Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode V:The Dream Child
The year after my trip to California, I was on a limited budget and compressed time schedule, due in large part to being a brand new homeowner. But this life of domestication was not enough to silence those strange longings for the road and to “get away.” Highway 50 was calling to me again. So I decided to take a short trip and see Arizona, Utah and Colorado again.
There’s a point when you head north of Flagstaff on the road that leads to the Grand Canyon, and you reach the top of this huge hill, turn a curve and see what looks like the entire United States before you, down in the valley.
There’s something about the landscape there that makes me feel like I’ve gone back in time. I expect to see cowboys and Indians riding by at any time. But in a way, those huge expanses of sparsely populated land
do give us a vision of the continent’s past. For, what are a canyon wall, or mountain if not a visual representation of the passage of time? Indeed, most of the features of the American Southwest would not exist without having been carved out by the knife of time.
Anyway, you just drive for miles and miles on those lonely high plains, surrounded by rocks and plateaus and storms creeping along the horizon, and every now and then you’ll see a little trailer with rusted-out truck parts and random household appliances out in front, parked away from the road in the protective shadow of a desert canyon wall, or you’ll see a little one-hallway-school out in the middle of what seems like nowhere. I see those things and I wonder what life is like for the people that inhabit those lonely places. I wonder what the average day is like for them. Are they somehow stuck in life? Or are they running or hiding from something? I wonder about the stories that lead up to
their now, living there amongst the ghosts of rugged individualists past.
Further Tales from Great Road Trips I Have Known- Episode IV: A New Hope
I was talking about that first solo road trip out to California a few days ago. And for the life of me, I still can’t pinpoint what exactly it is about getting out into the middle of nowhere that is so attractive to me. It’s no secret I’m a little misanthropic. Relating to people and just
being around people is a bit of a chore for me sometimes. So, I guess there is that kind of “vacation from people” element to it. But by the end of a week of running away from my regular life, I begin to miss being around people I know and easy conversation with them.
And I know deep within me there is an aesthetic response to seeing vast amounts of uninhabited creation. I love the idea that there still might be some part of God’s green earth that hasn’t been sullied by people and their wants and needs and shortsightedness and general ugliness. Virgin, untainted land is a fantastic idea. But that’s pretty much what it is- just an idea in my head. For, if you can see it from a road, chances are, you’re not the first and only person to have ever spotted it.
Listen, I’m not a very spiritual guy. Sometimes I wish I were. But I sound like what I’m searching for is a kind of Garden of Eden, Take 2, where it’s just me and God and the natural creation. And I’ll tell you one thing for sure. I wouldn’t go near that damn apple tree.
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There was one point coming back from that trip that I pulled off to the side of a lonely road in New Mexico, nothing but miles and miles of dead, yellow grass and rocks around me. And the thing I love about being that far out is the silence-at least the silence of humanity. There are sounds, but they’re the sounds we tend to ignore as we’re rushing around in the city, in our cars, on our phones, listening to our radios- the sound of the wind and it’s bassy, boomy tones modulating into mid-rangey wisps and the humming sound of bugs and the sound of birds waking up from mid-day summer naps.
And it’s amidst that environment that I pulled out my wine-red Takamine acoustic guitar and a Henry Weinhard’s root beer, sat down and leaned against the car and croaked out a few meager attempts at singing praise choruses to God.
That’s as close to the Garden of Eden as I’m likely to get.
Whatcha' Readin'? (Slight Return)
This weekend I got done reading a very interesting book and I would recommend it to anyone who is close to my age. The book is called
Urban Tribes by Ethan Watters. In it, he discusses the phenomenon of the “marriage delay” among a certain generation, and how “never-been-marrieds” have socialized themselves into interesting groups, separate from traditional “family” structures. While there is quite a bit of sociology in this book, Watters definitely writes as a concerned participant. It’s half sociology, half memoir of a thirty-something single man. Humorous at points and never boring or detached, I highly recommend this book as a quick read and I know it’s available at our local library. (I was a little distracted by a slew of typos, however.)
