Chapter Four: Road Trip! - Baltimore, MD
Baltimore, MD
"...the wind bids me leave you. Lest hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go. We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel."
- Kahlil Gibran, 1923
"All I've left behind, another night of weary dreams unraveling. What's been left behind, another time where days of late are far away. Far away."
-Simone Simons, 2012
July 11 - 22, 2013 - From Baltimore, MD to Dallas, TX
I chose to begin my vehicular journey to the south with a commemorative tattoo that would express my admiration for Maryland, a state that has seen me through the vast majority of my twenties. I have always viewed tattoos as being permanent reminders of transition, etched histories forever proclaiming the fluidity of life. The time will always come when the state of mind associated with a particular tattoo fades away, but the inked artwork is a tangible symbol that represents the conscious awareness of the existence of such a state. A memory of time that has passed, but was once indeed the present, and was as urgent and relevant as the so-called present seems to be at this very moment. I chose to preserve my experience in the East Coast as a black outline of the state of Maryland on my right shoulder blade. I went to Read Street Tattoos with Miranda's sister Chenoa who, in many ways, has become like my little sister over the past half-decade. We had been talking about getting tattoos together for years, so it seemed an appropriate time to finally do it, a week before I was scheduled to leave for my cross-country road-trip to Dallas, where I would be flying out two weeks later to live in Nepal for ten months. This tattoo would represent three things: my sibling-hood with Chenoa, a memorial of Maryland, and the sounding bell announcing the start of a road trip that would take me through the delight and wonderment of amusement parks and beautiful retreats in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, but also through dark, foreboding mountain storms and terrifying one-star hotels in New York and Tennessee. A journey that would prove both perilous and enlightening. Little did I know as I endured the slight pain of receiving a tattoo on the back that this road trip was destined to be more than just a long drive. It was, indeed, to be a life-changing experience that would drag me violently through the dark, damp caverns and secret dungeons in my own soul. The theme of this behemoth trip was leaving things behind.
In the weeks leading up to my departure, I met up with all the people I've crossed paths with in significant ways throughout my journeys in Maryland. I said goodbye to everyone who had been a friend or a companion during my time spent here. People I've met in the workplace, people I've met in my various apartment complexes, and people I've met just hanging out in Baltimore. I said goodbye to current co-workers, and I said goodbye to all the kids I've worked with in some capacity or another during the past five years. Saying goodbye to the kids was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but they were another one of those elements of my current life that I had to let go of in order to pursue my Vision Quest. I had to go on alone, and without baggage. Let everything go. The night before my departure I threw away everything I had that wouldn't fit in my car. Furniture, computer hardware, tables, chairs, desks. Basically everything left that wasn't destroyed by the flood was eventually tossed into the garbage anyway. It couldn't have possibly all fit into my little silver-gray four-door 2003 Toyota Corolla. It was midnight by the time I had fully packed my car and figured out the directions to my pre-departure volunteer training in New Hampshire, an eight-hour drive from Baltimore, MD. Nervous with the dread of anticipation, I tossed and turned for most of the night contemplating my plans, fading in and out of an unrelenting restless rest. I had been organizing and preparing for this trip for the previous eighteen months and it was finally going to happen, and would start promptly at 6 am, when I would drop my house keys into my landlord's mailbox and drive away from Baltimore, possibly forever. The idea of leaving this place where I had made a life for myself out of nothing was easy when I was daydreaming about my trip, but when it came right down to it I was hesitant. Not hesitant in that I would choose at the last moment not to leave physically, but hesitant in that I didn't want to let go emotionally of everything and everyone I had let into my heart during my decade in Maryland.
