Maybe it's not too late to turn pro...

I love Sunday when it’s not football season because I have absolutely nothing to do. 

I gave up drinking a long time ago and living in a small apartment really makes me think it would be a good time to get back into it. I used to be really good at it – I would daresay near Olympic Caliber, but that was back in the day when amateurs could compete. Today you’ve got to be Charlie Sheen-class to even register with the Association. I’m sure there is one.

So, instead, I will occasionally get around to banging out a thousand words or so and throw them into the electronic ether.  When last we met I made some vague reference to perhaps giving you more detail on my trip through the vast expanse of nothing that is the middle of our country, so I guess I’ll do that.

From Virginia until about Missouri, it wasn’t too bad. Green, rolling hills, the odd city and a comfortable familiarity. And then something happened. Looking back I don’t even think it happened slowly, it just transitioned like one of those storms where one minute it’s howling wind and deafening madness and suddenly everything stops and you can hear your neighbors alarm clock.

I mention the radio quite a bit because I don’t have satellite radio. And you can only listen to books for so long and I really kind of enjoy sports radio, which there was plenty of between Virginia and Kansas City. It wasn’t difficult to hit seek a few times and come upon an ESPN station, or talk radio, or a variety of music. It was as thing in America are intended to be, good and plentiful.

If, for an odd stretch, there was nothing playing, I could amuse myself by reading road signs and billboards. One great game is to guess how many billboard you will find in a given distance for a chain of adult bookstores. The number is higher than you would imagine.

It’s ironic, actually, that the billboard industry is being kept going in large parts by two competing markets – adult books stores and religious messaging. If you want to play the ‘guess how many religious messaging’ billboards you’ll see, you can do that too. The number in some places is about the same, but overall, religion apparently has much more money to spend on roadside advertising than do their competition.

After Missouri you are essentially left with, in addition to the two aforementioned types of billboards, two types of radio stations, each with an unfaltering ability to make you want to rip your ears off – religious radio and hillbilly radio. The first type gives you a message that one day you can go Home. The second type repeatedly tells you that no, you can’t, because your ex-wife lives there. With your dog.

After Missouri I had only one chance encounter with a sports radio station for 1,500 miles and it came and went within 30 minutes. For someone from the northeast and who has lived a considerable time in the eastern I-81 corridor, not having sports radio is like not having WalMart. Even around Washington DC where the Redskins have sucked for ages, they have plentiful sports radio.

Fortunately, however, I did have books on audio. If you are interested, The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is absolutely worth a read; and Freakonomics is worth a listen too. I would say you want to listen to the latter rather than read it. While I was totally taken in by the concept of Freakonomics, it would have been much more difficult to follow reading myself. But maybe that’s a problem with me.  I would stay well away from Tom Brokaw’s “The Time of our Lives” at least in audio format. Despite being a fine broadcaster, Brokaw doesn’t have a good reading voice – there just isn’t enough inflection in it. It might be a good read though, I don’t know as I didn’t finish listening to it. It just sapped my will to live.

I couldn’t very well go around listening to things that could kill me when I was being accosted the entire journey by new and terrible things, such as wind-planing. It’s like hydroplaning but it happens when you get hit by a particularly strong gust of wind. I’d never felt anything like it before and quite frankly, I’ll live a happy life if I don’t again.

Of the other new things I encountered, none were as potentially severe. I did lose what I think were some underwear out of my rooftop cargo box early on, but that was a problem resolved with a roll of duct tape; and I did experience the odd sensation of using a public rest room where the lock was on the outside of the door. I’ve never had to use a loo and felt like I might be standing in my very own Deliverance moment. My only thought was trying to figure out what I would do if the door were to be locked on me. It wasn’t a happy thought at all.

Despite the lack of sports radio, the generally poor building codes of Kentucky, the wind of Nebraska, and the swarms of accountants working for billboard companies who are laughing themselves silly at the dichotomy of their client base, there was one thought about the journey which took over and gave the trip some historical gravitas. The positivism of the American people.

That’s right, it’s not the drive, it’s the righteous feeling of our pioneer forebears 

who traveled west with a pocket hanky and a dream. A dream to not starve to death in the increasingly industrialized northeast; a dream to not be killed by Indians; and a dream to not end up stuck on a mountain top in the middle of winter with only two days of provisions and a the Johnson family, who, truth be told, are carrying a little weight and might pair nicely with some treebark wine.

Nothing else can explain how this continent is populated on each coast. After about 6 hours of driving without moving the wheel at all, I could imagine what it must have been like to be in a wagon that, on a good day, made 20 miles. They didn’t have radio stations or billboards, or gas stations or duct tape. They had … a very long trip and more patience than anyone in the world has the right to have.

And they were positive about the experience. They had to have been otherwise they most certainly would have just done themselves in or… I don’t know ... turned the hell around and went back east where the people were.

But I’m sure, like now, back then when wagons were rolling, after a few days the wife said, ‘let’s just go back.’ And the kids agreed and when the wagon didn’t get turned around, they asked, ‘are we there yet?’ over and over and over again until the father had enough and threw them all out of the wagon and made them walk.  When the wagon finally caught up to them, I’m sure he sat down with his family and said, ‘I’m sure it’s just a little further, let’s just go another day or two and certainly there will be something.’

But we know now, as I’m sure he knew then, he was lying.  There was never going to be anything until he finally ran out of ground and into the Pacific Ocean. But there comes a point where even his wife must have given in and said, “there’s no point in turning back now because certainly there’s something ahead of us that will take less time to reach than going back the way we came.”

And she was wrong too. Which is why our nation is so empty in the middle. People were positive there was something a little further along. For those few places where there are people, well, I’m sure there’s a reason. Denver for instance, has people just because they had to hole up for the winter and they burned their wagons to keep warm. By the time summer finally did roll around they had already built a house and barn and had a new baby, so it just felt like home.

And I’m sure, while sitting there in his brand new miniscule log home, listening to the wild animals outside and the wife and children cursing his name in their sleep inside, the Positive Pioneer American stared at the fire and said, ‘I wish I hadn’t stopped drinking back in Missouri.”