torrential rainfall and the disputed kingdom Protista

radiolaria

It’s been raining torrentially all day- this morning we took the dogs to kelly point park, the superfund site where the metallic Columbia meets the sewage-filled Willamette, and big cold drops began to pelt us as soon as we stepped from the car. We walked along the path through the woods, throwing Emy’s ball before us. The poplar trees, huge overhead, swayed ominously in the wind from the oncoming storm, and we watched in wonder as limbs broke off, now and then, and fell in slow motion to the ground. Let’s go to the beach? I said. A tree might fall on us? But the beach was too exposed, the wind beating us like a newspaper and the rain splatting us and the lights from the grain barges on the river. Back in the forest, we watched the trees. Woo woo, they said. The air was grey with condensation. Along the trail nettles grew hopefully, taking up nuclear waste from the soil.

Now I’m in my trailer with the space heater up too high, and it’s still raining torrentially. Earlier I tried to study, laying in bed with my big floppy biology book, watching the water run in rivulets down the little trailer-window, but I fell asleep instead. Before I fell asleep I’d been trying to focus on the disputed kingdom Protista, but instead I was thinking indulgently about summertime, and houses I used to live in, and meadows I have known.

I’ve been feeling a lot of nostalgia lately. Maybe because it is the wet end of the wintertime, maybe because I have been in the city too long with only crowded backyards and superfund sites to retreat to. And it’s funny, because when you finally let a thing go, sometimes years after you first realize that you should be done with it, you never think that it will come back all draped in the soft colors of nostalgia. But that is how I feel today, tonight, about all sorts of things- and I am thinking of them longingly, here in my little driveway-house full of warmth with the rain pounding on the aluminum roof.

Where do they go, these things that happen? Our experiences, our disembodied stories? Apparently there is a compost heap in my brain where they are recycled into magic treasures, more whole then they ever actually were.

I think of North Dakota often, it is one of my muses, if I am using muse in the correct sense, if a muse can be a thing other than a person. Also my friends are muses, people I have known, mostly old friends who cannot get their shit together, who are propelled helplessly through life by their own irreconcilable contradictions, who are moved about as if by mystery. Who do not use logic. Who are painfully beautiful. Who always seem more alive than other people but also more ungrounded. Which is maybe the same thing.

And North Dakota. North Dakota from a freight train- the train goes fast, because north Dakota is wide open. The train could be said to hurtle. On both sides of the train, the soft gold grass. Bent at the tops, like an ocean. The native prairie that grew back after people fled to the cities. Just the grass and the train and above you, the glass observatory of the sky. Now and then a broken down barn, melting into the grass. A stone fence, half-finished, built from stones fished from the ground. A shiny ribbon in the prairie is a stream, flat and clear, like you could float down it on your back. Wind, and sometimes clouds, charging from the east. Lightning.

I used to do whatever I wanted. Travel all the time, move back and forth. I ate dumpstered birthday cake and slept outside under forgotten clumps of trees and that was ok, because I was young and needed nothing. I thought that everything was too fucked up to invest in anything, but then investing in nothing made me feel like I was already dead, and that made me wish that I was, and that feeling was confusing because I had no reason to want to be dead. It was like I wanted to be free so bad but then when I was free I realized that there was nothing else. Like when I was little and I would try and play the video games my brother liked so much but all I cared about was finding the edge of the world, moving my little man into all the corners of the screen to try and find some place beyond what you could see. But there’s nothing else, there’s just the tunnel or whatever, and it’s all set up for you, you’re supposed to jump and get the coin and stomp the mushroom and it’s supposed to make you feel good.

When I was younger, I never thought about what would happen. I figured that the world would just end soon so there was no point in thinking about it. The world felt old, tense, used up, on the brink of something. Everything felt so extremely precarious, like if I touched it it would fall over. It didn’t make any sense to me to put my efforts into something that would just end anyway. I didn’t know then that things that fall over build themselves up again, over and over like magic. It took me a long time to see that.

I used to not need anything- not money, not a home, not any specific food. But there’s a lot of stress in that lifestyle, and loneliness, and eventually your adrenals get worn out and you wake up one day and your body hurts and you can’t do it anymore and you need things. Or you throw yourself off a bridge, because the world hasn’t ended yet and you can’t keep bluffing.

I’ve been in Portland for a year and a half straight. I used to leave for about half of every year. Also notable- I’ve had my dog for a year and a half, I’m starting my second year of undergrad next term, and March 18th is my one-year anniversary with Seamus. I turn thirty this year, and I’m so grateful that this shit is getting easier. And it feels sweet, this nostalgia for the way I lived for so long, tonight, sitting in my trailer with the rain coming down- memories, dreams, popping up like treasures from underwater. Sometimes I feel anxiety about it- like I’ll never be able to travel again, because I won’t have the money, and my body can’t handle the way I used to travel, for free. Waking up on the freight train, sided somewhere in Minnesota, watching the dawn bleed into the sky. Shoplifting grapefruit and sardines. Spending days in a bramble thicket, reading Steinbeck. Walking for miles in the dead of night, looking for water. So many moments of feeling so alive- stacking up on top of each other, making the universe hum like an electrical current. Like it was just me and the universe. The universe moving through me, like I wasn’t even there. Have you ever felt that way? Like you can actually forget yourself enough for the universe to go about its business right in front of you. Like in any Farley Mowat book, when he’s been in his canvas tent in the snow for long enough and the wolves decide he’s just a bunch of lichen, and they start playing with each other and acting out all their wolfy dramas in front of him. Like he’s found the secret place at the edge of everything, where there’s something else that no-one knew was there.

I haven’t been working on my book for a while. I took too many credits this term, and I moved, so I haven’t had time to write. And I hate being really busy. It gives me big fluffy piles of anxiety. Too much of my brain is devoted to thinking about stuff like colors and shapes and patterns of light and very little is devoted to time management and schedule planning. So I sort of freeze up if my life gets too complicated and then I can’t do anything. I need large blocks of time to stare out the window and think about sea creatures. I need to be able to accidentally fall asleep while studying. I need to be able to be ten minutes late for everything. I may not actually be ten minutes late for everything, but I need that to be ok.

I wish I had another three month stretch to work on my book. It’s my ladder to the moon- I need it to climb out of here. But you need a really strong ladder to climb out of one way of life and into another one, and it takes a long time to build a ladder that strong. Right now I’m doing undergrad to prepare to go to school for my master’s in Chinese medicine, because that’s my other dream, besides writing. But when I look down that road I see full-time school for the next five years and then after that, working full time to pay off my student loans, and then working forever until I die. And there’s no time for writing in that anywhere.

How do you do it? How do you be an adult. How do you want things hard enough to make them real. It’s like I woke up one day and all the rules had changed. Or I woke up one day and realized where I was- in this body, on this ground, with this rain coming down everywhere. There’s no place at the edge of everything, and yet there is. And I can want both worlds, but so far, I haven’t figured out how to have them both at once. And that’s painful, but pain can be good. A motivator. Soothing, even. I feel pain, therefore I exist. This sucks and I want something else, therefore I exist. This sucks this sucks this sucks, I exist I exist I exist.

Did I ever tell you about the time I hitch-hiked to Alaska and met my father?

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No? Well here, I wrote you this story. (Oh, and don’t forget to nominate me for best lesbian personal blog- every day until the 9th. Remember to confirm each vote through yr email, or it doesn’t count!)

The Elephant and the Rock

Did you ever just want to go north? There’s a lot up there, you know. Jagged, lonely mountains, and rivers and lakes and fields of blowing grass. Small, strange towns. And people. People who live in log cabins. That they built. Out of logs. Nailed all over with NO TRESPASSING signs. Old abandoned resorts, their empty buildings filled with sunlight and broken glass, at crossroads 100 miles from anything.

I hadn’t seen a northern forest in a long, long time. Boreal Forest. Boreal means north. We were in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory of Canada, and the sky was a dirty gray quilt of clouds. And poking the bottom of the quilt were hundreds of sharp black needles. Boreal forest. The silhouette of the boreal forest. I made a deep sigh. It was the skyline of my childhood, different than anywhere else. Like a magical land, that you had to travel for days just to reach. The forest silhouette of this magic land looked so sharp and pointed because it was Black spruce and White spruce, which only grew way up here. Spindly, dense, and leaning. White spruce on the south slopes, Black spruce on the north slopes.

