Surfing the Interstates: A Review of the First Book of The Spaces Between Trilogy
When the American Road Becomes a Vision Quest
André J de Saint Phalle’s Surfing the Interstates opens his memoir trilogy The Spaces Between with a masterwork of American road literature—but this isn’t Kerouac’s romantic wandering. This is 1973, and the dream has teeth.
Twenty-one years old, $80 “borrowed” from his divorcing mother’s closet, a pre-war guitar, and a thumb stuck out on Route 684. What follows is nine weeks and 4,000 miles of hitchhiking from New York to California and beyond—a journey that becomes equal parts escape, education, and exorcism.
The Architecture of Awakening
Saint Phalle structures his sixteen chapters like stations of the cross for the counterculture. Each encounter—each ride, each temporary family, each mystical experience—builds toward a reckoning in the Texas desert where everything falls away except what’s essential.
The writing shifts registers with startling fluidity: crystalline and immediate in the road sequences, psychedelic and expansive during the Grateful Dead concert flashback, clinical and devastating during his friend Steve’s descent into paranoia. This isn’t a writer showing off—it’s a consciousness learning to see in different frequencies.
Three Sacred Encounters
Jerry Garcia at the Dead’s San Rafael headquarters, blessing Andre’s 1935 Harmony Cremona: “The wood remembers everything. Let the guitar decide.” This moment transforms the instrument from possession to guide, and establishes the book’s central theme—we are all vessels carrying memories we don’t yet understand.
Lucy and the Glen Haven commune, where Andre discovers that love can operate by different physics. The week in the Colorado mountains becomes a masterclass in connection without possession, in belonging without claiming. Lucy’s parting wisdom—”the cracks are where the light gets in”—echoes through everything that follows.
The UFOs at Bixby Bridge, where a dozen witnesses watch two objects read the Pacific Ocean like scripture, making water transparent, moving outside known physics. It’s the book’s most audacious sequence—either collective vision or proof that reality has doors we rarely see. Saint Phalle never explains, never apologizes. The mystery stands as witnessed.
The Shadow Journey
But the book’s emotional center is Steve Ferry—brilliant Penn dropout, draft resister, friend spiraling into paranoia in a California chicken coop. Saint Phalle shows us a young man who convinced a psychiatrist he’d crack under pressure to avoid Vietnam, then spent years making that performance real. The film canisters labeled “Murder, Insanity, Death”—initially ironic commentary on reefer madness propaganda—become prophecy.
Steve’s death in a police shootout, detailed through a TV screen in an El Paso truck stop, provides the gravitational force that pulls Andre into the Texas canyons for his final reckoning. This isn’t gratuitous—it’s necessary. The road gives, but it also takes. Not everyone survives the seeking.
The Mystic Thread
What elevates Surfing the Interstates beyond standard memoir is its commitment to mystery. The psychedelic experiences aren’t explained away or apologized for—they’re rendered with the same precision as the highway encounters. The Grateful Dead concert at Penn becomes a cathedral moment. The peyote ceremony in the redwoods with Sasha opens doors to plant consciousness and geological time. The final vision in Santa Elena Canyon, as an F-4 Phantom violates sacred space and stones become doves become prayers become nothing, completes a transformation begun 4,000 miles earlier.
Saint Phalle understands that the spiritual journey and the physical journey aren’t separate. Every mile marker is also a meditation. Every ride a koan. The road itself becomes guru—patient, demanding, occasionally merciful.
The Stolen Guitar
The book’s masterstroke is the theft. After carrying his guitar through every trial, after Jerry’s blessing, after it becomes witness and companion and proof—it’s stolen while Andre sleeps in the canyon. The loss is almost unbearable to read. But it’s also perfect. Sometimes you have to lose everything to discover what can’t be lost.
The Writing Itself
Saint Phalle’s prose is deceptively simple—clear sentences, vivid details, dialogue that breathes. But beneath that clarity runs a current of poetry. His descriptions of landscape carry emotional weight without becoming precious. His portraits of fellow travelers—River the flute player who steers with his knees, Wade the veteran sailor with brutal wisdom, the Louisiana oil workers heading home—are rendered with respect and precision.
The book never condescends to its characters or its era. The hippies aren’t saints or fools—they’re humans trying to build something different, sometimes succeeding, often failing, always fascinating.
Who This Book Is For
Surfing the Interstates will resonate with anyone who:
Survived the seventies and wants to remember what seeking felt like
Loves road literature but craves something deeper than romantic wandering
Understands that spiritual transformation often looks like chaos from the outside
Knows that some friendships end in tragedy but still matter absolutely
Believes that music, landscape, and human connection can teach what books cannot
The Promise of More
As the first volume of The Spaces Between trilogy, this book establishes themes that clearly echo forward: the search for belonging, the cost of motion, the difference between running from and running toward. The final vision points toward water—toward boats and oceans and a different kind of freedom. Toward love that doesn’t require walls.
We leave Andre emerging from the canyon, transformed by fasting and loss and grace. His guitar stolen but his vision clarified. The road behind him, the water ahead. And somewhere in that future, the belonging he’s been seeking without knowing how to name it.
The Verdict
Surfing the Interstates is essential American literature—a book that captures a specific moment (summer 1973) and makes it eternal. It’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance meets The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but more honest than either. Saint Phalle doesn’t romanticize the counterculture or dismiss it. He shows us what it cost to seek, what it meant to drop out, and why some of us never found our way back in.
This is a book that earns its mysticism through specificity. That earns its poetry through precision. That earns its wisdom through unflinching witness to both beauty and catastrophe.
Read it for the road adventures. Stay for the reckoning. Return to it when you need to remember that transformation isn’t comfortable, grace isn’t gentle, and sometimes you have to lose everything to find what matters.
The spaces between—between leaving and arriving, between fear and freedom, between who we were and who we’re becoming—that’s where the real journey happens.
André J de Saint Phalle has mapped that territory with rare courage and rarer grace.
Surfing the Interstates is available now. Books two and three of the The Spaces Between trilogy are forthcoming.