The long stretches in between

The highway ahead had turned to gold, reflecting the sunset. Time to find a place to pull off and camp for the night.

U.S. Highway 6 in Nevada, running between Ely and Tonopah, may be even lonelier than its two-lane twin to the north, Highway 50, the self-proclaimed “Loneliest Road in America.” Both are soul-stretching, beautiful drives: All day on ribbons of naked geology, up and over 7,000-foot passes then down the centrifugal parabolas of the intervening basins -- a Brobdingnagian roller-coaster ride across the Great Basin from Colorado to California.

Back in the ‘80s, when our children were little, we made this two-day drive a lot. We could have stayed in motels, but we rarely did. It was much more fun to escape from television and high-season motel rates. We’d somehow missed out on the Reagan-era call to get rich, and we knew that once out in the open, out of the car, bigger, slower, more elemental forces would take over.

One particular night, on the edge of White Pine Range east of Currant, Nev., we spotted a barely marked Bureau of Land Management campsite beneath a clutch of cottonwood trees. We stretched out, horizontal at last, under that impossibly huge sky. Ellen and I listened to the girls giggling inside their nylon cocoons, while the wild night sounds, the frogs and crickets, and later the owls, rose with the fading light.

The West is so big, it offers anyone crossing it -- or anyone venturing out with less sweeping goals -- the chance to add a personal chapter to what is arguably the great American experience: the coming together of our automobiles, our highways and our national itch to roam. Car camping is just about as democratic as voting. With minimal equipment (a cooler and a tarp; perhaps a tent and a camp stove) and maximum opportunity for spontaneity, it defines a middle path between the hobo with a bedroll on his back and the RV with a satellite dish on the roof. It is most importantly, as Huckleberry Finn put it, a way to “light out for the territory ahead of the rest.”

The need to get out of town is timeless. My dad tells this story about growing up in La Jolla. As teenagers in the 1930s, he and his best friend went in together on a 1921 Model T Ford, sale price $14. They fixed it up, repainted it black (of course) and took off up the coast. They made it as far north as Yreka and returned by way of the inland valleys. The Model T cruised at a stately 35 mph, 40 down hills. Dad, who is 81 now, remembers parts of that trip as if it were yesterday -- throwing out sleeping bags in a farmer’s field near Healdsburg, the taste of the fresh milk the farmer brought them. Gasoline was 13 cents a gallon, and a highway patrolman, who thought they might be runaways, reminded them on the Golden Gate Bridge: “Retard the spark, and listen to her purr.”

Dad seems to have passed this particular joy on to me. I have wonderful, if hazy, memories of driving back and forth to school in the ‘60s, Berkeley to Southern California. I’d stop for the night off Highway 1 somewhere between San Simeon and Point Sur. Some mornings I woke up in the fog with rough sand scooped out at my hips and shoulders and the sound of waves sucking gently on kelp-strewn rocks. Other times I turned uphill into the Santa Lucia Range to wake in meadows above the fog, surrounded at hubcap level by dewdrop prisms.

Serendipity is often at the heart of such experiences. Sometimes en route to California, we’d play: Let’s see how long into the night Dad wants to drive. I remember one time. I’d been battling deadlines and editors up until the day we left, and the white line acted as a soothing balm. I followed a fingernail moon over the horizon, past Currant, past Tonopah, all the way to the sage plateau country surrounding Mono Lake.

At last I grew weary and turned up a red dirt double track across the sage. The terrain beyond and to either side of my high beams was a complete mystery. The moon was down, and the night had gone very dark.

The headlights found a cluster of Sierra junipers with a soft carpet of needles underneath. Ellen and I dragged the kids out of the back seat and helped them into their bags on the ground. It was late, but now nobody was particularly sleepy under a brilliant blanket of stars.

Cloe was the first to spot a shooting star. Then Cecily claimed one. You couldn’t call it a wilderness experience exactly; the car performed its clicking cool-down song just a few feet away. But there we lay in a row, four small heads (as tight together as a family can be) watching our planet traverse the heavens.

We may think we are a long ways from my Dad’s world and my youth, but are we? What worked in the ‘30s still works for us today, albeit with a little more competition for campsites. Even in a state as populous as California, wilderness (or a reasonable facsimile) is rarely more than a couple of hours drive from the here and now. It may take a little more planning, but it can be done. And the effect is as restorative as ever.

On one of our Great Basin crossings, we decided in advance to spend the night on Wheeler Peak, just over the Utah-Nevada border at what would become Great Basin National Park. Wheeler Peak is home to a colony of bristlecone pines, one of which, after it had been cut down in 1964 and its rings counted, was declared the oldest “living” thing on Earth. Its name was Prometheus, and it had been alive on that mountain for more than 4,900 years.

“No way!” The girls were shocked by its fate. I had hoped for such an epiphany: How can we expect our children to do a better job with the Earth than we have if they are not introduced to wild places and sad irony?

That night we gathered wood from the forest floor, freshly aware of the inchoate beings around us and watched that fire for hours. It gave us permission to stare, permission to eat roasted sugar on a stick, permission to stay up late and feel comfortable inside long, long silences.

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Peter Shelton is a former columnist for Ski magazine and the author of “Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops.”