I was twenty years old. I had forgotten about this forest. I hadn’t been in Alaska for six years, since I was a freshman in high school, and had left this heartbreakingly beautiful place to live in the desert with my grandparents.
Now I was back in the north. I’d hitchhiked from Portland, with my boyfriend. My boyfriend hadn’t wanted to come. I’d pressured him into it. I was an evil, manipulative girlfriend. It was nice of him to come with me. It was a long trip, a long trip to a far-away land.

It was summer, and it was hot. Hot in the north, record heat. We both had burnt faces, and the sun had made me crabby and determined. North! I had said. Farther north! We kept going, pushing into the land, but the heat just wouldn’t stop. Summers in the interior are hot, but not this hot!

In the beginning, just past Vancouver, BC, my boyfriend had gotten sick. Really sick. Pneumonia maybe, or SARS, one doctor had told us. This was when people were getting SARS. We had camped outside Whistler, next to a river that frothed deafeningly. I had let him have his big fever, grumbling. I stuffed him in the tent with his shirt off, took his temperature. If it got too high I made him sit in the river. The water was so cold he cried.

After eight days he was better. He tried to be cheerful for me, but I could tell he just wanted to go home, away from this far-away place, back to somewhere familiar.
“We’re going to Alaska,” I said.

I had a little slip of paper in my pocket, and it had my dad’s address on it. I’d gotten the address off the internet, for three dollars and fifty cents. My dad, apparently, was living in Anchorage, the town where I had grown up. I hadn’t seen him since I was three years old. For all I’d known, he was dead or in jail. But then I had found his address on the internet, and now I was going north to find him. I was planning on showing up on his doorstep and introducing myself, and on the way up, spending some days and nights in the fantastical land I had so deeply missed. But I hadn’t wanted to hitch-hike alone, so I’d pressured my boyfriend into going.

Hitchhiking alone is dangerous, no matter what your gender. The creepiest hitchhiking stories I’ve heard are all from my male assigned, male identified friends. They think they’re safer, less likely to become victims, so they hitch alone. And creepy things happen. Nothing really terrible, they mostly just get propositioned a lot. By lonely truck drivers and whatnot. Pretty normal people, actually. Folks you might see every day. Yep, there aren’t any monsters out there. Just us.

So we were hitchhiking to Alaska, my boyfriend and I, to find my dad, and one problem was that we were vegan. When you are very far north, in a far-away land, there is not much for a vegan to eat. There are only dusty bags of potato chips that sit, stale, on the shelves of little log stores crammed with taxidermy, stores peopled with hostile men who wear gently sloping mustaches. Because of this, my blood sugar was often very low. We ate a lot of bread, too, in addition to potato chips, and I didn’t yet know that I had a gluten allergy. My head was always foggy and dull, and I had about as much energy as a bag of rocks.

The other problem was that when Joe had been sick, I’d run out of reading material, and I’d found myself in the safeway in Whistler, BC, which was also made of logs, staring blankly at the glossy bookshelves, running my fingers over tales of tragic turn-of-the-century arctic expeditions, flipping through books on heroic young white women homesteaders in the far north, who had to sleep on piles of spruce boughs and learn to bakes cakes in a woodstove, and glancing at thick books of “old time” northern recipes that tell you how to make Eskimo ice cream (traditionally seal fat whipped with berries) out of canned tuna in oil and pink cake frosting. I finally settled on the only thing worth shoplifting- a big hefty volume of bear attack stories. I stole them, took them back to our campspot beside the loudly frothing river, and I read them. Oh boy did I read them- and when I was done with that volume there were more, and I read those too. There were stories of tree-planters stalked and treed by black bears, stories of loggers attacked by surprised grizzlies, stories of menstruating campers with tents full of snickers bars and what happens in the dead of night when they are sleeping- and of course the newlyweds who go back-country backpacking on their honeymoon. She is attacked, he runs for help- he finds another hiker after a few miles or so and by the time they return with the helicopter, she’s long dead and her remains have been half-buried in a hole by the tidy bear. I realized later that these books are mostly published by pro-hunting fanatics who work to perpetuate the bear’s image as an unpredictable sort of beast in order to justify their careless slaughter, but at the time I believed all of the stories, and didn’t give a thought to what sort of things might be happening in my brain, as I read them. And by the time I realized what I had done, it was too late.

Panicked, I flung down the book I had been reading, and craned my ears to the world outside the tent. My boyfriend was on my right, sleeping deeply in his sleeping bag. Outside, the forest was lit with a grey light- the midnight sun. Everything was silent. Or was it? A twig snapped. Was that breathing I heard? My heart beat faster, images of manic black bears and panicked grizzlies stomping through the blueberry bushes of my mind, competing with the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. Harder I strained for sound, my body stiff, the crinkling of my sleeping bag like thunder.
There was, of course, no bear. One night there was a bear. We had camped right on its path, the path it used to get to and fro, dear thing, along the river looking for fish. It ran by our tent as fast as it possibly could, brushing its short black self against our little diamond-shaped plastic window. My boyfriend was reading me Rumi, and we paused, frozen, my eyes bugging out of my skull. I couldn’t sleep that night until he let me listen to John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, over and over a few times, with his headphones on the mini-disc player he had brought.

I know now, of course, many years later, what a bear sounds like when it is crashing through the bushes. And I know where to pitch my tent so I am not in the middle of Mr. Bear’s nightly rounds. This is for the Bear’s peace of mind as well as mine, because I know, now, that the bear would rather have its skin peeled off and stuffed in a glass display case in the Anchorage airport than meet me on a forest path. I am the most horrible predator that has ever graced the face of this planet, and the bear is very, very afraid of me.

I have a friend in Anchorage, we grew up together. She has a baby now, and a husband who likes to drink beer and play video games. When I got to Anchorage that hot, dry summer, our ride dropped us off and this friend met us in the Sears parking lot. Surprise! I said. Can I stay with you?

“Well, no,” She said. She was staying with her boyfriend’s mom, and there wasn’t room for us. She would, however, lend us bikes, and so we camped in the woods next to goose lake- a lake I’d swum in a lot as a kid, down the road from a low-income apartment complex I’d lived in, a flat lake covered in ducks. We set up our tent in the woods next to the lake and slept, trying to pretend that there weren’t kids tromping about in the trees around us, playing the exact sorts of forest games I’d played when I was growing up in that neighborhood. After a day or two of gathering our strength, eating cans of beans and fingering the slip of paper in my pocket, I felt that it was Time, and we set off on our rusty bikes to find my father.

It had seemed like a good idea to hitchhike up to Alaska and meet my dad. It had seemed like a plucky and courageous thing to do. And I mean, why not? He was just some stranger, and I was curious about him, curious about that whole side of the family. There had to be something there, some little bit of spark or light or understanding, somewhere on his side of my family tree. It was the dark side of my tree, the half draped in shadow, a side I had never seen. Who knew what those people were like? I figured the odds were good. There had to be someone in my family who wasn’t a total zombie like the people on my mom’s side- who had the guts to feel a goddam emotion and be human, and maybe a wingnut or two, thrown in there, that I could relate to. But as of yet, I hadn’t met them. And I just hoped that if they were there, they would make themselves known- that they wouldn’t be invisible like me, floating around with some stupid nickname, fallen from a limb, forgotten.

He was just some dumb straight guy and I could see the fear in his eyes, shining there a little dull, and it made me want to punch him in the face. My dad the total stranger stood frozen in the door of his stupid, unremarkable townhouse, and smiled an unremarkable smile. He laughed a little and invited me in, faking warm and jovial, not betraying a bit of his fear. My boyfriend came it too. I had instructed him not to say anything. Not a word.

In my dad’s house there were fat leather couches and a big, big TV, and on the TV was a football game. There was a thin Pakistani woman leaning on the counter in the kitchen. His wife. She faked friendly as well. I did not shout. I did not ask him, So- where have you been all my life? I wondered, instead, if I was interrupting. I felt as if I was breaking and entering.