I woke up automatically at 5:58 am so as not to have to deal with my dreadful cell-phone alarm. The morning air was stale, damp and cold in my basement apartment, and I knew before I walked groggily outside that it was raining. Rain, on this particular day, was quite unfortunate. I had a very long drive ahead of me, and I hated driving in the rain, but it was especially bad that I would have to make this trip not only in unfavorable weather conditions, but also with everything I owned packed and shoved inside of my car like those contortionist clowns you might see at a third-rate circus sideshow. I was irritated by the rain, but nevertheless undeterred. I went back inside of the basement and did a double and triple-check of the tiny room that I had called home for nearly a year, making certain I had cleaned out everything I could, and had packed in my car everything that would be vital for the trip. Everything that I left behind would be at the Baltimore City dump in just a few days, so this was the last call. I jotted down my blog address on a couple of post-it notes and slipped them under my neighbor's doors so they could keep up with my Nepali adventures if they chose to do so. Then I stood there in the kitchen silently for just a few quick moments and nodded an affectionate affirmation of thankfulness into the air. I turned around and walked out the door, locking it behind me for the last time. I looked up at the trellis that stood slightly crooked, nailed lazily into the wall that hung over the bottom of the stairwell leading up to the front yard and I realized what it had symbolized in my life. While this particular trellis was used by the landlord as a decorative piece, a trellis in its natural environment is an architectural structure consisting of a framework of lattice or interwoven wood used as a guiding post by a gardener, who ties to it climbing plants or shrubs that are too young and wilted to grow upright on their own. The trellis acts as the plant's stability, allowing them to progress vertically until they are strong enough to continue on their own. In many ways, my shabby little basement apartment was like a metaphorical trellis of sorts, allowing me the opportunity to live cheaply while I planned my new life. It was $100 per week and the tiny room I inhabited was not nearly big enough to house all of my possessions, so moving in forced me to get rid of many of my things. I lived there alone, with not much to do other than read true-adventure books and watch stupid TV shows on DVD. It was here that I managed to flesh out a realistic life philosophy, save money for my journey, and mourn the loss of my previous life. It was here, in this essentially lifeless basement that I truly began to flourish and to grow. I pondered this as I walked hesitantly up that stairwell and onto the sidewalk leading directly to my car, and I was surprised at how hard it was to muster up the courage, once and for all, to leave. But I did. I left. I dropped off the keys, stepped into my car, and drove away. I left most of my possessions in Maryland.
My drive into New Hampshire was uneventful but thoroughly enjoyable. This was the honeymoon portion of my drive, and it was to be the only part that I completely enjoyed without hardships or burdens. I was in a hurry to arrive at the retreat by 4 pm for my pre-departure training, so I took the toll-roads all the way through. My directions had been printed by a malfunctioning laserjet printer that had taken a beating during the flood, and the text was a faded black smudge smeared vertically across all the pages. It was practically unreadable, but I managed to make it out of Maryland, through New Jersey, and then onward through a congested mid-afternoon New York City. The further I drove North, the more expensive the tolls became. In Maryland, the least expensive toll was a mere $0.50, and the most pricey was after I had made it through the bulk of New York, at $18.00. I cursed at the toll station attendant as she lifted up the security barrier to allow me through, but she was apathetic. She probably got cursed at all day. I'm fairly certain I ended up paying more than $60 in tolls altogether, and I made a promise to myself to avoid the toll-roads on my way from New Hampshire to Texas, even though that particular route was a little longer. It wasn't something I needed to worry about for several days though, as my time at the retreat took place over a long weekend. As soon as I arrived in New Hampshire I got lost trying to locate the retreat, which was hidden away in a forested area secured by several miles of unpaved winding dirt roads stretching through an ever-obscured countryside. The further I drove down the road, the bumpier and less maintained it became. The few road signs I passed by did not seem to correlate with my printed directions, so I drove through until I came upon a secluded house sitting up on a hill several yards away from the road. There were a few kids and adults swimming in an above-ground pool, and so I rolled down my driver-side window and waved at them frantically to get their attention. The distance between us was far enough that I had to scream. I asked them if they knew where the Toah Nipi Retreat was located, but they seemed hesitant to respond. They were suspicious of me, I guess. Finally, after I had repeated myself several times, and after an awkward silence, I started to roll my window up and drive away when one of the women in the pool responded. She said the retreat was two miles up the road, and I was heading in the right direction. So in retrospect, I suppose I wasn't lost at all, I just thought that I was. I thanked her, but she didn't respond. She only stared, along with everyone else. They had stopped swimming, the water in the pool was motionless. Even the dog who was sitting up on the deck surrounding the pool was completely still, its head cocked to the side, its eyes fixed on me from across the yard. They watched me as I drove away.
