Leaving Montana

September 1, 1996

5:43 AM, Thursday, August 29th.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, if Paul Simon has figured it out correctly, but there are only two rational ways to leave Polson, Montana if your objective is driving east to New York City. The most obvious route involves the Interstates: pick up route 90 in Missoula, turn your brain to the "off" position, and zone out until you reach the George Washington Bridge. It's fast, it's easy, it's reasonably safe, and it's utterly boring. If you're gonna drive cross-country on the Interstates at 80 mph, you might as well fly at 600 mph and view the whole thing from 30,000 feet.

But there is another way: shun-piking, following what a 1970s author, William Least Heat-Moon, referred to as the "blue highways." Once you allow yourself that option, the possibilities increase enormously: there are myriad spider-web paths from any one point to any other point in the country, and you can change your mind at almost any point along the way. To simplify things, I decided to follow one of the "main" highways that served my parents' generation in the decades before Eisenhower embarked upon the Interstate program in the 1950s. Just as Highway 1 traces a path from Maine to Florida that hardly anyone pays attention to these days, so Highway 2 traces a thin blue line known as the "high line" across the northern edge of the country. That was the path I decided to follow.

I like early starts on long trips like this, and I'm ready to go 15 minutes ahead of my planned 6 AM departure. A crystal-clear sky is awash in stars from one end of the horizon to the other, and the Jeep thermometer reads 56 degrees. The dock that stretches out into the lake behind the house is still wet when I walk out to say goodbye to Polson; after a cold rainstorm yesterday afternoon, it must have rained a little more last night, and a gentle roll of waves washes up and down on the lake.

By 6 AM, I've reached Elmo, a tiny collection of campers and mobile homes huddled on the west side of Flathead lake. A full moon is still high on the horizon, but the eastern sky is beginning to turn a dim purple. A little further up the lake, a deer, the first of several on this trip, crosses the road, glares at me, and vanishes into the underbrush. It's now 6:15, but still not light out; the moon is still up in the western sky, though now a little dimmer than when I started. There are small patches of fog hugging low on the ground along the shore of the lake, looking as if one strong puff of air would blow them away.

By 6:30, I've reached the town of Kalispell, situated a little past the north end of Flathead lake. This is the intersection of Route 2, where I make a right-hand turn to begin a 1,600 mile stretch of road that will carry me across 600 miles of Montana, and then through North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. During the daytime, there tends to be a lot of traffic in this area: Kalispell is near the entrance to Glacier Park from the south, and the roadside is filled with schlock tourist attractions that pull in the campers and the RVs. But at this early hour in the morning, it's quiet; the mountains are in fog, with clouds all the way down to the bottom valleys.

Skirting along the southern edge of the Glacier Park peaks, a freight train rumbles past me in the other direction, following tracks that have been blasted into the side of the mountain, while fog and mist dribble down from the peak. The head of the train consists of three grimy Santa Fe locomotives, looking like they've been making the same trip for 50 years; but further along the line of freight cars is a long line of double-height box-cars that with "Hyundai" signs painted in letters that could be read by a blind man ten miles away... an interesting contrast of old and new.

A little more than two hours after my departure from Polson, I've crossed Marias Pass, the summit of the mountains at Glacier Park. It's only a little over 5,200 feet above sea level, but a road-side sign informs me that I'm crossing the Continental Divide; if I were a river, it would truly be downhill all the way from here to the Atlantic Ocean. I'm out of the clouds and mist, and can see the sun for the first time since I came into the park area.

A few minutes later, I've passed the one-store village of East Glacier, out of the mountains and out on the high plains. There are vistas stretching on endlessly before me at this point, and the mountains are now behind me. The view is absolutely gorgeous out here; if I died and went to heaven, I'm convinced that I would end up right here. Or, as Ronald Reagan said about the California ranch that he loved so much, "If this isn't heaven, it has the same zip code."

