil Hall marketplace is jammed with tourists harking to the call of vendors selling broccoli, squash, limes, peanuts and lobsters. The city fathers have decked out some of Boston's sons in Revolutionary costumes and sent them roaming through the streets fifing and drumming. Paul Revere's house has lines of customers, a reproduction of the Boston Tea Party ship Beaver is fairly listing with visitors, and the Old North Church stands waiting for lights in the window. (One if by Land Rover, two if by CB.)

Multimedia shows are telling the world about olden times -Ben Franklin, the Salem witch trials; and newer times -exhibits of Bill Russell's basketball jersey, Julia Child's very own wire whisk.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is the questionnaire given visitors at one of the exhibits. They are asked to vote by ballot on four controversial Revolutionary issues: the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre Trials, the Tea Party and the British siege of the city. The ballots are fed into a computer, which so far has indicated that 27% of those questioned would be Tories and 47% patriots; the rest are undecided, that burgeoning American type.

I went through New York to Philadelphia and made a short visit to the latter town ... Philadelphians are not in these latter days any better than their neighbours. I am not sure whether in some respects they may not perhaps be worse.

-Trollope, North America

They were making wisecracks about Philadelphia even before Trollope, but there has been no evidence that tourists to the city this year have been disappointed. To begin with, Philadelphia is not closed, and in fact has huge traffic jams to prove it. So far this year, more than 1.5 million people have seen the No. 1 Bicentennial attraction, the Liberty Bell, which has been moved from its traditional place inside Independence Hall to a site opposite on Independence Mall. A surprising number of tourists are astonished to learn that the bell does not ring, but they get to touch it, exclaim over its famous crack and listen to a lecture that tells its history.

Philadelphia has spent considerable millions of dollars for displays, tours and a variety of cultural activities, with the expectation that all those millions of tourists out there will stop by. So far, Bicentennial officials, who had anticipated great multitudes of customers, have confessed to some disappointment over what they consider a poor showing. But the party is still young. Meanwhile, some 211,190 local citizens are having a celebration of their own: they have signed a petition for the recall of their mayor, Frank Rizzo. It is not yet apparent whether this event will serve to attract more tourists.

Sometimes we lolled on the sand in camp [at Lake Tahoe] and smoked pipes, and read some old well-worn novels. At night, by the campfire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind -and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer's acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds.

-Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872)

Actually, Philadelphia is not the only major city to find that it has overestimated the Bicentennial trade. Washington and Boston, despite record numbers of visitors, report they still have an abundance of unbooked hotel rooms. How can this be so in the year of the traveler? The answer is that the Bicentennial is only a minor lure after all. People are going places -many in order to get out of the way of the Bi crush -and want to keep moving. Their chief aim is to make vacation history of their own.

No single itinerary to see America in 1976 or any year can be drawn; even the barest mention of familiar landmarks and vistas hopelessly cramps the cartographer's art (see map). Planning a family vacation is a matter of infinite negotiations as the head of the household attempts to accommodate everyone's tastes and whims. Naturally he whims some, loses some, in an effort to schedule the Cooperstown baseball shrine, an art gallery, an antique market and a genuine prehistoric dinosaur park and rock garden all in one fractious, febrile day. Still, it might be instructive to conjure Dickens, Trollope and Twain on the road in '76, launched in their camper in the northeastern corner of the U.S. for a swift, spirited, perforce highly selective, swing through the nation. Twain, naturally, wants to drive.

The trio's odyssey might begin in Bar Harbor, Me., at the Acadia National Park, a 41,634-acre delight of mountains, sea-coast and forests. It is ideal for camping and hiking, but fellow campers warn the new arrivals that the national parks are not as pleasant as they used to be: once, one could leave his belongings untended at a campsite; now they must be locked away. "Cutpurses," observes Dickens knowingly.

They could next drive south to Newport, R.I., a Victorian throwback, once the exclusive playground of the American aristocracy. The Vanderbilt mansions are overwhelmingly beautiful; the lobster is superb. A resident proudly informs them that here "the tomato was first introduced into America." Later Twain explains to the Englishmen what a tomato is.