I arrived at Toah Nipi with news coverage of the Trayvon Martin case blaring from an AM radio station in my car. The verdict had been announced earlier in the day, Zimmerman was found not guilty, and Rush Limbaugh was snorting and gloating with such an intensity he was near hysterical. I turned my radio down as soon as I saw the sand-blasted wooden sign: "Toah Nipi: An Inter-varsity Retreat Center." The circular sign had an empty canoe sitting in a sun-drenched lake intricately carved into the center, and two Christian fish symbols sandblasted on either side. I parked in front of the sign, stepped carefully and painfully out of my car and snapped a picture. My back was killing me, and my field of vision was unsteady but after nearly eight hours of driving, I had made it to the first destination of my road trip. I smiled as the heat of the sun beat down on my face. The next several days was significantly more intense than I had assumed it would be. While my assumptions had been that I would be learning about how to cope with the new experiences I would encounter as an outsider in Nepal, the training turned out to be much more than that. I was there with fourteen other volunteers, all traveling to different locations around the globe. They were people from all over the world: Ecuador, Korea and the United States, to name just a few places. These were folks from different backgrounds, cultures and locations with widely different motivations and goals, but we all had something in common: we were all there to start our individual journeys. We had all put our lives on hold, so to speak, in order to give something back to the world that would extend beyond ourselves. Some of us were going to another country for a year, some for half a year, some for a few weeks. I was going to Nepal for ten months to volunteer at an orphanage in Kathmandu, others were going to various places in Asia, Europe and Africa to do conservation work or help to build houses in poor or disaster-struck areas.
I spent a total of four days at the retreat, living with my fellow volunteers in a beautiful little cabin that overlooked a small lake surrounded by acre upon acre of exquisitely-maintained woods and wildlife. The air was so crisp and clear that it seemed almost artificial; a dizzying contrast from the polluted city I had left behind. The retreat housed several buildings; mostly cabins and a huge, mansion-seeming main facility that acted as the dining hall, office and base-of-operations sitting directly in the middle of an expertly-manicured lawn boasting a variety of rich green foliage and shrubbery carved into shapes of divine beauty with Edward Scissorhands-like perfection. The scenery surrounding the lawn was made up of quaint sidewalks, stairways and stone paths leading quietly from building to building. These pathways had obviously been crafted with the utmost care, utility and aesthetic respect. Above was a translucent-blue with patches of clouds that held just a hint of light gray, and below a green so dark and lush it was hard to look at. Toah Nipi was fully staffed with very friendly people that took care of our every need during our weekend stay. The cooks made excellent food for breakfast, lunch and dinner and the waiters and waitresses kept the tea and coffee flowing all day and night. The United Planet teaching staff were well-prepared and made certain that our days flowed with a sense of timing that was just relaxed enough to feel comfortable, yet fast-paced enough to make us all appreciate the urgency of every lesson. We learned an assortment of essential facts related to international travel and volunteer work: what to pack in our suitcases, and how to pack those things efficiently, how to deal with culture shock, how to travel as safely as possible and what to do in case of an emergency. The mornings and afternoons were dedicated to group discussions, organized lessons, PowerPoint presentations and physical exercise. There was a finely-tuned balance between the classroom-oriented lessons and the outdoor activities, allowing us the opportunity to fully participate in the process of learning, in spirit and in body. Our nights were free, and most of us volunteers used this time to get to know one another. We had a vast array of leisurely activites available at our disposal; we could canoe on the crystal-clear lake, play games at the main building and dining hall, and explore the vast woods that circled the encampment. We stayed up late into the nights, playing cards, exchanging stories and reading each others books (most of us were avid readers and brought several books to the retreat). On a few nights we laid outside on the cold sand at midnight, the lake's lazy water beating gently just a few steps away from our bare feet, and we stared up in wonderment at what seemed like a thousand layers of stars blanketing an unfiltered sky almost completely unchallenged by the lights of distant cities. We lay head-to-head and talked about our fears, our plans and our motivations pertaining to the journey ahead, each one of us far removed from our pasts and far enough away from our futures that, at that moment, the only things that mattered were the stars above our heads, entangled and glowing in the eternal dance of a universe so vast and ancient it was incomprehensible. During the course of that weekend in New Hampshire, something changed inside of me; something died and something else was born. The friends that I made, although I will likely never see most of them again, were like my closest friends in the world and the landscape that we traversed together at Toah Nipi was like a most familiar and cherished childhood playground. I learned a lot that weekend, and most of what I learned was about friendship and the value of human companions. During the eighteen months that I had prepared for this trip, I spent the majority of my free time alone in my apartment in quiet contemplation, and my new friends at Toah Nipi helped to snap me back to the reality of humanity and its interconnectedness. On the final night at that gorgeous retreat, we sat around a campfire and ate smores, just like back when I was in Summer camp as a child. A few volunteers took turns playing an acoustic guitar, and we sang, danced and laughed into the early hours of morning until the flames of the fire, once burning brightly and illuminating our faces with orange and blue ferocity, flickered out dimly and were finally put to rest with a few buckets of water. The next morning after our final lesson, we were provided with two big pieces of poster-board and asked to write down one word per person on each board. One board was "things I will take with me," and the other was "things I will leave behind." This was to be expressed in a single word. On the board that was dedicated to things that we would chose to take with us, I wrote "people." On the board for things being left behind, I wrote "fear." At noon we all said our teary goodbyes and went bravely forward along the separate but parallel paths of our individual journeys.