There are lots of small towns along this long stretch of highway in northern Montana; most of them look as if time has stood still since the 1950s. Browning, Shelby, and Rudyard are the first to end up in the rear-view mirror. Browning is in the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and every store in town seems devoted to selling Native American artifacts of one kind or another (by the end of the day, I will have passed through four such reservations: the Flathead, Blackfeet, Fort Belknap, and Fort Peck reservations). Shelby is the first town since Kalispell big enough to have an airport; it's also the crossroads of Interstate 15, which heads south. At the intersection of Interstate 15, a highway signs proclaims that Shelby is the "crossroads of the West," which might generate a bit of an argument from the folks in Denver, Salt Lake City, or a dozen other larger cities. And another highway sign announces the entrance to Rudyard with the useful census data of, "Town of Rudyard: 596 nice people, 1 old sorehead."

The rest of the morning is spent zooming further along route 2, passing through Kremlin, Havre, Chinook, and Glasgow. Kremlin proudly announces that it is "Kremlin USA style," and Havre is dominated by giant grain silos on the railroad tracks that run parallel to the highway. Chinook, I'm sorry to say, had nothing memorable to say for itself. Glasgow, on the other hand, is big enough to sport both a bowling alley and a MacDonald's restaurant.

Glasgow has one other distinction: it's the nearest town of any significant size to Fort Peck Lake. The lake appears such an enormous mass of water on my map that it seems worth a detour; a tiny road leads south for 20 miles, and takes me to the enormous causeway of the Fort Peck dam. It's an awesome sight, but also very weird and artificial; out here in the middle of nowhere, the color of the water just doesn't look right against the parched, barren landscape all around it. There are a few dozen boats out in the lake, presumably fishing, all clustered around the dam.

I won't try to describe the lake or the dam in detail; fortunately, I don't have to, because the town of Glasgow has created a Web page for Fort Peck Lake, which I encourage you to visit (virtually if not actually). The lake and the massive dam and the hydroelectric generators were created by an army of 10,000 workers during the Depression, as one of FDR's New Deal projects, and the dimensions are staggering. The spillway provides a controlled mechanism for excess water to be allowed out of the lake and into the nearby Missouri River; it consists of 16 gates that weigh 80 tons each, measuring 25 feet high and 40 feet wide. The spillway is a thousand feet long, a hundred feet high, and consists of 560,000 cubic yards of concrete and 55 million pounds of steel.

These are big numbers, but they mean nothing until you see the place. All around the dam and the spillway are buildings and hydroelectric power stations that look distinctly like something out of the 1930s: the buildings clustered by the edge of the dam are a thick, dark foreboding grey, the kind of heavy Gothic architecture that reminds me of the Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Sixty years later, I'm totally alone out here on the spillway; the lack of any sign of human life almost makes it seem like the dam structure was built by a race of aliens who then departed for (literally) greener pastures.

After an hour wandering around the dam and the local museum, I turn north and west again, and eventually rejoin Highway 2. By 3:30, I've reached Wolf Point in western Montana. Like Glasgow, this is a town big enough to have a MacDonald's -- but the cell phone in the Jeep has gone out of range, so I'm cut off from civilization. The last town in Montana is Culbertson, where I have the pleasure of watching the local football team practicing as I drive past huge grain elevators silhouetted starkly in the bright afternoon glare.

At 4:45 PM, after some 625 miles of steady driving, I hit the border of North Dakota. Aside from the official border marker, the landscape looks basically the same. One of the interesting sights along the way, both in Montana and now again in North Dakota, have been the huge round bales of hay; in some places, there are literally hundreds of them scattered out along the fields and plains, as far as the eye can see. It's as if a race of giants had dropped hundreds of enormous golden Tootsie Rolls on the fields.

Around 8:30, having driven some 750 miles, I decide to call it a day in Minot, ND. I would have stopped an hour earlier in the town of Stanley -- home to 678 families and 1,371 residents -- but there was only one motel and it was full. There was also only one gas station, which I desperately needed -- as far as I could tell, I only had 0.2 gallons of gas left in the tank when I got there. And there was only one restaurant in Stanley, which served me (after some minor grumbling from the two teenage girls tending what seemed to be an otherwise empty establishment) the "special" dinner of a hamburger and fries, for the princely sum of $2.90. (For what it's worth, there was a UFO sighting in Stanley nearly three years after I passed through it, but there was no way I could have known at the time that the town was destined for such greatness.  It's possible that the two girls working in the restaurant were abducted by aliens who were grumpy that they couldn't even get a decent hamburger in the town.  Then again, it may have been the two girls in the restaurant who reported the sighting, since they obviously weren't paying much attention to their cooking and waitressing chores.  All we know from the documented record, dated July 16, 1999, is that one of the observers was named Christine.  And that's about all there is to say about Stanley, ND.)