Joe and I sat on the couch. We probably smelled. I had weird short hair under a red mesh cap. On the front of the cap was a rat peeing, and it said Piss on it! and the brim was curled up. I had the cap on backwards, the way I liked to wear it. I was wearing cutoff camo cargo pants, and my legs were hairy. I’d put on a long sleeve shirt over the black tank top I wore, to cover my tattoos. I don’t remember what my boyfriend was wearing, but it was probably a tight polo shirt that showed his nipple rings, and women’s boot cut jeans. He had long blonde hair and a big nose ring, and tattoos on his forearms of fists punching through earth and strange people-symbols in a ring, sharing mind-waves.

My dad looked at us sitting on the couch, a big tight grin plastered to his face. Then the three of us had some awkward small talk, as if this was just the most normal thing in the world, to show up on the doorstep of a parent you haven’t seen or heard from in eighteen years, and sit on their big leather couch and have small talk, the football game on mute, players still running around after the ball. His wife offered us some tea, and we said no. She offered us some juice, and we said no. She offered us juice again, and finally my boyfriend took some from her and then she never said another thing, just stood leaning against the kitchen counter, watching.

We talked, but really, we said nothing. Mostly my dad, he said nothing. He said so much nothing it filled the room with nothing, a big elephant nothing, and the elephant got fatter and fatter until it was crushing me, and rushing into my brain, and my mind went blank in the middle of a sentence and I just stared at him, unable to remember what we had been talking about or what the thought was that I had been vocalizing. Right in the middle of a sentence, the elephant had sat on my head and I couldn’t even finish the sentence. My dad stared at me and the elephant opened its big elephant mouth and screamed with all its elephant might, but it was an invisible elephant and invisible elephants scream invisible screams- it was a panic attack, pouring out of that elephant’s mouth. A great, big, nothing panic attack, because the elephant was really a million tiny ants, one ant for every long-ago day that I had wondered who my dad was, had wondered what he was like, where he was at, if he was in jail or dead, and why wasn’t he paying child support or supporting his children or giving us food. I was hungry and there was nothing to eat and in my world, there was no food, and there were no sheets or clean laundry or bottles of shampoo that smelled like strawberries. Suave. There was no one but me and my brother, staring into each others’ eyes, kicking our legs on opposite sides of the kitchen table, opening and re-opening the kitchen cabinets, hunger and malnutrition pinching at our insides and keeping us awake at night with leg cramps, making us steal other kids’ lunches at school and pick soggy oreos off the soccer field, desperate.

He looked at me and way back in his eyes, I could see it there. I could see what he was thinking. Everything had gone wrong and it was all his fault and now I was all fucked up and had come for him. I had come to make him pay. Emotionally, financially. Something. But actually I wasn’t even feeling too fucked up about the whole thing. I was feeling pretty well adjusted, in my own wingnut way. I wasn’t a junkie or a violent criminal. I was vegan at the time and I didn’t even drink. And I didn’t want to make him pay. I wanted him to be my friend. I wanted him to tell me about his life, and maybe tell me about any interesting relatives on his side that I might like to meet. I wanted him to tell me who he was. I wanted him to open up to me like the single men in pickup trucks that gave us rides north on the Alcan, who turned their bright eyes on us and let all their hopes and dreams spill out like a big vomit of crystallized sugar, used strong emotions, swept their arms across the horizon, declared their love for all of life and sweet regret for years that they had let pass by. One hundred miles the best of friends. Intimacy.

He didn’t want that. On his very longest list of things he absolutely did not want, way down at the very bottom, was that. He was like a rock inside of himself. Break it apart, you just find more rock. No way to get inside. I sat and looked at him, the rock. The big football rock. The silent, passive wife rock. The nice house rock. There was nothing. Even my dad himself- round but not tall, thick grey hair, freshly blow-dried. White teeth. A great big nothing.

I elbowed my boyfriend and we said Oh, Boy, Time to go! My dad-rock offered to drive us home. No, we said, a little awkwardly. We were sleeping in the woods, among the stunted spruce and the mosquitoes. I didn’t want him to see that we were camping. I wasn’t going to share any more of myself with this man, this man who wanted us in his living room like he wanted a natural disaster. So we left his house, pushing our way clumsily out of the elephant’s disorienting force-field, shaking our limbs to be free of it in the evening air, and walked to where we had locked our bikes. The light was cool and low, and as we walked along the street a young man pedaled towards us on a mountain bike, and in his left arm he cradled the most enormous king salmon, and his hoodie was splattered all over with blood. His right arm clutched a handlebar, and under that arm was his fishing pole. The kings were running, and he had been fishing at the creek at the end of the block, where a ribbon of forest ran through the neighborhood. We smiled and laughed at the magic of it all, and then I started to cry, big hot tears that made the world blurry, and since I couldn’t ride my bike because I was crying we just pushed them, and my boyfriend put his arm around me. Sob, sob, as I liquidated the elephant scream and pushed it out of my eyeballs. Sob, sob, quietly, my hand over my eyes, my lips pulled back in a horrible grimace, little gasping breaths. We were walking along a busy road, and the cars rushed by, blowing car-wind at us. One of the cars slowed and a man leaned out the window, waving his hand in the air.

“FAAAAAAAAAAGS!” he yelled, and sped away. I stopped crying and laughed, I dropped my bike and laughed. My boyfriend and I laughed and laughed, I leaned back my red splotchy face and laughed, the air hitting us cool and green, fresh even in the city, because it is Alaska.

Central Oregon is Made of Light and Magic

This is the very last installment of our regularly scheduled hitch-hiking program. The past has hereby officially caught up with the present tense, in a mild and happy manner, where everything goes alright and Home Is Reached. All entries from here on out will be made up of either the future (which by then will be the present tense) and the past (which has yet to be documented in its entirety).

Bear was a fat little black dog with a white stripe, like a skunk. He had a dog bed down on the passenger-side floor-mat, but now my feet were there, and he stood awkwardly in the space between me and the driver, staring at my feet. Finally he squeezed between my pants-cuffs and settled down with his nose on my shoe.

“You like Christmas music?” asked the driver, his big fingers on the radio dial.

“Uhh…”

“I love this station,” he said, turning up the volume. “It’s so soothing.” Light jazz remakes of Christmas songs filled the dark truck cab. I watched the road roll under the front of the truck, bouncing a little on my tall truck seat, with its super-deluxe shocks and ultra-adjustable everything. I reached a hand down and fiddled with the button for lumbar support, feeling the seat inflate against my lower back. The man seemed almost content to just zone out and watch the road. My eyelids grew heavy as the I watched the yellow line come out of darkness and slip under the truck. Have yourself a merry little blah blah…

“So you just travel around?”

I was wrong.

“No,” I said, giving him some garbled answer. The cliff notes of my life. We were headed over the passes in Northern California, and dark, dry pine forests flanked the highway, spotlit momentarily in the truck’s headlights. Suddenly, I smiled, remembering. My long, ridiculous journey was almost over. I was hurtling through the dark night in the direction of home. My chickens were as good as hatched. And it all seemed worthwhile, now- that super-zen devil-may-care attitude I’d managed to cultivate. As if nothing could go wrong. As if no matter how stuck I felt, I’d still make it home in the end. And nothing had gone wrong. And I was as good as home. I wanted to laugh out loud. It all works out in the end, it all works out in the end…

The man and I talked for a good chunk of hours, mostly about his relationship with his wife. They’d been married fourteen years, no kids together, and their children from previous marriages were grown and gone. She used to come with him when he worked, he said, and it had been incredible. Someone to share the road with, someone to talk with about whatever came into one’s mind while accumulating all those empty highway miles.

“Or not talk, too,” he said. “sometimes we’d just be in our own thoughts, and ride along for hundreds of miles that way. It was just nice to have the companionship.”

By and by his wife had wanted her own occupation, something that was soley hers, and had gotten into dog breeding. Now she stayed at home while he was away, and they’d go a week at a time without seeing each other.

The man’s ringtone went off. It was the sound of a baby crying. He pulled a headset from the window visor and put it over his ears.

“What’s up, baby cakes?”

They talked for a while, and he hung up. His wife called back in twenty minutes, and again half a dozen times after that, throughout the evening. I am always amazed when I ride with truckers who do this. They try so hard, in spite of everything, to maintain some sort of connection- even though they are never at home, even though it’s just a voice screeching out of a little electronic box, thin as a flaking pie tin. I wonder how real it is.