Next on my list-I shall attempt to conquer Cervantes’
Don Quixote. I will probably be reading this book for a couple months. It might be the longest book I’ve ever even
started to read.
Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode IV: A New Hope
After seeing Colorado, I had to see more. I knew there was a whole country out there for me to see. The Great American Southwest. Whenever I thought of “road trips,” or traveling, for some reason I always got the image in my head of mountains, deserts, canyons and the like. And after driving home myself from Colorado, I thought it was time to do a whole weeklong road trip by myself.
So, the next destination was California. I had always wanted to see California and the West Coast, but surely you know that these kinds of solo trips are not all about the arriving. The experience of the in-between is just as important to me. You can take I-40 straight out west for what seems like days, but I took a jaunt north to see the Grand Canyon. I won’t try to elucidate its grandeur, but two things did surprise me there at the edge of the hole in the ground: 1) there were a bunch of different languages being spoken all around me. I was not prepared for that, but it kind of made sense to me—from a foreign country and want to see “America?” Why not see its’ biggest hole? 2) Looking down into the bottom and seeing that tiny silent, white stream and knowing that if I was standing right on its’ shore, it would be loud, roaring rapids. That was a good indicator of the distance.
Anyway, on that trip I did fit in a couple days to meet up with my parents in Sedona, Arizona since they were living in Phoenix at the time. Sedona is embedded in the middle of a valley with mountains all around, but it was nothing short of a tourist trap. While it was called an “Artists’ colony,” I very quickly realized that what is produced there winds up being decorations for vacationing rich people’s houses, not art. That was actually a revelation to me as I walked around these opulent, air-conditioned stores. “Art” is not produced in such environments. There was no suffering in the creation of these cowboy sculptures and pleasant landscapes. These people were way too well off to be what I consider “artists.” I had heard the argument before, that art was merely a record of the suffering and woe of its’ creators over the ages and it had never really meant much to me, until wandering around these huge shops of well-dressed, middle-aged people with their new-agey music. It all felt so empty to me. I’m certainly no art expert, but I know this. “Art” is not empty. (Of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell my parents about this new aesthetic epiphany.)
I think that discovery was worth the trip, but it was really only the start of things. As Arizona was farther out than I had ever been, I had no clue what to expect. On I-40, Needles, right on the border of Cali and Arizona, seems like the last bastion of civilization. In fact, the next city requires a drive through the Mojave Desert and I came upon this reality at exactly the loneliest time of day when traveling by yourself-around 6:00 in the evening, when the sun starts going down and you begin to reflect on a whole day worth of driving and wonder where you’ll lay your head that night. It’s a pretty lonely image, my friends, being the only one on the road at dusk, with only the mountains on the horizon to your right and left and the gray-white sand dunes to keep you company. When it gets to be that time while driving, I imagine a whole nation of people safe at home with their families and TV trays and watching the nightly news after a long day of work. And I wonder why I force myself into these types of nomadic feelings…
Well, after creeping through the wasteland, with the music of No Doubt and The Living End to keep me awake, and finally arriving in Barstow, California began to look up after another full day of driving. That’s when you see the wonderful rolling straw-yellow hills and windmill farms outside of Bakersfield and a handful of hours of driving deliver you to the end of the continent. Something about the sounds and smells of the vast ocean bring me a strange calm. If you subscribe to evolution, the ocean is our ultimate home, where we all came from millions of years ago. Remember the end of
The Awakening by Kate Chopin, where the principal character drowns herself in the ocean at the end? Or in Steinbeck’s
The Winter of Our Discontent, where the main character comes
this close to doing the same? Anyway, all of that to say that the ocean has a strange draw for me, not in a suicidal way, but in a peaceful way.
Since this is becoming an epic post, let me skip over a couple days and relate the cleansing loneliness of driving back on the official “Loneliest Road in America”—highway 50 in Nevada. I honestly don’t know why I insist on subjecting myself to such forced exile like that. And every time I would tell people about these “what does it all mean?”-trips, they would always look at me kind of funny. And I don’t blame them. Who chooses that for themselves? Surely no one in their right mind, right?
