Probably the smartest question people asked me about my trip was what I thought about all day long. They realized the rigors are not just, or even primarily, physical. However punishing or exhilarating the day’s ride, the physical routine is not that difficult to wake up to on most mornings. Instead of getting up and going to work, I get up and move my legs in circles for eight hours or so. The wild card is more about the head — where it goes all day long.
I thought backwards a lot. Never far forward. Never farther ahead than where I’d spend the night, or where to go with a story. I wrote many parts of stories in my head, and I could see the organization of them. I found my mind very clear for those things when my spirits were up and the roads didn’t corner my attention. (When my spirits were down, I just felt sorry for myself.)
I talked recently to a friend back from her own cross-country trip this summer. She is busy learning the ropes as an intern at public radio and, like me, could not write about the trip itself when she first came back. She needs some distance from it. You can’t see the painting when you have your nose pressed up against it. Addie wondered if she would forget things if she didn’t write now but, with the benefit of an extra year of hindsight, I told her not to worry. She won’t forget the tiniest details for a long time, maybe ever.
I just lived in the present, with flashbacks to the past. Experiences good and bad that went by too fast at the time to really get to know them, came back to me. A joke, a slight, an exchange with someone from God knows how many years ago. A smile on the street from a stranger from another decade. The mind is clear for things like that. Your life doesn’t flash before your eyes but forgotten moments unfold slowly, at the lazy speed of wheels, and big moments are relived at the same pace for better and worse. You won’t escape your past.
Addie thought about death and transitions, and I know exactly what she means.
You see road-kill day in, day out, and the bloody guts and matted fur stay with you in some cycle-of-life way. Just as the spiky weeds clinging to survival _ and your tires if you let them _ in the dusty expanse of the prairie speak of life with heels dug in. I don’t know if she thought about death at a broad level or just at this level but nothing is mundane on the road; it’s all part of a big piece of something. You’re just not sure what.
She was struck by the achingly slow pace of transition and the extraordinary theater when things did change fast. At 70 mph on the Interstate, a sudden change is merely a footnote, a gulp from a Slurpee. At 14 mph, it’s high drama. I noticed this in the Flint Hills of eastern and central Kansas. First there were trees, as there had been everywhere. Suddenly that changed and the few remaining trees stood like lone sentries near farmhouses and everything else was a rolling moonscape rendered in mossy green. Then all trees were gone, and the green disappeared, too. Nothing in the High Plains but dirt and spiky weeds and fattened-up, dull-eyed cattle about to become food kill. And no more abrupt transitions for approximately forever. One ghostly white grain elevator is passed, then another one or two loom in the distance. Even the Rockies announce themselves with hour upon hour of slow growth on the horizon. And in these parts, the horizon is impossibly far away.
At 14 mph, however, you become exquisitely sensitive to transitions that most people don’t feel. Like a blind man with a supercharged sense of smell, you pick up the slightest signs of something in the offing. One breeze telegraphs a changing wind, one bush foretells a shift in what’s around you, even if it takes the rest of the day before those bushes are everywhere.
Boredom never enters the mind. The mind makes lists of the good and bad encountered, rarely finding anything in between. One person is an angel. Another is a jerk. I wrote off entire towns as hellholes based on one unpleasant episode and elevated others to Nirvana with equally scant justification. You’re either with me or against me.
I played mind games. One favorite was to see how often I could look around and see no evidence of modern times — nothing but the road. In this manner, I placed myself in the 18th century in farmlands of the east and prehistoric times in the desert. Norvill Jones, the guy who’s crossed the country four times this way, often looked around and pretended that everything he saw belonged to him. I did some of that, too. A quiet man, he broke out of character and sang out loud. I didn’t.
Those are some of the places the mind goes. Other times, in traffic, it’s trying to keep you from ending your own cycle of life on the side of the road.
If you think you will figure out the Big Something by the end of the journey, you may be disappointed. The end of the journey just makes you want to watch TV, climb into a normal bed and wear jeans again. But not for long.