“It’s like we live separate lives now.” Said the man. He had been thinking the very same thoughts. “We talk every day, but we don’t share any of the same experiences anymore. She’ll have a problem with this dog or that dog, she’ll get a migraine, she’ll pay this or that bill. I’ll hit some bad weather, I’ll have a problem with a load, I’ll get held up in traffic. It’s all separate now. And we she has a migraine, I’m not there. I don’t share that with her. So when I get home, it’s like…”

“It’s like you’ve grown apart.” I said.

“Yes,” said the man.

“I have a theory,” I said, “that if you don’t share the same physical space with someone, you may as well not exist. I’ve decided that’s why long distance relationships don’t work. As soon as you’re not in the same physical space, you start to grow apart from each other, growing instead into whatever physical space it is that you inhabit. And then when you finally see each other, even if you’ve talked on the phone every day, it’s like you’re total strangers. You may as well have not talked or thought of each other the whole time you’ve been apart.”

The man seemed to consider this.

“Telephone conversations aren’t real,” I said.

His phone began to cry again. He picked up the headset, fumbling with the cord in the dark.

“What’s up, baby cakes!”

We stopped somewhere in the dark mountains to get some dinner. It had begun to rain. I walked across the wet truckstop parking lot, my head floating above my body. I felt like I was wearing moon boots. Too much time on the road, too much time on the road… Inside the truckstop I balked at the bright florescent lighting. Glossy racks held cheap ceramic trinkets, wind chimes and fleece blankets. Snow-globes with deer in them. There were stacks of workboots, dvds in plastic anti-theft cases. A whole bin of discounted candy bars. Giant-size baby ruth. Candy orange slices. The men shuffled up the aisles, dark-eyed, fingering tins of peanuts. Looking like their faces had been frozen halfway between startled and asleep. I stood staring at a rack of snack-chips. The store needed to restock. There was only one bag of barbecue potato chips left, and no cheddar popcorn. I thought of getting home, of changing my clothes. Of wearing a different pair of pants. Of taking the wilted cabbage heel from the bottom of my pack and throwing it away. I could feel myself fishing it from the depths of my pack, now empty and deflated. I heard the thunk as it hit the bottom of the trashcan, and a wave of pleasure swept through me. Too much time on the road, too much time on the road…

The man and I had subway. I ordered a salad, because surprisingly, subway is one of the only fast-food places where there is absolutely nothing that I can eat. Not. A single. Thing. Everything has bread in it. Unless I want to eat the insides of a turkey sandwich, or scrape the tuna salad off its half-pound bread-log. I actually did that once, and it was sort of heartbreaking. So I got a salad, but I wasn’t really hungry anyway. And it was late now, almost midnight. The man was stopping soon, for the night. He’d said that he could leave me in a town on I-5, before he split off on his little country road to Bingen, or, if I wanted, I could come along with him, but he wasn’t going all the way until morning, stopping for the night just over the Oregon border. I knew he wasn’t a creep, and nothing sounded better than that top bunk, with its thin mattress and plastic walls. So I said yes, my heart jumping at the word “Oregon”.

We finally pulled off in the wee hours of the morning, after exhausting all of our topics of conversation. His in-laws, her in-laws, their kids, their ex’s kids. Where I sleep at night. I climbed up on the top bunk and curled up gratefully under my tired sleeping bag, putting away a chapter of my vampire book by lamplight before shoving in my earplugs and drifting off. The man was watching a movie on the bunk below, and I thought down to him, Sleep, sleep, you truckers never get enough sleep, as the foam expanded in my ear canal and slowly squeezed out all the wide world, with its noises and people and bright, endless highways, leaving only the sound of my own breathing and the distant rumble of the idling truck.

He got up too early and I pilfered a granola bar from the truckstop for breakfast. It had nuts in it, and fruits, all stuck together with some sort of glaze that made threads when you pulled it apart, like a rice crispy treat. I appreciate anything that resembles a rice crispy treat in any way. I ate the bar slowly, watching the morning world through the truck windshield. The morning world was full of pines, and dry grass, and bright clear sunshine. The brightest, clearest sunshine, it seemed I had ever seen. There had been sun in Arizona, sure, but the air had had a sort of haze to it- because of the fires in California, maybe, or because of Phoenix. The air here, in southern/central Oregon, was something else entirely. Cold, smelling of pine, and clear like it’d been steeped through a piece of flannel. With little trails of white cloud, startling for all their intricate edging and tiny detail. If I’d felt peaceful yesterday I was the Zen Master today, chewing my granola bar and staring out at the road, silent.

The man and his wife began their morning ritual of back-and-forth calls over the course of an hour. He drove, she called. There was someone at the door. She called back. He was still driving. She went to the store, got some coffee, took care of the dogs. She called. He was still there, behind that big wheel, facing the road. She had some breakfast. He sat, Christmas music down low. I opened my vampire novel and retreated into it. I’d decided that I didn’t want to talk today, that I’d used up all my words the night before. I needed to let them refill, like water trickling into a reservoir. One way to do that was to not talk, to stare out the window, and to read Stephanie Meyer’s absurd new plotline, which included vampires and broken-down motorcycles and was even more badly written than the first book. Edward wasn’t even in this one. He’d dumped the seventeen year-old girl and left town. All she had was her friend, who fixed cars. Sometimes she’d jump off cliffs into the ocean, because she’d found that when her life was in danger, she would hallucinate the sound of Edward’s voice, telling her she was a fucking idiot and that she’d better stop doing whatever she was doing or he’d hold her down by her wrists until her heart stopped.

Oh, those Mormon authors and their thinly-veiled BDSM.

Finally the phone stopped crying and the man looked over at me, tossing out a line of conversation like he was casting for trout. I muttered a word in response, and he looked back at the road. He switched stations, tapped the dash, hummed to himself. He threw out another hook, and I ignored it, staring intently into my book. I felt bad, but I just didn’t have any words left. I was used up. Empty. I’d been hitch-hiking for too long, and finally the fuel-light on my dash had come on. My car had stalled. I’d given him a good five hours the night before of solid listening/nodding/suggesting/encouraging, and now his appointment was over.

This happens sometimes, when I ride with someone for more then a day. No, it always happens. We just kind of turn away from each other, like a curtain has dropped between the seats. We’re over it.

We stopped once to eat, at a taco bell filled with light and the elderly. I ate a chicken bowl and a crispy taco, declaring the ground beef pure of gluten, which I’m sure is not the case. He ordered an unfamiliar foodstuff, a sort of burrito wrapped inside a burrito, the second burrito being deep-fried, and I handed it to him as he drove.

Central Oregon is the size of one day. The day was full of Central Oregon, Central Oregon and more Central Oregon. Around each new bend, was Central Oregon. I had no idea. I never went to Central Oregon. I had never been down this lonely stretch of state highway. Around mid-morning the world outside my window had become such a fantastical place- golden grasses waving in the wind, small towns clustered together in space, nothing to fill the air. Vacant pasture for hours and then a single stoplight, a small wooden church. One old Victorian, perched on a dry road. The highest point for miles. A flat-faced diner, a junk-shop. And the pure golden sun beating down on everything, the air as still as glass.

I am going to move here, I thought. I am going to move here one day.

I wondered about the winters, the summers. I wondered about the people who lived there. I wanted to leave my body and find myself on the dirt sidewalk, walk up to one of the houses and knock on the heavy door. I wanted to step inside and see what there was to see. Would the air smell like sage? Or dust? Would they have a pitbull? A piano? A cupboard of canned peaches? An attic full of framed photographs? A grandfather clock? Old people, the last humans on earth with possessions that do not come from walmart. And they sit inside peeling Victorians, miles from anyone, waiting to die…

All too soon we were through those small towns, we were on the other side of them, they were gone. And it was just the grassland and the sky, uncluttered, an arena for light to play. My spirits were flying high above the truck, my nose was dancing along the lines in my vampire novel. My ride was bored, thinking about his wife, imagining what he’d rather be doing. The day passed like this, in minutes and hours, the middle part of Oregon unwinding like a movie reel. When evening finally came I watched the sun set in the side-view mirror, and it was like an aircraft carrying neon colors had crashed into the horizon, in slow motion. The prairie was on fire. The only other thing besides the ground and sky came once a day, and it was this. A fireworks display to the death of light.

