And, of course, it's these security issues -- the ones travelers need to be aware of before heading abroad -- that are helping fuel the heightened interest in domestic travel since September 11 (although gas prices will no doubt take a toll on the number and length of our road trips). But more of us are indeed looking for great travel experiences within the U.S. and Canada. Terrorism has increased our desire to find beauty and wonder right here at home.

Here is another excerpt from "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," an excerpt that I read aloud at an interfaith observance marking the third anniversary of September 11:


There are moments, so many of them as you travel America, when something about this land takes your breath away. Its diversity and beauty enrich and amaze. A gorgeous land, one tableau melting into another. You need only crest the next summit or round the next lake or cross the next valley to come to someplace breathtaking, alive, proud, or peaceful. Someplace vast, productive, interesting, or important.

Often on this journey, when we came to a place that was exquisite in its way, I thought about September 11. On many a 300-mile day, which might have seen us rise in one time zone and retire in another, I thought about terrorism, still jarringly fresh and disturbingly fearsome.

But the magnificence and seeming infiniteness of the land put terrorism into perspective, and I was quieted. I shared my thoughts with Adam and Dana. They would inherit the world we lived in and helped create, and it was important to talk about America not just as a landscape or road trip or series of historic, cultural or scenic stops, but as a living, organic nation of people trying to find its best fit in the puzzle of the world. In trying, we’ve made and will make mistakes, and, more now than in the past, the world will ask us to pay for them. Sometimes, payment exacted will be fair and just. Sometimes, as on September 11, it will be insane, brutal, and murderous.

But, being out in America, getting up every day with the sun to follow new roads, I fell in love with the country I’d lived in and taken for granted for 44 years. I saw her strength and her strengths. Terrorism would be a fact of life, perhaps for generations, but the country we were traveling through told us not to fear. On the whole, we’ll be okay, it said.

America in its soul is a good, honest place. I found myself thinking that terrorists could pick away at small bits of us, like they did in Manhattan, killing people and creating hell on earth in some targeted corner of our world. But they could never take it all down. They could obliterate small pieces and make despair and chaos rain down on some chosen area. But the whole is just too big to bring down, and the people too resolved and resilient. They can’t really get us, I’d think, as we drove through endless landscape that changed and changed and brought more wonder the longer you spent in it. They could jab, but the nation’s sheer size would keep it standing, with tough pockets and corners stepping in to help tend wounds and fill gaps.

The quiet places intrigued me most. America is not just New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Miami. It’s a powerful chain of strong, silent, little known places that relish their freedom and react when it’s challenged, whether by bureaucrats, developers, punks, or terrorists. People and places that step in and act when something they love is messed with. I thought and felt this as we moved through the land.
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