Friday, August 30th

After the long drive last night, and then staying up to watch Bill Clinton's convention acceptance speech, plus some email and surfing on the Internet, I decided to sleep in until 7 this morning. It's now a little after 8, the sun is well up and the sky seems to be clear. It's 68 degrees outside, and I'm ready to leave Minot behind. An hour later, I pass through the town of Rugby, which claims to be the geographical center of the U.S. I can't image what on earth that means, and it's amusing to think that Rugby has nothing better to say for itself.

And two hours after that, I've passed through Grand Forks, across the Red River, and into Minnesota. At first, it looks much the same as North Dakota, but gradually it becomes flatter, and with more trees. The barren high plains are gradually disappearing and being replaced by the lush farm fields of the Midwest. It's lusher, greener, and there are more corn fields -- indeed, I didn't see any corn fields in Montana, and few that I can remember in ND.

Just after mid-day, a thousand miles from my starting point, I pass a huge field of sunflowers in full bloom; it's about as pretty as one could imagine. Indeed, it's extraordinarily pretty -- but unfortunately not very photogenic. One of the curious ironies about this trip is that I didn't find anything worth photographing. On the other hand, if I had been driving at 20 mph and in more of a mental frame of mind to stop on a dime, I suppose I would have found a few things that would have piqued my interest. But I've learned from several long trips like this in recent years that such photos can serve only as personal reminders, and never seem to be very good at showing or explaining to someone who wasn't there what it's really like.

But though nothing has been recorded on film, I've begun to catalog various small bits of trivia; after a thousand miles, patterns begin to emerge. One curious thing, for example, is the use of the term "supper club" all along this northern highway. It was a term I saw attached to a few modest restaurants back in Polson, and I thought it was nothing but the extravagance of an individual restaurant entrepreneur; but during the past two days, I've seen it a dozen more times. The term creates the image of a swank establishment, with Rolls Royces parked outside, a band (if not a full-scale orchestra) inside, and signs of elegance all around; but every supper club I've seen out here on the highway has turned out to be nothing more than a mediocre restaurant.

Indeed, the establishments that have identified themselves as mediocre establishments get more respect from me. Most of them are bars, one of which had a huge sign outside identifying itself as the Kro Bar. The rest have been inns: the STOP Inn, the C'mon Inn, the Meander Inn, and so forth. Unfortunately, I didn't stop at any of these, nor did I sample any of the truck-stop diners and small hometown restaurants along the way; I should have, and plan to do so next time I have a chance for such a drive. Instead, I followed a fairly steady routine of MacDonald's for breakfast (sausage/egg McMuffin and coffee) and lunch (Arche deluxe, large fries, medium diet coke), and whatever form of fast-food establishment was closest at dinner time. By the end of the trip, I swore that I would never step inside another MacDonald's again, but the resolve lasted only a couple of days.

The rest of the afternoon drifts by as I pass through a few tiny towns, endless miles of shrub forests, and the infinite lakes of Minnesota. I now recall that Minnesota is known as the land of 10,000 lakes -- and I'm sure I've seen at least 9,000 of them. After the first 3,000 they all begin to blur, and even though the point of being on this small road is to see more of the countryside, I find that I'm now ignoring much of it. By late afternoon, I've reached the eastern border of the state, passed through the huge ugly city of Duluth, and into Wisconsin. I stop for the day at 6:30 in the small town of Ashland, on the south shore of Lake Superior. Dinner consists of Kentucky Fried Chicken, followed by a stop at the local Exxon station to gas up the jeep. I stagger back to the motel, log onto the Internet to catch up on e-mail, and turn in early.

