A Calling for a road trip in the USA
This’ll be the third night sleeping in the car. You know you could find a hotel, but somehow you don’t think you deserve it. You wonder if you can keep driving, but that long night in Oregon flashes into your mind, and you’re not really sure you could handle losing another car. Her name was Jenny.
That’ll be the fourth morning not waking up in your bed. Your joints are stiff, and you have to get out to crack them; snap back into life. The world around you is alien. The Mojave is an ocean, but the sand and stone won’t slate your thirst. You wonder how long it’s been since this whole place was under water. You think that you should write; it’s been too long since you opened the dollar store notepad you’ve been abusing as a journal. It sits solemnly in the passenger seat, tempting a hateful glance every ten minutes. But there’s no beauty out there amidst the crags and the cactus. There’s nothing worth writing about. Or there must be, but you just can’t see it. Perhaps the wanderlust has finally taken its toll; maybe all that spinning has worn you away, eroded you like the dry creek beds and those gaping gulleys. You’ve hardened, but that’s what this was all about. You wanted to get to the core. You’re coring. You’re bedrock.
This will be the fifth time today you’ve reached for the journal, and fifth time you’ve closed it before writing a word. You took to the road to find inspiration, but you’re writing less than you were before. Another hasty wind blows you back into the car, and pretty soon the desert is only another image in the mirror. It’s another pronoun titled town, another night without dreams. And the lack of real memory worries you. You think this trip has been a mistake, but the nostalgia also empowers. You know you can’t have come this far for nothing. There must be something out there, at the end of the world, or you wouldn’t need to find it. You will go to the ends of the earth. That place where no soul has dared to tread before, and you will capture it; document the unknown. You will wrest it from oblivion, and take it back with you, or you will fall. Drive off the edge of the earth, or see that it is round, for your own eyes. But you’ve seen so much, you wonder if some of it hasn’t just passed right through you. So many miles, you couldn’t really remember it all. But you do.
Then by the sixth sunset, you find forest. Redwoods, oaks, firs as tall as the tallest building in your podunk Colorado town. The daylight is gone before you get there, but the night doesn’t swallow you up like it has before. Those stars that you held as companion for so many lonely evenings, seem like pale shades of friends, to the towering old world forest; those ancient sentinels of God’s vast imagination. They were here centuries before you were evening an inkling, a twinkling in your father’s eye, and they’ll be here for centuries after you’re nothing but dust, and wind. You hope you should be so lucky to be blown back to this place; this home to the most primordial of giants, this place where life is earliest. You roll down the windows, and let the humid atmosphere wash you. Even so late, and smothered in shadow, the forest is awake as always; it trembles, it catches the wind like no other clime, caressing a simple draft into a symphony of sustenance. The mountains back home are magnificent, but your forests are far less restful. This place is full of deep-rooted enchantment, but you did not come for trees. Tomorrow you will arrive; you can already smell the sea.
On the seventh day you find her. There are no lightning bolts, or choruses of angels descending from the heavens. There is beach, and more water than you thought there could ever be. Perhaps that call that drove you out the door, that call that led the pioneers to perilous years of settling, that call that drove the Spanish explorers to dare an unmapped horizon; perhaps the call was false. But you do not feel false. You sit in the sand, and watch the sun slink down to the edge of the earth. You taste the salty air, and you listen to the ocean. You hear the breath of the world for the first and only time, because you will never forget it, it will never leave you now. You know tomorrow you will head home. Until the next call that is, to some other distant imagined place. But today, you will write.
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