Truckin' on the Continent
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
Letter from Morruzze Truckin' on the Continent By Ruth Ellen Gruber Morruzze I've just returned from a threeweek car trip through the heart of Europe. My route took me in a loop from my...
...Keep on trucking—it's good...
...Ach, the yearning for the endless freeways and highways of the American West," wrote Geri Stocker, who produces a country music show on Swiss radio, in the program of the Interlaken festival...
...You'll know you are there when the mountains get higher and the white peak of the Jungfrau comes into view...
...You see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona...
...We do the same as the American truckers do, we listen to the same music, we dream the same dreams...
...Although the record high oil prices this summer have jacked up the price of gas everywhere, in Europe we still look at the U.S...
...We're on the road, away from our families...
...Gas costs slightly less in Italy and France than in Germany...
...Once, at a dank motel somewhere in Transylvania, I brought in some tapes from the car for the bartender to copy on his reel-to-reel recorder...
...Musicians and truckers share a lifestyle in a way," he said...
...But he immediately felt at home in the geography...
...Each is a mix of carnival, country music and shining chrome that to one degree or another appeals to deeply held dreams that identify the open road, and the trucks plying it, with the frontier mythology and symbolism of America...
...Langemann had never been to the United States until last year, when the group's record company sent them to Nashville to do the videos for two new singles...
...I installed a fabulous stereo system whose booming speakers set the pace during lengthy reporting trips through eastern Europe and the Balkans...
...That was long before the homogenizing global reach of MTV, satellite communications, iTunes, and the Internet...
...The highway tolls alone that day came to over $80...
...Anyone who travels long distances in Europe learns which countries have cheaper gas than others...
...In Europe, as in the U.S., the Route 66 motif turns up on T-shirts, jackets, bumper stickers, and tattoos...
...In those days I owned an 11-yearold VW Beetle I had bought from a friend for $750 even before obtaining my license...
...I find it almost a pleasure to buy gas when I'm back in the States...
...There are several such festivals around Europe every year...
...Embassy provided a translator who read the entire highway code to me so that I could take notes on the laws...
...They slapped me with an on-the-spot 128 euro [roughly $ 160] fine...
...Italy and France have by far the most expensive highways I know...
...But with musicians, the load we're hauling is ourselves...
...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...
...The only thing comparable may be the TransSiberian Railway...
...But the events also appeal to a broad spectrum of fans, loosely linked by both their love of country music and a rich compendium of romantic, pop culture fantasies...
...There's a 70 kilometer an hour speed limit in the tunnel," she told me, "and they told me I had been clocked at 72 kph" (a little over one mile an hour too fast...
...Agrève, in southern France, and I made it in one go...
...Not to mention the biker's dream of Easy Rider" Still, he added, "Let's have no illusions...
...I felt an almost subversive thrill in turning that dismal backwater of Ceausescu's Romania, at least for an evening, into a Solid Gold Weekend...
...Listening to the music, I recognized what I guess I have always been aware of subconsciously: the extraordinary role that traveling the wide open, borderless American spaces—the sheer size of the country and mobility of the people—plays in our songs and in the image of the U.S...
...Their lack of inhibition and their joy is so exciting...
...urged the organizers of the Interlaken Trucker and Country Festival in their welcoming remarks to visitors...
...In Austria, the price can be as much as 20 cents a liter less than in Italy—a bargain, so to speak, even at $4.50 or so a gallon...
...I also attended another one in Switzerland, on an unused airfield outside Interlaken...
...With gasoline at more than $5.50 a gallon in both countries, my fuel costs for the one day added up to at least another $80...
...One trucker I talked to told me his favorite artists were Johnny Cash and John Denver, whose song "Country Roads" is probably the single most popular country-style tune in Europe...
...It was a good try, but it was quite clear that neither they, nor anyone else, took the comparison seriously...
...At somepoint, everyone wants to drive Route 66," a heavy-set German truckdriver told me...
...They performed nighttime concerts in a 5,000-capacity tent arena, and daytime outdoor sets in a concessions area dubbed a "Western Village" that featured a saloon, a ferris wheel, food stalls, and vendors hawking CDs, Tshirts and a whole range of Wild West paraphernalia...
