Each fall for two decades, I drove 228 miles of U.S. Highway 395 in California – from the Mojave Desert town of Oak Hills to the eastern Sierras community of Bishop – to attend a wonderful three-day event called the Millpond Music Festival. Doing the math (opening the calculator on my iPhone), that’s 9,120 miles.
Over that many years and that many miles, one becomes intimately familiar with a road and, if one is open to the idea, how it informs one’s life.
For instance, in 1997, my favorite singer-songwriter, Tom Russell, released an album called The Long Way Around. On it was a song called “Manzanar,” which told the tale of a Japanese emigrant who was relocated to an internment camp after Pearl Harbor was bombed:…