I think that first solo trip to California was the best I have taken. There was so much that was new about it. New terrain. New levels of isolation and yes, new levels of loneliness. But it all helps to get life in perspective.
Maybe some more on this trip later.
Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode III:Back in Training
So, today I will relate the events of a road trip I took with Aaron, my rock star buddy over Spring Break about four or five years ago. We were driving to Colorado Springs to see the wedding of a friend. In a castle. Close to the Garden of the Gods. And then I was to drive Aaron further into Colorado for a church ski trip and drive home myself. I had never seen Colorado and had been bitten by the “driving long hours by myself” bug when I went to New England.
Well, it turned out that I got a little bit more than I bargained for. I guess it never occurred to me that driving in March in Colorado meant driving in snow. (The fact that Aaron was going on a
ski trip should have tipped me off.) I was also following another car the whole way to Colorado Springs. The pressure of following another person has a way of killing your Jack Kerouac vibe.
But as this was my first time to ever be west of Oklahoma, I was enthralled with the Southwestern scenery. This was my first taste of vast, open space. Driving east, you never seem to be too far from another town or city, or at the very least a gas station/Subway combination.
And as we turned north in New Mexico and gradually increased altitude, the weather turned a little bit snowy, which seemed kind of like an obstacle to my driving experience.
The wedding came and went and Aaron and I were off to Crested Butte, which was only a few inches further on the map, but might as well have been the path to the Black Gate of Mordor. I had never driven on these kinds of mountain roads before and there were four things impeding my enjoyment of this new scenery: 1) it was snowing hard, 2) it was getting dark, 3) my car was old and had one known problem with it- a bad CV boot, and 4) I had a passenger along. Driving in less than ideal conditions is always more nerve-wracking for me when someone else is in the car. But to his credit, Aaron was very sympathetic and quiet. The snow came to a head at Monarch Pass, which, I’m convinced, is a vent over the door to hell. Something always goes wrong there.
Well, we finally made it to Crested Butte and I was to leave the next morning. I think I slept a total of one hour that whole night, tossing and turning, going over all of the potential snowy crash scenarios in my head, all of them looking like when “Toonces the Cat” from Saturday Night Live would drive off the cliff. Another scenario that played in my head was the image of my old car giving up the ghost in those middle-of-nowhere parts of New Mexico. But all of this Doomsday prophecy was tempered with excitement to get
moving again. That whole
moving thing is a fundamental principal in the allure of the road to me.
The trip back sealed the deal for me. I really enjoyed driving alone. Thinking. Listening to music. Moving. I don’t know why. It’s all kind of mysterious to me. And although Monarch Pass was snowy and scary again, it wasn’t quite as bad in the middle of the day. And it wasn’t quite as bad suffering through it by myself. (I know that last sentence reveals a lot about my psychology. But it’s the truth. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I was more natural with life amongst others, but I’m just not. It takes work for me.)
There is a certain point there, coming south through New Mexico toward I-40, where the road curves around and you see in front of you and all around as far as the horizon-dry, flat, yellow earth. And as you descend hundreds of feet in about five minutes, you know that you’ve seen the last mountains on this trip. It’s kind of a sad moment, like what’s-his-name’s painting of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden.
But on this trip, the last one I made in my ’90 Honda Accord, it was almost a salvation experience to reach the security of I-40 and head back east.
Nerd City
It is with great pleasure that I announce the first issue of
Nerd City, a bi-weekly home to all manner of nerd-related topics. You might recognize some of the writing.
Please visit and comment often and tell all of your friends about this new online magazine.
I promise I’ll update this here blog very soon.
As you were.
Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode II: The Temple of Doom
After my road trip with Steve, I decided that I wanted to try to do some traveling on my own. At that time in my life, there seemed to be so much of the world for me to see—approximately a whole continent, at the very least. So, a year or two after that, I planned to do some driving and go to New England. I had always wanted to see that part of the country, and as luck had it, my friend Elizabeth was going to Russian language school in Middlebury, Vermont and I had arranged to pick her up and drive back.
