When I was seven, my Dad sat me at the kitchen table and showed me a map of Southern California. I was a dreamy kid - in a lot of ways, stereotypically dreamy in the style of the 1960s. I watched Bonanza on television, read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, played with trains, owned a white cowboy hat with a drawstring and wasn't embarrassed to wear it. I spent a lot of my time dreaming of the Old West and of Hannibal, Missouri, and being faintly restless with the actual world of Chevy Impalas and gas stations, schoolrooms, supermarkets and surfers on the beach. We would go after school and on Saturdays to the "ghost town" at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, a few miles from our apartment - my most beloved place, the capital of my imagination. It was home to the Calico Saloon with faux dancing girls, sarsaparilla and licorice ropes; the Ghost Town & Calico Railway, which steamed in a short loop from Calico Square to Calico Square; the Calico Mine Ride, which went through a stucco mountain past mannekins who wielded pick axes and set blasting caps in search of the next mother lode. (My mother learned to cringe at the sound of the word calico.) I didn't have a sure sense of how to separate the fact from the Hollywood, but I knew stucco, asphalt, flood lights and popcorn stands when I saw them, and that whatever may have been fact about this particular ghost town was long gone. I had to squint to see the place I was really looking for. My Dad was a quiet man, sympathetic, observant and a bit of a dreamer too. So he knew he didn't have to say a word to me on the morning when he spread out the map. He only pointed to the little name at the top of the loop road north of Barstow, and I sat there amazed. Calico wasn't Walter Knott's act of imagination after all. It was real. It was connected to my world and within reach of the car. We drove there the following Saturday.

I had only been on one read road trip before. My parents and I drove cross-country from Vermont to California in 1964 to start a new life near my mother's brother and sister. (I tried with marginal success to imagine it as a migration like the 49ers' in their covered wagons.) That was a trip with a purpose, and no room for a wandering eye; the trip to Calico was different. It was a drive to discover. We didn't know what we were going to do along the way or what we'd find when we got to the end. As it went, we stopped at the Roy Rogers Museum in Apple Valley; counted billboards making bold promises about Las Vegas casinos and the "best hamburgers in the upper desert"; won two glasses in a filling-station sweepstakes; and visited Calico itself, completely different than I had expected it to be, and the new capital of my imagination. I fell in love with the rushing car, the whoosh of air when I cracked the window, the auto-club maps that could lead like a divining rod in any direction, if you only let them. Most of all, being in the car - sealed, our own world, just the two of us - me and the man I most loved.

We started taking longer road trips after that on the flimsiest of excuses. A chocolate donut and a cup of coffee at Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, and then off. Three days to Las Vegas, Death Valley, Gold Rush Country and an all-night Clint Eastwood film festival in Monterey. Four days to the Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns and Tombstone. Plans changed like breezes, brochures collected on the car floor. Hours of radio stations and blue sky rolled past us. I still don't know if my Dad did any of it for himself or just to be with me. As soon as I was old enough, I started taking road trips with a friend or a girlfriend too - just the two of us, a few days in the desert or the mountains, and once, three weeks in Utah and the Northwest. My favorite sensation was having driven all night to put distance between us and the places we both knew, and then seeing the sky lighten in the distance, the neon switch off on the roadside motels and diners. We would sit down for a big breakfast with a full day ahead of us and no sure sense where we would go with it. The night seemed like something you could plunge into without ever coming up. The day, like a vast white canvas of possibility. You could throw yourself into the arms of the world and expect it to catch you in a completely unexpected way.