ALONG THE WAY

Road Trip Across America Sweetens the Return Home to Arizona

WE STAND IN THE CEMETERY outside Big Spring, Ohio, looking upon the resting place of four generations of Rosebrooks. My son, Stuart, and I had been to the church where family names were included within century-old stained-glass windows, and to the farm where the family had moved from Bedford County, Virginia, in 1830. Sold more than 70 years ago, it today bears the name Poverty Hill Farm-perhaps half in jest, perhaps all in earnest.

Earlier we visited a beautifully restored home in nearby Delaware, Ohio. My widowed grandmother built the home in 1907. For the next 30 years, she took in as boarders young women attending Ohio Wesleyan University, while putting her four children through college.

We had left Williamsburg, Virginia, the day before. Stuart had given up his position as research editor at Arizona Highways two years earlier to become editor of the alumni magazine for the College of William & Mary.

The time has come for his return journey to Arizona, where he has accepted a position as director of development for a private boarding school.

I am along for the ride. Both of us had begun driving across the country at young ages. My trips were in the days before interstates, his during the Interstate Age. Where possible, Stuart has chosen the old U.S. highways.

Jackson Browne sings “Running into the Sun” on the radio as we head west from Williamsburg. At Miss Anne's Cafe in Mossy, West Virginia, young men take a break from driving gravel trucks, unable to completely wash the grime and dust from their arms and hands to eat barbecue sandwiches in front of a wall of photographs of local men and women who have served in the armed forces. The Hamburger Inn in Delaware, Ohio, dates back to the early 1930s and stands in a downtown hurting because of a new regional shopping center on the outskirts of town. When a stranger asks if there is a fruit substitute for hash browns, the young waitress in a NASCAR T-shirt politely replies, “The only fruit here is in the strawberry pie.” The Derby Cafe, Arapahoe, Nebraska, Stuart and I agree, is home to the best cinnamon buns anywhere, freshly baked every morning. A waitress produces a 1952 menu: No one can figure out why a hamburger cost 24 cents and the french fries were 35 cents.

There is the land and the rivers. We marvel at the width of the Mississippi River at Burlington, Iowa, and the aging bridge over the Missouri, coming into Plattsmouth, Nebraska, on U.S. Route 34. From the Kanawha River Valley of West Virginia, across Ohio, into Indiana, Illinois, crossing lowa into Nebraska; small towns, some fading with age, yet homes always neatly kept, men and women riding small tractors, mowing laws. American flags on homes and decorating every block of a small-town street.

Corn, and corn, and more corn-deep, rich and green in a land in need of rain, as far as the eye can see, broken up in Nebraska by enormous grain elevators in nearly every small town. It is a festive Saturday morning in Holdridge, Nebraska, honoring Swedish-American Days, and a chance to enter a regional radio contest to win a restored 1951 Dodge pickup truck. Heading West, the corn gives way to rolling hills and ranches, small towns where baseball diamonds and rodeo arenas stand side by side.

When Stuart accidentally locks the keys in the car at a rest stop outside of McCook, Nebraska, a young stranger gives me a ride into town for help. On his dashboard sits a card that says he belongs to a group with the name “Good Samaritans.” Another young man gives me a ride back to the car and tells us he has lived in McCook (population 8,100) all his life. “I wouldn't live anywhere else but here,” he says.

There is not enough rain. We see enormous, rotating mechanical sprinkler systems called “pivots” watering the corn. Where there is no rain, there is fire. Stuart's homecoming quickly becomes a new reality.

Two fires rage in Colorado, two in New Mexico, and an out-of-control Rodeo-Chediski wildfire devastates more than 460,000 acres in east-central Arizona.

We do not see the sun between Denver and Winslow, only smoke.

My son had taken one road to revisit the Virginia and Ohio roots of his family. But I knew the road he always wanted to take was the way we have now traveled, the road home to Arizona-in truth, the road home to his heart. Al