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“Director Jennifer Siebel Newsom has once again created a documentary that is destined to become an instant classic that will be talked about and referenced for decades to come.​ This film, like Jennifer’s earlier films, Miss Representation and The Mask You Live In— is ahead of.
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She is the founder of The Representation Project, an organization that works to end gender stereotypes. Year Language English, Spanish. Premiere World. Runtime Country USA. Director Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Editor Jessica Congdon. Music Eric Holland. All my traveling life, 40 years of peregrinating Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania, I have thought constantly of home—and especially of the America I had never seen. My idea was not to linger anywhere, but to keep on the move, as though to create in my mind one long panning shot, from Los Angeles to Cape Cod; to get up each morning and set off after breakfast, going as far as I wished, and then find a place to sleep.

Generations of drivers have obviously felt the same way, since the country has become a set of natural divisions, from Los Angeles, say, to Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Sedona, Sedona to Santa Fe—but I am getting ahead of myself. Speeding east in late spring rain from the Pacific waves lapping at the edge of Los Angeles Airport, disentangling myself from Los Angeles, struggling from freeway to freeway, I was reminded that much of my life has been spent this way—escaping from cities. I wanted to see the glimmering spaces in the distances that lay between big cities, the road that unrolled before me.

Los Angeles was a complex set of on-ramps and merging freeways, like a gigantic game of snakes and ladders that propelled me though the bungaloid body of the city to deliver me to Rancho Cucamonga. Beyond the thinner scattering of houses was the sight of bare hills, a distinct canyon and a glimpse of desert as I cruised into Barstow, California.

Then I was happy. I was reminded that first day and every day after that we are a restless nation, rattling from road to road; a nation that had largely abandoned long-distance trains because they did not go to enough places. It is in our nature as Americans to want to drive everywhere, even into the wilderness.

The nature writer Edward Abbey decried in Desert Solitaire the fact that access roads were planned for Arches National Monument in Utah when he was a ranger there. Around Barstow, I was thinking of Abbey, who once exclaimed to a friend that the most glorious vision he'd beheld in his life was "the sight of a billboard burning against the sky.

What made Barstow's billboards a peculiar blight was the contrast with everything that lay around them—the landscape that was so stark and dramatic as a brooding expanse of withered shrubs and fat cactuses, the stony roads that seemed to lead nowhere, the bleak and beautiful backdrop that seemed as though no one had laid a hand on it, with lively colorations at a distance and up close so dry, like a valley of bones looking as though they could not support life. I had seen deserts in Patagonia and Turkmenistan, northern Kenya and Xinjiang in western China; but I had never seen anything like this.

The revelation of the Mojave Desert was peering past the billboards not just its illusion of emptiness but its assertive power of exclusion, the low bald hills and far-off mountains looking toasted and forbidding under the darkening sky. That sky slipped lower, scattered rain that quickly evaporated on the road, and then gouts of marble-size hailstones swept over the road ahead, like a plague of mothballs.

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You Shall Not Commit Adultery, like a word to the wise, until the state line into Nevada, and just beyond, the little town of Primm, overshadowed by its big bulking casinos. I turned off the super-slab to travel the slower parallel road away from the speeding cars. This route took me past Henderson, and its empty malls, and soon up ahead the lights and the tall hotels. I had never seen Las Vegas before. I was driving down the Strip, which was like the midway of the largest imaginable carnival—a free-for-all, with masks and bingeing.

Passing me were slow-moving trucks, pulling mobile billboards that advertised girls for hire and restaurants, magicians, singers, shows. The hotels and casinos were shaped like Oriental palaces, with turrets and waterfalls, and familiarly, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Sphinx guarding a glassy pyramid, the Arc de Triomphe that had the texture of stale cake.

The city of fun houses dazzled me for a day, until my eyes became habituated to the scene, and then I was depressed. Yet Las Vegas is in its way as American as a lobster pot, a lighthouse, a field of corn, a red barn; but it is more. Unlike those iconic images, Las Vegas represents the fulfillment of childish fantasies—easy money, entertainment, sex, risk, elbowroom, self-indulgence.

As a city without limits, it can go on spreading into the desert that surrounds it, reinventing itself as long as the water holds out. No one can satirize Las Vegas; it satirizes itself much more effectively, thriving on self-mockery. It was great. I didn't know where I was. I just fell down. I don't even know how I got back to my room!


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A manic eagerness penetrated the place, like forced laughter; the object was to have a good time, no matter the cost. I loitered, I nosed in the casinos, I saw the "Love. But on a visit to the Liberace Museum on East Tropicana, lured by the lovely hills, I kept going, to Boulder Highway, heading southeast down the open road.

On Route 93, through the mountainous desert, along the Art Deco lip of Hoover Dam, I passed 50 motorcyclists flying American flags crossing the dam and saluting as they did so, another glory of the road. Less than miles farther, I swung off the road at Kingman, Arizona, which is a crossroads, the Interstate meeting old Route This little town and truck stop was also associated with Timothy McVeigh, the unspeakable Oklahoma City bomber, who used Kingman as a base—he worked here, plotted here and holed up in a local trailer park.