...He was a garrulous young guy named Gigi who had been plying me all evening with what he called "coffee"—tall, lukewarm glasses of instant coffee made with seltzer water and enhanced with a big shot of brandy...
...I have been to Wild West theme parks in three different nations, to bluegrass and country music festivals, to rodeos, and to Western-style saloons where folks eat barbecued ribs and dress up like cowboys...
...My route took me in a loop from my home base here in central Italy to southern Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, and France...
...The festivals are meeting places where truckdrivers who lead solitary lives behind the wheel, governed by strict regulations and often monitored by global positioning satellite systems, can party...
...An official translator then sat with me for the written part of the exam...
...The ideal of the open road, I found, is one of the most potent images and attractions defining the American mythos to outsiders...
...The Swiss, however, make you pay for a sticker that lasts a full year, even if you are just passing through...
...She didn't have the cash, and the police would not accept a credit card...
...They included tapes of an oldies radio show someone had brought me from New York, songs, DJ patter, commercials and all...
...Here in Europe, the European Union now makes it a lot easier, but we still have borders...
...It is sung in all languages and all forms—once I even heard a disco version...
...I found it noteworthy that number five on the list was a Czech page, in the Czech language, about the legendary highway...
...A friend in Geneva said she regarded the tolls as a sort of "ecology tax" that penalizes pollution...
...Actually, I like to drive, perhaps because I didn't get a license until I was 30 and experienced teenage auto enthusiasm only as an adult...
...Agrève, I was thrilled to find a discount gas pump that was about 12 cents a liter below the going rate at highway service stations...
...That's what matters for truckdrivers all over the world...
...More than 45,000 visitors attended over the event's three days, many of them dressed up in cowboy hats, boots or more elaborate costumes...
...The last leg was a 650mile drive home from the small town of St...
...A Google search for "Route 66" produced a whopping 1,430,000 web pages...
...Friends of mine who live in France told me they did not mind so much, because the high tolls keep the highways relatively empty—or so they believed...
...I also felt broke...
...Highway tolls also vary a lot...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...
...Don't forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino...
...This fascination for the 18-wheelers...
...All in all, it made for a four-hour delay," she said...
...Big wheels keep on turnin' as we do some "Hard Travelin'" or spend "Six Days on the Road...
...Like a number of country artists, Watson plays a lot of trucker songs dealing specifically with life on the road, away from home, dodging the cops and fighting boredom...
...He also, of course...
...The Interlaken festival drew more than 1,000 trucks and 5,500 motorcycles, all parked, one by one, in an impressive display of heavy metal...
...In a sense, I was exploring "America" as seen, presented and represented in European contexts...
...There is no toll (just as there is no speed limit) on Germany's network of autobahns, though no one knows how long that will last...
...People dress up like cowboys, rebel soldiers, Indians...
...After all these years, I can still remember the Serbo-Croatian words for esoteric things like the lights that mark the outlines of trucks...
...They're not afraid to really turn it on...
...We're always "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" or covering "Miles and Miles of Texas" or just "Movin' On," revisiting Highway 61...
...Soon after I graduated, I moved to Europe, where for years I did just fine using public transportation...
...The U.S...
...It was a beautiful day, most of the time I was on four-lane highways through gorgeous scenery, there was very little traffic, and my car has air conditioning and a good stereo...
...The music I played as I bowled along had a symbolic resonance that has faded with the post-Communist opening of borders...
...Germany is more expensive than its neighbors, for example, so I made sure to fill up in the Czech Republic before crossing the border...
...with envy...
...You can only drive parts of Route 66 these days," states one of the Web sites I checked out...
...Paying $2.25 or even $3 a gallon feels like a bargain...
...We love country music, we identify with it," the trucker told me...
...My recent trip was the latest of several long sweeps through more than half a dozen countries as I continue on-site research for a book on how, and why, contemporary Europeans imagine, adapt, appropriate, and reinvent the American West...
...I have done a lot of driving this summer...
...All told, they did not add up to much more than going coast to coast across the United States and back, but it is the most I have driven in a good number of years...