It went on and on and on, and then it was dark. Not too long after we pulled off the highway and suddenly I knew the Columbia river was nearby, I could sense it. The border between Oregon and Washington. And straight west from us was Portland. Ninety miles. I almost jumped, startled.

The man and I said our goodbyes.

“Sorry I wasn’t much of a talker today, I’ve just been talking too much.” I said, by way of apology, after I had climbed out of the truck and stood, planted on the good firm ground, looking back into the cab.

“Oh, no, it was me who wasn’t talkative,” he said, over the seat. I turned that over in my brain. That must be his way of saying he accepted my apology, and was over it.

“No really,” I said. “it wasn’t you. I just didn’t feel like talking. And I’m really stuck in this book I’m reading.”

He nodded, a little sad.

I gave him a wave goodbye and walked into the truckstop. The man only had four more hours to go, four more hours of driving until he could stand up and walk down the manicured walkway to the planet where his wife lived. Tired, he’d set his cooler down on a kitchen chair, and awkwardly drop his jacket on the table. His wife would be everywhere, on all the furniture and all fixtures, in the spacing of the framed photographs and the way the plates were stacked. She’d be in the drape of the curtains, in the way the numbers were worn on the phone. She knew what time the mail came, the houseplants lived because of her. And where was he?

At the truckstop I bought another dark-chocolate candy bar with mint in it, and a sausage breakfast sandwich. And a banana. I sat on a gravel median outside assembling dinner, sliding the sausage off the biscuit and onto my weird, crumbly rice bread. I was on the “car” side of the truckstop, and hardly anyone was fueling up. The night had gotten cold, and I wrapped my scarf around me and buttoned up my wool jacket. I’d made a new sign. PORTLAND, it said, in big, triumphant letters.

Hours passed. My faith was unflagging. My heart danced around in my ribcage. Right around the time I began glancing around, sizing up clumps of trees across the road, thinking maybe I should just get a good night’s sleep and try again in the morning, bright and early, a car stopped directly in front of me and a man peered out the rolled-down window.

“You need a ride?” He asked. “I’m going to Vancouver. I can drop you in Portland.” It was the shiniest, newest car this side of the Willamette river. And the rest, my friends, is HISTORY.

Second-hand crank smoke and Never Look a Gift Cheeseburger in the Mouth

We pick up our regularly-scheduled hitch-hiking program where we left off, in a rest area just south of LA.

It was with great hope and a general sense of well-being that I settled onto the grass at that early-morning rest area just south of LA, cardboard sign propped against my pack (I-5 north!) and a great brick of an unread vampire novel in my lap. So imagine my surprise when, but a handful of pages later, a curly-haired man with a scruffy face was calling my name (Hey you!) and pointing in the direction of an idling SUV, stumbling as if he hadn’t slept.

“You need a ride?” He said. I stuttered and told him I did, dazed a little at being pulled so quickly away from my vampires and into the present tense, like a portal that closed too fast and caught the heel of my shoe. He named some town I hadn’t heard of, but then, I don’t know California.

“Is that on I-5?” I asked him. “How far?”

“Pretty far,” he said. “Ten hours?”

“Great,” I said, and hopped up. The car was blandly colored and fairly new, pulling a small u-haul trailer. Another man sat in the driver’s seat, soft and rounded with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. As I climbed into the backseat, the curly-haired man turned and eyed me a bit bashfully.

“We smoke pot, crank, drink beers.” He paused, almost embarrassed. “You still want the ride?”

Crank? Really? I thought. But I did like the man’s honesty, and they were going far.

“As long as you guys don’t drive drunk,” I said, somewhat lamely.

“Oh, no, no, we don’t do that.” They said, nodding their heads. We were all in agreement now. We had reached some sort of compromise.

The men turned forward and pulled out of the rest area, the driver muttering as he cut into traffic, glancing at the exit signs overhead. The radio had been set to “scan” and as we drove it jarred unevenly across the dial, settling on each station for a good fifteen seconds before that song ended abruptly and another one took its place.

“You hand me a rockstar?” Said the driver, over his shoulder to me. “In the cooler.” There was a cooler next to me, red, and full of ice. I opened the lid and found beer, soda, and an assortment of massive energy drinks. I handed him one, cold and wet, the size of a potato gun. The curly-haired man, meanwhile, was cursing over a small iphone in his hands, tapping at the screen with his blunt, stained fingers.

“You know how to work these things?” He asked, turning and holding the thing out to me like a kid who cannot unscrew a jar of pickles. I took the iphone from him. He had a map on the screen, some sort of GPS. It was I-5, and a small blinking dot where we were, headed north. A third of the landscape was caked in some sort of dried food, as if he’d dropped the phone in his milkshake.

“Yeah, we’re fine.” I said. “We’re going the right way.”

“I want to know how to get around the city,” he said quickly, blinking. “Like a highway that cuts off and goes around the city.” I scrolled out on the map and looked for alternate routes, and the man and I spent a few minutes passing the thing back and forth, watching the blinking dot move along the green line, suspended in a blank white landscape of crusted milkshake. We finally found a route and turned off in the nick of time, the driver man muttering and swearing as he cut across traffic to make the exit. Then we were set for a bit on our route and the curly-haired man nestled the iphone in a hoodie that lay balled-up between the seats, taking off his baseball cap and scratching his oily scalp for a length of time. The car fell silent except for the chattering of the radio, pulling us from station to station in quick, random jerks, never lingering long enough for me to relax. I sent frustrated vibes their way, hoping they’d turn it off, but instead they talked to each other, quiet and mumbling, seeming to forget I was there at all. Suits me, I thought, cracking open my vampire novel and putting four hundred pages between me and reality. Every now and then the curly-haired man would pick up the iphone and thrust it my way, to check and make sure we were still on track. The wallpaper on his phone was of a sticky-faced kid, blonde ringlets against a background of grass, looking up into the camera with fair blue eyes.

“I got five kids.” Said the man, rummaging around in the cavity between the seats, pulling out a plastic CD case. He cracked it open and next thing I new a handful of clear stones rested on its smooth surface, like pieces of fancy rock-salt. “You want a line of crank?” He said, looking over the seat at me like he was offering a tin of Christmas cookies.

“No, thanks.” I said. He turned and busied himself with the rocks, chopping at them with a device that was hidden from view. I could see his face reflected in the passenger side-view mirror, bent over his careful work, eyes focused in anticipation. Then there was the tube of a ballpoint pen, so quick I would have missed it, and a swift brush of the nose with a forefinger. The rocks went back in the case, the case went back in the cavity between seats, it was as if nothing had happened.

I looked back down at my book, and the car was gone for a while. The men were silent, mostly, watching the road ahead, the burned-out hills to the right where wildfires had just swept through. Oprah lost a house, I thought, but I didn’t say it. The curly-haired man turned to the soft-faced driver.

“I miss June.” He said, matter-of-fact.

The soft-faced driver nodded, thoughtful.

“Maybe you do love her,” he said. His phone rang just then and he picked it up, fingers fumbling at the buttons. It was his wife. She wanted to know where they were, what was taking them so long. “We had to get the trailer,” he said, into the phone. “then we had to turn around and go back. Yeah. She was being difficult. I don’t know. Yeah, we got it. She might call again. Yeah, I hope it works out.” the voice on the other end prattled on for a bit, small and thin as a tin cup. “We got a hitch-hiker,” said the man. Yeah. She’s real polite. Quiet. She’s a train jumper! She’s pretty cool.” I smiled to myself in the backseat. The man set down his phone and fiddled with the radio, turning it up, down, off, on again. He put in a CD and turned up the volume, skipping through the tracks and pulling it out again. Then he was distracted changing lanes and for a moment we had some quiet jazz, before he came back into himself an punched the “scan” button again.

Later that afternoon, we were back on the road after stopping to eat massive, warm burgers at a highway exit. I’d developed a new piece of hitch-hiking wisdom, which was “never look a gift cheeseburger in the mouth”. Instead of looking the cheeseburger in the mouth, quietly pull a slice of gluten-free bread from your pack and slide the burger onto it, or whatever you need to do to make it edible to you, even if that means cracking your door a bit and dropping the meat and cheese onto the asphalt. I even ate the fries, which were good, for fastfood fries, and came in a little carton with the words “our cooking oil contains no trans fat” printed on the bottom, so you wouldn’t feel so bad when you ate them all and were left staring at an empty carton, which seemed to scream poverty and gluttony, excess and food scarcity all at once.

