[Last of a three-part post.]
“Searchin’ through the fragments of my dream-shattered sleep, I wonder if the years have closed her mind…” —Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway”
Sunday morning, May 2, 1993, I was up around 8. The road was calling, but I didn’t want to listen.
“Let it wait,” I thought. “Let me have breakfast with my friends.”
And what a breakfast it was! I was staying at Bud and Ellen’s apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, so we joined forces to cook up “some buckwheat pancakes, mini biscuits with country ham, and plenty of hot coffee. We had a nice last chat about my writing and about families and that was good.”
I confessed to the journal: “I love them both very much.” Then I packed up my truck, we said goodbye, and I hit the road.
“I drove all day,” the journal reports, stating I went west rather than the way I’d come, from Indianapolis. The weather had improved and “I saw the Hoosier National Forest (and was surprised to know there was one!)” sweating the draining gas gauge and talking to myself “nearly all through Illinois … Then it started to rain and rained most of the way, even when I left Iowa City after 8:30 p.m.”
At this point the journal gets introspective. Case in point, this paragraph:
“You probably would be interested in what I talked to myself about. I was thinking about Louisville and how much I love it down there, but I kept coming back to Lynn and was relieved that I wasn’t at all in love with her and was a little saddened by it—I think it was important for me to have someone who was my focus and when I realized that wasn’t the case, well, I felt a little empty. But, like I said, relieved. There was nothing there, I felt. I had yet to ‘crack’ the person—as well as she to me. That’s the beginning of love, I suspect. You spy an element of a person that is miraculous in its respect—indefinable yet reassuring. She/He’s that way, I see. Oh, but how wonderful! So, I was driving along and really wondering about the future. Where was I going to go? What was I going to do? It was a Real Journey.”
This is where a road trip is so much like life: it’s a real journey.
Because on that journey there’s no avoiding the return trip, even if it seems it may never actually happen. When it does, there you are, on your way to the future and whatever that entails. And there I was, driving and thinking about all the people I knew and would soon come to know—but then it was just me, the rainy lonesome road, and some Zen-like thinking.
“I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin’ to get free, from the good ol’ faithful feelin’ we once knew.”
—Gordon Lightfoot, “Carefree Highway”
“I drove like a weary madman,” the journal says, “until I got to Iowa City” where I stopped for dinner at a Japanese restaurant before getting back out on the road northward to Cedar Rapids, and where “the rain came down so hard I almost thought about pulling over for the night. My windshield wipers were shot as well and I was afraid I’d get in an accident. I was pretty scared until I got around Cedar Rapids and the rain stopped.”
Sometimes the road is terrifying; it demands your attention. You have to gauge whether you should continue on. But at some point you must keep going.
“I listened to the radio and the lights played on my eyes on the highway.” I entered into a sort of dream state, driving through that haunting May night:
“I thought it was strange how cars in the distance all of a sudden were right on your bumper, or how you could see a car going off a side road and it could seem so comforting and busy at the same time. Turning off onto 35W going northbound I latched onto, completely by chance, an AM station out of Louisville. I listened to it nearly to downtown St. Paul. They talked of the incipient rain and the post-Derby letdown. The woman who read the news was chatted to by the announcer who had her tell her Derby story: her boyfriend had proposed marriage to her in a park near downtown Louisville and she had, of course, accepted. I was laughing. Then they played Christopher Cross’ old hit ‘Never Be the Same,’ and Chicago’s ‘Questions 67 and 68.’ Later they played James Brown’s ‘It’s A Man’s, [Man’s, Man’s] World,’ and Mary Hopkin’s cover of the McCartney song ‘Goodbye.’ It made my drive—damn, damn tired as I was—all the more bearable.”
Around 2 a.m. I’d pulled into my parking spot at my Cathedral Hill apartment and passed out on my bed until the alarm rang at 6:30 a.m. “I dragged myself to CTS where I proofread banking Truth in Savings forms until I went home at 3 in the afternoon, still stoned from the road.”
I’d made a run for the roses and truly attained them: it was only the first road trip in a spectacularly eventful year.
New adventures were ahead further down the road.