Saturday, August 31st

Out of bed at 5:30, breakfast at 6, and I'm on the road at 6:20 AM. The sun isn't above the horizon at this point, but the sky is pink and the Jeep thermometer says it's 63 degrees outside. By 6:30, I'm out of Ashland, with foggy mist on the grass along the side of the road, an occasional deer lurking at the edge of the trees, and nobody else in sight. The sun is a huge orange ball, just coming up over the horizon, and the sky is hazy, so the emerging sun is turning the eastern sky completely orange. About once a mile along this stretch of deserted highway, I spot a big black crow sitting out on the road, watching me approach -- and finally, when it's obvious that I'm not going to disappear, it floats up lazily into the sky. Something about the mist, and the angle of the sun in the sky, and the general ambience of silence, tells me subtly that summer is over. Fall must come quickly to these northern woods.

Shortly after 7 AM, I've crossed the border into the northern Michigan peninsula, where the first sign of civilization is the small town of Ironwood. The road conditions are worse here; it's down to 2 lanes, with hardly any shoulder, bumpier, with a lot of wear and tear. Forests stretch away into the distance on both sides, and I have a strong feeling of being alone in the north woods.

But even though it's isolated and lonely here, there's no sense of danger or menace. This is rather amusing, because when I thought about the prospects of driving cross-country with a Jeep filled with my belongings, I worried about the prospects of having it all stolen. Not that the loss of several boxes of books and suitcases filled with moldy summer clothing would have been such a tragedy, but I've got my laptop with me too; it's in a padded bag on the front seat, and my initial assumption was that I would have to carry it with me when I went into restaurants, and even when I took a bathroom break in the gas stations. What a laugh: I could have driven barefoot across the country, and left the windows rolled down and the doors unlocked; nobody has given me or my Jeep full of junk a second glance.

Part of this is the small-town atmosphere that I enjoyed all summer; it has persisted throughout the journey. At breakfast this morning in Ashland, the hotel desk clerk and the restaurant waitress struck up a conversation with me, and discussed at great length the pluses and minuses of the fact that they'd never been to New York City. Not a big deal, of course, but it's still strange for someone who has spent the past 28 years in New York to see people so friendly and ready to start up a conversation with just about anyone. Yesterday, in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, I got into a conversation with a total stranger about the size of the bugs that hit the windshield, while we were both filling our cars at the local gas station; if I had done that in New York, the other guy would have pulled out a gun.

Along the stretch of highway here in the northern Michigan peninsula, I've begun passing signs referring to "Old Highway 2," which obviously indicates that I'm on a second-generation road ... which, of course, has been superseded by a third generation known as the Interstates. I suppose that if I really wanted to be a purist, I could have tried to follow the "old" highways all across the country. Another interesting point about the highway: all the way across, through five states, the roadside has been remarkably clean. No beer cans, no paper, no junk in sight. Maybe this is the result of the endless blue "Adopt A Highway" signs that pop up every couple miles.

I've also been intrigued to note that almost every town has a billboard as you approach on the highway, which describes it as the "home" of high-school state champions of some sport. I was impressed, for example, to see that some rinky-dink town in northern Montana had produced the 1994 high-school football champs; but another town could only boast of having the class-D junior high-school basketball team; and several times, the championship event dated back to the 1970s; and once it was the debating team that was so honored. The debating team, for goodness sakes! Pretty pathetic that that's the best that a town could brag about, but it obviously matters to these folks.

Somewhere this morning, I crossed into the Eastern time zone and lost an hour without even knowing it. It's now a little after one in the afternoon, and I've passed through the town of Estanaba, coming around the northern end of Lake Michigan. Traffic has been heavy in both directions since about 9 AM; I suppose this is an indication of the holiday weekend. As such, it's very different from the experience of driving in Montana and North Dakota, where I often went 10-20 miles without seeing another car in either direction.

At the very north end of Lake Michigan, there's surf on the water, and it feels almost like being in Maine, with windswept shores, sand dunes, and scruffy pines along the other side of the road (the water is on my right side as I'm driving north). I stop the car -- for the first time in a long while -- get out, take my shoes off, and stick my feet in the water. Cold: I wouldn't want to swim here, though I've seen hundreds of people out in their bathing suits as I've driven along the shoreline, splashing around in the tiny rolling breakers. It's interesting that while much of Minnesota and Wisconsin have been boring and uninteresting, this morning's drive has been completely captivating. To realize that you're skirting around such an enormous body of water as the Great Lakes is awesome.