The men were tired. The had had, it seemed, a difficult journey thus far, with lots of setbacks and missed connections and driving-through-the-nights. They were, apparently, shuttling a motorcycle for someone or other, from somewhere south of LA to the town where they lived, on the coast up past San Francisco. I was having a hard time, watching the backs of their heads as they talked, piecing together the story of their trip or of their very existence- why did they have such a nice SUV (with heated seats, even, I thought to myself, as I flipped the switch for mine) when they looked so ragged? The curly-haired one could be a homeless man, for all his fumbling speech and weathered, unshaven face, and the driver looked straight but was very obviously high on drugs, and had been for some time. They took turns with the crank, snorting a line every hour or so as we drove, and the driver chased his meth with frosty energy drinks the size of my arm. As we pulled through the drive thru at the burger joint it all seemed to come together in his stomach, and he turned away from the wheel, eyes wide.

“I’m feeling it. I’m fucking feeling it. Do you guys feel it? Like a fucking rollercoaster man, like waves.”

As evening fell the lack of sleep threatened to catch up with them (I offered to drive, but they wouldn’t have it) and they switched to burning the stuff, little puffs of smoke from a small glass pipe. I could see it all in the side-view mirror- the curly-haired man bent over the flame (window up, of course, although mine was inconspicuously cracked) and sucking on the pipe, passing it to the driver and then, at last, letting out a mouthful of bitter smoke. The whole business smelled of burning plastic, and I frowned intensely to myself in the backseat, watching carefully so I wouldn’t miss a puff and forget to open my window, and somehow expose myself to a whiff of second-hand crank. As they smoked they talked back and forth about pounds, and ounces, and the going price of things these days, and I realized, with a wave of relief, as if I’d finally found the last cardboard piece to a jigsaw puzzle and fitted it into the frame, that they were drug dealers. Sort of career drug dealers. Grown-men-with-kids drug dealers.

The curly-haired man did, indeed, have five kids. One of them called, the five-year-old whose picture was on the phone.

“I heard you were on top of the RV,” said the man. “Gramma told me. What were you doing on top of the RV? You know you’re not supposed to be on top of the RV. You better behave when I’m away.” The kid screeched through the phone. “Ok, I’ll be home late tonight. I said, daddy will be home late tonight. Uh-huh. I love you. I said, I LOVE YOU. I MISS YOU. I’LL SEE YOU LATE TONIGHT. BYE.” The man turned to the backseat and asked me, could I please pass him another beer. I opened the cooler and fished one from the ice. A fog had fallen outside the window. Orange groves stretched on into nothing, the trees heavy with fruit.

“You traveled far?” asked the man, as if noticing me for the first time. So far they had just let me read, for which I had been extremely grateful.

“I’ve been hitch-hiking all the way from North Carolina.” I said. The man shook his head appreciatively.

“Man,” he said. “You’re not afraid of much, are you?”

“No,” I said. The curly-haired man was quiet. The soft-faced man looked at me in the rear-view mirror.

“What are you afraid of?” He asked, curious.

“I’m afraid of the woods at night.” I said, after a moment. “I’m afraid of being alone in the woods at night.”

The man seemed to consider this.

“Are you afraid of death?” he asked. I thought for a moment.

“No.” I said. The men nodded, and turned to each other.

“That’s good.” said the driver, sober.

“Are you?” I asked. The day had gone dark now, and there was only the fog, and the hum of wheels on pavement. The man seemed to deliberate, and then he gave his answer.

“No.” he said. We all fell quiet then, lost in our own murky worlds, which seemed to clear, every so often, in moments like these, like a glass of lake water whose silt has settled to the bottom. I wasn’t sure what the curly-haired man was afraid of, or if he was afraid of anything at all. He seemed old for his age, worn down from a lifetime of drugs (First smoked crank when I was eleven years old! Smoked pot when I was seven!), his body like an old car that barely ran. A cripple, I thought. He’s a cripple. But then, aren’t we all, after a while? Being able bodied is, after all, just a temporary state- a sort of dream that makes our eventual, more enduring existence seem that much more dreadful- we start out strong, most of us, with parts factory-new, and lose springs and bolts on the bumpy dirt-track of life- ending up with a sort of compromise, between our desire to live and the inevitable passage of time.

We drove on in silence, stopping once so the curly-haired man could dash off into the citrus orchards to steal fruit, running like a stooped, startled elf, disappearing in the perfect rows of trees that turned, as you passed them, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel- returning finally with a shirtful of oranges, eyes lit up like he’d just robbed the chicken house, and I felt, suddenly, as if I were in The Grapes of Wrath.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” He cried, paranoid, dumping his loot into the cooler.

“Yeah!” I said, laughing, “The citrus police are gonna get us!” The men laughed, then, too, and we all ate an orange. Mine was ice-cold and not quiet ripe, but I loved it anyway. It tasted of plants, of sunlight, and of what life could be pulled from chemical soil.

We neared the split for San Francisco, and I almost considered going with the men and having them drop me off in the city, because I had never been there, and I have friends there. But then I thought of the dirty clothes in my pack, and of the everlasting chunk of cabbage, and how badly my shoes needed polishing, and I knew in my heart that what I wanted, was to be home. Or as close to home as I could get- a warm room in a friend’s house and my extensive flannel collection. So I had the men leave me, just before midnight, at a rest area where I-5 continued north, and when they stepped from the car to check the trailer I shook their hands, and said Thank You, and I really, really, meant it. They rubbed the sleep from their eyes for the five-hundredth time and pulled away, and I buttoned up my wool jacket against the cold fog and stood, staring, at the bank of vending machines, trying to decide if a gross minty candy bar would bring up moral, and if so, how much, and would it be worth the sugar-crash afterward. I wondered, too, if the trees just beyond the grass would be any good for sleeping, and if it was going to get much colder than this. I’d barely sat down on a concrete bench and unwrapped the shiny foil from my 75 cent moral-booster when a man with a fat little dog on a leash approached me and, peering at my face through the bundled scarf, asked if I needed a ride north. He was, he said, headed all the way to Bingen, Oregon, which at first I had never heard of, but later, while headed north through the cold, humid night, I learned from his laminated atlas was a town along the Columbia river, a mere ninety miles east of Portland.

Ninety miles.

Ninety.

Miles.

Salt is the sun, traffic is cold honey, and no-one knows why Phoenix exists

Phoenix spreads like a teastain across the bare skin of the earth. It begs the question: What is this place? and Where are we? Aside from the fact that part of my vampire novel was set in Phoenix, the place made me feel nothing. Why do modern humans treat the desert as if it were just a giant parkinglot, a tract of land pre-paved for them, a realtor’s sign perpetually at the corner? Infinite acreage. Commercially zoned.

I posed this question to Lawrence, who is a learned man with a head full of thoughts and a clear way of speaking, as we trolled the dark city streets on the edge of town. I had talked to no-one in days and days, and now here was Lawrence, my own personal Google.

“Why is Phoenix here?” I asked.

“Why is Phoenix here.” He repeated.

“It’s a good question.” I said.

“A very good question.” He agreed.

“Why here, and not somewhere else?” I asked.

“Why is Phoenix here…” He said.

“Yes.” I said. “Why.”

We drove on in silence for a while, the streets seeming to repeat themselves like background images in an old videogame.

“I don’t know.” He said, after a time.

“Me neither.” Suddenly I had a thought. “Is there anybody that knows?”

“Why Phoenix exists?”

“Yes.”

The car grew quiet again, nothing but the sound of the wind in the window crack.

“No.” He said, astounded by his own answer. And in that moment, we both knew it to be true. It was like the last knot of thread on a new shirt-button, closing fast a gap to keep out the cold air.

“Maybe,” I said, turning to Lawrence, my eyes wide and bright with excitement, “maybe cities have gotten so complex, urban civilization has gotten so complex, that there’s no-one who can explain, anymore, why cities grow the way they do. Maybe it’s gotten so large it’s become even larger than we are- it’s become It’s own organic process.” I stared out the car window at the weedy lots and bright box stores of Phoenix, terribly excited by my new idea.

