As I drive south from Fargo, North Dakota, determined to make Council Bluffs before going to sleep, the radio forecasts snow in northern Iowa with temperatures dropping to 18 during the night. It is 9 o'clock and I am entering a peculiar zone in my driving, my mind in two pieces, one focussing on the road, the other flashing back to other long drives I have made in the past. In this state, I pay attention to the highway, reacting as needed, but I can really see nothing, no spot on the route will come back to my memory, but it is dark and I drove through this area only five days ago. I stop momentarily and take a caffeine hit through Diet Coke. I am smoking again, but will stop when I am back in Texas.
I drive through Sioux City and the weather reports are letting up. There will be no snow here tomorrow. I am tempted to stop, but on long drives I have this feeling that I must make my goals or something, I do not know what, will happen. As I leave Sioux City behind, I am driving 80 miles an hour, coasting, and am passed by a semi pulling two trailers. I smile as I read the sign on the side: Batesville Casket Company and think of Janet Leigh in her shower at the Bates Motel.
But I begin to relive a drive I took 23 years ago, nonstop from Austin, Texas, to Washington, D.C. I was engaged to Linda and with the passing days and weeks had become more and more convinced that I had made a mistake, that I simply did not want to be married, not to anyone, not at this stage in my life. Austin had been nirvana for me in the few short months I had lived there. When Don and Allen and I were discharged from the Army back in December, we drove straight through, taking turns at the wheel and at sleeping. The first two nights in Austin we spent with Ann and her two room mates. For a couple of years the three of us would share a house near the University, and in those first months had a great time repainting the interior in black with day-glo highlights. As I said, a long time ago.
That day I realized I didn't want to marry Linda, I agonized over how to tell her and was tempted to just call and break it off. But that seemed too easy, much too easy, for me after a relationship that had lasted two years, had seen us marching together against the war in the streets of Washington, making love almost every night, taking her twins out to the parks on the weekends, getting high together on life and on various chemical substances. Linda deserved better than a brierf phone call and that time in my life deserved something more momumental to mark its passing. So, I decided to return to Washington.
At 9 a.m. the next morning, I threw some clothes into a bag and filled my cooler with beer and cokes, left a note for Don and Allen and headed northeast from Austin to Washington in a 1966 VW convertible. The trip took 27 hours one-way, non-stop except for fueling the car every 250 miles or so. The first nine hours were all in Texas: Austin to Dallas on I-35, Dallas to Texarkana on I-30. One problem with living in the heart of Texas is that you have to drive so far to really feel you've made progress. When I lived in Washington, I could drive through four states in the same time it took me to reach the Arkansas border. But the highways were good and the miles rolled under me.
Late that night, 2 or 3 a.m., I drove along the Blue Ridge in Virginia and a million fireflies made the Shenandoah Valley glow out the driver's side window. The Milky Way was above and below me as I took steep turns, barely awake, zoning out as I am zoned out driving through Iowa. But this time, I began to fall asleep, and my car drifted out of my lane towards the cliffs on the left side of the road. I suspect I would be dead now except for a truck driver who raced up on my tail and blinked his lights, blowing his air horn loudly, jolting me back to life. I was able to swing the car back into my lane, then stopped and got out, just standing there, almost drunk from exhaustion, watched the fireflies below me, winking in and out, and sat down under a tree for what seemed like hours.
I drove on down the highway and stopped at the first diner I came to. This was the first real stop I had made and at the diner I drank cup after cup of coffee and I do not normally drink coffee, got strung out, tense, jittery, and headed back east and north, anxious to have the trip over, the trip almost becoming the meaning, the form pushing the substance of the trip, my split with Linda, back into the recesses of my mind. As I drove on, I began to see things along the road that were not really there, bushes became animals leaping onto the road in front of me, the shadows were alive, and slowly, slowly, the fireflies began to disappear.
As the sun rose that morning, I continued to fight sleep, continued to make the VW move as quickly as possible, the drive becoming the thing itself, punishment for what I was going to do, pushing guilt back and back. I irrationally began to get mad at Linda, blamed her for the whole thing, for my near accident on the Blue Ridge Skyline, for my driving to Washington, though I knew she was not to blame.
I took the beltway around Washington, exited at one of the Silver Spring exits, and pulled the VW into her parking space. It was 2 p.m. and Linda was still at work. I opened her door with my key and walked into the apartment, so familiar, like I still belonged there. I walked back to our bedroom, took my clothes off and fell asleep almost instantly.
Not until 9 that evening did Linda wake me up. She climbed into bed and kissed me awake, her body pressed against mine. We made love that night, my body settling into familiar rhythms, hers knowing mine instantly. Even in doing it, I knew that I should not, but I was still on the highway, still in that zone where you do things without really thinking. A sad comment, I know, but truthful.
The whole thing would have been much easier if she had gotten mad at me, had kicked me out of her house when I told her after we got up, after we went into the kitchen and had a beer, that I did not want to get married, that no, there was no one else, and there was not, that I simply was not ready for marriage, but she didn't. She was the very soul of reason, very controlled, very cool. She didn't cry, didn't scream at me, didn't try to get me to change my mind. When I told her I needed to leave right away, to get back to Austin for classes, she told me to spend the night, to rest. The next morning, she made breakfast for me after the kids had gone to school. And then she kissed me goodbye.
I'm glad I made the trip. It would not have been right to end things with a simple phone call. But I wish, somehow, she had been nasty. But if she had, it would have been just for me. I hope now that when I left she closed the door and laughed, howled, shook with joy that she had gotten out of a situation that she did not want. But I don't really believe that.
Just out of Washington, I picked up two hitchhikers headed for Memphis, Tennessee, and we smoked their grass and talked. When I got tired, I turned the driving over to them and slept until we got to their place. I drove back to Austin.
As I pull into the Council Bluffs Holiday Inn, my thoughts are filled with Linda, with that trip to Washington almost 25 years ago. And tomorrow, tomorrow, when I drive through Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and more than halfway through Texas, I will enter that zone again, my driving will be safe, but automatic. And I will be back in the past, always in the past, probably in the sixties, my signifying decade. I will be driving to Key West just after being drafted, with Anthony in the car, or maybe to Arizona to be with my sister when she had some problems or perhaps on a long trip to Manhattan in 1964, just after graduating from college, to work in the World's Fair, but really, just to be alive in New York.
I carry my luggage into the hotel, fill out the registration form, and go to bed. Alone, but not really. I am never more in company than I am when I get in my car and head across country.