The Southern Comfort Tour - Prologue: Points West
I’m so excited and nervous and ready to go that I barely slept.
About six years ago was the last time I embarked upon a solo journey - a lonely bus ride across the country, from Charleston to San Diego in a little over two days. (if you’re bored enough, I wrote about it in here afterward: follow this link and it will take you there.) It was labor day weekend, 2001, right around the end of August and beginning of September, and a time I now think of as the end of a sort of Golden Age - a time when the sight of a low flying plane did not make me instinctively look up, did not raise a question in my mind about where the nearest place to go for shelter was - a time when the most tragic thing that happened on that bus ride was when the soft-spoken illegal alien was escorted from the bus somewhere in New Mexico - a time when I was in love, or thought I was.
It was that belief in love that sustained me through the next few weeks, that eventually got me onto a plane bound for Minnesota (although how the hell I managed to get on one after September 11th is a question I will always wonder about) and, once that love had fallen apart, it was the love of other amazing people I had met in the Twin Cities - Drew, Jen, Craig, Jen, Theresa, Peter, Lydia, Jared, and Beth, always and forever Beth - that made my trek ultimately worth it.
I’m rambling off, so let me get back on track - you’ll have to excuse me, I’m tired and a little cranky and my body is making strange rumblings and bubblings - and that was what happened when I was waiting for my connecting bus in Ft. Worth, Texas, a place that is a stones throw away from my westernmost destination this time around.
I was standing in the balmy late summer night, having a smoke, the smell of diesel fumes, unwashed travelers, cheap cologne and perfume, forgotten, rotting garbage in the cracks and crevices of the gutters, and cigarette smoke all around me. Underlying it all was the ever present scent of the nearby desert tickling the edge of my memory, and a smell that was ultimately relaxing, as only someone brought up in the southwest would understand, especially after almost nine months in the brackish lowcountry of South Carolina. I wasn’t really talking to anyone - I’d had my fill of the lower-income masses that seemed to flock to Greyhound like lemmings over a cliff and, almost inevitably, wanted to engage me in conversation, as though I were the patron saint of the semi-retarded. To accomplish this, I had a semi-permanent scowl attached to my face, and the thousand-yard-stare of the traveler who has reached their wall of exhaustion, and yet has many more miles to go.
Fun times, let me tell you!
Anyway, while standing there, the announcer came on the loudspeaker and told myself and the rest of the zombie-fied bus riding troglodytes that my bus, bound for El Paso, Albuquerque, Tucson, Phoenix and “points west” was now boarding. And for some reason, that just struck a chord - stuck with me for the rest of the trip, and in the time that has unspoiled for me since - the years that have passed, the women whom I have loved, and lost, in that time - the triumphs and failures and accomplishments and disappointments that have come to pass in that time.
And now, I prepare to take another solo journey, my first true one since that time - and I look at my life now; I look at how much I have changed, at what I have done in those intervening years - and I look at how much things have remained the same, how I feel the inability to maintain a connection with anyone for a decent span, either through my own faults and failings (which are, sadly, the culprit most of the time) or through outside machinations beyond my control. And in looking at those failings - at the numerous meanders down Disaster Lane - I am left to wonder if I am, in fact, capable of ever fixing whatever it is that may be wrong with me - if I will ever be able to make that connection and hold on to it - if I will ever be someone that is truly worthy of being loved, and, in return, be able to not completely screw up my relationships in the process.
I’m rambling again - I think there is just a lot that is on my mind, before this trip begins, and that is a big reason why I am taking it. I want to leave behind the things that have been dragging me down. I want to lose myself in the hum of the road beneath my tires - the painted lines reaching out to the horizon; that first sight of mountains beckoning from the distance; the sound of the wind past your window at 75 miles an hour; the scrape of the windshield wipers against rain, ice, snow; that first deep breath of air that doesn’t smell like a city, like a swamp, like a hundred cigarettes and a million pounds of wet pulpy paper crowding up against each other in a mad-dash to get turned into something useful; that feeling of freedom that only comes with the call of the open road.
With that in mind, it is time to meet the travelers who will be making this trip:
Mary, Mary, why ya buggin’?
This is Mary.
Mary is a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder who has proven herself to be quite the workhorse. Although it has not been on my list for quite a while, this is a vehicle that was, at one time, on my “dream cars” list, so the fact that I now own one is kind of cool. Hopefully, Mary has the stones to carry me through this journey intact….although, that would be kind of weird. I mean, really, stones on a girl? Gross.
I Am Jack’s Rampant Wanderlust.
This is Jack.
Jack is my antenna ball. He has journeyed with me from (as it happens) Texas, when he was purchased at a Jack In The Box that Scott and I stopped at on our way to Bentonville (where, incidentally, he lives now)after leaving Crista in Dallas (the main person I’m visiting on this trip) with the intention that once I acquired my own vehicle, he would live on the antenna. When that happened, a year and a half later, he served faithfully with my Mustang, Sally, she who was the Bonnie to his Clyde. With her death...
...he will now be the Yin to Mary’s Yang.
The Man With The Plan
This is Steven.
Steven is your erstwhile narrator, driver, photo taker, observer, poet, romantic, cynic, lonely one, hopeful believer, magician, assistant, writer, muse, and bad-ass air guitar player all rolled into one. Usually in need of a shave, a bed, a cigarette, a cup of coffee, a hug, some lovin’, and a full tank of gas, he is typically obligated to make due without most of those. Even so, he has somehow survived this long, and hopes to make it at least to the end of this trip.
Now that we’ve met the travelers, let’s meet the support team.
Velcro is Swelco!
This is my dashboard, and you can see that there is my main phone (on the left) my Ipod, and my backup phone. In addition, I have a laptop with Microsoft Streets And Trips, printouts of directions, my camera (which you can’t really see unless I take one of those lame-ass pictures of myself in a mirror)
...a
Carton of cigarettes, and a cooler full of various goodies - drinks, snacks, Psilocybe Mushrooms, black tar heroin, and speed. Well, everything I mentioned except those last three items, anyway.
The Burbanks
These are my home support guys. If I run into any trouble on the road, well….God help me, really, because these guys would probably just laugh and then hang up on me. Theoretically, they should be here to provide any sort of assistance I might need while out on this trip. If theory becomes fact, then we must make sure to sing their praises. If not, then we will have no choice but to fucking stone them. And I don’t mean in the good way.
So, that about covers it; my next entry should be from somewhere “out there; somewhere far from the confines of home; somewhere in the direction of the fabled Seven Cities Of Gold; somewhere down the way, chasing the sun across the horizon; somewhere that is, in fact, Points West.
Salud.