Lawrence seemed to turn this over. Cities like Himalayan blackberry, like English ivy, like kudzu. Bearing strange box-store fruits and suffocating the landscape with their thorny canes.

Lawrence’s friend lived in a small red barn on a sprawling piece of property that once had been a farm. There was a pool, still and blue, and a goat and dog, who were friends. In the barn there was an upstairs and a downstairs. The stairs to the upstairs twisted as you climbed, growing smaller and shorter, as if you were Alice in Wonderland, finally forcing you into a crouch. My bed was to be a loveseat covered in cat hair, too short for me. I talked for hours, using up all the words I had saved, waved my hands about, ate dinner twice and slept wonderfully. A person had called me from craigslist to say, somewhat cryptically, that they were driving to LA at four a.m. the next morning. They might not, however, have room for me. They would call me at said obscene morning hour and let me know.

The cryptic craigslist ride never called me, and sped off into the darkness on his own. I woke in the morning and took a shower, making breakfast while Lawrence worked on the computer. We’d made an agreement the night before. I had need of a bookstore, he would drive me to one.

We drove past strip malls and bare, colorless sidewalks, everything blasted in sunlight, until finally we were at the huge chain box bookstore, which Allison Bechdel, in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, calls “Bunns & Noodle” when it moves in and pushes out the non-profit feminist bookstore. This store had been a guilty pleasure for me while on many a middle-american adventure, a safe refuge from the wheat fields and cold, screaming freight trains. Now Lawrence and I wandered the aisles in this Phoenix box store, so much like the others, and all the media scarcity of my previous week came crashing down around me as I trailed my fingers over the endless stacks of glossy, unread novels. There is enough of everything, there is enough, I repeated to myself. There is so much. There is too much. The Bunns & Noodle mantra.

I wanted to binge on printed matter but books are not like food. You cannot eat too many at once and carry them around for leaner times, an undigested spare tire of fiction and autobiography around your waist. I carefully selected a copy of the second book in the vampire series from its large display, one of many similar displays peddling vampire books that were placed strategically throughout the store. It was a glossy brick of a book, already smeared with fingerprints, pages white with excess. I then pulled a copy of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father off the shelf by its spine, adding it to the vampire book as a sort of fiber supplement. I had been meaning to read it, really I had. The simple fact that our new president wrote paragraphs that I enjoyed reading filled me with a sort of wonder. He even went so far as to create complex metaphors that teetered on the rocky outcrop of logic, metaphors that threatened to fall into the great abyss of nonsense. Not only that, but the whole book, practically, was about race. It was a sort of bravery I was unaccustomed to in a president, even in an old book he’d written in school. Turning into an aisle of greeting cards, I shoved the books under the back of my shirt, settling my backpack over them. Pulling Lawrence from his nerdy computer magazines, the two of us swam free of the great sea of printed matter. I’ll miss things like this, I thought, as we left the store, crossing the bright, hot parking lot, after the collapse of civilization. Really, I will.

Next I ate the biggest salad I could find, with an avocado on it and a can of beans mixed in, and then packed up my things for the highway, slowly. I was attempting to shear a few pounds of weight from my pack, and the process took the most intense amount of concentration, because by this point in the journey I had convinced myself of the necessity of every small thing.

I peeled a thick sweater off the small stack of clothes. My sheep. My sheep! How could I part with my sheep! But the weather was warmer, here, and it would not be cold again. I still had a lighter wool sweater and my heavy letterman jacket. It would be enough. I unrolled the nori-colored sleeping bag liner I’d used to cover the safety-orange outside of my sleeping bag, before I had a bivy sack. I didn’t need it any more. And I could get a new one in Portland if I did. I picked up the glass jar of sunflower seed butter, and placed it in the “leave behind” pile. I already had almond butter, and glass jars were heavy. I also got rid of a jar of salad dressing, and my stale corn tortillas. I’d found a loaf of gluten-free rice bread here in Phoenix. On sale, even!

And finally, my vampire romance- small and square and thumbed. It was finished, and I had finally found the sequel. It was no longer a metaphor for anything, no longer the only friend I had on a long solo journey. It was time to let it go. I placed it on the kitchen table for Lawrence’s friend, who had expressed an interest in reading it.

Finally I was ready to go, with new books and a lighter pack. Lawrence drove me to the highway on the very other side of town, right on the edge of where Phoenix really and truly did end, and the desert began again, eating up the horizon until it seemed bigger than all of mankind, bigger than god itself, and you laughed at the idea of human beings ever burying a thing in asphalt, let alone building a whole city there. Lawrence dropped me off at an onramp next to a string of hotels. The sun was sinking, it was rush hour, and traffic crept past, or stopped altogether. To heck with my bench warrant, I thought, and climbed the onramp onto the highway, waving my sign in the wind.

Backed-up rush-hour traffic is a hitch-hiker’s pot of gold. You are a roadside carnival attraction, a sort of mime, with your thumb out standing still, and the people file past one by one, in their shining, empty cars, vents blowing hot air or vents blowing cold air, cellphones crushed against their ears. Or you are a puppy, for free in a cardboard box. Eventually someone will stop, they cannot resist. They’ve always wanted a puppy.

A highway patrol car drove past and did not stop. Generally, a cop will not stop and harass you when you’re hitching unless someone has called them, or you do not get a ride within an hour or so, whichever happens first. When they do stop they’ll run your ID and then send you on your way, usually vaguely prohibiting you from hitch-hiking on their highway (I’ll be back around here later, I hope I don’t see you again) but they mostly understand that you’ll keep hitch-hiking, because however else would you get out of there? Sometimes they’ll even give you a ride to the edge of their jurisdiction and dump you there, blasting top 40 country the whole way and singing along, bright sun glinting off their reflective aviator shades.

The highway patrol car did not stop. I peered into the windows at the passing people, stared, curious, at their clean faces and bright shining clothing, the same way they were staring back at me. Finally a low sports car pulled off the road just past me, and I trotted up to it, joyful. The driver was a man in his thirties, very nondescript, like a JC Penney ad. Ah, America. I tossed my pack in the back and climbed into the front seat. The upholstery was fawn-colored leather and the interior was immaculate. The man had just unwrapped a sandwich, some sort of dark bread with a respectable amount of vegetables inside.

“I don’t usually like to eat in front of people,” said the man, as he pulled out into traffic, “but I wasn’t planning on having company.”

“That’s alright.” I said. “I just ate an hour ago.” It was true. There was also a haggen-das bar lying next to the gear shift, fresh from the convenience store. I could almost hear it melting, inside its plastic wrapper. I willed the man to eat his sandwich faster. I had a strange anxiety, when it came to icecream melting.

The man finished up and slowly ate the icecream bar, on hand wrapped around the neat leather steering wheel, after which we started talking. The man was careful to ration conversation, talking for a while and then saying Why don’t we listen to a CD, and then we listened to that and watched the desert go by. We listened to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack as the sun set behind the jagged dragon mountains and then seemed to rise again as it followed the contours of the ridges; down, up, down for good. The man told me that he was a marine, but as of midnight tonight he was a marine no longer. He was headed to camp Pendleton outside of LA to pick up his honorable discharge papers. He had decided to pursue a career in the culinary arts, which was his newfound passion. He’d never been to combat, he said. He’d worked in the communications sector. He’d been to Iraq twice. Now he just wanted to start over again, and salvage what was left of his marriage. As the orange drained from the sky he told me about salt.

“Salt is the sun.” He said, sweeping his hand across the dash. “It illuminates the flavors.” He spoke about food as if discovering it for the first time.

He’d be getting into LA late in the night. I asked him to drop me off at a rest area on the outskirts of the city.

“Where do you sleep at night?” he asked me.

“I crawl off into the bushes.” I said.

“Have you ever had to deal with spiders, or snakes, or anything like that?” he asked me, his lips tight. I laughed.

“Sometimes spiders crawl into my bag,” I said. “and then they crawl out again. They’d rather not bite me, I think.” The man made a face. Who’s the marine? I wondered, laughing to myself.

