Several of my friends and I had dinner the other night on the outdoor deck of a popular restaurant by the railroad tracks. We chose to sit outside not because it was warm, but because it was possible. We knew from the start that we were going to freeze - and we did. We opted for outdoor seating as a vote of no confidence in the winter that now seems finally over.

Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, and all I can think about is gettin' out on the blacktop roads of America. I want to grab someone with a sense of spontaneity and a flexible work schedule, throw some clothes and a toothbrush into a duffel, jump in the car and drive off at random into the American West. With no destination in mind except the freedom of the open road. No hotel reservations, no mission statement except adventure and endless conversation, with nothing but a sad little return date tucked as far back as possible into our pockets. We wouldn't even gas up before leaving the city limits because any gesture of good sense might break the spell and scold us back to our desks. Gas and red licorice and sodas in … Beach or Sidney or Miles City. Thereafter? Let the road write the narrative.

We'll just drive all day, windows open if possible, eating up the miles at an unhurried pace, stopping for cheeseburgers at a home-owned roadside cafe, getting out to stretch or hike or change drivers. Gab endlessly about everything that comes to mind, laughing for the sheer joy of rekindled animal life, talking the issues, gazing silently for long periods at the endless western Badlands, buttes, pine ridges, clouds and sky, river valleys, rolling and sand hills and just plain open flowing plains in every direction until you shudder at the sheer size of America and the audacity of torpedoing into the heart of it in a contraption you couldn't really fix if it broke down in the middle of all that nowhere.

Paradise.

And sometime around dusk, a shag carpet motel in a faraway marginal plains town, the local "nightclub" out on the curve at the city limits, a perfect ribeye medium rare and a slightly wilted house salad with French dressing. And the coldest beer you ever drank.

After decades of loopy pointless auto trips through the American West, I know that thus far I have seen only a tiny, even pitiful, fraction of what is there to see. I've wandered along fragile filaments of roads on the back of the infinity of the continent and a handful of historic sites, parks and monuments scattered across a vast and largely empty landscape. In a place as obscure as the hills of Ekalaka, Mont., at the heart of Marlboro Man's America, there is more scenic beauty and romance than in most of Europe, and yet if you made a list of the 100 best places in the American West, it wouldn't even register - except perhaps among Ekalakans. If you could put the land around Ekalaka on a flatbed and truck it to Germany, they'd instantly make it a national park, possibly their premiere national park.

In Oregon last week, out by McMinville, in a rental car, I passed a man on the side of the road with a foot-long black beard shouldering a 20-foot wooden cross toward the Pacific Ocean. Traffic whizzing by, people shaking their heads in derision and disgust, turning to their road companion and saying, "Did you just see that?"

It's not clear what the proper thing to do is when you see someone carrying a large cross across the outback of America. Do you give him licorice or a crown of thorns?

I'm not sure what kind of crazy or divine (or crazy and divine) motivation put that long-haired beatific man under that cross on a Friday afternoon in the heart of Oregon, but in a country where 50 million people watch "American Idol" at the same time, I felt nothing but admiration for the blue highways pilgrim and his grail quest.

The other day I had the impulse to buy a big touring motorcycle. Does Bobcat Co. make a road bike?

You can hear the sense of joy and expectation in the journal entry of Meriwether Lewis on the day when the Corps of Northwestern Discovery finally threw off its winter sedentariness and got back on the road, April 7, 1805.

"We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width," Lewis wrote, "on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden … entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of our departure as among the most happy of my life."

I know that feeling - toward the end of the first day of driving, when you've gotten into a smooth road rhythm and the car is running perfectly, and you are awake in a way you haven't been awake in a long time, drinking in the majesty of America, not quite sure just where, and you realize that you could drive evermore in that perfect zone.

Out in the Thunder Basin of Wyoming, between Gillette and Casper, the tribal homeland of the pronghorn antelope, it is still possible to wonder just how much the "foot of civilized man" has trodden the grass and sage. Which is why we go there. Somewhere between Havre and Browning the West will swallow up all your cares and give you a momentary sense that anything is still possible.

Unfortunately for my sense of contentment, just at this time, for accidental (?) reasons, I'm reading the greatest of all American road novels, Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957). If you haven't read it, give yourself that pleasure. It's one of the foundation texts of the Beat Generation and there is no other book that gets so close to the heart of the American trinity of car, freedom and the open road.

"On The Road" contains possibly the single best road sentence ever, a sad Tocquevillian utterance that gets to the heart of the essential restlessness of the American spirit.

"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage.)@aol.com