familiar territory

September 15

Saturday brings room service: espresso and Eggs Benedict in bed (funny, how overpriced food and beverage, unlike fancy cabs and canvas campground tents, never seem too indulgent for us), and a gleaming dual-head shower. Then, bemused, I’m back on the road, and I miss the Chevy Venture, whose passenger seat foam had cast itself perfectly to my behind. I don’t care about the fine safe hotel once I’ve left it; I can now conjure the totally non-synthetic splendor of The Outer Banks and Savannah, the Southern places where I found the formula that was just right. I miss them. I miss the Atlantic spray, the weeping willows and Spanish moss, the hushpuppies and booze-walking, and I miss the Twin Towers, which is a weird sensation since all these things meant very little to me back in August.

            The edge of Kansas City, and of Missouri for that matter, is tenuous and confusing, as there are two cities next to each other with the same name. The one on the Kansas side of the Missouri River is a malformed twin neglected by its mother. After a tense figure eight of missed on-ramps, we are thankfully beyond it. The actual state of Kansas on the other hand, when it blooms into its own an hour west of the border, is beautiful. I’m surprised by how much I enjoy looking at it. Waves of Kelly green fields to the horizon, frothing with yellow flowers, charming me with unexpected radiance. I had presumed Kansas was black and white, but I’d believe it today if I saw the turrets of an Emerald City rise from the horizon, behind the layers of glossy rock walls and sunflowers by the meadow-full. I tilt my seat way back and rest my hand on Brian’s knee. I’ve forsaken the war-minded radio for some Reggae CDs. We marvel over a tollbooth at the Kansas City turnpike—there are currently no tollbooths that I know of on the West Coast. Topeka comes and goes without fanfare, just one more capital dome.

          The East Kansas colors run and flatten out on either side of the road forever. At mid-state the sky is changing, trying to pull together swirls of ominous gray threaded with pasty sun streaks. The wind picks up anything not heavy enough to hold itself down and swishes it along the shoulder; it shakes the stark trees clustered around the mile posts. The impending dark follows us to a rest stop where I don’t want to rest long. We’re in the middle of the whole map with no fortress in sight. It’s very difficult to light a cigarette, but quite easy to envision a tornado. 

            I can understand how the sky here wants to make them all the time, for some spirit, because there’s no other interruption in sight. This sky, with nothing to see except its own reflection in the grass, wants to make whatever it can. I’m certain that cows and tractors are flying nearby. If you think about it enough, the air around you becomes electric even if the storm is benign. The first notes of Wagner rip through the back of my mind. A tornado would certainly vie for the top of the list of stories to tell when we got home, but just like the hint of hurricane and sharks lurking off the Carolina Coast, I don’t think it’s worth waiting around for. I might be at capacity for the dramatic. So we drive. Abilene, Salina, Hays, Colby. We eat somewhere unmemorable except for the blackening clouds over the parking lot and the flag snapping angrily at half mast. I burn through the last few CDs we haven’t played yet, and that menacing sky creeps behind us, casting incorrect shadows.

          By late afternoon we’re in Colorado, where, as real life re-emerges at last, people are expecting us. A peculiar thing about this country is how it can have a state I never intended to see sitting right next to one I’ve been meaning to see for years. Kansas and Colorado are like smooth-sided toy blocks where the “mid” falls backwards off the edge of the “west”. If Colorado--the Centennial State--weren’t shoving its northeast corner into the bottom of Nebraska, the edge would be perfectly straight through the map, and that’s how sharply I invoke the regional shift as I roll across it. Everything in the 48 hours beyond this point belongs to the familiar. 

            Our college friend Steve has been stranded on vacation at his mom’s lake house in Loveland, 40 miles north of Denver. Suddenly that visit we’ve talked casually about for years is fortuitously practical; Brian made the plan in the Westin business office last night. He once spent a Fourth of July weekend at this house and fondly recalls the wide lawn rolling down to the lake, private dock with party boat, big hot tub to take in the view, fire pit at the water’s edge for afterwards. An all-American venue. It sounds so good that we rush through Denver and I have to turn around in my seat to really say I saw it: diminutive city among the mountains, all shades of brown, hardly any hints of blue. Okay. That postcard is tossed into the bottom of the trunk.