The idea of a few days on the road all by myself was both exciting and scary to me at the same time. On one hand was total freedom to do whatever I wanted to,
whenever I wanted to, without having to entertain anyone. (That’s a big pressure for me, “is the person I’m with bored?”) On the other hand, I had never spent that much time alone in my whole life. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t go insane without someone around to distract me from my thoughts. I seriously thought that I might go nuts with that much time to myself.
What I forgot, though, was how much I like to drive long distances. City driving, I have no love for. But to spend hours in a car with my tunes, nothing but road in front of me, that’s really when I’m most at peace. Maybe it’s the whole “master-of-my-own-destiny”-kind of thing.
But the first night of that New England road trip didn’t go as expected. I made it to Indianapolis by the first night and unfortunately every motel in town was booked because of the Indy 500 or some other car race. So I continued down the highway in the middle of the night until, unable to keep my eyes open for very long, I just decided to pull into a hotel parking lot and sleep in the car, which was a unique experience. Have you ever woken up one morning, wondering where you were? Have you ever been in a car when that happened? Pretty odd.
I must admit, as I wound through those New England roads, ambling around in search of things to see and do, I got a little bit lonely. Construction signs saying “Be Careful. My Daddy Works Here,” and Jeff Buckley’s voice echoing around in my brain as I zigged and zagged around mountain roads on a cool Appalachian evening-for some reason, they failed to comfort me. And I found that the loneliness affected my ability to make decisions. “Should I stay here for the night, or keep driving?” “Ah, what does it matter? You won’t know anybody or have anything to do, no matter
where you stop.” And my gut reaction when those doubts arose was to just keep
moving.
Anyway, I wound up picking up Elizabeth a day early because of the listlessness and we headed for home. It’s funny, just having someone else breathing the same air, even if they are asleep, fights off the loneliness somehow.
I discovered the joy of Liz Phair’s
whitechocolatespaceegg on that trip and I remember meeting a couple of bicycle-riding guys, a homosexual couple with JFK accents, on the ferry on the Vermont border. I also remember a rare display of teamwork between us in a downpour outside Schenectady, New York-- lost. The old Honda Accord had a bad tendency to fog up when it rained and using the defroster was like trying to translate Egyptian Hieroglyphics. As I drove, trying to act calm and like I knew where I was going, my traveling companion wiped the windshield with a towel.
That trip home was probably the longest amount of time I’ve ever spent with a girl who was not a girlfriend and overall, I remember Elizabeth being a good person to share large amounts of time trapped in a car. She knew when to talk and when not to talk. She didn’t mind sharing the driving duties. She didn’t even complain about having to go windows-down for most of the trip since the air conditioner wasn’t the best.
I look back on that trip fondly, although it seems sooo long ago.
Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode 1:The Phantom Menace
It was my first junior year in college. I say that because I guess I had two junior years. It was also my first year at UCO. For spring break I decided to go visit my brother and his family, (including a new little girl), in Savannah. For some reason, I decided to invite my pal Steve.
He is one of the more interesting people I’ve met. Some people peg him as an asshole. He’s a nitpicker. A squabbler. He’s abrasive most of the time. He doesn’t allow you any pleasure over your achievements. He’s got a bit of a foul mouth. He’s also very smart.
I’ve known the guy since I was in fifth grade. The first time I met him, we were in the championship of the connect-four tournament held during recess on a rainy day. I’m sure he beat me. He’s much smarter than I am. Plus, I’m not good under pressure.
In seventh grade, we used to walk around the halls of the junior high before first period. He would recite the presidents in order, as I would mosey along, trying to look like we weren’t friends. But we really needed each other back then. I think we were secretly fearful of people and ourselves. That’s why we were always walking around: to keep from having to face other kids. There’s something about being in motion that makes your existence legitimate.
