- August 25, 2010 • 5:00 am PDT
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My family loves traveling. Not vacationing, but traveling: trying to cover as much distance and see as many things as possible before exhaustion and darkness force us to stop and rest. When my sister and I reached an age of suitable patience for long car rides, every summer became focused around "The Trip": My parents would pack our brown 1983 Volvo 240 DL and we would set off across California and beyond. We had no iPods, no Gameboys: just thousands of miles of interstate and state highway; deserts, beaches, and forests.
After a thousand miles spent gazing out the window, a brain becomes a sponge for visual landmarks. On trips to Los Angeles, I'd recognize our imminent arrival by the giant Western Exterminator billboard in Silver Lake; if we were headed to LAX, I'd start gathering my things and putting my sneakers on as soon as Randy's Donuts was in sight.
In 1986 we went to Wisconsin, staying at my great-grandmother's tiny cabin by a lake. I remember the general mood of the place—birch trees and loons crying at sunset, the cedar scented knickknacks at the local souvenir shop. My most specific memory, however, is of a 50 foot tall Paul Bunyan (accompanied by an equally large Babe the Blue Ox) outside Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty in Minocqua. The statue (it might have been just a flat billboard) was nowhere near 50 feet tall, maybe 15 feet at most. But my memory is of finishing my pancakes and walking into the parking lot to behold Paul and Babe, lit from below with spotlights, stretching infinitely skywards into the Midwestern summer night. Being five years old, I doubt the Taj Mahal could have impressed me more.
Today, I cannot pass a Muffler Man, Sinclair dinosaur, or giant doughnut without the urge to stop and take a picture. They seem lonely out there, fiberglass antiques ignored by a generation of kids with headrest DVD players and iPod Touches. Maybe the decline and disappearance of roadside kitsch is for the best—after all, the sculptures are a goofy reminder of America's painful reliance on fossil fuels to move us from place to place.
Despite all that, some of the landmarks live on. Even today, somewhere on the 405 Freeway, there is probably a kid in a backseat with his face against the window. Who—upon spotting the giant golf-club-clutching Muffler Man at the Dominguez Hills Golf Course—begins putting on his shoes and posing a question to which he already knows the answer: "Are we there yet?"
A selection of photographs from Will Etling's "Roadside Giants."