            We call ahead for street directions and Steve meets us at the curb. After hugs all around, we drop our bags at the top of stairs that lead down, and meet Steve’s small mom in her big messy kitchen. The sink is full of glasses, the dish rack full of cookie sheets. A short stack of pizza boxes sits on the floor next to the overflowing trash can. A variety of empty two-liters and wine bottles loiter next to the fridge. Towels are draped over the breakfast nook chairs and sneakers are scattered beneath the table; the golden retriever napping amidst them doesn’t mind. The room has been well lived in for the last few days, in the way only a family and its summer friends can accomplish, and I lean gratefully against the crumb-covered tiled counter. As soon as the boys have beers in hand, Steve brushes off Mom and leads us into the back yard. 

            “I’m pretty fucking glad to see you guys.” He reveals a more genuine smile than his usual cool one. “My step-brother and his punk friend have been running wild, and my mom’s been a stress case ‘cause Tuesday was the first day of school. Like, I love coming here, but when you’re stuck it’s a whole other deal.

            Brian responds with some inquiry about which of Steve’s other high school friends are around, but I’m distracted, thinking about guiding a classroom through a September 11^th inauguration of the school year. I’ll have to do my own classroom follow up in only a week, and though they may not share the same fears as children, college freshman will bring plenty of tough questions with them. I won’t have the answers by then; we’ll have to process it together.

            “…and Diana’s in town;” Steve is saying, “I told her to come hang out with us tonight.” 

            Brian turns to me and nods melodramatically. He thinks that Steve has a crush on Diana that he’d love to see consummated. 

            “Shut up, dude. We’ll just barbeque, take out the boat, do some S’mores; it’ll be cool.”

            Sounds good to me. My hopscotch board of longing—for comfort one minute and adventure the next—is hard for my heartbeat to follow, so I just breath deeply and listen to the guys’ verbal shoulder punching. They kick off their flip flops and recline at the patio table.

            "So, New Orleans, how'd you like it? Was it the same?" Steve was one of the posse on Brian's prior party trip there.

            "Yes and no," Brian replies. "It was pretty weird getting there in the middle of this," he waves his hand at the sky.

            "Hm. Yeah, was anyone out?"

            "Oh yeah, Bourbon street was still nuts. Not like Mardi Gras, but--"

            "But you guys still went for it, right." Steve badly wants this to be true for some reason. I can tell he is picturing Brian singing with the street band, me wearing nothing but beads on top, both of us passed out in the wrong hotel room. I don't want to hear his disappointment. His mom is making margaritas, so I go in to fill up an icy glass and ask if I can help with anything. Of course not.

            “Thanks...for letting us stay,” I tell this woman I’ve just met, and I’m actually about to cry over being, finally, in the presence of a mother, “it’s really nice.” 

            We talk about school, hers and mine, until Steve’s step-dad comes home with the punks and groceries. While the burgers grill, stories are traded about everyone’s calamitous Tuesday. It’s the first time Brian and I have told ours and we spare no emotional detail, though talking to people whom we know but who are not each other is a tricky habit to pick back up at first. Political speculation ensues and the punks retreat to the far side of the yard with their SuperSoakers. The light is fading into eggplant, leaving diamonds on the smooth lake, when Diana arrives. After introductions Steve takes a stack of dishes to the kitchen, so Brian and I practice our story again for the fresh audience.

            By the time the stars are out, the family has retired inside. The rest of us gather sweatshirts and rations of alcohol and light across the lake on the boat. Steve likes driving it, directing our attention to points of interest, which aren’t particularly interesting to anyone else, along the shore. I like leaning over the side and thinking about nothing but the dark water and how my trailing fingers slice through it. In the middle of the lake, Steve cuts the motor and drifts awhile so the four of us can revere the silence, the stars, and the commanding outline of the Rocky Mountains that enfold us.