Anyway, who better to be a traveling companion? A guy I’d shared the pain of growing up with. A guy who knew my fears because he knew them as his.
He also would pay for half of the gas.
One novel idea we had on this trip was “drive straight through.” Taking shifts, one would sleep while the other drove. Only rich people stayed in motels. (I have since made the drive from Savannah back to Oklahoma City in one looooong day of driving. With the flu. So, it wasn’t
that crazy of an idea to “drive straight through.”)
So, what makes this a “Great Road Trip I Have Known?” It’s pretty simple. I thought I was in love. I had her picture right next to the speedometer and I probably could have flown to Savannah like Superman. I was smitten. I remember harassing Steve with all manner of Romantic, poetic flights of fancy for approximately 90% of the time in the car. So, this probably doesn’t go down as one of his “great road trips he has known.” I don’t know how to describe my state of mind other than to say that all sensations and thoughts were strengthened. It’s a drug, I guess. Turns out I was just in love with the
idea of being in love and it would all come crumbling down around me upon my return.
But man! Hearing Radiohead’s
OK Computer for the first time while traveling 80 miles an hour with hundreds of miles of concrete ahead and the possibility it represents, or dozing off to the sound of Steely Dan at 3 in the morning in black-as-night Alabama back roads. Rejoicing on finally finding the right highway sign to 10 seconds later find yourself in a strip mall parking lot…these are memories that I don’t have to try to create.
And at the beach, our true natures were revealed. I needed to sit and lean against a huge piece of driftwood and listen and be still and watch. Steve needed to walk around. To move. To
do something. These are the two fundamental, philosophical essences of each of us.
I know he probably will never read this, so I can say that even though his abrasiveness sometimes embarrasses me when he comes into contact with sweet people minding their own business; I love Steve, (not in
that way), and I thank God every time I pray, for him and the others in the cast of characters, (some would say “rogue’s gallery”), that He has placed in my path.
Hell, I will say that even if he
does read this.
Salvation
I don’t know if we have any theologians out there, but I would like to pose a question and would appreciate some feedback.
Often, Christians will refer to themselves as “saved.” The apostle Paul talks about being “saved by grace.” I’ve heard the phrase “once saved, always saved.” Apparently, there’s a lot of saving going on.
My question is a simple one. What exactly are Christians saved FROM?
Are they saved from God’s punishment for their sins? Or is it a kind of philosophical saving where they are free from viewing the world in certain ways?
Somebody (or somebodies) unpack all of this for me. Like I’ve written before, I grew up in a place where this kind of language was never used. And “making decisions” and “going to altars” and all of that is still kind of foreign to me.
What Are You Reading, Love?
I’ve gone through some books pretty quickly as of late. First was Donald Miller’s
Blue Like Jazz, kind of a spiritual autobiography that has some apologetic leanings. We’ve been discussing this book every week in a class up at the church and when I heard that they wanted to devote six weeks to it, I was a little surprised. I didn’t think it had THAT much new to say.
Anyway, Miller’s initial idea is “I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve […] I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.” Of course, there’s a problem right from the get-go in that, except for the most “free” of free jazz, jazz is full of tension and resolution, both harmonic and melodic. But that’s a little nit-picky. I take the point of God not resolving and I agree-- resolution is rare in this life. (But not rare in this book…)
I also read Anne Lamott’s
Traveling Mercies within the last week. It’s also in the spiritual autobiography vein, but feels much less preachy. But both of these authors seem pretty intent on presenting an individualist’s take on Christianity. They don’t have what I consider to be typical Christian language and ideas. I can say that after reading both, I think I would rather meet Lamott. She seems more real and has a pretty impressive conversion story. I’m always a sucker for the story of a life redeemed.
Last night, I got done reading James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon, which I was supposed to read in high school. It’s the fictional story of four people stranded from an air crash in a hidden, mysterious monastery called Shangri-La somewhere near Tibet. It was a much quicker read than it was, oh, I don’t know,
12 years ago?
So, what’s everybody else reading these days?
