“At Devil’s Kettle, the river split—one side kept going, the other refused to explain itself.”
We started in Clearwater, Florida, in the summer of 1975.
Everything we owned for the trip fit into a customized van—built by my father, practical and no-nonsense, its only decoration the scars of use. My parents hired a carpenter to build a frame contraption that held a Coleman gas stove like a brace. The frame could fold up and store the stove into the side door, or fold down like a kitchen table with the stove locked in place.
We packed food and drinks into the cooler. Each of us had our own box for personal stuff—small, strict boundaries inside a moving world.
My father built a bed in the back half of the van with storage underneath, and we towed a pop-up camper. We set up tents to serve as our dining room and kitchen. We traveled by hopping campground sites—about the best way to experience America’s beautiful wilderness…
My father was an upholsterer, the kind of man who fixed worn-out things instead of replacing them. Before that, he’d been an under-aged sailor in the U.S. Navy during World War II, serving on a support ship in the South Pacific. He didn’t talk about it much.
The van doors slammed shut as my mother checked her list one last time. The engine roared to life, and Florida vanished behind us.
We headed north.
North out of Clearwater, past familiar places, then beyond the edge of familiarity. Palm trees thinned while billboards advertised the next tourist traps. The air lost its salty tang, replaced by the smell of hot pavement and pine as we climbed out of the coastal plain.
No one checked the time. When someone asked how much longer until the campground, my father didn’t answer. The sun hung high in a cloudy sky while the road hummed beneath us. Heat pressed into the van’s interior, but the open windows kept us cool as we passed through small towns.
We had puzzle books and games to keep us busy, but after a while they were pushed aside. Legs shifted, feet kicked, and I was hypnotized by the road, watching it slide past the windows.
My mother watched the road from the front passenger seat, one hand resting on a folded map. She navigated while my father drove, and when us kids grew bored and restless she taught us a road game: find letters A to Z on passing license plates. Cars had to be moving. Parked ones didn’t count. Signs were a last resort.
So we leaned forward with enthusiasm, eyes tracking motion as cars passed or we passed them. Some letters came quickly while others dragged on. Q could halt everything, and Z showed up when it didn’t help.
She let us argue about what counted—whether a car was moving, whether someone had already claimed a plate. Rules bent, broke, and were remade because we were only wasting time on the road. The game didn’t shorten the miles. It just kept us occupied while the van carried us toward the Georgia-Florida line.
We didn’t make it to Georgia the first day. By late afternoon my father pulled off the road as the light began fading. We rolled into a KOA campground, the sign easy to spot before anything else. That’s how we knew it was time to stop.
KOA meant a place that worked—bathrooms, a small store, one or two pinball machines, cabins shaped like triangles set back from the road. It wasn’t exciting. It was enough.
My father parked the van while my mother checked the site number and nodded. The engine shut off, and everything slowed down at once.
That night didn’t feel like an arrival. It felt like the trip had finally begun.
Rest Stops
By noon each day, we ate at rest stops that were always near something cool—rivers we could hear before we saw, woods that pressed up against the tables, open fields where the wind didn’t stop. We followed the smell of grass and water after using the bathrooms.
We ate at picnic tables next to trees or railings, sandwiches from the cooler balanced on our laps while bugs sometimes swarmed. Trucks rumbled past close enough to feel.
When we were done, we didn’t linger. My father called time to go. My mother packed lunch away, and back in the van we went, the journey beginning again.
Alabama Opened Up
Fields stretched wide and low, divided by fences that didn’t seem to keep much in or out. The road slid between farms and trees, past houses set back from the highway, their porches dark even before nightfall.
We camped in the country where, by dusk, fireflies blinked in the grass—slow at first, then everywhere at once. We ran with mason jars, catching fireflies in them, then watched their lights pulse against the glass.
The air smelled of cut grass and dirt still holding the day’s heat while crickets took over once the sun dropped. The fields went dark all at once, like someone had flipped a switch. Before bed, we let the fireflies go, tipping the jars and watching the light drift back into the trees.
The Smoky Mountains
We KOA’d and rest-stop-hopped our way to the Smoky Mountains where the roads grew steeper, winding up into hills that rose suddenly from the flatlands. The temperature dropped as we climbed, the air noticeably cooler.