            “We’re lucky to be here,” Diana says without looking at the rest of us.

            “No doubt.” Steve raises his bottle into the middle of our circle. We make eye contact and toast our fortune, pushing away the weight of those not so fortunate tonight, those whose fate is still unspeakable.

            “Dare anyone to jump in the water right now,” Brian shifts gears. But Steve vetoes that in favor of the far more appealing hot tub, and turns the boat back toward the shore. Brian and I sneak through the house like teenagers breaking curfew, and locate our guest room downstairs by the noise of the actual teenagers encamped across the hall. We change into bathing suits and return to the patio, where the view of the purple-peaked Rockies is striking.

            “We’re not interrupting are we?” asks Brian presumptuously as he splashes into the tub. Diana giggles and sips her beer. We’re really not. The time isn’t right for a random hook-up between these two, but it bears noting how much we want to witness one, how anxious we are for the promising aura of a fresh coupling. We have grown old together in these four years, even though we have not grown at all. I look at him and love the way he’s rescued me from the end of this trip. I feel safe, but not nascent; I don’t know if I can see starting another trip with him, and another one after that, or if he can with me. 

            The conversation turns to reminiscence: high school stories, college stories, summer stories. Once we’re water-shriveled, wrapped in scratchy camp blankets, we move down to the fire pit, which Steve gets blazing right away. Just as impressively, he produces two straightened coat hangers and a bag of marshmallows which we pass around and half empty. In the early hours of Sunday, I see Brian’s sugar high run out; his head lolls over the top of his lawn chair and I put him to bed. We sleep like rocks, well-fortified in the crowded house.          

 

September 16

The many feet stomping up the stairs and across the kitchen floor wake me. Overcast light seeps onto me through a high basement window, but I see no reason to get out of this very soft bed. Burrowing down into the middle of it, completely under cover, I look for something to anticipate, the magnet that glints at the end of the tunnel. I grope around for the spring inside myself, but it's gone. Only the risk of being too late to take a shower finally gets my feet on the shaggy carpet and across the basement. Even though this bathroom shows signs of abuse by two teen boys, it’s a small pleasure to use a full-sized shampoo bottle, to hear through the water competing voices in the kitchen, and especially to find the family already dispersed by the time I get upstairs, so I don't have to smile unless I want to. 

            Brian relates to me that Diana went home without incident last night after we retired. Steve dismisses the topic and shuffles us out of the house in pursuit of breakfast. Behind the wheel of his mom’s car, he runs through the restaurant choices. I defer my vote to Brian and stretch across the back seat soaking in the fact that somebody besides him is driving. It's a very different view and I wonder if it gives him any pause at all. It's funny not to have him all to myself to ask. He's nodding at Steve, giving thumbs up to a place called The Egg and I. 

            It serves a hearty breakfast, the kind we usually get on just such a late hung-over Sunday morning—black tar coffee, uniform hash browns and scrambled eggs enlivened only by thin curls of bacon and optional Tabasco sauce. Can this be called regional food, the standard slop of the wagon train, of the West? I eat like a cowboy.

            "Yeah, it's been here basically forever," Steve is saying, "I used to bus tables. Lame job, soooo busy on the weekends."  He points past a table where a couple of cops are reading the paper, "There used to be a wall right there, but they knocked it down..." Who cares about this small time history lesson? Brian is pretending to. I'm more concerned about the identity of our bulky bland food. Will everything have to be rich, famous, corn-fried or scarred in order to move me now? Why doesn't Steve tell us a story about how this place used to be a church harboring sick soldiers, or at least a brothel? If it's been here so long, why isn't there a plaque outside?