At 2 PM, I've finished yet another MacDonald's lunch, filled the gas tank, and am ready to cross the Macinac Bridge, a mammoth piece of engineering that separates Lake Huron from Lake Michigan. At this point, I've come 1600 miles and I've reached the end of Route 2. I'll head south on Interstate 75 for a few miles across the bridge before getting on highway 23 for a trip down the west shore of Lake Huron.

Along the Lake Huron shoreline, there are hundreds of small cabins and tiny resorts. It's heavily populated, but nicely organized, without the sense of shlock suburban malls and crowding that one sees in seaside resort areas like the Hamptons. Interestingly there is no evidence of any farms; maybe they're farther inland, but within my view, there are only water-related things. The water on Lake Huron is gorgeous -- a color very much like the Caribbean, a sparkling light blue-green. Along the shoreline, there are little dirt roads that lead off into the trees, perpendicular from my highway, down to the water line. And on each of these dirt roads, which must be a quarter-mile in length, four or five houses are hidden away, each with a yard, and one or two with beachfront. And while there are a bunch of small name-posters out on the main highway, the way they've indicated the identity of the dirt roads themselves is with a big numeral sign: a white number in a red background. I first noticed this at dirt road #64, and it counts down methodically, over a 20 mile length, down to 1.

An hour later, I pass through the town of Cheboygan; I didn't know it was spelled that way! And a few minutes later, I pass a restaurant called the Yeck Family Restaurant. How on earth could they get any customers with a name like that? And just past the Yecks, I encounter my first fox; it comes out on the highway, looks all around, and I beep at it while I'm still a few hundred yards away. The fox levitates, then scampers back into the brush.

Further down the peninsula, just past the town of Alpena, I pass a sign saying that I'm crossing the 45th parallel, halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. No other indication of anything special -- but interesting to know that I'm right on the temperate zone. At this point, the lake shoreline is grassy and a little marshy, and it changes fairly regularly from one scene to another along the shoreline. All in all, I'm getting the impression that Lake Huron is one of the great undiscovered vacation spots of the country.

At 5 PM, I creep through Harrisville, where a huge fair has filled the main street so that everyone has to slow to a crawl. Most of the arts and crafts in the fair look pretty tacky, but it appears that the whole town has turned out, and they appear to be having a good time. And a little further along, I chuckle at a sign that someone has posted in front of their house: "Success comes before work only in the dictionary."

At 6:40, my little highway 23 rejoins Interstate 75, whether I like it or not. What a contrast! On the one hand, there is the undeniable exhilaration of being able to drive 75 mph without worrying about being stuck behind some little old grandma going 35 mph or being trapped in a town fair. But on the other hand, there is the utter boredom of being on an anonymous road that could be in Alabama or Maine or Michigan. As it turns out, I'm now about 20 miles north of Saginaw -- but how would I know that from the scenery around me?

Twenty minutes later, I'm in Bay City, having pulled off the Interstate again. The name seems vaguely familiar; I seem to remember that this is a city featured on one of the TV soap operas. It has huge Victorian houses, set back from the street on big lawns, but the whole thing seems a bit run-down -- sort of what you would expect to see in England. The city itself is industrialized, obviously a port city of some kind, probably dealing with the auto and steel industry. It was probably booming in the 40s and 50s, but seems to have quieted down somewhat.

Past Bay City, I'm heading toward the eastern peninsula shoreline. It's farm land once again, and it looks as rural and peaceful as some of the areas in Minnesota that I drove through yesterday. It's very flat, very lush, with lots of alfalfa and corn fields; it reminds me of eastern Long Island, because one has a sense that water is nearby -- various restaurants are labelled "Harbor this" and "Harbor that."

