Summer Solstice and Summer Road Trips: We’re Already Here

The Summer Solstice is upon us, the longest day of the year. There’s nothing like a June morning with the Sun blazing into the bathroom window at five o’clock. Who can stay in bed on a day like that?

Rita the dog agrees. She knows the drill: coffee, breakfast (hers), then out to patrol the neighborhood before six. Sometimes we encounter homeless people in the park, and on occasion we run into friends, both canine and human. There aren’t many cars on the streets at that hour, and the world feels new and full of possibility.

On these long days, my mind wanders to the ocean. A clear June day in a sailboat on the Maine Coast is one of the finer things in life. The daylight doesn’t completely leave the sky until nine in the evening, and if you get an early start, you can go a long, long way on nothing but the wind.

The Maine Coast is closer to the Equator than the Pole. Not by much – the 45 th parallel, the halfway point, cuts across the northern part of the state. Many other places have longer Summer Solstices. In Fairbanks, Alaska, I’m told, they play a midnight baseball game in broad daylight.

I don’t like to leave Maine in the summer, because where else would I rather be? But I’ve always wanted to go somewhere way up north for the Summer Solstice. Alaska doesn’t beckon me. It would likely involve a lot of flying and driving, as it’s all the way on the other side of the continent. I’d like to see L’Anse au Meadows in Newfoundland, the site of the first confirmed Viking settlement in North America. Or Tromsø, above the Arctic Circle in Norway, where resistance fighters sank a Nazi warship, which I learned about through one of the characters in James Michener’s 1971 novel The Drifters. Or maybe Greenland, if I could convince the locals that I have no designs on the place.

One thing I don’t want to do is waste a single summer day on the Interstate Highway system, that vast network of limited-access asphalt arteries spanning the USA from Houlton to Huntington Beach. The romance of the mythical summer road trip has all but disappeared under a sea of motor vehicles racing between rest stops and exit ramps that all look alike.

In 1960, when the Interstate system was only four years old and consisted mainly of state turnpikes being expanded and connected to one another, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck accurately predicted the future that we are living in today. In his picaresque memoir Travels with Charley in Search of America, he wrote:

“These great roads are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspecting a countryside. You are bound to the wheel and your eyes to the car ahead and to the rear-view mirror for the car behind and the side mirror for the car or truck about to pass, and at the same time you must read all the signs for fear you may miss some instructions or orders. No roadside stands selling squash juice, no antique stores, no farm products or factory outlets. When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

No thanks. The slowest train or sailboat is preferable. I hope that in one of my remaining Junes I’ll make it to Tromsø, or someplace close to the midnight sun. But I’m not going to spend any long summer days in a car getting there.