The Beagle has landed!

It’s official.

After 43 years, numerous discussions, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pints of barista coffee we have begun our ‘Journey Through America’. We, being one Nicholas Charles Adler and Neville Peter Jacob, buddies, former kings of the road, lovers of travel and purveyors of a good yarn.

In his post, Nick explains how our friendship began, how it developed and what keeps us excited about the United States of America, the country, its history, its very diverse culture and above all the stories that describe the lives of its people.

In our youth, we travelled widely and gained a great deal from the experience but we always knew there was more to do. Having raised families of our own and aged gracefully we know that the travels and travails of our youth are not yet over. We have seen substantial parts of the United States but not the country as a whole, America is beckoning to us, the Statue of Liberty has lowered her arm, the flame tip on her torch points to the interior with its numerous freeways, interstate highways and country roads stretching out across the vast expanse of desert, hill and mountain and calling out to us, ‘this much!’

Like wild coyote on the loose we will answer the call.

Nick, Neville & our old friend Floyd

The purpose of the Beagle is to describe our journey and the people we meet as well as the preparations leading up to the journey itself. There will be insights and stories to share before then, as well as a look at some of the classic road travel literature of Steinbeck, Kerouac and their ilk. Nick and I hope that you too will be part of this process and share insights and stories of your own and ideas on how to cover as much of the US as possible within the limits of time and budget. This is not a travelogue, nor is it an account of a trip, we want characters and we want stories. We want to see, touch, taste and observe America as she is at what we might call an ordinary level. We are not interested in elite journeys, or respectful meetings with the high and mighty, we want to observe, recount and sing a song in the spirit of Woody Guthrie.

We will sing for whisky.

It is commonly understood that the United States is riven by deep political, sociological and even religious differences, and whilst we may touch on these things we believe there is a deeper spirit within America that can explain what it means to call yourself American at this moment in time.

My last trip to the States in 2022 found me taking coffee one day in the Mall off Val Vista, in Mesa, just outside Phoenix.  I was sitting at an outside table by myself and was thinking about reading a few more pages from my book. As I began to find my place, an old guy in a wheelchair made a beeline for my table. There was a moment of irritation on my part as I thought I was going to be tapped for a few dollars.

As he neared the table, the man shouted out, ‘Is that the year you went to college?’

I looked puzzled.

‘Your t-shirt. It says 1972.‘

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I just bought it in a store back in the UK’.

Without invitation, the man wheeled right up to the table and began to talk.

‘That was the year I went to college,’ he said, ’is 1972 at all significant to you?’

I could feel myself being drawn, against my will, into conversation.

‘My first job was on a ship bound for the Arctic where we took some measurements. Then I joined another ship and headed for Bermuda.’

There was then a leap from Bermuda to working in the Pentagon planning drills for the navy during the Cold War. Little by little, his story took hold of me, at the words Pentagon and then Cold War, I was slowly reeled in.

It transpired that the man, Randy, was a chemical engineer by trade and it was this that led him to work for NASA on developing the Challenger space shuttle programme in 1986. It was an ill-fated mission that resulted in the loss of everyone on board, apparently, the investigation into what went wrong became part of Randy’s brief. He explained that incorrect seaming at the top of the fuel tank led to water being forced into the tube, it then froze and expanded allowing fuel to escape and explode. When he explained it, it seemed obvious that a seam open to the elements might have been a problem allowing the ingress of water.

I should have been a NASA scientist.

In his way, Randy moved from being a potential public nuisance, to an interesting storyteller. He could have been a fantasist, but his story hung together and it was plausible. Perhaps he was entertaining me with a made up story, I couldn’t tell, but it was worth the listen and I regretted my initial reluctance to engage in conversation.

In this digital world where everything is uncertain despite all the surveillance and security checks, Nick and I still believe in good old analogue friendship, but to the digital we must return because we are looking for writers, thinkers, photographers and people with nothing more than a darned good idea to share, there is the comments section below and the possibility of writing a post of your own. If you have a good idea now is the time to start applying pixel to screen.

We have a few ideas, but we are hoping that you may be able to give us a nudge along the way, make suggestions, describe your own experiences or even get us to go somewhere just to see how we react to what we find. We’ll finesse some of the detail as we go along. Nothing is set in concrete at this point, we haven’t decided on an itinerary, nor people we should spend time with, or even how we are going to travel, we are opening these important matters up for discussion.

Many years ago, at a Children’s Summer Camp we used to sit round a campfire in the midst of a pine forest and sing these words written by Woody Guthrie. At first, I knew nothing of the vastness of the country I was in nor of the diversity of its people. What I did pick up from the song was a spirit of cheerful optimism and welcome, it is a song born out of struggle and suffering but it is also a song of belonging. These first few verses convey the message perfectly:

‘This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
All around me, a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me.

This Land is your Land – Woody Guthrie

I’m finishing there as the Beagle is telling me he wants to be let out, he’s scented a deer that has just passed by and slipped back into the nearby woods. The road is stretching out to the far horizon, it is empty but for the distant grassland and the wind passing across it, but the question is where to start?