Road Trips. How I love them.
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I still don't have a licence, but I totally and completely buy into the dream of the American open road. Manifest Destiny! Capital F Freedom! I used to be surprised at the sameness of the views from the highways- long wide stretches, plains and hills, shades of green and gold and brown, occasional livestock...- but when you spend hours, really hours, looking out the windows you realize that it's not a sameness, but a slow creeping change. It's the middle. The in-between. Not quite all-the-way change, but a range of shades. I think that this is what makes it different from driving for hours on end in France or Spain or England or Germany. Eventually, in Europe, you hit a border. Here, our interstate misses the distinction that different countries can lend. I mean, when you cross the border into Switzerland, you know it. There are places you have to stop and talk to people in official-looking hats and suddenly all the houses look different. On US highways, difference is couched in similarity. Maybe what I like isn't the idea of discovering a new world, but some secret inside expanse of an existing one. One with rest stops.
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| Granziella's |
I love rest stops. I love the weird non-space you find in the square-mile indoors of Granziella's and the freeway-side taco stands. I love the people at rest stops who linger because they want to be where they're going but they really want an excuse to stand and roam freely through olive bars and plastic-molded picnic tables and surprise regional specialties.
I got the opportunity to go North with the band I've been singing with. Hernandez Hideaway took two cars for its six members, and we headed from El Cerrito to Eugene early morningish after a Tuesday night rehearsal. Hit the road around 9 and rolled at least a good 20 minutes before stopping for gas. It was, of course, only the beginning.
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One thing I dig about road trips is that the non-space gets filled by all this frivolous and sometimes sneakily important stuff. You get to consume things you wouldn't touch otherwise. It's like everywhere you stop is that island Pinnochio goes to where everything is deliciously sinful and you know you have to leave before you get too drawn in. Our violin player bought at least two bags of Pork Skins. A liter of Huckleberry milkshake did it for our bassist, whose temple-bodied organic farmer hands gripped that styrofoam monolith so smoothly, so lovingly. Fritos and Original flavor Corn Nuts for our trombonist. Egg-cheese-sausage biscuits for our saxophonist and accordionist. I don't remember where we were when I saw the Pop Tarts Ice Cream Sandwich. Washington? I only regret that it was breakfast time. Taste America.
We hit the Dairy Queen, Subway, a roadside taco stand, a diner with a picture of Not The Biggest Dog but Close on the register and an EAT sign out on the road, and a decent handful of truckstops equipped with showers and car-maintenance aisles and, inexplicably, display cases of blown-glass collectibles. These were not the highlights of the trip. Of course. We made a fire in the dark in Oregon and drank beer and roasted marshmallows. We dipped our wiggling toes in the river and our naked bodies in the boiled-egg smelling hot springs. We greeted people in Portland and Seattle and a lovely spot called Gig Harbor and played music in bars and danced and celebrated a wedding and ran amuck in new venues and with old friends. That was great, lovely, the REAL point of the trip. But for me, it was during those shared moments in the cars and booths and gas pumps that I felt like we were growing together. Girl talk in the gear-stuffed but so much more comfy 4x4. Conversations in the front seat of the sedan about family and music and choices and directions and bug corpses on the windshield. Pillow organization in the backseat, the naming and slow consuming of Mister Cabbagehead, who rode all the way up but only part of the way back down. |
| Mister Cabbagehead. In memoriam. |
And all that bonding between important moments gets stored like so much LSD in the fat cells generously provided by the wonderfully nutritionless stuff we put in our bellies. She may forget the conversation about surprise adulthood and life changes, but it will live on in the 5 pounds she gained on the six day trip. Just like you can build memory into muscle, I think road trips whip up a special kind of padding that shapes the way you see things, or at least the way you will hold yourself for a little while. Like some physical memory. A souvenir. I wonder if, when we burn off these calories, we'll tap into the same feeling of scenery flying by and similarity morphing into difference while the faces and profiles of our companions stay the same.