In the little town of Sebeling, where modest houses are set on one acre plots, a big fender-bender accident has taken place in the middle of town, apparently only moments before I've arrived. Two cars have crunched into one another; police cars and ambulances are all around, and a local citizen is out in the middle of the street, sweeping away the broken glass with a broom. Further on, passing through Bayport, I see a sign announcing the "reorganized" Church of Latter Day Saints. Reorganized? What could this mean? Have the Mormons decided to do a little business process reengineering?

My plan is to stop in the town of Port Austin, which appears as nothing more than a tiny dot on the United States map I've got with me. But Port Austin turns out to be a town like East Hampton, swarming with yuppies and tourists; the only thing missing is the Ralph Lauren Polo store and the cut-throat Wall Street investment bankers. In any case, there are no hotels, motels, bed-and-breakfast inns, or any other civilized form of lodging. So, after another gas and bathroom break at the local gas station, I'm on my way again.

From 8 PM to 10 PM, I drive through pitch-black darkness from Port Austin down to Port Huron. There is dense fog in all the hollows as the road dips up and down; hardly any houses, no lights. Along the way, are half a dozen little towns -- Forrestville and Gumpville, and goodness knows what else -- but almost all of them are closed for the night. Sometimes a gas station, sometimes a small general store are still open, but not much besides that.

Alas, no hotel rooms can be found in Port Huron either. The front-desk clerk at one of the hotels tells me that everything is full for 50 miles around. Arghh! I still have plenty of gas, so instead of crossing over into Canada as I had originally planned (something I was planning to do tomorrow, not tonight), I stumble on Interstate 94 and begin heading toward Detroit. Twenty miles along the Interstate, I finally find a motel (innocently called the InnKeeper) which has one single room left, available for one night only. I take it thankfully, lock and bolt the door (I'm close to Detroit, after all, which is sobering even for a resident of New York) and finally collapse into bed at 11:30 PM. A long, long, long day indeed.

Sunday, September 1, 1996

One the final day of the trip, I check out of the hotel and pull out of the parking lot at 8 AM. My plan is to top up the gas tank before heading out -- but the gas station next to the hotel is an East Coast variety that requires customers to go into the station and pay the cashier before pumping the gas. This is the first time it's happened on the entire trip, and my reaction is: bah, humbug. I'll move on and find gas elsewhere.

The basic game plan today is to zoom to New York on the Interstates at supersonic speed: down I-94, through Detroit, to the intersection of 75; south on 75 to Toledo, where I'll pick up Interstate 80; then east across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to the George Washington Bridge. My original plan was to cross into Canada at Port Huron, skirt across part of Ontario to Toronto, reenter the U.S. at Niagara Falls and Buffalo, and then cut across the width of New York State on the thruway ... but I'll have to save that for another trip.

As expected, the day passes in a blur; the 600 miles of Interstate rush past at 75 mph. It's interesting that the tolls for the entire cross-country trip are only $9.50, most of which is spent today: $1.50 on the Macinac Bridge yesterday, $3.95 on the Ohio Turnpike, and $4.00 on the George Washington Bridge. On the other hand, I've been sobered by the cost of gas to drive across the country: I've been filling the tank twice a day, at a cost of about $25 each time.

A small incident toward the end of the journey illustrates better than anything else I've seen these past four days how much of a difference there is between the East Coast and the rural areas of the West. All the way across Ohio and Pennsylvania, the traffic slowly gets heavier, and it becomes more and more difficult to pass the slower cars, even though the Interstates typically have three or four lanes in each direction. This leads to a phenomenon I'll call "angry passing": if someone gets stuck behind a slowpoke in the passing lane, they'll pass on the right, and then cut back sharply into the passing lane, just ahead of the slowpoke -- hopefully so close that it startles the slowpoke and makes him realize that he's committed a faux pas by being there in the first place. It's a little risky at 75 mph, but everyone does it from time to time, including me.