Trees crowded the asphalt, their branches arching overhead while mist gathered on the windshield—a fine, clinging damp the wipers couldn’t clear. The world outside turned soft and blurred as the air took on a different smell—cool, sharp, wet—that mixed with the faint tang of the van.
My father drove slowly, his hands steady on the wheel as the van groaned a little on the climbs. My mother unfolded the map again, tracing the lines with her finger. No one called ahead. We just found a campsite once we got there.
Sound carried differently in the mountains. Voices from distant campsites drifted through the trees while the van’s engine echoed off rock faces, a low rumble that lingered after we’d passed. The forest was a different green here—darker, deeper than Alabama, almost black in the shadows where rhododendron tunnels swallowed the road whole. We drove through them in near-darkness, then emerged into sudden clearings where the sky opened again.
At night we camped in wilder places where gravel lots had fire pits ringed with stones. We parked the van, set up the pop-up camper, and pitched tents on uneven ground, their walls sagging in the damp air while other families’ Coleman lanterns glowed through canvas nearby.
The first morning, fog hung low over the trees, swallowing our clearing and leaving only shadows of the tents. We ate breakfast in silence, our breath visible in the chill until midday when the fog lifted, revealing rolling hills covered in dense forest, their peaks lost in clouds.
We drove along ridges where the land dropped away sharply, giving glimpses of valleys below. The road narrowed and twisted, forcing us to grip our seats as the pop-up camper swayed behind us on the curves.
At rest stops we followed hiking trails to overlooks or streams where wooden railings were worn smooth by hands and weather. We fished with cane poles. We found our own walking sticks. We carried them for a day, then left them leaning against a tree somewhere.
The Smokies felt old and magical. The air was thicker, the light softer, the sounds different—wind in the trees instead of highway trucks, bird calls instead of crickets. When afternoon rain came suddenly, we scrambled to cover the cooler and zip tent flaps while the fire pit filled with water. Afterward everything smelled of wet pine and damp canvas.
One night by a river we roasted marshmallows and watched sparks shoot into the dark. Cigarette smoke drifted from a neighboring campsite, mixing with wood smoke while the mountains stood watch around us.
We left the Smokies and headed toward Rock City, and something changed in how the road talked to us.
The mountains loosened their grip without disappearing. They backed off just enough to let farms and fields slide in, and that’s when the barns started showing up—big, old ones that looked like they’d been there longer than the road itself.
At first it was just one roof.
SEE ROCK CITY.
Big red letters, sharp against weathered wood. I stared at it, trying to read the whole thing before it slid past the window. It felt like a secret meant just for us, like the road was leaving notes.
Then there was another. And another.
Some were painted on roofs. Some stretched across the sides of barns, letters so big they looked carved into the countryside. Red and black paint. Simple words. No pictures. No explanations. Just the message, steady and confident, like it had nowhere else to be.
Every time one appeared, one of us shouted it out before the others could.
The barns didn’t rush. They just sat there, part of the land, telling the same story they’d been telling for years. They made the road feel slower, like time had stretched out and agreed to travel with us for a while.
I pressed my forehead against the glass and watched fields roll by. Fence posts flicked past in rhythm. Cows lifted their heads and went back to chewing. The words stayed with me longer than the barns themselves.
SEE ROCK CITY.
It sounded less like advertising and more like an invitation.
Rock City turned out to be a tourist trap.
Not in a bad way—just in the way things were back then. Gift shops came first. Shelves packed tight with souvenirs that smelled like rubber and dust. Rubber tomahawks. Plastic arrowheads. Fake feathers.
Nothing in the shop matched the barns. The tomahawks stuck with me because they felt wrong—bright, cheap, made to be bought and forgotten.
On the drive back, the barn signs were gone. Just pavement, trees, and the hum of the van. The rubber tomahawk lay on the floor by my feet, already dull.
The road felt more real than Rock City ever did.
Kentucky came next.
The land shifted—flatter in places, then folding in on itself without warning. The mountains didn’t rise the way they had in the Smokies. They felt older, worn down, softened by time.
The barns changed too. Fewer painted roofs. More bare wood. Tobacco hung drying in open sheds, long rows turning brown. The smell drifted into the van when we passed too close. It wasn’t sweet or bad. It just was.
Towns went by quietly. Courthouses in the center. Gas stations with one pump working and another taped off. People sat and watched us pass like we were temporary.
At night the air felt heavier. Crickets were louder. Fireflies fewer. At rest stops we ate in silence. No one asked how much farther.
