I
Thirty miles west of San Antonio the mesas begin to rise out of the ground. They are massive trapezoids with green trees along their sides and too-big houses sometimes christening their tops. My black two-door snakes between them trying, perhaps vainly and naively, to get out of Texas.
I’ve been on the road for seven days now. This is a trip that I’ve been promising myself since mid-terms of my last semester in college. The idea of packing up the car and driving to the West Coast carried me through the papers and the grey mid-western winter all the way through graduation. On my computer was a map of the U.S. with a blue line running across it and a promise that one day I would be on that line, riding it to the Pacific.
I’m alone for the first time on the road. My roommate came with me from St. Louis to Dallas but after a few days there he went home and I got back in the car, lonely for the first time with no one in the passenger seat. A day and a half of following my feet in Austin and now I find myself here in West Texas, looking for the next dot on my blue line—the next something to fill the void. College has come and gone and now I’m on the road, unsure of what comes next.
In Texas the road never changes. Eighty, eighty-five, ninety miles per hour, it makes no difference; outside of the white lines the scene is constant. A gold wash of land flecked with the green of shoulder-high scrub slides past my windows. The landscape is mute, soundless save for the noise of the tires on the asphalt. Road signs silently call out to me, attempting to convince me that there is life out there. Names of towns like Sterling City and Sonora, Ozona and Pandale appear on the green signs. I blow by them.
I get the sense that Texas is testing me. It answers my scoffs at yellow signs that read STRONG CROSS WINDS by blowing my little car a foot and half over the dotted yellow line and challenging my thought that I’ve seen hard country before. Testing me by reducing my cell phone to a silent, plastic rectangle. Testing me with its blown out tires rotting on the highway like dug up corpses. In Fort Stockton there are only two radio stations and they are both in Spanish. In Pecos there is an unmarked fast food restaurant that advertises “small pig” for eighty-five cents. As I so often find that I am the only one on the highway, my mind wrestles with the question of how long it would take for someone to find my body if something happened.
I pull off the highway and follow tilted signs to a filling station. There’s a quarter tank left but I don’t know where or when the next outpost of civilization will be. Gas is 50 cents more.
“Ohio?” asks the man standing next to his truck opposite of me at the filling station, after catching a glimpse of my license plate. Both our hands are on the triggers of our pumps, leaning on our cars. He’s wearing a cowboy hat. I’m wearing Ray-Bans. There is a line-up of cars behind us; seemingly everyone in town has come out to this oasis on a dusty, hot day.
“You’re a long way from home, partner.”
I don’t tell him “you have no idea,” or “bingo,” or “yessir.” I don’t tell him that I’ve been thinking about getting a pair of cowboy boots, ones a lot like his. I don’t ask him to tell me how this town hasn’t been blown away in the night by a decent gust of wind. I don’t tell him how good his twang sounds.
“Yeah,” I say and hang up the pump, his words carrying more weight than he knows, “Yeah, I am.”
II
I’m on my aunt’s couch in Northern California and it has been two years since I’ve seen her. The last time we were together I was about to start my semester abroad in Spain. She sits next to me and we talk about my trip. I’m closing in on my third week on the road. Texas is behind me now, along with a blown out tire, Carlsbad, Durango, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Big Sur, and a day and half on California’s Highway 1, where I had little regard for the guard rail or the cliffs beyond it. My foot was on the gas, I tell her, one hand tight on the wheel, the other moving the shifter from second to third, touching briefly into fourth, and then back into second again. It was like I was dancing, whipping my car around corners and ripping through the gears as I curled around the edges of the continent.
Then we are talking about a family reunion or a birthday party for my great-grandmother, though I was too young for both to be able to distinguish one from the other.
“No, the party for Darcy, that was in Calistoga,” she says. Her tongue slides on her “s,” her distinct Spanish accent undiluted even after half her lifetime in California. I ask her if she misses Barcelona and if she wants to go back.
“Yes.”
“Do you think you will?”
“Maybe,” she says with a giggle. “Once your Uncle Chris retires. It is something we’ve talked about, ya? Chris loves it and Barcelona will always be home,” she says and laughs again.
“I want to show you a picture of you and your mom and dad. From Calistoga. It’s so funny. You will laugh.”
Together we flip though heavy photo albums. On one page my uncle Chris grins at us from behind the wheel of a green Austin Healey. On the next, my parents laugh during their wedding, which was held in my grandparents’ backyard. There is a bath tub full of ice and drinks in the background. My mom tips an empty wine bottle to her lips, hamming for the camera, my dad’s mouth agape in faux bewilderment.
“Here,” she says and points at the picture she’s been looking for. It’s of my parents and me. My dad is on the right, my mom standing beside him. She is holding me in her arms, cradling my head on her shoulder, showing the back of my head to my aunt’s camera.