...Somehow I was never scheduled for drivers' ed in high school, and at Oberlin, where I went to college, students were not allowed to have cars...
...In far away, small, narrow, cozy Switzerland, we naturally can't manage all this...
...Gigi thirsted for any sort of contact with the West, and music was an almost mystic talisman...
...She drove into France through the Mont Blanc runnel—which, like the Fréjus tunnel costs roughly $35 one way— and when she exited into daylight she was immediately pulled over by police...
...For him, my cassettes were like abottle of fine, fizzy champagne ready to pop open and fill every glass in the room...
...This summer, each of my trips has averaged 2,000 to 2,500 miles...
...A growing number of countries whose highways were once free have instituted toll systems requiring you to purchase, and display on your windshield, a prepaid sticker that allows you unlimited highway access for a stipulated period of time...
...Live country music, played by artists from Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and the Czech Republic, as well as from the U.S., provided a constant soundtrack...
...it cost about $35 to go through the eight-mile Fréjus tunnel between France and Italy...
...Right...
...I finally got my license in Belgrade, in the late 1970s, when I was the correspondent there for UPI...
...Because of songs like Little Feat's 'Willin',' I knew where Tuscon and Tucumcari and Tehachapi and Tonopah were on the map," he explained, "and I felt very familiar...
...knew all about Route 66—"The Mother Road," "The Main Street of America"— which, thanks in great part to Bobby Troup's famous song, has achieved iconic status as a symbol of American mobility for foreigners and Americans alike...
...Both charge according to distance, and as I found on my latest travels, the kilometers mount up...
...there's so much passion for the music...
...There are lots of festivals in Europe with the same vibes," one of the performers, atattooed, Texas-based country singer named Dale Watson, said...
...That's the kinship...
...We're always on the run, "Like a Rolling Stone...
...Everyone feels comfortable with this mythology, regardless of whether or not they have been to America, and regardless of whether they are road warriors or armchair dreamers...
...And it doesn't matter whether we're "Truckin'," merely "Ramblin' Round" or gently ridin' "Old Paint...
...It has been replaced by the interstate highways 1-55,1-44,1-40,1-15 and I-10, but still a surprisingly high amount of old road is waiting to be found by the more adventurous traveler...
...In Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, you can purchase tourist stickers for periods ranging from a few days to a couple of weeks, enabling you to keep total tolls for a trip under $ 10...
...they project...
...I took the driving test in a Yugoslavmade Fiat 600, a tinny little vehicle that looks like a wind-up toy...
...Lutz Langemann, a musician in his late 40s who plays in a German country band called Slow Horses, says the sense of identification is a very strange phenomenon...
...No highway or byway in Europe has the same romantic resonance...
...Troup's song, recorded by everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Texas swing band Asleep at the Wheel, has entered into the international idiom and helped perpetuate the allure of a 2,448mile route, from Chicago to Santa Monica, that was officially decommissioned in 1985 and is not even included on current maps...
...Coming and going, the first service station in Austria gets a lot of my business...
...But on a recent trip to France she was penalized in a different way...
...It was nerve-wracking, but I managed to slowly navigate the grimy streets of downtown Belgrade and made the grade...
...Still, by the time I got back, after more than 11 hours of driving, I felt welded to the wheel and could only stagger from the car...
...America remains inevitably the backdrop for our longing...
...In popular music, particularly country and folk music, we simply never stay put...
...At a supermarket outside St...
...In France this trip, I photographed a motorcycle that had "Route 66" stamped on its pedal...
...Get your kicks on Route 66—or better yet, on the A8, direction Interlaken...
...They made her leave her passport (and, if I'm not mistaken, her children), drive miles to the next town with an ATM machine, secure the cash and come back to pay...
...Now you go through Saint Looey Joplin, Missouri, and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty...
...I spoke to this driver at a trucker and country music festival in Germany, held at what is reputed to be the biggest highway service station plaza in Europe...
...Two enormous, uniformed policemen squeezed into the back, and the driving instructor sat up front with me, doing his best to translate barked directions before we overshot the places where I was supposed to turn, park or perform other maneuvers...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
