Editor’s note: This column won first place (Division C) and Best of Show overall in the Online Blog Commentary category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2023 Contest. Read our other award-winning pieces here.
A cross-country drive is a form of escapism. It is also a form of comparison.
Even as you seek out the unexpected, at every stop you evaluate – consciously or not — how another place stacks up against your own.
Karen and I traveled 6,978 miles across the country this fall, driving to the Pacific Ocean and back. We traversed 16 states and spent time in dozens of cities and towns. We aspired to learn what was distinctive about every place. Through it all, I was comparing each place to Baltimore.
This was our third major driving journey of several thousand miles. The first came more than 30 years ago. We were unmarried, and set out in a hatchback packed with a never-used tent, stiff hiking boots, and a copy of “Roadfood” by Jane and Michael Stern, an eater’s guide to local dives and hotspots. (The book is now in its 10th edition; I’m guessing we carried the first.) We were young reporters taking a break before graduate school. We put nearly 10,000 miles on Karen’s Acura Integra, and AM radio was our guide to what people were talking about in 1992.
Our second major journey came in 2007, in an RV borrowed from a friend in Los Angeles. There were four of us then – two parents and two kids, ages 10 and 7. We looped counterclockwise for 4,200 miles and visited must-see national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite, but also cities like Boise, Idaho.
This year’s trip was different. For the first time, we had the internet and smartphones and apps that made it easy to find a scenic camping spot or the best local beer. We never turned on AM radio. We didn’t play Jenga.
In the past 30 years, our nation has – at least superficially – become more homogenized. The same style of development abounds in every exurb, with the same nets of fancy golf driving ranges, the same billboards for lawyers, and the same big box stores lining every highway.
Our western destination was Los Angeles, where we picked up a little lightweight fiberglass travel trailer that was to become our transportable home and remote office for the next month, and for hopefully many months in the years ahead.
On this journey, we sought to explore every place on foot – often by running, which is what we do.
Running around a new city has so many benefits. You savor the flavor of neighborhoods and development patterns. You absorb architecture and find pocket parks and tucked-away blocks. You can follow a main boulevard from the oldest buildings to the newest. You see art in public places, and learn about the philanthropists who funded it.
And in every city, you encounter the unhoused and neglected buildings; you reach the end of one thriving block and cross onto another that is struggling. The ravages of addiction, of an uneven economy, and of systemic racism and redlining are everywhere.
Spend time in any city – any place that grew organically over the last century or two with thousands of people living together near each other – and you observe that Baltimore is not unique.
The very real problems that consume us here are felt everywhere.
This sense of commonality hit me for the first time in St. Louis, after we left the soaring Gateway Arch and tried to find a Riverfront Trail that a map showed us stretched north along the Mississippi River. We never got there, thwarted by detours and roadblocks around decrepit warehouses and homeless encampments. The whole stretch of industrial waterfront north of a downtown casino is tremendously blighted.
At one point, I saw a few cars parked around a building and thought that the signs of life indicated the point where we could get on the trail. Instead, I watched people shooting needles in their arms.
Within an hour, we saw the best of what St. Louis has to offer a visitor, and the tremendous challenges facing any American city grappling with economic woes, racism and social ills. It was a scene repeated in Los Angeles, and Oklahoma City, and Lexington, Kentucky.
I found myself imagining about a doppelganger from any of these places who lands in Baltimore and heads out on foot. They would explore the Inner Harbor and Harbor East, and travel up Charles Street. Maybe they would explore the Howard Street corridor to experience an arts district, and quickly find abandoned buildings and pan-handlers.
They would see the beauty of Baltimore, the good bones. They would feel the challenges.
We often focus on the worst in Baltimore, the violent crime, car thefts, underperforming schools, stagnant jobs. We obsess over numbers and rankings, and shake our heads when Baltimore tops the nation in some depressing statistic.
Those figures represent real lives and real futures built or squandered. We shouldn’t ignore them.
But everything we lament here is lamentable somewhere else, whether it’s the third worst city on some list or the third best. We saw this ourselves in Columbus, Ohio; and Kansas City, Missouri; and Salina, Kansas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Boulder, Colorado; and Los Angeles.
And in every place, we saw the grandeur of both the natural environment and the built one, and the spirit of the people. Just like in Baltimore.
Every year, a group of Baltimore leaders under the auspices of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council travel to a different city to get an inside perspective on the strengths and struggles of a peer metropolitan area. They’ve visited Cleveland; New Orleans; Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia; Detroit; and the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Each of those places has, at one time or another, been the butt of national jokes or source negative headlines. They have also been a source of innovation, and our leaders are learning from them.
The policy and political solutions that evade us in Baltimore are elusive everywhere. The benefits of clean water, good transportation, thriving arts and social connections are also everywhere – and they are here.
We are all dealing with the same stuff. If you look to escape it with a long drive, you probably won’t. And it’s OK to compare. You’ll see that we are all closer than we might imagine.
