A Sunday Drive

[Listen, if you haven’t noticed yet, things are going to be pretty intermittent in the land of the Maillot Jaune for the next several months as I do some heavy disserting, career planning, and the like. I am trying to live by words of my advisor, who told me, “You just need to have no life.” I mean, I have even given up Monday Night Football, and not just because Joe Theismann is dumber than Gomer Pyle. In any event, your patience is appreciated, and I will do my part to put up more frequent short entries rather than six-mile long advisory anecdotes that take way too much time to write, such as this one here. Also, while I’m at it, super-double thanks to those who contributed to the music geek and pop-culture reference discussions. I owe you some response to your comments, or at least a Snickers bar.]

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who are mentally and emotionally equipped to go on road trips, and those who are not. I have no disrespect to offer to those who are not so equipped, as their preferences for air travel, hotel rooms, daily showers and never driving across Kansas are deeply rational. That said, there is a ton and a half of joy to be had from the completely irrational act of sitting down in a tiny room on wheels and hurling yourself across this great land of ours. In early July I set off with Louis, of Pictured Rocks hiking trip fame, on just such a trip, the agenda of which was posted in this space many weeks ago. It was, as expected, a grand adventure, one of those sorts of excursions on which I find myself frequently saying aloud, “I love my life.”

Lou and I have a bit of a history when it comes to road trips. In the summer of 1998, we set off from Indianapolis to visit friends living in central California. This turned out to be the Big Honking Bull Moose of all road trips. To summarize: Day One: Thirty-two hours straight through to the Grand Canyon via Zion National Park in Utah, fueled by Mountain Dew, Ginseng and the insanity of youth. I drove thirty of the thirty-two hours personally, and Lou kept me awake with scintillating conversation and stabs in the arm with a mechanical pencil. Day Two: Hiked into and out of the Grand Canyon, drove to Vegas via Hoover Dam, gambled on the Strip, slept. Days Three-Eight: Grabbed friends in central California, visited San Francisco and Yosemite, ran out of money, drove home via Petrified Forest National Park, slept for two days.

This summer’s car-based horizon chase was somewhat less ambitious (insane), and was centered around the Breckenridge, Colorado marriage of Nate, also of Pictured Rocks hiking fame. Obviously, this necessitated some sort of manly nature trek for the three of us, since Colorado is a place where you can’t swing a dead snowboarder without hitting an amazing hiking opportunity.

And so, on a mid-July Saturday at about 11:30 p.m., I picked up Louis and we headed westward into the night, car stuffed with hiking gear, turkey sandwich materials, and various caffeinated items. If you are going to take a road trip with someone, I highly suggest that you take it with Louis, or at least with your version of Louis. By this I mean someone with the following qualities:

1. Substantial personal history.
2. Complete comfort with a wide variety of conversation topics.
3. Eagerness to engage in said topics over long periods of time.
4. General interest in: Philosophy, history, sociology, sports, persons of opposite sex, movies, music.
5. Extremely low tendency to get in petty disagreements or to dig up old grudges.
6. Little or no need for sleep.
7. Willingness to play various admittedly stupid road-trip games, including My Cows and “Let’s take pictures of people as we pass them.” As in:

8. Makes a solid turkey sandwich out of the cooler in the back seat without dropping the mayo-covered sandwich top face down on the floor mat. This is harder than you think.

Before leaving Indianapolis, we stopped at a twenty-four hour pharmacy to pick up our prescriptions of Dimox, which Nate had recommended to us for prevention of elevation sickness. Four hours of constant and invigorating conversation later, we hit St. Louis, and then the energy started to wane a bit. Lou slept for about two hours in Missouri, and I think I slept for about thirty minutes myself. Somehow the car kept traveling westward at a high rate of speed.

Road Trip Hint: Feeling drowsy? Afraid of drifting into a Missouri culvert? Unable to find an open Starbucks at 4 a.m.? Stop at a gas station and buy a bottle of chocolate milk and a can of Starbucks “Double Shot” espresso and cream. Mix the two, and enjoy! This will keep you awake and beats the holy hell out of Red Bull, which, let’s be honest, is basically a mixture of cough syrup and battery acid, both in terms of taste and direct effect on the lining of my stomach.

Next came what must surely be the opening of some awful novel: “The dawn broke in Kansas. It was raining.” For those of you who have driven across the so-called sunflower state, you know of the pain, the emptiness, the Twilight Zone-esque miles of mind-numbing monotony. For those of you who have not traversed Kansas, it’s not so much that the scenery is boring, but rather that it is difficult to prevent your brain from reaching down into your chest and crushing your heart in an effort to end it all. Kansas looks mainly like this, all six hundred and seventy thousand million miles of it:

There are some variables, of course. When it isn’t raining, it looks like that except sunny:

At night, it is dark. Around cities, there are buildings. Mostly, there are cows and cow fields. That pretty much covers it. All six and a half hours of it. Actually, there is some genuine physical beauty to the sparse, rolling landscape, but the sameness wears at your mind like a grinding wheel on Jello.