Knowing this history gave this road junction in the desert place a sinister aura of anonymity. This country runs as efficiently as it does because of trucks. They are everywhere. They can go where there are no trains: they penetrate to the smallest towns. And truckers—tough, resolute, willing—constitute one of the great traveling fraternities in America. They know every road.

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Did I say "fraternity"? It is also a sorority. The truckers fueling in Kingman that day were mostly women, co-drivers with their husbands.

Elaine and Casey were gassing up and grumbling about fuel prices. Casey, a short, stout woman of 50 or so, said, "I'll tell you. All the trucks stopping altogether—every truck in America—for about four days. That's going to put up the prices of shipping, but it'll make the point. Twenty miles out of Kingman I obeyed the Watch for Elk sign and turned south off the Interstate on slower, narrower Route 93 toward Wikieup, through butter-colored hills and deep green ravines, and after some miles to an even narrower road that led northeast toward Prescott National Forest. The land was thick with fat, wind-sculpted junipers in my long climb up Mingus Mountain on a switchback road to the 7,foot ridge, as far from the stereotype of desert Arizona as one is likely to find.

And another reward on this back road was the old mile-high mining town of Jerome, a restored settlement clinging to the mountainside.

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In the distance, past Verde Valley, were the almost-dusty pastels, the ochers and purples and pinks and oranges in the smooth cliffs of Sedona. These happy battlements and looming canyons invited me farther off the road, where I found a hotel spa and signed up for a massage. That was another lesson of the open road: if you don't like what you see in Las Vegas, a day's drive will take you through a natural forest to a pastel paradiso.

I would have stayed longer—but this was a road trip, I reminded myself: the journey was the destination. On my way to Santa Fe, heading east from Flagstaff into New Mexico, the advertised feature of the desert was the crater of a meteorite on the way to Winslow. But really the desert itself was the feature, under a blue canopy of sky. Here and there a Land for Sale sign, with an arrow pointing into the heat-shimmering emptiness; and the sight in the far distance of a tiny dot of habitation, a small house-trailer sitting deep in the desert wilderness, the living symbol of American elbowroom.

Passing a billboard in the desert—"Entering Navajo Country"—I checked my map and saw that the whole of this northeastern quadrant of Arizona is the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, the Painted Desert visible in the great striated walls of reddish cliff faces at the northerly horizon. Travel usually implies seeing a place once and moving on; but this became a trip in which I made lists of places I'd return to —Prescott, and Sedona, and now Gallup, New Mexico, where I'd happily go mountain-biking or hiking in the high desert, or visiting the people who possessed the country before we claimed it as ours.

I stopped at the town of Thoreau just long enough to establish whether it was named for the author of Walden and was told that this was not the case—was not even pronounced the same, but sounded more like my own name said correctly Ther-oo.

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By late afternoon I was rounding Albuquerque and arrived in Santa Fe in the clear light of early evening. Santa Fe, mild in May at 7, feet, was a monochromatic town of tastefully manufactured adobe. I felt no compulsion to return to Santa Fe. I left the next day, driving through the unexpectedly green and rolling hills, to pick up Interstate 40, old Route 66 with a face-lift.

Sixty miles on I used the offramp at Santa Rosa, to verify the unlikely fact that this was one of the more important scuba-diving destinations in the Southwest desert, and also for the pleasure of looking more closely at the small town, glittering in the desert sunlight, bisected by the Pecos River. At a local diner, I met Manuel and Jorge, of Basque descent, men in their late 70s. They had spent their working lives raising sheep and cattle and were now retired, their children scattered throughout New Mexico.

I asked what the town had been like when it was a stop on Route But now we're in the End Times and everything is changing.

Farther down I, across the state line and looming at lunchtime, was the Texas city of Amarillo, near the center of the Panhandle. I stopped and had a steak, gassed the car again and set off into a different-looking desert, stonier, with clusters of junipers softening its appearance. Nearer Oklahoma, green turned to lush, and then to a great grassy expanse with browsing cattle and tall Texan bushy-boughed trees. Cattle and grassland, trees and meadows, from Shamrock all the way to the border and the even greener pastures of Oklahoma. Wide-eyed, because it was my first look at the heartland, I saw Oklahoma as a ravishing pastoral, widely spaced towns proclaiming on enormous billboards their local heroes: Erick "Home of Roger Miller, King of the Road" ; Elk City "Home of Miss America, ".

I had always associated this part of America with dramatic weather—tornados, searing heat, thunderstorms. My expectations were met as dark pinnacles of storm clouds massed in the big sky ahead, creamy and marbled at their peaks and almost black below. This was not just a singular set of clouds but an entire storm front, visible in the distance and as wide as the plains—I could not see where it began or ended.

The storm was formally configured, as a great iron-dark wall, as high as the sky, bulking over the whole of western Oklahoma, it seemed: the vertical clouds like darkening watchtowers. This was fearsome and satisfying, especially the croaky weather warnings interrupting the music on the radio.