Every road trip is a narrative of sorts, or at least that's what we like to tell ourselves, in a Kerouac kind of way. But most trips are really nothing of the sort. The long-ago days when a cross-country driver could count on a flat tire to give him a close-up view of the countryside - when there were no freeways and the way West was along a two-lane highway - were, well, long ago. Now the narrative, such as it is, is the smooth hum of tires, refueling at automatic, credit-card-reading gas pumps, stopping for the night at motels that do their best to be unvarying coast to coast.

You have to drive quite a ways off the Interstate to get to a town that hasn't been distorted by the dark commercial gravity of so much traffic so near at hand. And even then it's hard to find a good place to eat.