Road Notes
You have to eat 600 miles on the first day, just to get anywhere.
New Jersey:
I’m on the Pulaski Skyway. It’s the first half hour of a break-gravity day. An escape velocity day. It’s I-78 to whatever, then whatever to whatever, until we’re on I-70 and straight on to evening. Paul booked a room outside Dayton, Ohio. We’ll spend the day passing all those towns and cities you never stop to see when you’re on the interstate. Will I ever see Pittsburgh? Nope, just have to keep moving. Why? Well, if you stopped, then you might not make it any farther West. It always feels like you have to eat 600 miles on the first day, just to get anywhere.
Louisiana:
So much of America smells like chicken. It’s by far the most common thing I smell. Sitting at a gas station. Rolling through some small town. Someone in this town is frying chicken. Someone is going to make chicken sandwiches or they’ll make chicken 'n waffles. Chicken with mashed potatoes; maybe even chicken with dumplings. I don’t mind the smell of chicken in the air. Sometimes it makes me hungry. Mostly, it makes me wonder who’s standing over the stove. I might prefer the smell of cut grass or lilac trees, but we can’t have everything. Chicken is better than chemical plants and it’s better than the piped-out smell of McDonald’s french fries, which is a low-down lie of a smell. Chicken, at least, is the real thing.
Montana:
When I make it back into the passenger seat after a hundred-mile shift of driving, I like to look out the window with my eyes soft, a little sleepy, and let the landscape blend into colors and shapes and insinuations. I always wish I could catch that feeling and preserve it—the river of tree limbs, roofs, open windows, signage, undifferentiated by the drowsy eye. It’s those uncatchable moments I love the most. Something intensely beautiful moving quickly in and out of view at 70 miles an hour. A white sheet on a clothesline. A woman sitting on her porch.
How you live your days is how you live your life. Where did that come from? Annie Dillard maybe. I’m a wealth of these sayings lately, which all sound like bullshit until you realize they’re deathly true. They only sound like bullshit until you try to live up to them. You find it’s impossible as Everest, learning how to live each moment as it comes.
Alabama:
Just changed the clock on the dash to match the new time zone. Now the car agrees with my phone again, which agrees with every other phone everywhere, all tightly wound to the tick-tick-tick of some satellite in the sky. I was tempted to add a few minutes to the clock, the way I used to on my wristwatch, back when I wore the kind of watch you set manually. I always liked to run ahead of schedule back then. This bothers me, actually, the way every clock in the whole digital world is set to the same time. We have only accurate time now. How awful that feels.
Florida:
My mantra of the day: no feeling lasts forever. The good ones or the bad ones. I woke up with anxious thoughts, chased them all morning into a bad mood. But give it a few minutes. It’ll pass.
Driving by a Target superstore and then a big drug rehab facility inside a rundown multi-story hotel. Outside the rehab, on the sidewalk, a man pushing a filthy old Target shopping cart down the block. A woman sits in the basket studying her fingernails. Another man stands, facing forward, on the front wheels. He has a smile on his face, the captain of the shopping cart, as they all roll toward the promised land. He is smiling straight up at the sun.
See, now I feel better.
Oklahoma:
I’m leaning against the car, drinking a coffee from Starbucks, about to get back on the interstate and drive north. The coffee is good enough. It’s what I expected, which is no small feat when you’re talking about coffee drinks in Oklahoma.
They have a big concrete patio outside this Starbucks with a few metal tables and chairs bolted to the ground. The patio is empty of course. It’s 7am and no one is here. But I can’t imagine it’s ever full. I just can’t picture the kind of person who would sit on the sun-blasted concrete patio outside an Oklahoma Starbucks and watch the cars drive up the ramp onto I-35. Actually, the weirdness of it almost makes me want to be that person.
Brooklyn:
I love everything about shop windows, looking into them when it’s dark out and catching little scenes. I love the bookstores and cafes and bodegas, especially the way they look under tonight’s steady rain. The wooden shelves and counters and the way that particular man just ran into the corner store. He was holding his jacket over him as a makeshift hood, and he stopped inside the door, dropped the jacket, and shook his wet head like a dog. The people inside the store looked like friends, even if they weren’t. A few men standing at the counter, thrown into a warm intimacy with each other by the weather outside.
Missouri:
10 miles of billboards:
*GUNS + SILENCERS. Next Exit
*Ozarkland Taffy
*KJAB 88.3 Christian Radio
*PASSIONS Adult Superstore
*Window World - Windows, Siding and Doors
*BLACK VULTURES CAN HARM LIVESTOCK (Know the Difference)
*Antique Mall - Exit NOW
*~Stone Hill Winery~
*Pain Management - Interventional Pain Institute
*Love’s Truck Stop
*Ozarkland Fudge
*All N Stitches Fabric and Quilt Shop
*Crane’s Country Store - Boots, Bullets, Britches and Bologna
After steady rain all morning, the sun is shining over Columbia, Missouri. Clouds like pillows of fried dough. I see all this green grass and I want to buy cherries and lie out on a picnic blanket. I just want the long, green days to go on and on and...
Indiana:
Any place is a nowhere until you stop for a while. This whole drive along I-70 has felt like a parade of nowheres. But that would change if I got off the highway. If I ever got to know people in some particular town and saw the place through their eyes. If I ever slowed down and drove the two-lane roads. Probably every place can be interesting if you slow down for them in that way. Actually, I’m not sure about Ohio. But certainly otherwise.
Pennsylvania:
It’s raining in Pennsylvania again. It’s ALWAYS raining in Pennsylvania. 200 miles down, 397 left on today’s drive.
Still the rain is meditative. I’ve been remembering my dreams from last night. I was back on that porch in Coldwater, sitting in front of my old house. I was rocking in the porch swing when my cat Rascal came walking up the front stoop to see me, just like it was another day. Like it was some warm, wet day three years ago. I picked him up and held him a while. He was as soft as he ever was. Heavy on my legs. He stayed with me, curled in my lap. At some point I realized he’d left, but I wasn’t disturbed. He’d gone off somewhere. Along came Possum, the younger cat. Poor little Possum, for years he managed a good life despite a bad kidney. He jumped up to see me, still so skinny and clumsy on my knees. He licked my hand again and again with that dry tongue.
“I thought you were gone,” I said to him. “I really thought you were gone.”
Before I woke up, I took Possum inside the house to give him something to eat.
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
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Maybe a question for Paul, but do you think driving through America is a sadder experience these days? Beyond our personal melancholies, are the people in roadside stops friendlier or more impatient, intolerant, angry? I loved these notes and how they spoke to a melancholy that not only hangs over individuals but also over the whole country. Your comment about I-70 being a string of nowheres makes me wonder if interior America is rotting or has been for quite some time. Maybe it never was an energetic place, out there in the hinterlands. You do a good job of capturing the mood of places, even though you are just passing through them.
oh I loved this. captures those fleeting thoughts that trail behind as we pass life at 70 mph!