But in Eastern Pennsylvania, about 10 miles before the Delaware Water Gap that marks the border of New Jersey (where everyone is certifiably crazy), I witness an amazing example of angry passing. It begins behind me, for I'm in the passing lane, a couple of car-lengths behind a Ford pickup, which in turn is behind a powder-blue Mercedes, which in turn is behind someone else. Somewhere up ahead is a slowpoke, I suppose, but since we're all zooming along at 75 mph and moving briskly and steadily past all the cars in the middle lane and the right lane, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

But behind me are two hotshots in a Jeep Cherokee who clearly disagree; they nudge up closer and closer behind me, indicating in a subtle way that they hold me to blame for the fact that they can't go any faster. When I don't respond, they suddenly pop out of the left-most lane, zoom past me on the right, and then pop back in front of me; I have only a brief glance at two young men in baseball hats as they zoom past me. Since I had only left three car-lengths between me and the Ford pickup in front of me, this maneuver causes all three cars to be crammed in far too compact a space.... so, muttering a few choice words, I slow a bit and allow a little space to open up.

But the hotshots aren't satisfied. Less than a minute after passing me, they pop back into the middle lane, zoom past the Ford pickup, and then cut sharply back into the passing lane again. And then a few seconds later, they pop into the middle lane yet again, and zip past the Mercedes, swerving sharply back into the passing lane a third time. All of these maneuvers have resulted in the Jeep being only three cars ahead of me, a distance of no more than a quarter of a mile.

But while the Ford pickup and I have accepted all of this reasonably graciously, the Mercedes takes it as an insult. I haven't seen the Mercedes occupants clearly, but there are at least four people, sitting in both the front and rear seats. No sooner does the Jeep Cherokee settle into the passing lane than the Mercedes returns the favor: it pops into the middle lane and pulls up beside the jeep. The driver has his window rolled down, and he extends his middle finger toward the Jeep with a snap of the elbow and a flourishing gesture far more eloquent than a ten-minute string of verbal abuse.

This is funny enough, but the next move is breath-taking: the Jeep suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, moves straight into the middle lane occupied by the Mercedes. No turn signal, no horn, no warning at all, just bam! and it's there. And it's not a movement of a few inches; the Jeep clearly intends to side-swipe and ram the Mercedes right off the road.

But the Mercedes driver has been watching this, and the moment the Jeep makes its move, he too swerves to the right -- and fortunately for all concerned, the right lane is empty at this point. Even better: the right lane extends further off to the right, into the beginning of a turnpike exit that runs almost parallel with the main highway for a quarter-mile or so before slowly angling off to some smaller road in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Whether the Mercedes had originally planned to take that exit, I'll never know. But in any case, it does so now -- first swerving almost instantaneously from the middle lane to the right lane to avoid the oncoming Jeep, and then drifting further and further right as the exit lane pulls away from the main road. And just at the moment when the Mercedes has a bit of grass and concrete barrier between itself and the main road -- and this is literally seconds after the Jeep has initiated the whole side-swiping process -- arms and middle fingers extend out of all four Mercedes windows, with magnificent flourishes of abuse at the Jeep. And the final gesture: the passenger sitting immediately behind the Mercedes driver manages to stick his naked ass out the window, wiggling back and forth in an elaborate mooning insult.

And the Jeep, whose baseball-hatted occupants I can clearly see ahead of me, goes into a spasm of rage; the vehicle quivers and shakes from side to side. The Jeep driver yanks off his hat and flings it down, while the fellow in the passenger seat leans out the window and shakes his fist furiously at the Mercedes. The Jeep moves quickly into the right lane, and it looks for a moment like it will try to jump the barrier and charge off down the exit lane in hot pursuit of the Mercedes. But it's too late: the Jeep quivers and shakes for another few seconds, and then reluctantly moves back into the middle lane.

The whole thing, from start to finish, has taken less than a minute. At least six angry young men are now hurtling along in slowly diverging directions, and since none of them are carrying shotguns, the level of violence hasn't escalated any further. But after that, everything else on this road seems rather tame. The drivers in New Jersey truly are crazy (or maybe it's New Yorkers who are crazed at the thought of being stuck in New Jersey before they can escape via the George Washington Bridge), but there are no further mooning or side-swiping incidents.

And by 6:00, I've reached the George Washington Bridge; twenty minutes later, I've crossed the bridge, zoomed down the West Side highway, navigated through crowded side streets, and pulled up in front of my apartment building. Four long days and 2,757 miles from door to door -- and I'd do it again in a second.