But. If you want one road that gives you the American West in all its beauty and mystery, this is it. Starting here at the border, U.S. 89 rolls nearly 1,400 miles south through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, through national parks, through Blackfeet and Navajo country, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, stunning and surprising at every turn.
And me? I will spend the next two weeks driving U.S. 89 because I need a road trip, and specifically this one. I grew up along this road. The highway is braided into my earliest memories, so entwined that I can’t imagine my childhood without it. I have spent many of the years since then traveling the West and writing about it, and though I have seen many remarkable places, Highway 89 remains my prime meridian. I’ve been away too long. I’ve needed a trip down a highway that is familiar but strange, because my life has grown familiar but strange. I want what only the best road trips give you: velocity and transcendence.
In 1847, the Springs General Store — a two-story Greek-revival farmhouse sitting near the East Hampton wetlands known as Pussy’s Pond — opened its doors. Just about 100 years later, Jackson Pollock moved into a barn down the road and began to trade paintings for his groceries. In 2003, Kristi Hood, a chef from California, moved into the apartment upstairs with her family and started to run the store downstairs. Under Hood’s stewardship, Springs General Store became the kind of place where real-estate brokers and carpenters rubbed elbows with summer visitors over breakfast sandwiches, and a launch point where residents could take kayaks out on a sliver of semi-public waterfront. “It was a part of everyone’s everyday life,” Hood says, “but it was not a moneymaker.” Hood managed for almost 17 years in a town where the cost of goods is inflated, year-round staff retention can be difficult, and would-be customers all but vanish in the winter months. In June 2019, the store was listed for sale, asking $2.9 million. In the fall of 2021, two brothers, Daniel and Evan Bennett, bought it. Now, nearly four years later, they’re still struggling to open its doors.
Throughout “American Mythology,” Cromley keeps readers reaching for answers alongside the motley expedition crew, anticipating a big reveal with Bigfoot in the woods (or an inevitable letdown). Without giving anything away, the ending is both magical and deeply meaningful for Jute and Vergil, reminding readers that their enduring friendship has been at the center of this tale all along.
If art imitates life, then My Clavicle does a good job, because it’s all over the place—but not all over the place in a way that feels disorienting. Although, if it is disorienting, it’s because, Sanz is saying life is disorienting, and fractured like the main character’s pain, in a way we don’t ask for.
“The Tilting House,” by Miami-based writer Ivonne Lamazares, is an affecting and sometimes amusing coming-of-age novel set in a country that few have had the opportunity to visit, despite its proximity to the U.S.
It’s a study of hidden family secrets, the unhealed wound of losing a mother and the quest for home.
In his new book, simply titled Shade, Bloch argues that the absence of shade from our lives is not an accident. “Shade has been deliberately designed out of our environments,” he tells me on a recent phone call. “Those decisions may have made sense in the past, but we are rapidly moving into a new world where sun protection is going to be as important as sun access.”