Down the line, a day's journey, is New York City, home of Radio City Music Hall (improbably, one of the best bargains in town) and, this year, the Democratic National Convention. Twain likes the Rockettes, but thinks the Democrats are even more improbable. At night, Central Park features Shakespeare (which Trollope finds surprisingly good) and muggings ("Cut-purses," says Dickens smugly). A most unusual event, they discover, is a relay of 27 "Liberty Torch" runners who will carry water from the Atlantic Ocean across the entire country and dump it into the Pacific. The purpose, like the water, is unclear.

Then southward, first for a stop in antebellum Charleston, where Twain insists on renting an electric boat to tour the ricefield bogs; and Savannah, Ga., with its quaint cobblestone streets and a gracious populace that calls outsiders "visitors," not "tourists." In New Orleans they stroll through the somewhat scruffy but genteel French Quarter (prostitutes will stare from their wrought-iron balconies). Again, at Twain's insistence, they pause at a Dixieland jazz joint and later dine aboard one of the Mississippi steamboats.

Next stop is Lincoln country, Springfield, Ill. Traffic is stilled at night and street lights extinguished, and a sound and light show dramatizes Lincoln's "House Divided" speech. Not far away, in the woods along the Sangamon River, the travelers visit Rutledge Tavern, where Lincoln paid only 15-c- for his meals. "You can't get a Baskin and Robbins for that today," snorts Twain. "What," inquires Trollope, "are a Baskin and Robbins?"

After traversing the Iowa plains, they come to Rapid City, S. Dak., gateway to one of the nation's most remarkable monuments -Mount Rushmore's great granite faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. A local menu offers buffalo burgers, which are indifferently appreciated until they see a herd of live buffalo in Custer State Park. Tour Guide Twain also takes his friends to Dead wood, the old cowboy town where Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane did things together that went unrecorded in children's schoolbooks. The main street is largely a series of tourist traps, but the three are intrigued by a helicopter lifting felled trees out of a nearby forest.

Turning southwest, they cross the Continental Divide, push past gaudy Las Vegas and climb the Sierra Nevadas, pausing at Donner Pass. Here, explains Twain, whose lecturing is becoming a mild irritant, a wagon train, led by George and Jacob Donner in the winter of 1846-47, became trapped in a fierce snowstorm. Several members of the party died, whereupon the survivors proceeded to cannibalize the dead. Twain, having now discovered the credit-card culture, suggests that this event gave rise to the Donner's Club. Trollope is puzzled. "Is that like Carte Blanche?" Dickens, who has been dozing, starts. "No!" he cackles. "Cartepurses!"

Moving right along, the group drives to California's Yosemite National Park, resplendent with great waterfalls, the sheer granite face of El Capitan, the sublime giant sequoias, the teeming thousands of campers, hikers and rock climbers. Refreshed, they turn toward Los Angeles and captivating Disneyland. Trollope is incredulous; Dickens is amused.

Twain is neither. He is impatient to visit the region where he lived and labored a century ago. The travelers drive north along the wild California coast at Big Sur and into San Francisco -charmingly provincial still, studiously cosmopolitan. Even Twain is impressed with that great sculpture in steel, the Golden Gate Bridge. People, he is told, come from miles around just to jump from it, but these visitors prefer to enjoy the scene from the hills immediately northwest of the span.

Then they take the coastal highway north again along the savage shore, turning off at Oregon's Siskiyou National Forest to see the aptly named Rogue River, where the salmon in spring and fall fairly beg to be caught. On they drive, through the state of Washington, into Canada, where they pick up the Alaska highway that takes them to America's true last frontier. Not far from Anchorage, they get out and walk on Portage Glacier. Later they fly to Mount McKinley National Park, where they learn that 100 hardy souls are threatening this season to assault the 20,320-ft. McKinley. The travelers are not so inclimbed, preferring instead to discover their atavistic selves by hiking for a day into the bush, or flying across the icy, prehistoric wilderness to northernmost Barrow. Soon, they will pick up their camper at Fairbanks and take the long road back across the country.

There are an infinite number of permutations to a trip of this sort. Indeed, what attracts travelers in the U.S. is the country's immense riches, its diversity in geography and regional culture. When Trollope wrote that "everybody travels in the States," he was discovering something more profound than mere wanderlust. The scale of America is part of its genius, a shaper of its history as much as the men and women who settled it, as much a part of its character as those who now inhabit it.

More recently another author, John Steinbeck, recorded his own view of American travel. "Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process," he wrote in Travels with Charley, "a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike ... We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." So it will surely prove in '76, as an America on the move rediscovers itself.

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