I packed my things back into my Toyota Corolla, said goodbye to my new friends and headed back onto the road with my grainy, blotted-out map and directions that would tell me how to get to my next destination: Hershey, Pennsylvania. This was the shortest drive of my trip, and should have been a mere six hours, but ended up taking over nine hours due to relentless traffic and my propensity for getting lost. I stopped to ask for directions three times, once in New Jersey and twice in New York. The final time I stopped, I tore up my original MapQuest directions and angrily tossed them in the trash at some random real-estate office on the outskirts of New York. The two women who worked there were nice enough to give me very simple directions to my destination which took up a third of a page, whereas MapQuest wanted to send me all over the country with three entire pages full of convoluted directions. I ended up taking a single highway for almost 500 miles, which lead me right into Hershey, PA. I found a Motel 6 and got a room for two days. I then drove up the street to the nearest bar and bought a six-pack of Heineken, which I took back to my hotel room. I'm not a drinker, but after my long, exhausting trip from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, I was so stressed out that my nerves were frayed and my mind muddled. I just wanted to relax. I unpacked the essentials from my car and lugged them up to my hotel room on the third floor, using quite possibly the slowest elevator in the world. I drank two of my beers that night, and the remaining four would stay with me for the entirety of the rest of the trip. I never ended up finishing the six-pack. I fell asleep that night watching reruns of Frasier on the Lifetime channel in my hotel room.
The next day I went to Hershey Park. It was my first time at an amusement park in a decade or more, and it was an amazing day. My greatest memories as a child involve frolicking about at Six Flags Over Texas, one of the biggest amusement parks in the country, and as I was originally planning my road trip, I thought it would be fun to relive that childhood joy by riding roller coasters and playing at a water park all day with reckless abandon. I had never been to an amusement park by myself, and I highly recommend it. When you go alone, you don't have to haggle with friends over which rides to go on, you don't have to wait for anyone, and you can do whatever you want without having to discuss it with a group. To my delight, the lines for the roller coasters were not long at all, and I suspect this was because of the relentless heat that day. Everyone was trying to stay cool in the water park, avoiding the roller coasters until later in the evening. I spent eight hours riding roller coasters. Some of them I rode over and over again. It was a fantastic, incredible, fun-filled day. Hershey Park is definitely the best amusement park I have ever been to, and quite possibly the best place in the entire world. Everywhere there is chocolate, candy, ice-cream, fudge, funnel cake and any variety of overpriced tooth-decaying sweets you can imagine. I ate as much as I could stomach. There is amazing, bad-for-you food all over the park. Nachos, burgers, pizza, pretzels, hot-dogs, sandwiches and sodas of all varieties. I had a little bit of everything. There are shops that sell t-shirts, coffee mugs, postcards, stuffed animals, and other useless souvenirs, but I bought a bit of every one of these as well. I saw this as my last day to truly splurge, to really have a grand time before the reality of the journey that lay before me was actualized. After I had eaten half my body weight in junk food and rode each and every roller coaster repeatedly until I felt like I was going to throw up, I made my way toward the water-park included in the ticket cost, called "The Boardwalk." I spent the remainder of my day here, swimming, going down water slides and riding water rides. After the sun went down I enjoyed the more moderate, less intense rides that Hershey Park has to offer, and topped the day off with a slow, tranquil ride on the ferris wheel, where I gazed upon the entirety of the moonlit park with a nostalgia that cannot be matched. I stayed in the park until staff started to herd people out, at which point I visited Chocolate World, located at the entrance of the facility. I purchased some t-shirts and chocolate and went on one last ride - a tour of a fake chocolate factory that ended with handouts of free, fresh Hershey's chocolate bars. It was a magical day, and despite my exhaustion, I didn't want it to end. As I walked back to my car near midnight, I contemplated going back the next day and staying in PA for a bit longer, but I knew that my journey needed to continue forward. Back at the hotel room a few miles away, I fell asleep watching some indie movie on HBO and drifted off into a deep sleep.
