essay mountains of Eastern California, only 100 miles from Indios, the beginnings of the Los Angeles sprawl. I knew that Sam would make me drive through Los Angeles (she aspires to live in a city, but refuses to drive in one) and in my delirious state I thought that if she awoke on the coast after I had driven all night, she would insist on driving the remainder of the way to San Francisco. I desperately wanted to sleep on the beach and decided to wake Sam. I told her to wake me when she was tired, thinking that she would wake me in Indios, but instead I awoke with Sam’s head on my lap. We were in a rest area. She insisted that we drive through the night and had fallen asleep well before sunrise. Normally, I wouldn’t have taken issue with sleeping in the rest area. It was moderately safe, sound, and in my sleepy state extremely comfortable. However, by the time I awoke and took the wheel, the slow trickle of cars had turned into a steady flow. We would be driving through Los Angeles at the height of rush hour. I drove through the largest city in the United States on a pittance of sleep during the morning rush. We planned this trip very well. Through it all, we haven’t been more than 15 feet apart. It reminds me of a story I read in the New York Times about two Buddhist teachers that vowed never to separate. At the time, Sam thought it was romantic and I thought it was slightly off. I now understand that the Buddhist teacher’s vow is utterly insane. 96 hours into our trip, I’ve found myself sitting alone in the City of Lights bookstore reading a coffee table book. Sam is ecstatic to peruse the novels that the Beats may have perused, and she is excited to buy a pocket edition of Howl that will forever sit on our bookshelf. I flipped through a few pages of historical fiction before settling into my current position. My pile of books masks where my attention has actually wandered. A woman dressed in all black has caught my eye. Not because she is pretty, but because she has matched her eye shadow to the color of her hooded sweat shirt, and she has apparently tried to connect the two. She and her boyfriend were reading poetry to each other. They obviously haven’t driven 2,735 miles together. But I am not being completely fair. For example, Sam happily encouraged the detour through Silver City that my father had required as the cost of borrowing my mother’s vehicle for a 6,000 mile road trip. We stopped by the long-closed visitor’s center to take a picture of my mother’s car in front of the sign that named the city of her birth, and then we stole a rock or two for good measure before returning to the road. Sam was game for whatever this trip had to throw at her. At hour 60 of the trip, we pulled into Refugio Beach along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. I barely slowed the car to a roll before Sam was sprinting for the beach. I’m not sure if it was the ecstasy of reaching our destination or the thrill of escape from what had become our sleep-in beetle. But it would be wrong of me to say I slaved away on setting up camp when I almost beat her to the beach. People say that time travels too fast on vacations, but those people have obviously not spent the majority of theirs in a car. We only spent eight hours in the sunlight on that beach before the cold crept up the surf and drove us into the tent, but those eight hours were some of the
most relaxing and memorable of my moderately short life. She’s never camped before, and Round One was a moderate success. We slept on a beach west of Santa Barbara after driving all night. It was beautiful and romantic until a little after sundown when the temperature dropped; I’ve never seen her try so hard to be amicable. The tent that I bought for our trip was a three season backpacking tent, only slightly bigger than the backseat of the bug. It was designed for camping in those seasons when the heat is stifling and warm, and suffocating air dominates camp life. I remember marveling that this engineering marvel would eliminate uncomfortably warm nights by allowing air to ventilate the tent through a conveniently located chimney. I also remember the smell of the first of many salt water winds that rushed through our tent that night, carrying away body heat and waking each of us in turn. In retrospect, I’m thrilled that she at least tried to be amicable. The pretense for the entire trip was to visit graduate schools along the coast and make a decision about our future. She has not let me forget that she has a job offer to respond to back in Madison. So among constant questions of our future, we left Refugio for San Francisco. We traveled quickly at first, and then more slowly as coastal highways gave way to mountainous two lane switchbacks. Behind each curve we encountered a new vista. Behind each mountain lay another, larger, taller, more impressive mountain. And behind each of these was a subtle voice that intoned, “I would like to live here.” The beatniks moved once more, now onto commentary of a novelist of whom I’ve never heard. If I am to believe everything that I hear, I will soon be drowning myself in this unknown hardcover, enriching my mind with soliloquies of the alien cultures of small town Texas. Texas: vast open plains of broken farmhouses and lonely windmills. Where hopes and dreams go to die. That was my impression of Texas, or at least of the Panhandle of Texas. Sam and I had been driving for six hours already when we found our “giant ball of string” in Texas. We had left Kansas long behind and dipped through Oklahoma in a flash. But the plains of Texas stretched on. They loomed on the horizon in every direction, save that from which we had come. Our giant ball of string was a cross, the largest cross in the western hemisphere. We watched it approach from what felt like hundreds of miles away. It passed from the rearview mirror hundreds of miles later. I was not thoroughly impressed by Texas. Perhaps this process of elimination is how we will decide where we will be living and working next year. After Sam and I graduate we will be educated and informed adults. Desired by employers for our creativity and decision making capabilities; we will change America for the better. We will single handedly reverse the recession. But before we launch into such menial tasks, we will have to decide where we are living and working. I’ve applied to dozens of jobs and five graduate schools. It will be months before I hear back, but decisions are also looming. Just like the plains of Texas. I hate Texas. Thankfully the beatniks have moved on to the next room, and my coffee table book has recaptured my attention. There are sketches in this book of everything that passes people by in their busy lives. Here are the cables that lay across the intersections of San Francisco like spider webs, each carefully redrawn from multiple perspectives.
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