On the Road again

On the Road Again - Almost!

The fever hit me pretty hard today. The fever I speak of is the travel bug. I've been planning this expedition, if I can call it that, for almost exactly one year now, September 17, 2010 to be precise. Since that time countless things have risen their head to put a crimp in my plans. Some of them big things, but mostly petty things. Any expedition has to be outfitted properly to have a chance to succeed. We all know that.

But there always comes a time when after so much planning, so many delays, so much contemplation, so much worry, that one reaches that point where they are wanting to throw some things into the car and drive almost blindly toward the horizon. To tempt fate to bring on the worst, but to above all to get moving and doing.

It might be the change of season that brings on the fever. The mornings are now starting to have that crisp feel to them but the sun quickly warms up the day. Something about true autumn makes one want to travel.

Throwing oneself into a jalopy or car or truck and driving toward the far horizon has a great tradition in American life and literature. Jack Kerouac wrote a minor-classic in his novel On the Road. Steinbeck often used the car or truck or even bus as the centerpiece for his books; The Wayward Bus, Grapes of Wrath, Travels With Charley. Ken Kessey and his merry band of druggies outfitted a bus and gave it a name and drove it around the U.S. (all the time high on the drug of your choice.) Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also takes place much of the time inside an automobile driven by two drug crazed men. Blue Highways is a kind of non-fiction classic of a man searching for himself driving across the U.S. in his van in 1978.  In fact, there have been too many books about men or women and men with woman (Lolita) searching for some existential coming to grips with life from the inside of a car or truck or van to give them credit. But the best ones seem to be about those who head West into the big country with brilliant sunsets. "Go West young man!"

The end of the rainbow has somehow always been in the West.

"Eastward I go only by force,
but westward I go free....
This is the prevailing tendency
of my countrymen.
I must walk toward Oregon..."
- Thoreau

So maybe I can blame it on the changing of the season that the names of the cities ahead of me that dot the map have something musical and even magical when I roll them over in my mind; Coeur d'Alene, Regis, Missoula, Butte, Bozeman, Billings, Sheridan, Gillette, Deadwood...I have to go to Deadwood this time. The old western city where Wild Bill Hickock was shot in the back. And Rapid City. Rapid City where Mt. Rushmore National Part is. I have to see some books and get some American faces in the Freedom Book from Rapid City. How can this trip be considered a success if I don't sell some books in Rapid City in the shadow of Mt. Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy looking down on me? Then why not Sioux Falls and Sioux City too? Sioux City Sue! Sell them all books. Then on to Dubuque, the little old lady from Dubuque, sell her some books too! Then Cedar Rapids where the Czech-Slovak National Museum sits. After that why not Springfield, Illinois the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. Sell them some books. Who knows after that. Nashville?

Searchin' through the fragments of my dream-shattered sleep
I wonder if the years have closed her mind
I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin' to get free
From the good old faithful feelin' we once knew
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you
Carefree highway, you seen better days
The mornin' after blues from my head down to my shoes
Carefree highway, let me slip away
Slip away on you
Let me slip away on you

Carefree highway, got ta see you my old flame
Carefree highway, you seen better days
The mornin' after blues from my head down to my shoes
Carefree highway, let me slip away
Slip away on you
- words and music by Gordon Lighfoot

Well, I'm still hoping to have all done in order to start off next Monday. I've gone back and forth in my head about the route to take to Florida. But it comes back to one thing: the woman who wrote the first review of my first published book in 1976 lived in a place called Billings, Montana - which is about 650 miles from here. Billings is about the only city of note for 500 miles in any direction. And from what I could glean playing detective two summers ago, this woman is either dead or seriously ill. The provider of said information would reveal no more to me, a stranger.

So I know it makes little sense to take the route of going through Billings, Montana. But I'm almost sure that is precisely the route I'll take. For in this life one must pay homage to those no matter there status, alive or dead, who have believed in you and extended "simple acts of kindness." If we cannot honor them or their memory, then it reveals something barren in our own soul. And as a great man once wrote, "The only important things for a writer are loyalty, fortitude, and honour and for a writer to be born knowing that goes at least part of the way to being a great writer." - Max Perkins

I've always followed my heart when it was in conflict with my head. Which has always baffled people and added to the opinion that all writers/artists are strange birds. But as I've tried to explain to those close to me, this isn't just about money but a journey of the spirit. And I would like the ghost of the spirit of this woman to know, if I find her in a grave, that her kindness never was forgotten by me. So it would be a small thing to drive 650 miles or more out of my way.

