There's something uniquely American about getting in your car and going on a long trip to some of the country's national parks. Comedy writer Blythe Roberson did just that. She quit her full-time job and hopped in a borrowed car in Wisconsin to start her journey alone.
Along her travels, she wondered if the trip would make her more enlightened or if it was just selfish escapism. Roberson wrote about the journey in her new comedy travel log, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled.
At first, she thought the book would revolve around road travel from a female perspective. Roberson says whenever she shared she was traveling alone, everyone worried she would get murdered.
"Everyone told me I was gonna get murdered, which I think had more to do with the role of fear of male violence and keeping women kind of controlled in our society than it did with, you know, my actual risk of being murdered," Roberson says.
But quickly, while visiting national parks and learning about each park's history while acquiring her Junior Ranger badges, Roberson realized the stories written about the parks only started when a white man saw the landscape.
Throughout her book, Roberson dives into the histories of the land that commonly gets left out. "To make all of these parks, they had to remove the Indigenous People who had lived there, and you know, stewarded that land for a long time," she says.
Roberson enjoyed her solo road trip but wished that she could have spent more intentional time in each place. However, she did leave appreciating the nature in her neck of the woods in New York City. "I am just surrounded by skyscrapers and rats in all directions," she jokes.
"Before I did this trip, I was just like, 'Oh, if I want to see nature, I have to get out of the city'... But during this trip, and wishing that I had stayed places longer made me think about OK, well, what is the nature that is near my home? I live a five to ten-minute walk from two parks, which are, you know, there's no mountains in these parks, but they're still nature."
Roberson will be at Boswell Books on April 25, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. to talk more about America the Beautiful?
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