“You didn’t want your picture taken. But I was going to get you. See?” and her finger falls on the next picture. This time my dad is on the left and my mom on the right. My face is peeking over my mom’s shoulder. I don’t look happy in the picture but now, in her living room, the two of us laugh.
That night I think about Barcelona and the photo album. I wonder if my aunt will ever go home. Then I wonder if I am facing the camera yet. I will sleep here tonight with my family but I will be alone on the road tomorrow.
III
I can hear the river from the tent, a constant gurgle living on the other side of the nylon as my ex-girlfriend sleeps next to me. I want to know what time it is, but my phone is out of reach and I accidentally left my watch in Portland a week ago.
“I just want it to be OK. Just pleasant. Civil, you know?” I would tell my friends when they asked me what I thought of staying with her. My mom’s cousin lives in Seattle too, I thought, a phone call that I could make in case of emergency.
This is our second night camping together in the foothills of Mt. Rainier. I had been staying in her apartment on the floor for the week before as neither one of us was ready to share her single bed. Before breezing through Portland to get to her, it had been a year since I had seen her and two since we had split up.
The day before, after we make camp, we go down to the river with my camera and our beers. The water is cold and the evergreens cut jaggedly through the silver of the water and the grey of the sky. She takes pictures of me washing my hands in the stream and skipping rocks. I take pictures of her making dinner on a fold out stove. As night falls we sit together and watch our fire, occasionally pulling on our drinks. I feel like we could get swept up with the stream on the other side of the darkness, that we could float down, carried off by forces we can’t see. Already doubts form in my mind about keeping my promise of being in Boulder for Independence Day.
In the tent in the morning I try not to move too much. She forgot to bring a pillow so we share mine, forcing closeness and, in any other circumstance, intimacy. Since I arrived we had been stumbling through what to make of my being in Seattle—both of us aware of my impermanence, both of us aware of the comfort that has come from the days that we had shared.
A few days after we leave the mountains, we are at an art show downtown. There are rows of vendors hawking oil paintings and wind chimes. She stops at a booth with handmade jewelry and I watch her examine the necklaces.
“I know which one you want,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
I point to the one she had been eying and she looks at me. “How did you know?”
Right then we are on the edge of it, as I leave the question hanging and we walk past the booths toward a musical group. If we hold our stares for a heartbeat longer we will be gone, swept downstream like driftwood in the whitewater. We both feel the undertow pulling on our fingers but we keep our hands in our pockets.
I stay for a few days after that and we move closer, feeling our way through how each of us has changed over the last two years. We move closer, awkward and tender. I can’t stay though and I’ve run out of continent in the West. I point my car east and start the trip back.
IV
My friend Austin is now living in a condominium in downtown Boulder. It took me two full days of driving to get from Seattle to his luxurious spread and now that I’m here I appreciate the extra space. He has a gas range and dark counter tops. From his balcony the Flatiron Mountains look like brown irregular teeth growing up from the earth, though the view is mostly wasted on me—I’ve been on the road for forty days.
Colorado was home, a realization I came to only after moving away. Coming to the Midwest after fourteen years in the mountains was a difficult transition. During the Winter Olympics I would see skiers plummet down white mountains and instead of being amazed by their speed or grace, I would remember the excitement of a snow day and the comfort of a wood-burning stove. Every time I come back to Colorado I think about what my life would have been if we hadn’t had to move—my mind’s mountains shrouded in clouds of “what if?”
Things are different this time.
He and I had been friends in high school, then I moved away. We were roommates in college in St. Louis, then he transferred to Colorado. I’m on his couch in the morning when he wakes up and we sip coffee and watch sports highlights. He’s waiting for law school to start in the fall and I am trying to relate.
During the day we watch the World Cup and play video games and wait for our friends to get off work. At night we sit on high stools with tall glasses in front of us, but we keep our eyes on televisions. There are rumors concerning old friends I used to know and I shake my head and think about what a long six years it’s been since this was my life. When I tell them about my trip and they call me Kerouac and I wince. We make jokes and laugh but something is off and I think everyone can tell.
I have trouble sleeping on his couch; the trip weighs heavy on my heart. My mind is unable to shake this one thought: In each new city I build a fantasy life for myself. As I walk down a strange street I see a coffee shop and watch a scene play out in my mind of a much older me who would spend day after day sitting at a particular table. My hair would be greyer and I would wear glasses. Then, after years at this coffee shop, management would change hands and I would never come back again. The older version of me wouldn’t have to tell myself that this is how these things go. In Boulder, I toy with this thought as the hours slip by in the dark.
V
I did so much driving at night, the stars above me as clear as they were when I was a boy. My hands on the wheel as my headlights burned a hole through the dark space between where I had been and where I was headed. I was looking for something—looking for something in the space between stops; exploring the gaps that had opened up between myself and the people I had loved. To think about it now, I don’t know how I did it. How I kept it between the dotted and solid lines. All that silence, all that space.
