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.”