That night I had a dream that might have been a nightmare. I dreamed that I was living on the top floor of a multistory apartment building and I had an enemy who lived downstairs. I don't know who he was or why we were enemies, but while I was away, this guy broke into my apartment and destroyed my floorboards by hacking them to pieces with some kind of blunt and sharp instrument. When I got home, I saw that my door had been kicked open and the floor was completely torn apart. I knew immediately that my downstairs neighbor was the culprit. When I began to examine the damage, I saw, to my horror, that there was a massive, cave-like enclosure underneath the floor which had been hidden by the wooden floorboards. This cave was sectioned off into cavernous partitions by what appeared to be gigantic gray and orange-colored plastic bins, each one so deep that all I could see when I looked down inside was darkness. They were very similar to the bins that I had crammed all of my possessions into when I was packing my car for the road trip, the same bins that had saved some of my possessions when the flood came. I could hear sounds coming from inside of each one, and they were familiar sounds. The voices of my Maryland friends, and of painful East Coast memories were echoing eerily with reverberation from each bin, as if the sounds originated a thousand feet deep. They were crying out to me in desperation and pain. I got on the phone and called the police, but the officer who answered the phone simply told me that they were not going to come out to my apartment again (again?), and that I needed to handle the situation myself this time (this time?). I slammed down the phone and raced downstairs to confront my neighbor, but instead was greeted by my ex-girlfriend Miranda at the bottom of the stairwell. She said nothing. She simply shoved me aside and power-walked up the stairs with a sort of daft determination. I followed her, panicking, trying to form the words from my mouth to warn her of the dangers inside the apartment, but either I couldn't speak or she wouldn't listen. I'm not sure which one it was - it might have been both. As she got closer to the top of the stairwell, the noises echoing from my past began to get louder and more violent. They wanted blood. They wanted her down there with them. I raced up the stairs and grabbed her arm right as she was about to mindlessly step into the cavernous plastic bin that lay closest to the door. I managed to pull her away, but it wasn't easy. She was literally being sucked into the bin as if there was a super-powered vacuum at the bottom. The voices deep inside the cave underneath the floor were relentless now; loud, booming and absolutely evil. After a brief struggle I pulled her away and we both fell into the hallway and onto the floor directly outside of my apartment. We barely managed to avoid tumbling down the stairs. I had saved her from falling into the abyss of my past, from becoming merely a frightful memory. I woke up with that falling sensation that so often accompanies the sudden termination of a terrible dream.
I thought about my dream a lot during the next few days. There wasn't much else to do but think. After I had reluctantly left Hershey, PA (with a stomach-ache), I began the drive toward Tennessee that I assumed would be monotonous, but turned out to be rather treacherous. My original plans had included a visit to Graceland and an overnight stay in Nashville, TN so I could pay tribute to one of Rock & Roll's greatest heroes and wander around Musicland, but things didn't turn out the way I had planned. They never do. When I first arrived in the state of Tennessee, the weather had been beautiful and the landscape all around me was breathtaking. The clouds were like puffy white marshmallows that had been put into a microwave for a few seconds and had mushroomed out with thick gooey-ness that just barely melted over the mountaintops. The scenery was incredible, and I thought many times during my drive that I should get out and take a picture, but the stress of driving coupled with my determination to arrive at the next destination on schedule prevented me from doing so. I pressed on, laying my foot down heavily on the accelerator and speeding through much of the first few hundred miles of Tennessee, listening to CDs and thinking about my dream and what it meant. It was during a contemplative moment such as this when I looked up and realized that the sky had become dark and menacing. The sunlight had disappeared and was replaced by clouds that were almost black and were lined thinly with vague remnants of the golden rays which had ruled the skyline only a few minutes earlier. Little droplets of baby rain-spots began to splatter onto my windshield and, to my dismay, were multiplying by the second. Two minutes later it was storming and raining with such an intensity that there was literally no visibility on the highway. I had flipped the switch to turn on my malfunctioning, withered windshield wipers but it was to no avail. I pulled over to the side of the road, put my emergency blinkers on and watched the pouring rainwater dance maniacally on the windshield before they were quickly smeared into a mixture of mud, grease and bug intestines thanks to my useless windshield wipers. I silently cursed myself for not having them changed before I left Maryland. I then turned off my Epica CD and started to flip through the FM radio station channels, searching for