Day One... Two Lane Blacktop Calling
It's the way the city starves you that you don’t even realize, like how it takes the stars from you and makes you look for something else to look at. That's how the city chokes me. Slowly. Until I don’t remember how deep you can breathe until you feel the weight lifted off. For me, the weight leaves on the road, not the highway, the road. A two lane blacktop winding up the Shenandoahs just an hour off 66 west of DC, a biblical days-long storm behind me, a heavy grey cloud of mist in front of me, around me. It could be Costa Rica. If the skies don’t clear it could be anywhere. I could be anyone. I could breathe.
I may wax on for quite some time, but if you want the lesson, the moral, whatever, TL:DR, it’s pretty simple. If you’re used to the city, get out to the country. If you’re from the country, give a city a shot. If you’re one thing, try to be another. It’s good for ya. And it’s fun. You know what’s fun? The stupid things. The little things. I’m really looking forward to taking a crap in my camper van. I’ve got the whole thing pictured in my head, back doors open, cup of coffee in hand, view of a lake. From my throne.
The simple things.
Something to pursue.
If you do different then you’ll be different and it’s the differences that make a difference.
This is my fourth time driving across country. This country. I’ve driven Australia, England, France, Italy, But I keep coming back to this one. I’m 42 years old. I don’t have any kids. I have a dog. I don’t know how old she is. Sometimes I say 10, sometimes I say 11, depending on the tone of whoever’s asking and how steady her gait happens to be on the day. Her name is Sadie. She’s fawn colored. She’s a pitbull mutt. Her ears have been like that since I got her. Probably scarred from being chewed up by flies when she was the breed dog in a fighting ring. She had a litter before she was one and a half. No, I don’t know what happened to them. That thing on her face? That’s her lump. It keeps getting bigger every year. It was the size of a walnut 9 years ago, now it’s almost a baseball, but no it doesn’t seem to bother her. It’s not cancerous. Whenever I have it tested it increases in size. Sure, you can pet her. She’s great with kids. She’s great with everyone. She’s a creature of pure love. If you could genetically engineer a domesticated pet hippo…Sadie. Sadie-sades. Saders. Pumpkin. Hippo. Piggy. Piglet. Munchkin. Sweetheart. She’s got a lot of pet names.
A grey haired old lady on a yellow jet ski sprays a rooster tail as she buzzes the ducks on the lake in front of me.
I am deliberately homeless. I spent 50 bucks on gas yesterday and 48 on a lakefront spot with a 30amp plug in Summersville, West Virginia. I picked this destination cuz it seemed to keep ranking at or near the top of every best lake in West Virginia list I found online. It’s almost the end of July, the length of days has just about peaked, and it’s a terrible time to be in DC, weather-wise. It’s already done 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity then went right into completely out of character monsoon season which they call a derecho. In between were a couple of days of merciful dryness when pretty much every person in the city took to the night. Friday night, I had drinks down by the Potomac with most of the only new friends I’ve made since I’ve been back in my birthplace. I’m surrounded by my family, that was the point of returning there, I drove back from LA last November, got home just before Thanksgiving. There were lots of reasons to do it. There were lots of reasons to move into my parents’ basement, I swear to God there were. I stand by the decision. I tell people with pride, even strangers. Yeah, I started talking to strangers, really made some progress with Andrew the Brit at the dog park. Our dogs got on so why couldn’t we? Still felt awkward to swap phone numbers. A few weeks of intermittent point-free text exchanges until the World Cup gave us solid ground to meet. After a couple of DC biergartens and bars for the first few rounds of the knockout stage, we ended up at the British Embassy for the semifinals where his girlfriend works for Scotland business development. They’d set up a theater’s worth of chairs in front of a drop down screen in a big groundfloor room. The game didn’t work out for England, but they’d all drinken away that sour memory by the time we were sitting barside at the riverfront a couple weeks later for my sendoff.
The talk turned to California. Andrew’s friend Rory, a Scotsman with a penchant for road trips himself, loves LA, has spent time in Venice and West Hollywood and wanted recs. Once I started giving ‘em, I found my voice picking up speed and intensity and volume, nostalgic for the brilliant towns of the California coastline and I realized I hadn’t spoken of the place much since I’d left. I don’t know if that was deliberate. But I did have a mission when I came to DC. My mission was to pay attention to my family. Attention is love. I was overdrawn. Since then, my little niece has learned to call me Uncle Jesse, and then Jeshie, and then Jashie. Pet names. I couldn’t miss that.
I also felt like DC itself was calling to me, telling me to find a cause to get involved with, a candidate to back. LA didn’t speak to me me in any of those ways, not so much. So I threw the dog in the car and just started driving. (It was a hybrid Lexus that got 550 miles to the tank which meant I could drive from sunrise to sunset without even thinking about gassing up. It was absolutely fucking mind-blowingly incredible and I highly recommend it.)
My DC mission worked out pretty good, pretty well. While I'm terrible at day-to-day planning, I have a tendency to make big giant stupid plans and then chase after them. My batting average is alright. I’ve nailed some of the bigger ones. Been stumbling the last couple years. It feels good to get a little victory here. Like getting miles on the road. Putting up numbers. Something measurable.
Anyway, the next mission materialized while I was in that basement, in that house, in that city, in that life. I found somewhere I had to go, a couple of places. I turned the Lexus in to a dealership in Virginia and I went camper van shopping and now here we are. Day One. Three forests, Shenandoah, George Washington and the Monongahela. Farmland and parkland and tiny towns with broken phonebooths and peeling paint next to new builds and manicured lawns. Baby deer in roadside streams and cows running downhill to freshly loaded food troughs. Lumber country and red, white and blue bunting and American flags outnumbering Confederate flags 4 to 1. The soundtrack in my gold and white 1999 Ford Coachmen high-top is Willie Nelson, John Denver, Little Dragons, Van Morrison and Alabama Shakes, in case you want to listen along with me and the dog.
We’re taking the backroads to Texas. And we’re taking our time.