Chicago felt big before we ever saw it.
The road widened. Traffic thickened. The city announced itself in layers—first the smell, then brick buildings pressed close together, then train tracks everywhere. Everything felt louder. Faster. Hard-edged.
We visited Chicago in a storm.
Rain came down hard enough to blur the city. Wind shoved it sideways. Water ran off buildings and flooded the streets. Cars hissed and sprayed as they passed.
We walked anyway.
The statues were already soaked—big men on horses, dark and shining, rain hammering down on their backs. Water streamed along the horses’ bodies and poured off wherever it could, hitting the pavement hard.
The storm made everything louder. Rain on stone. Rain on metal. Wind pushing at coats. The statues didn’t move. They just took it.
We didn’t stay long.
We got back in the van, wet and quiet, and left the city with the rain still falling behind us.
After Chicago, we went to my uncle’s farm.
The buildings dropped away fast. Streets turned into highway, then into quieter roads. Traffic thinned. The van settled into its hum.
We turned off the main road. Gravel snapped under the tires. Fields pressed in close. Fences ran alongside us.
The smell came first.
Warm. Heavy. Alive.
The dairy farm sat low against the land. Big barns. Wide doors. Cows already inside, standing close together, calm and chewing.
We didn’t just visit. We helped milk the cows. Inside the barn it was warm and close. Milking mechines works by using a controlled vacuum and pulsation system to draw milk from the udder in a steady, repeatable way.
Soft rubber liners fit over each teat, and a pulsator alternates suction and rest phases to protect the tissue while allowing milk to flow.
The milk moves immediately through sanitized piping to a sealed tank where it is filtered and rapidly cooled, limiting contamination and preserving quality.
When we were finished, we drank raw milk still warm. It was good.
Near Randolph, Minnesota, we went north to where the Mississippi River starts.
It didn’t look like a river yet. Just water slipping through rocks, narrow enough to step across. I remember thinking how strange it was that something so small could turn into something so big.
We walked along the edge where the ground dropped away faster than it looked. Water rushed below us, louder than the land around it. The rocks were slick. The air felt colder there.
At Devil’s Kettle, I almost fell to my death. I was running down a trail. It suddenly bend to the left and I suddenly had a gut feeling to stop running.
I slid around the corner and nearly off a cliff into a raging river below.
I didn’t fall, but I remember how close it felt. How quick everything went quiet afterward. The river kept moving like it hadn’t noticed.
We stood back from the edge after that.
The water rushed on. The hole stayed dark. The river didn’t explain itself.
After Randolph, we went west.
The land opened fast. Trees thinned. Fields stretched longer, then gave way to space that felt unfinished. The road stopped curving and started pointing straight. Wind pushed at the van like it had somewhere else to be.
South Dakota didn’t announce itself. It just kept going.
Mount Rushmore came up slowly.
First the hills. Then the rock. Then the faces, carved out of something that looked too solid to be touched. They didn’t feel close, even when we were standing there. Too big. Too fixed.
People stood looking up. Cameras clicked. Voices stayed low.
When we left, the monument shrank fast in the rear window, turning back into rock, then hill, then nothing special at all.
The west kept pulling.
By the time we reached Montana, the land felt heavier. Not louder. Just older.
Little Bighorn didn’t announce itself either.
Grass rolled. The river cut through. Markers sat low and scattered. The quiet made you lower your voice without thinking.
We saw the grave up on the hill, set apart from everything else. From there you could see the whole field below. The distance between the markers felt larger from above.
Later, we rode horses across part of the land.
Slow. Careful. Leather creaked. From the saddle, the ground rolled wider and more serious.
When we got down, my legs felt wrong for a while.
From there, we went south to Devil’s Tower.
You saw it before you believed it. The land stayed ordinary, then the road bent and it was suddenly there—rising straight up, too clean, too solid to belong.
We walked closer. The rock didn’t change. Columns climbed straight out of the earth. I tilted my head back until my neck hurt and still couldn’t find the top.
People moved quietly at the base. The wind slid around the stone and came back colder.
When we left, it stayed exactly where it was.
The road took us away.
The tower didn’t follow.
In the fall, school started again.
Kids came back bragging—France, airplanes, castles, Walt Disney World. Lines, rides, postcards. Places with names you were supposed to recognize.
When it was my turn, I said I vacationed in my own backyard.
They laughed like it was a joke.
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