Head out on the highway

By GRAHAM REID

Is America the best, and possibly safest, country in which to drive? In the absence of objective data - and not having checked out Burkina Faso or Portugal - I'm out on a limb when I start making the case over beers.

"Oh no, man," says Aaron, a music programmer for the college radio station at Texas Tech in Lubbock, the birthplace of Buddy Holly. We're sitting in Tom's Place, a rowdy bar in the town's Depot district, where the walls are covered in graffiti and an extraordinary variety of bras hang from the rafters.

We have agreed about most things so far - many and various beers, and certain altrock bands - but he's not so sure about American drivers. "I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in Texas we're the worst," he says as he chugs a Shiner Bock.

I have to disagree, and with 2500km on the clock from LA to Lubbock via six states - okay, Utah for only half an hour - I'm going to bat for American drivers as courteous and cautious.

This is the country of the car and a long fascination with the automobile. Admittedly we are driving something that commands attention - the new BMW 645 with SMG and a whole bunch of other things I don't understand. And everywhere we go we are on the receiving end of unexpected but enthusiastic car comments from strangers.

"Tight ride, man," says a Hispanic teenager at a gas station one afternoon outside Santa Fe, near the artist Georgia O'Keeffe's home. "A BMW, right?" asks an impressed elderly man at San Angelo.

And then an embarrassing moment. At San Antonio I am about to accept the compliment again from a total stranger when I realise he is admiring the low-slung sports car next to ours.

Cars, pickups, SUVs and XXOS motorbikes are topics of knowledgeable conversation. Highways and driving are such a part of life they are celebrated in song. From the trucker-twang of Six Days on The Road ("got little white pills and they keep my eyes open wide") through the soft-rock of Ventura Highway to the proto-metal of Born to Be Wild, song lyrics have articulated the American passion for the car and motorcycle. Songs speak of the romance of the road and the belief that something better lies beyond the city limits.

Bruce Springsteen's early career was founded on such myths in songs such as Born to Run, Thunder Road, or the failed highway dreams on Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

We have been down bits of the most famous US highway, Route 66, and there, as everywhere from inner-city cruising on the Strip in Las Vegas to the backstreets of small towns and the long hauls down interstates where cruising at 80m/h (128km/h) is the norm, the driving has been easy and a pleasure.

The reasons are simple: excellent roads, for a start. We are sometimes using our 1959 National Geographic map of the old roads, which means detours along deserted byways near the busy interstates.

Yet we haven't hit a patch of unsealed road, an unannounced dangerous curve or even potholes of the kind we expect at home.

Add to that better cars.

Yes, you do see a few older models, but seldom outside inner-city streets do you find the equivalent of our rust-bucket Holdens or even my egg-shell Honda City. And cars seem equipped with functioning indicators and drivers who can use them. Strangers let you in and are contagiously considerate.

If you have cruise control it's just a matter of pointing that baby down the road and your only worry is what radio station you want to tolerate while America goes by beyond the windscreen - hilarious sports talk, sentimental country, the numerous God channels or classic Elton-rock.

And in a country where the wide lanes roll like ribbons across the continent, people are prepared, willing and even expect to drive long distances.

Alcohol is banned on the Navajo Nation but without thinking, while chatting in a Wal-Mart queue one afternoon, I ask a hometown teacher where a good bar might be, somewhere I could sit and chat with locals.

He reminds me of the ban - noting when he lived off the rez he used to have maybe a bottle or two in the house, now he stacks up and has close to two dozen hidden. Then he says I might try Page down the road. Page is 145km away. Quite a round trip for a few beers.

Even though we are now accustomed to long drives, I decline and that night at dinner agree to try the restaurant's non-alcoholic chardonnay. It is so artlessly foul it could drive a man to drink. Or Page.

In Lubbock a week later, I am chatting with Joe Don who asks about our route west. We mention we are going through San Angelo and San Antonio then on to Austin. "I'm going to Austin tonight," he says.

We blink hard. We can read a map and Austin is a handspread across it. I have to ask. "Oh," he says in an admirably slow drawl, "it's about eight hours."

But as we head across the flatlands spotted with oil derricks and little else I realise we, too, take on enormous distances across this open land with little concern.

That is not to say driving is uneventful. It can be disconcerting to glance in the rear-view mirror and see the front of a semi-trailer filling your vision, its looming snout like an angry bull bearing down. But, as they say, "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear".

So you push the gas pedal a little harder and put some distance between you and the raging bull.

Outside Durango one morning, traffic stalls for 20 minutes. When we pull alongside the police cars and tow-away vehicles the mess is horrific: a car flipped with its roof shaved down to the steering wheel and another vehicle with its front folded like an accordion.

They are on a straight, downhill piece of two-lane blacktop and not where you'd expect an accident. But the message from home comes back: the faster you go, the bigger the mess.

Yet we drive by, forgetting this ugly event until nightfall after another day of America out the window, service station forecourts and small-town cafes. We have been too busy contemplating the culture of the car in America.

It is simple: you can just go. Freedom for the price of a gallon (4 litres) of gas, around US$1.80 ($3).

Outside Amarillo we detour to see Cadillac Ranch, celebrated in song by Springsteen and the brainchild of the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm.

It is 10 classic Caddies (El Dorados and Coupe De Villes) from between 1948 and 1959 buried bonnet-down with their fins in the air. It is a salute to the spirit of the road and the time when Cadillac fins just got bigger.

Sponsored by eccentric Amarillo businessman and art patron Stanley Marsh III, Cadillac Ranch is just off the I-40 in a field of endless wheat. Over the years it has been painted and repainted - by professionals and amateur graffiti artists alike - yet possesses a mysterious quality in this landscape which is silent, except for the steady, distant hum of vehicles along the interstate.

Marsh, who is also believed to be behind the oddball, art-project street signs in Amarillo, says Cadillac Ranch is about the bigger picture.

"What makes America the best country in the world is the car. In Germany, Africa, China or Russia, kids grow up thinking they'll have a house some day. But American kids dream that they'll have a car.

"A car represents freedom, romance, money. You can head west to Las Vegas where you can break the bank, then go out to the beach in California and become a movie star."

We have put the beach and the blackjack behind us and are heading the other way, east to embrace whatever liberties these highways offer.

So we drive on, past the familiar - Tony Roma's rib houses, KFC, Quizno, Burger King - and down this endless freedom road into the great unknown.

* Graham Reid is a Herald feature writer on holiday in America. He is travelling courtesy of BMW.