            They move on to a discussion of the days ahead. The games and shows that are cancelled, for how long? No football this afternoon or tomorrow night. The marquee lights on Broadway are running dimmed. How are they going to get rid of the mess in Manhattan now? What is Bush going to do? Air travel is coming back online, what a nightmare for all the people that got stuck somewhere awful. Steve couldn't get a flight back to Seattle until tomorrow night, and there’s brief talk of him riding the rest of the way with us. To him it sounds like an exciting detour. To us it sounds like a minor distraction from the tedious end of the odyssey, like we could pretend we're already home and just cruising around instead of losing life to another 1300 featureless miles. 

            But we don't really have room for another person and his suitcase in our compact car, and it wouldn't get him home any earlier than his rescheduled flight would. So the idea is abandoned; we pay the bill and go to the liquor store. Booze is tax-free in Colorado, and on the Sabbath morning a quick stop at The House of Spirits seems appropriate. We store one handle of Absolut, one of Bacardi and one of Jack in the trunk of the rental, climb into the front seats, and leave Steve in his mom's driveway holding a double paper bag of clinking bottles.

            "Thank her again for letting us stay..." I holler out the window. His shoulders droop as he waves us off. Brian has abruptly shifted into moving-on mode; he won’t even stop back inside the house for formal goodbyes.

            "It's still fucking far," he says to me with dejection, "and I'm already tired.

            So his job is to stay awake, and mine is to immediately decide how to get out of Colorado and across the Northwest. There is no ground ahead of us that we haven't covered some summer before, eventually all roads lead to the looming I90. We could head straight for it up the east side of Wyoming, but it would sicken me to be that close to icons like Devil’s Tower and Mt. Rushmore but not be able to stop, and there can be no more scenic stops. I direct us across the bottom of Wyoming instead: Cheyenne, Laramie, The Great Divide. 

 

            We share the road with only eighteen-wheelers, flat land and vast smoke-colored sky. Occasionally there’s a rock at the asphalt’s edge painted with a crude American flag. We say goodbye to Colorado with a John Denver CD, and then drive alongside a train while Free Bird plays on Wyoming’s Best Rock ’n’ Roll, Kiss It FM. The view out my window is all mesas, no trees; all cracked red with bits of green instead of all lush green powdered with blossoms. We do have the same drizzle of rain that’s followed us almost everywhere, but the drops are lighter, fall sideways and evaporate fast. There are rest stops (with stars and stripes still at half mast above the state buffalo), but no other travelers stopping to rest.

            This is empty empty space. More memories of where we’ve been crowd into the blank canvas: the many-shaded characters passing time outside, in the street and on the porch, all the props of their life on display; the monuments, somber and extravagant; ducks in the lobby and ghost whispers behind the brick walls; the cloying heat that hides things in a soft filter. Out here there is truly no place to hide. The absolute exposure and emptiness may be why I spurn such landscape. It is uncontained farther than the eye can see, presumably because masses of white culture have not yet been able to infest all the inhospitable space between the Rockies and the Pacific. It is still the last frontier, where everything has yet to reach its full potential. Or perhaps is already past it. 

            Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, suggested that “…great societies cannot exist without government; the savages therefore, break them into small ones.” But as we have learned, survival on any land labeled USA requires deference to a single control; no tribe is allowed to flourish too long independently. That's why the culture out here is made only of mountain lions and lizards, and whatever else still roams low and wild amid the rocks and Joshua Trees.

            Jefferson also claimed that he knew “of no such thing existing as an Indian Monument,” though he once exhumed a native burial site in his hometown, describing how the bones disintegrated in his hands. But mostly the claim seems accurate from where I’m sitting. The red ground has swallowed all the spilled blood here and keeps it a secret. Perhaps a conflict that nearly eradicates a whole native population remains inexpressible—the rivals can’t mingle in the streets a century later, hanging plaques and polishing headstones. The monuments left here honor only the land itself: architecture of wind and water, shelves of topaz, tourmaline, granite, and sandstone reaching up to the next world. It does grow magnificent the further west we move, but it seems a lifeless beauty. This place is far older than the beginnings of time the South showed me; I cannot even try to reach it. It would be lonely work to define oneself out here.        