There are a few college towns along this trail and I figure it will take about two days to get to Billings. I know no more at this point. I have bought a cot to sleep on in the rear stage of my van. It seems a little oversized for what I wanted. I must outfit it with some other utensils that would normally outfit a camping trip with.

Say what you will about the state of this decaying, corrupt country and all of its fading glory that saddens the spirit to think of what it could have been, the magnificence of the landscape itself and the dreams pioneers sweat into its earthen pores, still emits something that lifts the spirit like the winds lifts hawks who ride the currents. To ride over it in solitary fashion, with the soothing sounds of a man strumming a country guitar giving off chords from the music tapes I carry that are slow enough to sooth the soul, is the best part of what I call a freedom ride. Perhaps the solitary sailor at sea understands my meaning.

Alone in the Western landscape where towns and signs of civilization are few and far between you see what the pioneer, the cowboy, the fur trappers, the Indians all saw and absorbed. So in a kind of existential way you join them. By them I mean all of them from the first ones hundreds of years ago to the last ones to travel over it. Your worries about life, money, business, are all
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suspended temporarily. In other words you are a free man. You belong to no one and no one can claim you. As your eye skims over the horizon and the rugged landscape you easily imagine from time to time how a pioneer's wagon came over a hill or a lone man on horseback stopped at the crown of a hill or bluff to survey the vast landscape ahead and perhaps make a decision about whether to camp or press ahead. You share that decision with him once again as you attempt to absorb what he saw and re-create his thoughts.

For you know the West is crisscrossed with Indian trails and wagon trails and the invisible path that a lone cowboy and his horse made through sage and Buffalo grass and cacti.

That's the glory of the American West. Every man who ever came West took that freedom ride whether he rode a horse or a covered wagon or tramped alongside his faithful donkey. I suppose some of the late arriving immigrants who rode the locomotives west seeking their fortune and carrying everything they owned in a battered satchel had dreams every bit as big and precious as any who came before them. All of us who dream and follow rainbow trails belong to the same tribe.

Anyway, I reckon this is my last freedom ride. I suppose I'll appear to be a strange bird to most I meet along the way. And surely the story I have to tell will test their understanding. C'est la vie. We'll see how it turns out. I am supposing I'll meet some strange birds and hear some stories that will test my understanding. I suppose that's why old Mark Twain rode a wagon to California way back in 1869. (He had to borrow the money from his brother.) He was looking for some strange birds - and he found them! He too belonged to the tribe I speak of.

I know my European friends who read this letter will not understand the fever I speak of. Maybe you have to have been born under an American Western sky and sun to know about that fever. Gordon Lighfoot the Canadian writer of that song above knew it as he escaped to Los Angeles as a young man and wrote this song.

In the early mornin' rain
With a dollar in my hand
And an aching in my heart
And my -pockets full of sand
I'm a long ways from home
And I missed my loved one so
In the early mornin' rain
With no place to go

This ol' airport's got me down
It's no earthly good to me
'Cause I'm stuck here on the ground
Cold and drunk as I might be
Can't jump a jet plane

Like you can a freight train
So I best be on my way
In the early mornin' rain

Another Gordon Lighfoot song. And that my friend is what the fever is all about. And why songwriters are the greatest poets of our time. For years I have envied them and their genius to get the fever not only in music but on paper. And in so few words.

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I'll be listening to Gordon Lightfoot's songs on my music tapes somewhere as I roll over the vast landscape. But unlike the past, I won't be drinking beer or wine as I am listening. I'll be savoring every minute of it as I know it's my last Freedom Ride over America. When a man gets to the last of anything there is a fondness for it that escapes all words. It's like this big country called America. It's certainly not the country Kerouac saw in 1948 that he wrote about in his book. It's not the country Hemingway traveled over in his annual auto trip from Key West to Idaho starting about in 1932. It's not the country Steinbeck explored in his camper truck in 1960.

And it's not even the country I first explored in some of my battered old jalopies when I got out of the Army in the 1960s. All that is gone and gone forever. But traveling over the big landscape some of the ghosts from those times are easy to recall.

As Hemingway wrote at the end of his story, Wyoming Wine, "It's my country, you see, and I love it. It's my country you see." He knew all about the fever too. The fever is a kind of love fever for a land that escapes words.

Carefree highway, got ta see you my old flame
Carefree highway, you seen better days
The mornin' after blues from my head down to my shoes
Carefree highway, let me slip away
Slip away on you

Always,
Roger