The Unique Power of the Roadtrip
Thank Eisenhower for those long stretches of highway
There was a period after my first divorce when her parking tickets—a trash bin of unpaid fines left to me when we signed the decree and agreed all financial business was concluded—when the City of Chicago impounded my car and suspended my license.
I'm a stubborn ass so I refused to pay her fines and went without either car or license for nearly twelve years. Not as impossible as it may sound given I lived in Chicago, a place with an exceptional mass transit system but I was still landlocked. No car, no ability to just hop in and drive away. No sense of the possibilities provided by rolling down a wonderfully long stretch with nothing but wind through the open driver's side window and the GenX playlist booming through the speakers. No freedom.
And so...
The life as I knew it was blown to bits a little over a month ago. I have a Prius (red so it's like a pocket protector with a Clash sticker). I had a destination (Kansas, home of my parents and sister). And lots and lots of road in between.
Heading from Vegas to Albuquerque was not the cleansing experience I was hoping for. I listened to podcasts about news that didn't seem to matter. I used the Prius hands-free phone capabilities to talk to my sister, my mom, a few friends. I felt numb still, shell shocked by the new reality. I stopped for gas but didn't enjoy the moments of tiny Nevada towns or the people I'd meet. I wasn't sleepwalking, I was sleep-driving.
The hotel I booked in Albuquerque was on the cheap. $63. Quality Inn. It was a dump. Pubic hair in the toilet, a small pile of sweepings in a corner. No food within two miles. Almost as if the room was mirroring my life or the current state of my soul. I watched The Godfather Part II and crashed for a few hours. A shower that felt more like a couple of teenagers spitting on me from a balcony and back on the road.
But the second day was different.
No podcasts. Music. 80s heavy metal. Leonard Cohen. Miles Davis. The driver's side window open, my arm resting out there, the music cranking. Nothing but highway and horizon and with each mile away from my troubles, a lighter, more optimistic outlook.
At one point in the drive, I had one of those fantasy images in my head. What if, Peggy Sue Got Married-style, I could go back into my body at 16-years-old with all of my five decades of experience? I wandered around moments in high school. I thought about writing something mind-blowing for my junior-year English teacher. Performing in the same musicals but better. Having sex with the girls I always thought were amazing. The fantasy dispelled as fast as I was moving on the highway.
Then it hit me. What was different about me now and me then? Lots of life experience. Lots of mistakes. Lots of lessons. What, on the other hand, was the same? This is when the highway seemed to open even further and the horizon widened.
A sense of unlimited possibility. Just like in high school, I am now completely untethered from a seven-year partnership that was mostly fantastic but also founded in deception from the beginning. I recalled how it felt when, after graduating college, I simply drove north looking for a place to land. I stopped in Chicago, lived in my truck for four months, and stayed there for thirty years.
Set to the dulcet sounds of Rage Against the Machine I expanded some like one of those foam animals you buy for a quarter in a plastic ball. I was so into the moment, I got pulled over and received my first speeding ticket in thirty years. I didn't even mind because it was an indication of my sense of possibility.
There is a lot of grief going around these days. A metric ton of loss. I even read an article about 'prolonged grief syndrome' when people are so debilitated by the grief they can't function for years.
I feel the loss. I feel the grief. I am deeply sad about the dissolution of my third (and final) marriage but I am also of the stripe that requires getting over all of that. Or at least managing it in that Dylan Thomas way. That ChumbaWumba way. Getting knocked down, licking my wounds, getting right back up and simply pushing forward because lying around crying may feel good but so does breaking shit and being furious. What feels better is resilience. What feels better is forward momentum.
What feels best is driving on a strip of asphalt through the country listening to tunes that were popular in 1984, pumping my fist in the air, and breathing in the air like a thirsty man drinks water.
"Here I go again on my own. Goin' down the only road I've ever known Like a hobo I was born to walk alone."
Damn right.