news of the storm. As it turns out, this particular storm was a one-in-a-thousand kind of beast, and had descended upon Tennessee with little to no warning. The general consensus was to stay off the roads until the storm had passed unless driving was an absolute necessity. I was quite irritated, as I had only driven a few hundred miles, but I made the decision to cancel my travels for the remainder of the day and immediately seek shelter in the form of the first hotel I came across. I pulled back onto the highway with my emergency lights blinking and drove something like ten or fifteen miles per hour until I saw through black rainwater the dim outline of a sign advertising lodging located a few yards from an exit. I took the exit and drove onward for a few minutes until I came across the hotel advertised. I parked in the front, right outside of the office. I don't remember what the name of it was, but it looked exactly like the hotel that you see in every horror movie about teenagers being brutally murdered by a masked hotel clerk. It was small, shabby and lit only by the occasional bouts of lightning that flashed through the sky directly behind the building. It was during these brief blue streaks that I could see the outline of the hotel clerk as a silhouette through two thick grimy glass doors. He was staring at me from behind his desk, lighting a cigarette. I was the only car in the parking lot. On the outside door was a paperback-sized sign with no words, only an image of a handgun circled in red with a thick line slashed through it. Well, at least guns aren't allowed here... I put my jean-jacket over my head and stepped out into the rain, annoyed with myself for not having the foresight to bring an umbrella. I ran up to the front door, which was locked. I waved frantically at the clerk, who stared at me for too long, and then buzzed me in. I walked through the two doors and after an awkward moment of silence during which he seemed to size me up, I finally asked him how long the storm was supposed to go on, and he said he didn't know. "Probably all day and into the night," he said as he snubbed out his half-smoked cigarette into a plastic ashtray overflowing with butts. The small office was unkempt and smelled of dead animals and stale smoke. I asked him how much the rooms were, and he said $35, for me. I hesitated. That was insanely cheap. I asked him how the area was in terms of crime, and if my things would be safe in my car outside (I didn't want to lug anything out into the rain). He hesitated and said something like "ehhhh, you know. It's as safe here as any other place," through a crooked smile of yellowing cavities and amphetamine-destroyed tooth enamel. He lit up another cigarette. Without saying a word, I turned around, walked out the double-doors and stepped back into my car. I had half-expected the doors to be locked again, but thankfully they were not. I jumped back into my car and drove away, speeding directly into the violent storm.
I drove on until I found a Super-8 motel in Kingsport, TN which had very friendly and sane-looking staff at the front desk. Run-of-the-mill hillbillies. I spent the night there, in Room 111 with an extra-large mushroom and jalapeno pizza, a 2-liter Pepsi and a marathon of South Park playing on a slightly fuzzy TV screen while I dozed into sleep. Occasionally I woke up momentarily to groggily listen for the sounds of the rainwater pittering against the glass hotel window, hoping it would let up by morning. To my astonishment, the next day at 9 am was brilliant; not a cloud was in the sky and the sun was shining so bright it hurt my eyes to stand outside of the hotel room door. Satisfied with the weather, I left before the 11 am checkout time and headed back on the road, only to experience a repeat of the previous day. I drove for a few hours through Tennessee and then was forced off the road by another sudden violent storm. This storm was significantly worse than the one the day before, and I felt defeated as I pulled into a Ramada Inn, and even more defeated when I fled the Ramada Inn, driven away by a steep price for what was sure to be a sub-par hotel room with bad movies playing on cable TV and a noisy, buzzing refrigerator. I then drove aimlessly for an hour through the bare-visibility of an obnoxiously persistent TN thunderstorm, searching for a reasonably-priced room. I settled on a Days Inn and spent the night inside, watching the terrible Johnny Depp remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and eating Skittles and half of a disgusting peanut butter protein bar I had purchased somewhere in New Jersey. I had eaten so much greasy junk food during my road trip that I just couldn't bare to go back out into the storm searching for another Subway or McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts to satisfy my quickly growing hunger for processed food. It is quite easy to eat an excess of overpriced not-really-food when on an extended road trip. You just drive and drive and drive until you feel hungry from exhaustion and too much gas-station coffee, you spot a road sign advertising a variety of fast-food options, and then choose your poison. I had definitely taken this artery-clogging route during my excursion, and I paid the price. I fell asleep that last night in Tennessee feeling very sick and very irritated. I was tired of driving, tired of rain, and VERY tired of Tennessee. Tomorrow, I decided, I would escape and never come back.
