At the Express Oil Change in Hendersonville in Tennessee, an alert employee noticed we were driving a camper. He got a wistful look as I showed him the features. Taking to the open road is one of those thoughts that crosses more than one mind brought up on the myths of the Great American Road Trip.
The biggest problem, and any nomad will tell you, is breaking the bonds. We are all programmed to be settled and be social and have friends. Some few of us have an unusual set of genes that reject life as lived by most of us. Others have more of a struggle to break out from the circles of settled living. I know I do. It sounds easy to say good bye, to get on the road, to be excited by the prospect of new horizons, but departure is a wrench.
We drove away from Barbara and Gary in a prolonged silence. Well I said, I feel like we have launched ourselves at last. Up next- South America! Not so fast pardner… Layne said, first we have to see Johnny.
I think in some ways being a nomad is easier for Layne as she has a highly developed capacity for connection. Not only has she kept in touch with Johnny for fifty years but she has a whole circle of friends still communicating with each other from their time in Birmingham Alabama half a century ago. This valet Parker found the tedium of his job made easier with a phone. I think I used to wave a newspaper around she. I was bored.
I gave them time to reminisce while Rusty and I walked a little around Johnny’s neighborhood. He grew up in Birmingham and is the total opposite to me in that he hates moving, doesn’t like to drive but he has the most expansive curiosity of anyone I know. Layne’s photos of Mexican beaches have captured his imagination but would never ignite the desire in him to go himself. He marvels from his high rise apartment.
Only Johnny would give me a thick heavy volume of writings by Giacomo Leopardi as a parting gift and then have the capacity to discuss the contents of the book as though he it was who grew up in Italy, where Leopardi is taught in school.
And yet the precision and mental demands of operating modern electronics are far beyond him. Luckily he has many friends who drop in to see how his art is progressing who will take time to plug in his various devices and remind him of the deadlines of daily living.
It’s hard sometimes to tear yourself away and get on the road when conversation is flowing. “I need to get your picture,” he drawls and frowns and fiddles and prolongs our departure by ten minutes simply trying to compose his phone.
Especially when you have finished dawdling among the familiar places and are now leaping off at the start of something prolonged. However our goal for our first night was a banal rest area on I-10 just inside Louisiana. We have to be in California by the eleventh for Layne’s dental appointment in Algodones, Mexico the 12th. This means we have many miles to cover along the interstate in a short time.
We started off inauspiciously when I tried to navigate a short cut in defiance of Google maps instructions. It’ll be dark I said but we can cut a bit across country, it’ll be fun. Actually it was a choice designed to make us start reminiscing about all the other times we thought a good idea was the best way to tangle us up. Getting lost at night in a rainstorm in a banana plantation in Grenada. Driving the wrong way down some old railroad tracks in Bosnia. Backing through a surprised Mexican’s garden in Chiapas. We do, from time to time, get lost.
It turns out there is a place called the John Stennis rocket testing center that sat right across my proposed short cut in southwest Mississippi. This is the largest rocket testing facility in the world run by NASA and decidedly not open to John Q Public farting around in his camper van looking for a missing Interstate highway. Which is probably a very good thing to not allow. However I can say it was another occasion when we felt lucky not to be stopped and have to explain ourselves. There are officials all over the world wondering how a cretin like me found his way into their jurisdiction and they were only too glad to see the last of me. That I got out to enjoy the full moon and pee at the same time on a lovely balmy Mississippi night was what led me not to notice which direction the wind was blowing. My lack of attention to details precludes me from being a rocket scientist among other things, though I don’t suppose peeing on yourself and swearing copiously need be a disqualifier. We disentangled ourselves from our various predicaments without getting arrested and found ourselves in the Louisiana rest area across the Pearl River just before midnight. Our journey to Patagonia had officially begun and happily I had a spare pair of pants packed aboard GANNET2. For just such emergencies.