            We exit Wyoming in time to cut through northeast Utah, for no reason except to say we drove by Salt Lake City. My faith in how that sort of experience will enhance us is dwindling, though—is it fair to just stick a colored pin in the map on every star you’ve driven by? What good is a map full of pins? From the interstate I don't see much anyway, even sitting up straight and scanning the canvas in all directions, straining for a glimpse of the Mormon Tabernacle's gilded spires. For a minute Brian considers checking up on another friend, this time one he hasn’t seen in a decade.

            “Mike and his family live in Salt Lake somewhere.”

            “Yeah?”

            “I think he has two kids.”

            “Do you have his number? When did you think of this?”

            “No…I don’t know…” He doesn’t know how to go all the way back to high school? He recognizes his college self and can comfortably spend time there, reminiscing in New Orleans or Loveland. But the boy he was on the Ramstein Air Base with Mike must be too foreign. The last city exit sign vanishes behind us like so many have. We sink down in our seats, and I turn up the radio volume knob with my bare big toe.

            Don’t pull your love out on me baby, if you do then I think that maybe I’ll just lay me down and cry for a hundred years…

            “Is that Elvis?” Brian asks. I listen closely…take my heart my soul my money, but don’t leave me here drowin' in my tears… 

            “I don’t think so. Sounds like him, but not quite.” I keep listening and wait for the DJ to tell me who it is after the song is over. Somebody called Hamilton Joe Frank and Reynolds. 1971. It did sound like late Elvis, though. In the Ghetto, Suspicious Minds, Mary in the Morning… the sound of Elvis that was actually steeped in my heart from the AM radio when I was little. The feel of the blurry white 1970’s, of carefree highways, summer breeze, dusty shafts of sunlight in the afternoon on the shag carpet, playing with my "Fashion Plates". Gritty, not shiny like the 1960’s package. Too small and too big at the same time. It was the feel of Graceland. This is what I should have been looking for there at the beginning of this journey, but I was confused. It was not Graceland or Elvis or Memphis that let me down, it was my own irreconcilable tastes for the true and the beautiful.

            The car smells like stale smoke and greasy wrappers. It almost eradicates everything good I’ve inhaled since the first day of the month, all that ethereal ocean brine, the smell of life. This smell is closer to dying, a panic attack invitation. I ride into the azure sunset with two fingers pressed against my neck under my jaw.   

            In a blink we have rolled over 668 miles of road today. We did 645 yesterday, 425 the day before that. We will do 630 tomorrow. Eight states in less than 100 hours. In the low belly of Idaho—sage brush, black dirt, and more flat sky, wholly different than the state’s northern terrain—Brian's eyes give out. He’s made it to Twin Falls, a town disguised as one long street of strip mall. Stoplights materialize out of the inky dark like runway markers, leading to a gorge spanned by a huge trestle bridge. But two lights before we reach this gorge and the twin falls inside of it, a Super 8 Motel sags through the rain-spattered windshield. Brian needs to park directly outside the room again after he gets the key, so we can hear and intervene when marauders break into the car to steal our belongings, our valuable souvenirs, at four in the morning. I skeptically watch him batten down the hatches while I sit on a parking curb and smoke the last cigarette of the trip; it tastes terrible without a peach pie, campfire, dogwood blossom, or cold rum accompaniment.

            There's not a lot happening in Twin Falls tonight; even the TV programming on Sunday feels like the beginning of being dead. To be fair, Sundays have often felt this way throughout my life, like the narrative is resolved and there’s no next page to look forward to. On an exceptional night, across the world in a princess room, I might be led past the dark by enchanted spirits and Spielberg premiers on HBO. But that’s gone. The tic-tic-tic-tic of 60 minutes in this indolent Idaho motel room tastes like that last cigarette. Brian has a fight on the phone with his sister, or maybe we have another fight about his sister after he gets off the phone with her, still something about not feeding the cat. We've been gone a long time.