I had trouble waking up the next morning, and found myself lying in a bed-full of skittles (the "riddles" variety) with an aching stomach and a craving for donuts, cream-cheese bagels and jet-black coffee. I checked out of what was to be my final hotel room, made a silent decision to skip Graceland altogether, got my food and coffee and drove the hell out of Tennessee as fast as my Corolla would allow. The scenery changed drastically as my little car sped clunkily past the sign announcing my arrival into Arizona, where I would spend the majority of the drive that day. Tennessee had been a landscape of mountains and hills; a wasteland of storms and dark waters. Arizona was in sharp contrast to this, sporting little but dry, hot flat-lands that seem expertly designed to make a weary traveler lose all hope in himself. I had never understood what "highway hypnosis" was until that day. I had learned, in driver's education class, when I was seventeen, that if you drive for too long on a stretch of highway that is absolutely barren and boasts nothing but the same boring scenery for miles upon miles, you tend to drift off into a state of zombification, and can even forget that you're driving. I had to constantly turn up my music, turn my air conditioner on full-blast and sing as loud as I possibly could in order to escape the dangerous boredom of driving in Arizona. It was life-or-death here in the desert. Falling asleep at the wheel is a serious situation. When I first spotted the sign that marked my transition from Tennessee to Oklahoma, I rejoiced like I have never rejoiced before. It was only two more hours from this landmark and I would be at my cousin's house in Oklahoma City, where I could relax and recuperate from my long, difficult journey. After a few days there I would drive a measly four hours into Texas and arrive at my road trip's final destination: my parent's house. As the stress and tension and uncertainty of my plans started to melt away into the humid heat of Oklahoma, I began to assess my dream back in that hotel room in Pennsylvania. It had only been three days, but it felt like a million years had since passed. New Hampshire and Hershey, PA had been so joyful and exciting; so carefree and excessive. But Tennessee and Arizona had been so harsh and unforgiving; bleak and menacing. Now that my trip was winding down I could start to look at the experiences from hindsight, and I realized that a million years HAD passed since then. The years were metaphorical. The struggle of driving had been a mixture of many different factors, and the difficulty wasn't necessarily the drive itself, but what the length of the drive represented. I was leaving everything behind, traveling far, far away from my former life, and in those several days on the road I had gone through a sort of transformation that wouldn't have been possible if I had simply taken a flight to Texas. The trip started with the intimacy of meeting like-minded friends and was followed by a rousing day of absent-minded thrill rides and gluttony, but soon developed into a frenzy of dark storms and changes of plans, requiring an immediate ability to face challenges and accept life on life's own terms. The whole experience almost perfectly symbolized not only the life that I was leaving behind, but also the life that I was coming into, and even the challenge of life itself.
As I drove into Oklahoma City and searched for my Cousin's house, I realized what my dream in Pennsylvania had truly meant: the house was my world, and the apartment my personal sanctuary. My evil neighbor was not really evil - he was just an aspect of myself that desired I know and see the truth. The secret caverns he revealed underneath the floorboards contained the remnants of my past that had been sacrificed for my new journey, and of course, I wanted to prevent Miranda from falling deep inside because I didn't want to lose her. I didn't want her to become a mere memory. But the difference between the life that was decaying underneath the floorboards and the life that I was living up above them also symbolized the fact that I had grown. I had escaped from the caverns and pulled myself up and out of their fleshy physicality and transcended them altogether. The top of the house, my apartment, was the next stage of my existence, and it was above the physical. It was my new spiritual abode, and it was just a little bit closer to the heavens. It wasn't until the floorboards had been ripped away that I realized how far I had truly come, the same realization of growth that the floodwater had forced me to realize way back in Maryland. I was dying, but I was also becoming more alive, because the door to life is the same door that death brings. As I pulled into my Cousin's old countryside driveway I saw her through a field in the distance walking her dog. As I turned the key toward myself and terminated the engine, everything came into perspective. My fear had been left in New Hampshire, even as I wrote the word on that piece of white poster-board. I had left most of my past in Pennsylvania, and the roller coasters were like the profound inertia of moving away from things, but you always return to the same place, yet somehow it is different than it was when you left. The storms of Tennessee had purified my heart of the agony of regret, but had cautioned my soul to be alert and steadfast during my journey East. Much like the flood back in Maryland that had claimed my physical possessions, the storms had taken what was left of my past by brute force. It had been necessary, and the universe took care of it; the universe has always taken care of me. I got out of the car, stretched, and laid down on my back in the coarse grass, closed my eyes and smiled. All things are new.
