To think about America is to think about its vastness. Anyone who has never ventured outside the realm of cities cannot understand it. To understand it is to cross it. To understand it is to let yourself be drawn away from a haphazard metropolis and through the intricate web of highways whose miles stretch on mercilessly across the continent.

When I left my home it was spring. I can’t explain it, but when driving away from St. Louis?I broke into big, magnificent sobs. They were delirious, absurdly happy sobs, through which I tasted the canyons and oceans and deserts, and America, her rivers and mountains, her roads, her people, her borders, her ineffable expanse. I tasted the tears collecting in salty deposits at the sides of my mouth. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever felt in my life.

I will try and paint a picture.

I took Interstate 44 down to Pryor, OK. The snow-drenched bluffs of St. Louis county faded slowly away into sloping grassland Missouri, parched hungry wilderness. The land rolled until I hit the Oklahoma border-then it was flat, and the wind grew angry. The sun fought back the clouds so that all I could see for miles and miles was the road and the gold blue sky.

Driving through the rest of Oklahoma, on the second day: I watched the land morph from bright plains to tumbling hills that bled red clay in skinned patches only to flatten out again after Oklahoma City, I watched the land grow more desolate as I traveled south. I watched the bison roaming the fields, and the cows too; the deeper I drove into the heart of the continent, the more rugged and untamed the earth became. It is a land of highways and dirt roads could never harness.

I stress the largeness of this country, because I believe it is integral to our national identity. I believe who we are is wrapped up in where we are; our geography has shaped us. No matter what seemingly small background we come from, we are all part of a large country that begs to be understood.

The American West was a different world, one that awed my Midwestern senses. There was such a merging of cultures: Spanish and American Indian ghosts flickered on dusty corners, pushed and prodded by the specters of highway USA, Route 66 gamblers who stamped out their cigarettes with metal-heeled cowboy boots; phantom cattle ranchers visiting from their homes of the plains; mountaineers appearing from the Sangre de Christo range. All these visions paraded around the same draw, planting their feet obstinately into the soil and watching all the new Americans before them.

Farther west, the mountains multiplied, squeezing the rolling earth; there were tough rocky ones in the distance whose ice-capped peaks punctured the perfect hue of the sky, and subtler hilly ones that rocked the road back and forth. There were forested mountains, their backs bristling with pines and cedars. The highways ran through them. I felt their curve under its gravel paws and wailed with stories of high-altitude inhabitants. I felt it more than ever: the highway, the mountains, the ranches and the straw plains of this New Mexico, America. We like to pretend that we’re all the same country, but the land knows its own mood and how it changes from state to state.

Then-much later-far over the Great Divide-I remember my fear of the ocean, how it crashed and howled at me in the wet March darkness. Like America and its vastness, the end of the road can be terrifying.

I was not the first. Consider the countless road-trippers heading off down Route 66, through St. Louis and all the way across to the Pacific. Somehow they knew this was a country to be driven across, that hopping from city to city with urban pretension and neglected highwayland and small-town USA was no way to arrive at the heart of the country. One should treat the road as they treat a lover: with respect and awe at its endless mysteries and wonder at where it will take you.

Roberta Singer is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.