In addition to the continual flow of solid conversation topics (the impact of globalization on the American labor force, the nature of father-son relationships, various attractive girls from the past with whom we never quite managed to hook up, whether “Achtung Baby” or “The Joshua Tree” is U2’s best album, etc), we played a lot of My Cows. Here is how to play: If you see cows, you say, “my cows” before the other person, and the cows are yours. You now have one group of cows. The object is to collect the most groups of cows. You must simultaneously make creative use of objects seen along the roadside to kill your opponents cows. As in, “Hey Tyler, did you see that rusty farm equipment back there? Your cows cut themselves and got tetanus and died.” Feel free to invent any additional rules as necessary. Even a spirited round of My Cows failed to prevent Kansas from sucking our will to live, mainly because there is almost nothing in Kansas with which to kill cows. There is rusty farm equipment, but once you’ve used a means of death, you can’t use it again. This leads to desperate stretches of imaginary bovine homicide, as in: “Hey Lou, your cows were standing in Kansas and they died of boredom.” Also: “Hey Tyler, you know your cows? Did you see that abortion sign back there?” (Lightning strikes car).

Very eventually, we entered Colorado, at which point two things happened. Rather, one thing happened and one thing did not. The thing that did not happen was the scenery changing. “Hey Lou, your cows were in Eastern Colorado and somebody told them they weren’t in Kansas and they died of shock.” The thing that did happen was that Louis’s hands went pins-and-needles numb for no apparent reason. This caused us to check the labels on our Dimox prescriptions for relevant warnings (“Do not take Dimox if you are in or near a state beginning with the letter ‘C’”), but there was no helpful information, and Lou’s hands remained numb. Being men, we adhered religiously to the “ignore it and it will go away” doctrine of personal health care.

It was at this point that we took a major road-trip risk: we stopped. No, you fool, not to seek medical attention, but rather because the World Cup championship match was on. Killing your momentum is a very dangerous thing to do on a road trip. You stop for a nice, leisurely lunch, take in a three hour soccer game, and the next thing you know it’s midnight and the snaggle-toothed waitress is poking you awake with a broom handle because she has to squeegee up your drool puddle and close the restaurant. But, lucky us, we not only found the only restaurant in Eastern Colorado (Population: Seedy) that was actually broadcasting the game, we also managed not to fall asleep in it:

This despite a game that was, even for a serious soccer fan, a pretty awful example of a lot that is wrong with the sport. There was a certain weakness of will as we staggered out of the restaurant and climbed back into the car, but since there were no hotels for miles, we had no choice but to press on.

After that, the rest of the trip starts to get a little hazy. At some point some mountains appeared on the horizon. Shortly thereafter, Denver followed, and we drove through it, or past it, or maybe a little bit around it, perhaps to the north. I’m not certain. After Denver was Boulder, where we decided to call it a day, making the final stats for the trip 1105 miles in nineteen hours, including a three hour stop to watch a Frenchman head-butt an Italian in the chest. We were both hurting pretty badly, verging on outright incoherence. I had been awake for about three weeks, and Lou was working on a little more sleep than that, damn him for napping in Missouri. Uncooperatively, the Boulder hotels seemed to be divided into two categories: sketchy and wildly overpriced. Our momentum was not just fading at this point, it was wounded, bleeding, dead, found on the side of the road, stuffed and mounted above someone’s fireplace.

After way too much effort, we finally found a hotel for between nineteen and eleven hundred dollars, I can’t recall. A brief phone conversation with Nate revealed that yes, when you take Dimox, it is completely normal for parts of your body to go randomly numb. That was good to know, as it indicated that Lou was not dying. Then, we took much needed showers. The post-road-trip shower will make you think your momentum is alive again, but really, you’re just hallucinating as you gaze at it hanging above that fireplace. You think you saw it blink, but you did not. At this point you should stay in your hotel room, order a pizza, and pass out face down in it when it gets there. The cheese and oil you absorb epidermally will provide sufficient nutrients for the night. Do not under any circumstances go out to a cool Thai restaurant in Boulder, Colorado and get in a near-shouting argument about the possible evils of corporate homogenization as expressed by suburban sprawl and the fact that there is now a Noodles and Co. on every corner in America. This is no way to end a very long day. Plus, you can’t remember any statistics to support your completely incoherent arguments.

The next day, we arose feeling absurdly rested and incredibly happy to be 1105 mile from where we had started. We drove two more hours to Rocky Mountain National Park, where we camped and hiked. Later, Nate arrived from Breckenridge and we climbed up a mountain, but that story will have to wait until, at this rate, 2009.

So that’s pretty much it for the road trip: Pick the right person to go with, caffeinate regularly, keep yourself entertained, and don’t stop. When you finally do stop, skip the Pad Thai and conversation. Get some sleep.