Under the antler arches, the American road trip perseveres

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

By Grace Hammond

Tourists. God bless ‘em.

I didn’t grow up here. Most of the people I know in Jackson Hole didn’t grow up here.  Nonetheless, people like me face a rite of passage when we hit our second summer: a sense of smug superiority over the tourists who, now that we have places to go and people to see, are simply in our way.

It feels good to relinquish the position of “new kid on the block,” to zoom past an RV lumbering slower than the bison grazing on the side of the road and roll our eyes at the sheer mass of camera equipment protruding from the window.

And what better way to feel like you belong somewhere than by belonging there more than someone else? Never mind that, to the old-timers, we ‘second-summer-ers’ are just tourists who took their vacations a little too seriously or maybe missed their return flights.

When I first came here, I thought the elk antler arches were magnificent and tacky, and for that reason, I liked them very much. They are kitsch personified; they are emblematic, strange, and somehow lovely. It is here that the “I’ve been here slightly longer than you” chip gets knocked off my shoulder. Here, people do what people on road trips do best: collect evidence that they went somewhere. They pose, often baffled by what they are standing under, and grin into the sun. They put their arms around each other and honor a dying legacy: the great American road trip.

The United States is one of the only industrialized countries without federally mandated vacation time. In Europe, average paid leave ranges from 22 to 50 days per year by law; in Australia, four weeks is the legal minimum; in Japan, three weeks; and in China, two. In America, one in four workers receives no paid vacation time; everyone else receives an average of 8.1 days off per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and more than one in three Americans uses only a portion of these days for fear of jeopardizing their jobs by taking vacation.

With only scraps of vacation time to work with, high gas prices and a weak dollar, now, more than ever, tourists deserve applause just for leaving the house.

Like many Americans, when I was a kid, my family didn’t go anywhere on vacation “just because.” We saw my aunt in New York City and my grandparents in Chicago. Otherwise, we went to Bible camp, and past that, the money was gone. The first time my parents took a trip together, “just because,” the kids were all grown up. Now they take trips to see us, their children living in three different states and in places like Jackson Hole.

When they come, I sit with them on the side of the road, and we take pictures of bison. We pause under the elk antlers and my mom gets weepy about the few days out of the year the family is together. There, I am reminded again that it is a privilege to be in Jackson Hole - one that should, above all, be shared.



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Under the antler arches, the American road trip perseveres | Planet JH News Article: General News

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