Garrett Kennedy: Freedom and the open road

A jagged tear across country, burning a trail for 18 hours nonstop through the hauntingly repetitive landscape of America's Deep South, through the netherregions of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.

An 18-hour trek, solo, non-stop, across territory that 200 years ago probably was fully traveled by only a few people and definitely not in less than a day. Maybe in a year. Maybe a lifetime. Probably never.

Eighteen hours straight driving. Headlights streaming ahead in some awkward imitation of real sight, faintly lighting the indefinitely infinite stretch of pavement receding into the shadows, the rows of trees surrounding the road just impinging on the light. Faint awareness of the surrounding world; not so much that I get tired and doze, but just enough that I'm safe save if I start hurtling into another lane, although at this hour there are so few cars out I couldn't hurt anyone else if I wanted to.

The straight road ahead, limitless.

Sometime about the ninth or tenth hour, I start to question my own existence. An introspective hell of sorts. Eighteen hours straight without any contact with the outside world. A temporary freedom of sorts, no reminders of societal binds, no billboards in these here woods, only concrete, yellow line and tree.

Growing up in the heart of the American Dream -- King of Prussia, Pa., home to the gratuitous mall -- the possibility of any time free of marketing or advertising or merchants hocking wares is something foreign, much like a Burmese python.

Put this strange temporary relief at an average speed of 80 m.p.h. and something strange, dangerous and enlightening occurs. With pops and clicks and whirs and the sound of a tree falling alone in the woods. An activation of the mind, a minute step from the boundaries, or maybe through the boundaries, that are so readily apparent in everyday life.

A look at the world that I've known and then a look a bit deeper. The question of freedom. More important, what is freedom? Or maybe, are we free?

There is the Jeffersonian idea of freedom, the idea that every person is entitled to a bit of something, a little piece of life. The idea that we are each guaranteed a certain niche and that if the bounds of that niche are not overstepped then life shall proceed smoothly.

Freedom of speech, yet laws against libel. Freedom over one's own person, yet prohibition against drugs and, earlier, alcohol. Taxation. Laws that prohibit people dying from disease to taste experimental drugs.

The American Dream, the safely defined boundaries of freedom set by our forefathers.

The notion of freedom is a funny sort, a slippery bastard that is harder to grab hold of then a greased pig running full speed over a sheet of buttered wax paper. Freedom is a speed freak, lurching awkwardly and uttering schizophrenic babble, unpredictable and volatile.

And maybe that's the real root of the problem. Freedom isn't something that can be phrased neatly, that can be organized, designed, plotted or planned, but something that just is, and maybe can't be defined and can't really be known but in briefest of flashes.

So now I stumble onto the Neal Cassady/Easy Rider freedom. The freedom of thought, the freedom of movement. Moving across the world at 80 m.p.h. in a marathon trek from start to an indeterminable end.

Sometime around 10 hours in I heard something snap. Or maybe more felt it. It was like a quick jolt of understanding. Kerouac's description of himself and Dean Moriarty (Cassady) whipping across the U.S. brought to life in my own mind. It was a feeling of removal, the feeling that my actions were not in any way dependent on nor reinforcing the actions of others. A removal from all of that -- the pure ability to move without the constraints of the world around, my life and my own thoughts flying by at as fast I could muster.

It was a freedom from responsibility. A marathon journey at high speed testing of personal will, body and mind.

Maybe saying that a trip as short as 18 hours is enough to give a taste of real freedom is a bit naive. True freedom may be something that is never attainable. Pure freedom may not be something that lies on the boundary of society and anarchy and exists in the twin breasts of inhibition and insanity.

I don't know if that six-hour feeling of momentary freedom, fleeting yet omnipresent the better part of year later, is even tangible enough to describe, purely too powerful for words. Yet, there is something to it.

Garret Kennedy is a senior Anthropology major from Wayne, Pa.

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