There are moments when anthropologist and journalist Sarah Kendzior’s The Last American Road Trip feels like a mashup of William Least Heat-Moon’s bestselling 1982 travelogue, Blue Highways, and National Lampoon’s Vacation. In truth, Kendzior’s memoir combines an elegiac account of her family travels with a frank political and cultural critique of the United States in the first quarter of the 21st century as, she argues, it “went from being a flawed democracy to a burgeoning autocracy.”
Despite her memoir’s title, Kendzior (The View From Flyover Country) doesn’t chronicle a single family trip, but instead offers a lovingly curated photo album in prose describing serial journeys “through a country falling apart” with her husband, daughter and son, now 17 and 14 years old. The book opens with a nighttime trip she and her husband take in a voyageur canoe from their St. Louis home down the Mississippi River and concludes with a survey of American caves, from Missouri to New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns.
Kendzior hopes to aid her children in constructing a sort of memory palace to preserve a sense of the country she believes is quickly disappearing. Beginning in 2016, they visited 38 states and 21 national parks, places whose physical beauty and emotional impact she captures. Among their stops are historically significant locations that include the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut; the site of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico; and multiple excursions along a once-mythic Route 66, now little more than the “faulty memory of a faded dream.” Other highlights include irreverent drop-ins at oddball tourist attractions like the World’s Largest Fork (Missouri) and World’s Largest Holstein Cow (North Dakota).
Kendzior readily confesses to an incurable wanderlust, but hers is infused with a sense that America has lost touch with its core values and a passion to keep them alive, if only in her offspring. “I love this country more than anyone I know,” she tells her daughter. “But you have to love it honestly.” If The Last American Road Trip doesn’t spark the urge to see more of America yourself, or if that yearning can’t be fulfilled, traveling with such an intelligent, perceptive guide isn’t a bad substitute.
