When I first got the job with New Hampshire Public Television, I lived in Hanover, an easy two hours from Durham, where the station is. Now I’m an hour farther west, so I’m much more conscious of driving in the early morning right into the rising sun and, often tired at the end of the day, several more hours toward the sunset. Nothing too serious, as long as everything goes right and I keep the inside of my windshield polished.

Last week, as the dark stars slipped into whatever they do, I was facing two widely separated days of filming in Maine and New Hampshire and two obligatory social events in Nahant, MA, one at each end of the week.

I laid out a big road map of the Northeast and could see that the locations of the venues formed a large, rough triangle. “Large” seemed the operative word. I added up the mileage; it came to about 1100. I could see I was going to have to dig into the vigorous days of my youth to get through it and get home at the end of the week with enough left in my tank to tackle the obligations neglected in my absence. In those earlier days I kept a copy of On the Road in a plastic bag under my seat to remind me how much fun I was having, and how much I was learning as I stared through the steering wheel at America unfolding, like a TripTik, before me.

The first leg, to Nahant and my sweetheart’s house, was a piece of cake; we’re wearing a groove in the route, the hybrid Eric the Red and I. But Bridget, the disembodied voice in the dashboard, has the nasty habit of switching suddenly from speaking firmly through my hearing aids to murmuring softly through the radio. So I missed my exit and wound up plodding at rush hour through a city whose name I still don’t know. In sheer desperation, as always when lost near the coast, I simply followed the digital compass east till I hit a road I knew, and thence north to Nahant.

A couple of days later, having relaxed while somebody else drove, I headed north to Concord for a night in an okay hotel with a grumpy, distracted desk clerk. Next morning to Canterbury for a shoot in the woods around the Shaker Village and some delightful inside stories about life in that strange, but creative community now almost entirely extinct.

A run home with Kiki for a night in a familiar bedroom, and then off for about five hours to Belfast, Maine. On the way, on excellent secondary roads newly paved, I had leisure to reflect in the changes since I flogged my 1946 Plymouth for hundreds of miles over similar roads on a weekend. The traffic flow is much faster now, and the cars much more competent and safer; but there are so many more of us on the road that it’s probably a wash. You have but to inch along (or stop completely) on a multi-lane highway to appreciate the pressure of so many in a finite amount of space.

Next, a pell-mell herd-of-elephants rush down I-95 to a quiet afternoon of apple-picking in Massachusetts. Someone else drove; I held Kiki and snoozed. Sunday, after a whole week of blue skies and cold, frosty nights, we returned home to a pile of newspapers and an empty refrigerator.