into the car and got back on the road.
In 1924, the renowned British essayist and travel writer Hillaire Belloc (who once walked across the western United States to visit his future wife) wrote a piece entitled The Road. “The Road is one of the great human institutions because it is fundamental to social existence,” he wrote. “The Road moves and controls all history.”
Belloc may have written those words nearly ninety years ago with some confidence, but he could hardly have known how prescient they were, particularly in relation to North American history. His thoughts on the connection between man and road coincided with something of a sea change in the national psyche which allowed the common person to believe that travel for leisure purposes was not just possible, but morally acceptable. Elmer Davis summed it up in 1932 when he wrote that the “pioneer conditions that made indolence suspect and leisure unknown discouraged the habit of traveling for pleasure . . . till good roads were general. There was not enough fun in it to make it worth while . . . Then suddenly, the automobile came within reach of every one. There were immense distances to be covered and a machine capable of covering them.”
Davis was broadly correct, but I think his words have particular resonance for someone from the western part of North America; in our own early family travels we had farther to go to get somewhere. It was that simple. On the wide and endless prairie where I was raised and still live you could drive for hours and hours, stop, get out of your car, look around, and be hard pressed not to conclude that you’d forgotten to put the car in gear back home. I have no doubt that in choosing to go to Mexico and back in 1973, my parents were not just trying to do something different and unusual for their children, but also that they simply had no choice but to go far away in order for us to see something far different. The almost genetic need to cover vast distances has, to my observer’s eye, less purchase on the subconscious of the eastern North American because history and geography have conspired to create a denser, more tightly concentrated web of sights and destinations worth seeing in the east. Within two hours’ drive of Washington, DC, you can, for instance, reach most of the sites central to America’s formation. Within two hours’ drive of Edmonton you can reach places that look about the same as what you’d find if you drove two minutes from Edmonton; there is precious little of historical interest within two hours’ drive of my home, unless you are a student of the fur trade, Native history, or the North-West Mounted Police, and even less of geographical interest, unless you are an aficionado of the prairie landscape (luckily I happen to find all of the above quite compelling).
But none of this was of any consequence to the middle class until the automobile became widely available. John Rae, writing in 1971, concurred with Elmer Davis on the middle-class leap to the automobile. In The Road and the Car in American Life, Rae tells us that it wasn’t until the advent of an automobile readily accessible for nearly every class of citizen that the notion of an actual “vacation” for all was thinkable. Travel for the purposes of pleasure and recreation was a novelty as the 1920s dawned; by the 1930s it was not novel at all, largely due to the affordability, mobility, and control the automobile gave those without a summer house in the Hamptons to escape the pressures of the Upper East Side. Going on a vacation with the family was suddenly not just possible, but convenient and affordable, although the trickle-down effect for the masses didn’t hit until after the Second World War.
It was a trend that would not stop for decades and which only began to abate with the advent of cheap air travel and the gasoline crises of the 1970s. In 1971, the year Rae published The Road and the Car in American Life (and when my parents were probably subconsciously hatching the idea for our epic family car trip), he reported that nine out of ten families took their family vacations in a car via the highway. It’s important to point out—because it’s crucial to understanding the evolution of the family vacation—that the development of the American automobile industry was from the start pursued by people with a mass market in mind; this was the opposite of the European auto industry. Manufacturers in Britain and Germany pursued auto development as a purview of the wealthy. Henry Ford, conversely, expressly stated that his dream was to create “a car for the great multitude.” His dream came true. Even in dire circumstances, car ownership was possible; in The Grapes of Wrath the Joads may have had to escape to California during the Depression, but they were able to do so in a car.
There may have been times along the way to Mexico that we looked like a bunch of Okies, too, with eight of us jammed into that wagon and with most of our earthly possessions roped to the roof.
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It was in 1956 that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Federal Aid Highway Act, which was the plan to change the highway system from one of semi-anarchic toll road state construction to a federally controlled Interstate Highway system. It was essentially from that point forward that the family car trip became the vacation idiom of the average family; the creation of the Interstate corresponded with increased postwar economic power (more families could afford cars), increased industry advances (cars could go faster and were safer), and increased amenities along the way (more motels, gas stations, and restaurants, not to mention better tourism facilities to handle the travellers). In short, Ike built the highways when people were willing and able to travel on them in great numbers (although the Interstate was, as many a book has noted, hardly an unqualified success: maintenance and repair was radically underfunded; critics felt freeways leading into cities cut off and therefore quarantined low-income areas from upscale neighbourhoods; there was widespread corruption in the highway construction industry). In 1955, Los Angelenos protesting against Eisenhower’s plan labelled the increased auto pollution smog, which was the first time the word had been applied to carbon emissions in America (the word was first recorded in 1905 in London, England, to describe a mixture of smoke and fog).
The massive upgrade in the highway system brought change everywhere. The motel industry developed in lockstep with the travelling population, becoming more convenient and consumer-friendly, attracting families with children-stay-free offers, swimming pools, free breakfasts for children under certain ages, playgrounds. Fast-food outlets changed to accommodate family car travel, as well, perhaps the most iconic example being the A&W drive-in, a car-friendly approach that was rapidly adopted by numerous chains and independents.
Of course, the car and its corollary industries were everywhere. During this period, one-sixth of all Americans produced, sold, serviced, or drove motorized vehicles for their livelihood, and certainly this was the case in Canada, as well, which has always featured the auto industry as a huge component of its economy. In fact, it was even the basis of our household economy. My father ran his own business, Calgary Glass and Trim, and although he repaired and recovered furniture now and then, his biggest customers, by a wide margin, were the car dealerships in town. Most of his business revolved around car-windshield repair, seat-cover repair, and (here’s a nostalgia item) vinyl-roof repair—the canopy, the halo, and, my favourite, the glorious landau, which was a covering of the rear third or so of the roof, designed to make it appear as though it were a convertible. He regularly removed and applied these vinyl roofs, and I can so easily winch up from my memory the smell of the glue he used, a smell that delivers me whole to my youth and my father’s workshop.
My siblings and I often spent time in his workshop helping him—or so we thought—although I wish now I’d gone more often. In retrospect, it feels as though in pulling off those vinyl roofs we were also peeling away some of the symbols of the auto industry’s excesses, even that my father was, in fact, part of an industry soon to have the lid yanked off its trash can full of problems. Car travel might well have reached its peak in the sixties and seventies, which meant that just before the oil embargo of 1973 the family vacation was the epicentre of the North American family’s love affair with the car, that moment when romance, cost, and efficiency met and group-hugged, an embrace that lasted until mass air travel, OPEC, and the environment broke up the party. Susan Sessions Rugh, in her book Are We There Yet?, termed this period—roughly from the end of the Second World War to the mid-seventies—the “golden age” of the American vacation.
