As I neared the end of my freshman year of college, my sister and I started laying out plans for a weeks-long cross-country road trip. We were going to start south down the coast from Massachusetts, turn west to catch some sights in Texas, then pivot north until we reached Yellowstone. That was really the purpose of the trip: to see firsthand the beauty of our country’s less tame Western reaches. I had never been past Ohio, and haven’t to this day; I don’t think she’s made it any farther.
It’s probably good that we never went; we would have killed each other. That wasn’t our reason for bailing, though. We didn’t have a car. Well, we did have a car: a beat-up Ford our grandfather had passed down when my sister and our brother turned 16. But if it had...