I spent a few days with my Cousin, her sister (my younger Cousin) and her husband in Oklahoma. They live a quiet and peaceful life in the country on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. They are far enough away from the city to have a sense of solitude and security, yet close enough to have access to all the wonderful and necessary things the city can provide. They live a life that is drastically different from my old life in Baltimore; my life was fast-paced and stressful and took place in the midst of a city haunted by noise and air pollution at all hours of the day and night. Their life, however, is marked with a sense of stillness punctuated by the sounds of birds chirping and the gentle breeze of a lazy wind blowing its unsteady breath amongst the gaps in the trees outside. In between these gaps, people play golf. My cousin's house is smack dab in the middle of a huge golf range, where her husband works. He doesn't have to drive to work in the morning because he lives on the same property where he works. My cousin is preparing to finish school and become a full-time teacher, so most of her time is spent inside, quietly studying. It was in this silent and comforting environment that I was able to unwind and clear my head before my final drive into my old hometown. I spend time with several members of my family and visited a few hotspots in downtown Oklahoma. But mostly I stayed inside and caught up with my Cousins. We watched some old home videos I had brought with me and we reminisced about the past. We drank coffee. I gave my cousins some books and DVDs I didn't need anymore. After a couple of days and nights, I felt clear-headed enough to take off again, and drive my final few hundred miles into Texas. I would leave for Nepal in just two weeks. I said goodbye to my family in Oklahoma, re-packed what was left of my life into my amazingly resilient and unsuspectingly spacious 2003 Toyota Corolla and drove away toward Texas. On my way there, I used my cellphone to contact a reputable tattoo shop in Dallas and set up an appointment for the same day.
I pulled into the tattoo facility in downtown Dallas after a four-hour drive. My best friend Ashley was waiting for me there. I hadn't seen her in several years, and had arranged for her to meet me here so I could see her before I went to my parent's house, which was the road trip's final destination. We caught up for a few minutes and then went inside the shop where I was right on time for my scheduled appointment. I had decided when I was in Oklahoma that it made since for this behemoth road trip to end in the same way it had begun: with a tattoo commemorating my adoration for a place I had lived for so many years. Right before I left Baltimore, I had received a tattoo in the shape of the state of Maryland on my right shoulder blade, and so it seemed only fitting that I would have the shape of Texas, my home state, forever etched into my skin as a reminder of the end of my road trip, and of the place I had spent the majority of my life. I chose a spot on my back that was down and to the left of the still-healing Maryland tattoo, Southwest across my spine in an attempt to have some semblance of accurate geographical proximity. Ashley sat with me during this procedure, which was much more painful than the Maryland one had been, likely a result of its placement directly over the bottom part of my spine. She asked me halfway through the inking how it felt, and I told her it was a sensation that seemed like a thousand bees were stinging me all at once. I think she said something like "well, at least it isn't a million bees," and I grimaced in agreement. When all was said and done (and the tattoo artist paid, of course), for better or for worse, I had an outline of the state of Texas now sketched expertly into my back in black ink, a permanent reminder of where I had been, where I was going, and what I had lost or left behind. I thought maybe I had left my expectations in Oklahoma. The future was tabula rasa. What then would I leave in Texas? What was left?
Ashley and I had lunch and coffee, and then she sent me on my way. I had nowhere else to go now but back to my original home in The Colony, TX. As I drove there I felt a sense of completeness that wasn't quite complete, but close enough for confusion. Even though I have very mixed feelings about Texas, the tattoo which was now a burning sensation on my spinal cord gave me a sense of strange comfort, as though everything had now been accounted for. As if I had done everything I needed to do to prepare for this new life ahead of me, which would begin in Nepal. As if I was ready for my journey. I drove blindly onward toward my final destination, The Colony, Texas, with no idea the things that I would have to confront; I had no idea what was waiting for me there. But I drove.
-Richard Vaughn
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Some Music I Listened To During My Road Trip
Deadwing - Porcupine Tree
Requiem For The Indifferent - Epica
Crack The Skye - Mastodon
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