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WASHINGTON, D.C. - I don't know what you did last week, but I drove 3,000 miles in a truck. I had some old furniture and books and stuff in a storage locker out west, so a buddy and I flew to Boise, Idaho and rented a six-wheeled 16-footer and booted it back here.

To be exact, it was 3,281 miles, and that's as far as Winnipeg to Ottawa and back again. Not bad for seven days, and we avoided the Interstates and took the back roads wherever we could. You can't see anything real from a freeway.

You learn a lot about a country when you roll through Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland in a week. You see the desert and the high peaks, cross the Continental Divide, bridge the Snake and the Rio Grande and the Mississippi and the Cumberland and the Kanawha, and watch the sun rise over the plains. You see the fall colours in the Appalachians and the sagebrush in the Great Basin and the bluegrass where the great thoroughbreds are born.

You shout and sing Amarillo by Morning and Livin' on Tulsa Time and Blue Moon of Kentucky over the roar of the engine, and you sleep in motels with identical beds and bathrooms and Bibles, and you fill up twice a day with gas at $70 a tank. You grab a snack at the Kum 'n Go or the Cash 'n Dash or the Git 'n Split and head back down the road.

You miss the New Mexico state fair by a day in Albuquerque, and the firehouse suppers and rodeos and bake sales always seem to be the night before or the morning after you pass through. You pass a diamond named for Preacher Roe in Viola, Arkansas, and a Hal Greer Boulevard in Huntington, W. Va., but you might not even know who those men were.

The corrugated folds of history that you travel are deep enough to swallow the truck: Civil War monuments and Lincoln's birthplace; Indian mounds in Missouri and wagon ruts on the Oregon Trail; standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona; the Woody Guthrie Memorial Highway. You find a great old roadhouse in Sikeston, Mo. where they toss hot rolls at you like snowballs, and you order a "vegetable soup" in Keyser, W. Va. that turns out to be a mush of pasta sauce with some canned green beans stirred in.

You see a couple of wild turkeys along the road in Kentucky, one deer in a patch of autumn woods, and not a single kid playing baseball on a field or catch with her Dad the entire way. You stop to pee at a picnic area in Texas and a scissor-tailed flycatcher lifts without a sound from the only tree.

If you talk to folks at all, it's at a gas station -- "Where ya headed? Geez, that's a long way" -- or you josh with the girl who slices the ribs at the Cattle Exchange BBQ in the little town of Canadian, Texas.

"Why's this place called Canadian?"

"Maybe for the Canadian River."

"Why's it called the Canadian River?"

"I have no idea."

We picked up the truck in Boise because that's where my ex-stepdaughter lives with her Dad, and because Budget was offering an unlimited-mileage sale. People in Washington, D.C. don't think about Idaho very much, except maybe when a Senator from out there gets arrested for allegedly propositioning sex in an airport washroom.

Then we went south through the magnificent desolation of Nevada -- no, we did NOT stop at any of the legal brothels -- and then to the Utah-Arizona line, where friends of mine teach at a school for the children of polygamists. I emptied my locker in the little town that I loved so much on the Colorado River, and we steered down through Navajoland and stayed the night in Flagstaff. When we started out at dawn the next morning, I could pretend to my buddy Don that it was just the rising sun that was making me cry.

Somewhere between Tucumcari and Amarillo, the piñon and juniper thinned out and we saw a couple of thousand beef cattle in a feed lot, fattening for the slaughter. I was driving, and I turned to my friend and asked him, "Do you think they know?"

"No," he replied. "They're just mute, dumb animals."

And 'way out there in Texas, I thought of Walt Whitman:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,

"I stand and look at them long and long. / They do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins . . ."

So that's what I did last week -- three thousand miles of morning mist, wheeling hawks and desert rainbows. I didn't really need the furniture.

If I had to drive it again tomorrow, would you come along with me?

Allen Abel is a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who after more than 25 years of journalism in Canada moved to Washington. His column appears here every Monday.