Notes from the Road

Eat your heart out, Kerouac

Finally, I have that crucial combination of juuuuuust enough energy, some actual time, and a reliable wi-fi connection needed to check in with all of you. It seems like several lives ago that I was waking up in San Francisco to write one of these as I sipped my coffee at the little desk in the corner of the bedroom that I’ll never see again. California as a concept seems wildly far away from here in the heartland. We’ve been through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Kansas in the last four days. Tomorrow, Missouri, and maybe Arkansas, depending on how far we feel like going.

The crickets are melodious here, and it’s been years since I’ve heard crickets. I’m in love with the weather, which is just what it should be, hotter-side-of-warm in mid-June. As we were walking in from the car I felt a familiar jolt of Midwestern summer vivid from my two years in Wheaton. I thought, this is the air around first romances. I’ve thought about teen romance a fair bit in the past however-many-hundreds-of-miles because we’ve passed through many a town in which there isn’t much else, at least on the face of it, to drum up, if you’re young and in the mood for adventure, for spark. Maybe the kids are more creative than I am. Did you know that the state of Utah is 85.1% Mormon?

My head is swimming, I’m afraid, so all these organized thoughts and observations I was planning to show you with accompanying photos have disappeared into a mental whirl. I can feel the loss of the Pacific Timezone hours, even if time is a lie, and I can feel another heavier loss that’s going to linger in the center of my test possibly for the rest of my natural life. I was going to say “That’s fine,” which is not wholly true but has to be fine enough, because I can’t do anything about its steadfast presence.

Ian and I have travelled this nation before, but we’ve never taken Highway 50, officially known for damn good reason as The Loneliest Highway in America. Here’s an actual exchange that took place en route:

me: It was nice to see a town.

Ian: Yeah. Eventually we’ll be in a part of America where those are a normal thing.

Does anyone miss the rattail hairstyle on little boys? It’s alive and well, lemee tell ya. Also fashionable is braided pigtails on women and socks-with-sandals on apparently everyone, in accordance with a memo that I have never recieved.

Kiiiiiinda fell in love just a little in Austin, Nevada with this outdoorsy super-hetero-lookin’ dude that’s not the type I normally go for, maybe it was the mountain air making me lightheaded as Ian filled the tank, but he had this lion tattoo on his bicep that’s tattooed on the inside of my head now. Ages ago, on our very first road trip together, Ian and I somehow got into imagining an alternate universe where I make a life in Bozeman, Montana with a classically masculine taciturn fellow named Tobin. When Ian got back to the car I said, “Hon, I think I found my Tobin,” and he said, “Was it the guy in those ass-shorts?” (They were long, but tight.)

Yeah. It was. Is.

Anyway, I’m also gratitating toward motorcycles in a not-entirely-decent manner as though getting away from that damn coast is bringing out a love I didn’t know I had for some serious down-home toughness of a certain kind, go figure. Over the past few months of working on the kind of memoir that no dignity-valuing human being would ever write, I’ve had to entertain the unsettling notion that every scrap of identity I’ve coeleced around the kind of woman I’m not had to do with ways in which femaleness was simply closed off to me, what with being unable to wear high heels etc.

Oh we listened to two country songs on the radio and I cried at both of them.

If you’d like to get an idea how Christian Kansas is, I’m still laughing about a coffee shop called Brew Unto Others. It wasn’t possible to find a non-chain cup of coffee outside of Witchita on a Sunday. It was, however, delightfully surprisingly more-than-possible to score a memorably deliscious Vietnamese meal in Garden City, KS, so I highly recommend a stop at Saigon Corner if you’re ever out that way.

This trek is so epic and at times surreal that I’ve been focused fully on our day-to-day without consciously remembering why we’re driving across the country in the first place. Oh, right, some good people in Georgia are paying me to write books and work for 3 years. Is that real? That doesn’t sound real. That sounds like the kind of thing I’d decided when I was little I would love to do when I grew up but didn’t actually go do. What about how I can’t drive? Wait, my partner of 11 years is doing all the driving? How does that make me feel about dependence on him? Unhinged-ly not good? Does that mean there have been breakdowns on this drive? Sure, a few. Does Ian push me to address deep-seated emotional issues in ways that occassionally have me thinking, Tobin would never push such discussions about healing and trauma and related matters? Yes, if you must know.

Obviously you must.

Anyway, this rockscape:

And I’m no passionate Sasquatch believer, but does this not look like a bona fide Bigfoot print?

America. According to American Family Radio, the government is buying up all the ammo and making it difficult for amunition manufacturers to get their jobs done. Did you know that they’re promoting biodegradable bullet parts? “We want to try to minimize our impact,” said the Gun Authority. Ain’t that somethin.’ I should also let you know, speaking of unrecieved memos, that there’s a Gun-Banning Lobby. Beats me who’s paying them or where that money is going, but American Family Radio knows they’re there.

I did not take a photo of the flag in the diner that depicted a giant hand pulling back (a grave black-toned version of) the American flag to reveal a cross, because I thought I might provoke hostility from the eaters of Lamar, CO by taking the picture. I have regrets. You shoulda seen this thing.

I’m very, very tired. Such a life, in such a nation!