Two years ago, we got up at 5am, packed the jeep full, grabbed the camera and pillows and set off on a road trip in a 6000-mile oval across the United States. We breached 18 states, more than 15 mountain ranges, and 12 major highways, through places like Cheyenne, Wyoming… Topeka, Kansas… The Poconos… New York City… Morgantown, West Virginia… and Grand Junction, Colorado. We flew past pancake-flat countryside, red, rolling desert hills, jagged snow-capped mountains and vast concrete cityscapes.

I had so much I wanted to say about that trip. It did so much for me. To me. I wanted to talk about the blistering, oppressive heat blowing across the Bonneville Flats. About the abandoned, eerily silent rest stop in eastern Nebraska. The dewy, thick-as-mud air we couldn’t escape from in the third-from-the-last morning in West Virginia. Sticky molasses sunsets in Missouri. Tornadic storms in Wyoming, and again in Eastern Colorado. Big horned sheep by the roadside outside of Denver and 3-hour traffic in Chicago. Fireworks over Des Moines and bright yellow sunflowers in southern Utah. Sleeping with my feet out the window through most of Ohio and Indiana, and standing in the middle of a long, empty desert road – yelling, waiting for my echo to come back. Watching the clouds rotate out our hotel room window. Long, slow breakfasts before most of the rest of the world was alive. Obscure, distant radio stations fighting the static in the middle of nowhere. Sailing on gas fumes until the next station 17 miles ahead. Hail downpours and blinding sun and driving wind and still, dark night. People and no people. Exhausted and alive. Driving 19 hours straight through the night on the Loneliest Road in America. Jumping up and down on the side of the road at 2:17a.m. somewhere in the guts of Nevada, trying to keep myself awake for the last stretch home.

I had so much I wanted to say about that trip. But coming home was so overwhelming that it took nearly two years to say it.

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I finished up a couple minutes early and raced out the door through crevices between the high rises, still trying to negotiate one shoulder into the backpack, to the bus stop at the corner.

“Has the early commuter come yet?” I ask. She points up the street, where the tail end of the bus is just pulling away from the curb up ahead, on its way uptown.

“Damn.”

Another 40 minutes. I sit my stuff and my self down on the bench, and start reading more Annie Lamott in the sun that’s bouncing off the glass windows across the street. Watching people come and go out of the corner of my eye. All of them walking, riding, talking, driving. Every brain and body moving.

After a few minutes the sun was hot enough to chase me away and I packed up and wandered down the block to the library, thinking about economics and interesting dreams. Picked up four crinkly children’s books. Thought again for a second about Mark’s suggestion. Checked them out and walked out just in time to make a run for my bus that was just rounding the corner and trying again to leave me behind.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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