He dropped me at a rest area eighty miles outside LA, the last one before highway congestion set in like honey hardening in cold weather. The rest area was flanked by a brightly lit RV park on one side and the deafening rush of highway on the other. One the other side of a tall fence was a sort of trampled forest, the ground strewn with torn landscaping cloth. I found the fence-hole and set up camp, practically singing to myself. California, California, California, west coast west coast west coast, I was almost home. The night was mild, the shadows dark, and I fell asleep, my dreams empty and light.

Handsome Homosexual Needs a Ride West

On a random day in December, this ad somehow found its way onto the craigslist rideshare board of a major city-

Handsome Homosexual Needs a Ride West

Hey- I’m an attractive gay man in my thirties and I’m looking for a ride west, preferably with another gay man. I like to have fun when I travel, and I’m hoping that you’re into that too. What sorts of things do you like? Send me an email with a description of yourself and what you’re into, and let’s see if it clicks.

Oh, and truckers- I’ll sleep on the top bunk, but I prefer the bottom

-Bryan

And then this one popped up soon after, on the man-for-man “casual encounters” part of the site-

I got your milk and cookies, Santa!

Hey fellas- I’m an attractive gay man, mid-thirties, in town for the week (family, Christmas, you know!) I’ve been sitting here in my lush hotel room, thinking about how much I’d like to take it from a group of guys tonight. Are you that group of guys? And if there’s only one of you, can you bang me so hard I see double?
I like to be topped. If nothing else, please send a photo and tell me just how you’d like to top me. It’ll make my day so much brighter.
I miss sunny Arizona! It’s so dreary here!

Ho ho ho,
Bryan

And then many more popped up, on craigslist boards coast to coast, seemingly independent of each other. Some were a little wilder than others, but they all carried the same message and had the same, charming photo- a tanned man in his late thirties, reclining on the railing of a sun-drenched speedboat, a bit of land in the distance. And an email address, of course.

In the end, it was actually a lot of fun to make up ads posing as poor Bryan. And for all I know, he actually is into guys, and I was doing him a huge favor. At worst, he’d get a dose of his own medicine, and back off on trying to pick up girls on the rideshare board- which seems to me like asking for blowjobs at the supermarket just because someone made a movie about it once, when the adult video store is right next door. At best, maybe he’d meet the man of his dreams, and they could drive off into the sunset together, hand in hand. What a great story they’d have, someday, to tell their dogs! The time I tried to get unsuspecting strangers to have sex with me in my car but ended up meeting the man of my dreams instead. How romantic!

My Christmas gift to him. Tis the season.

I finished my library time and left the library in Casa Grande feeling peaceful and satisfied. I was now twelve miles from the highway, in the middle of the Arizona desert, with no way to get home, but it didn’t phase me in the least. I was, it seemed, acquiring a sort of super-human power on this trip- the ability to just not give a fuck. Enlightenment? I thought, as I tossed my pack behind the toolshed of a vacant house up for sale, and spread my bivy sack over it. I was thinking of the hippie man I’d ridden with into Arizona, and his meditation retreats. Who needed that? All it takes is a good bit of hitch-hiking and train-riding before you give up on trying to force the universe into some sort of order, and just admit to yourself that you really have no control whatsoever over your life, or the things that take place within it. Once you wrap your brain around that idea, all of the worry falls away and you just sort of become one with everything. Who cares if you’re homeless and you sleep in the dappled shade of a clump of trees? Who cares if you live in a house with houseplants and pay your car insurance on time? Who cares if you sell drugs for a living and spin fire in Guatemala? Our routines do not make us who we are. And routine itself, it seems, is just an illusion. Each day is new. We never do the same thing twice.

Whoa.

Leaving my pack behind the vacant building (it was small, stucco, and filled with bright light), I wandered through the small downtown and onto the long commercial strip beyond, where cars jammed the busy road and big-box stores marched away to the horizon. I’ll walk to the grocery store, I thought, and buy some vegetables and a can of beans. Then maybe I’ll find a bookstore somewhere that has the second vampire book, and I can finally resolve this awful cliffhanger and move on with my life.

It felt good to walk down the strip, stretching my legs and seeing all the people out and about, eating fast food tacos and obsessively washing and re-washing their cars. I ducked into a big grocery store and bought some bulk baby greens, some salad dressing, and an avocado. Then I sat outside in the sun and ate them, avoiding the stares of the teenagers in slipper boots who came out of the mall. I finished the meal with a little citrus of some sort, the kind who’s peel comes off easily in one piece, and there are lots of them in the dumpster around Christmas. Having eaten a good number of non-meat items, I continued on my quest, rejuvenated.

The story was the same in every store. Everyone had the first book in the series- the little five-dollar trade paperback- EVERYONE. Some stores had the fourth book, which had just come out a few weeks ago, and a few stores even had the third. But no-one, NO-ONE, had the second book. I’d walked all over town, and searched the crowded, messy, day-after-black-Friday aisles of half a dozen big-box stores, and some smaller ones, but my drug of choice was nowhere to be found. God. Dammit.

I was starting to project more feeling than was called for onto this little paperback. It was starting to feel as though me not having a resolution to my vampire story was just a complex metaphor for my being stuck in Arizona, and if I could just find out what happened to the girl at her birthday party, if she got eaten or not, or turned into a vampire or whatever, then maybe I would finally be free from this desert vortex.

Just then my friend Lark called.

“I just remembered, I have a friend in Phoenix.” She said. “Do you want me to call him?”

Did I ever! Lark called her friend, who called me, who said that not only would he come pick me up in Casa Grande, but that I could crash on his couch for the night, do my laundry, whatever. We’d actually met once before, long, long ago, in Lark’s kitchen in Virginia when I was 19 years old. L was here in Phoenix visiting a friend, he said, in the refinished barn she lived in on the edge of town. They were both web designers and his friend was here while her boyfriend went to naturopathy school. L would pick me up, take me home, and they would make me some dinner. In the morning I could hitch-hike on my way, or whatever I wanted to do.

Thank god.

I retrieved my pack from behind the empty house and carried it over to the mall to wait for L. He pulled up after an hour and I tossed my pack into the back of the car, ducking down to sit in the front. Although I didn’t know it, as I pulled shut the car door, I was also closing the door on a sort of portal- it was the end of my time trapped in Arizona, the end of my time of endless moments ticking away to nowhere, of directionless wanderings in an empty desert, of a sort of voyeuristic non-existence. I was a leaf, come unstuck from an eddy. From now on all would be movement again, and life’s waterways would once again bear me forward, an object hurtled through space. The question was no longer would I arrive, but, in the end, would I arrive someplace that felt like home.

Decomposing mattresses and cold breakfast sandwiches (In which Annie Dillard and I have a falling out, following my affair with the vampires)

It rained while I dried my sleeping bag at the truckstop laundromat, but then the rain turned off like I knew it would. The desert dripped, fresh from the shower, but the sky opened up, warmed, and promised a dry, brilliant tomorrow. I left the truckstop and pushed my way through the thorny bushes along the highway, remembering how desert sand turns to mud that clings to your boots like dogshit. I’d already scuffed the shine off these new boots, scratched a scar in the leather on one of the toes, and now, as I walked, they gathered heavy soles of grass and desert clay, the stuff mud huts are made of.

I turned away from the highway and walked, instead, out into the inky blackness of the desert. Desert is like a dollhouse with the side cut away- you can see every little thing: every burned out car, every broken bottle, every scrap of trash- going on for ever and ever. You cannot hide in the desert, I thought, and dropped my pack beneath a bare, thorny tree, out in the open. I made up my freshly laundered nest and crawled inside, grateful- ten thousand geese made new again, seventeen feet of cherished loft, and a camo-print shell to make me invisible- nothing but a crumpled tarpaulin on an endless stretch of dirt.

In the morning I woke to the sound of a four-wheeler spinning out on the road just beyond my head- it was early but I sprang up, feeling exposed, the sun bright in the empty sky. I stuffed my things away and brushed my teeth, standing under the bare limbs of the mysterious thorn-tree and spitting into the dirt, now dry. Back at the truckstop I set up camp on a large flattened rock in some gravely landscaping in front of the double doors, propping my sign (OREGON) in front of me and ducking my head into the last few chapters of my vampire romance. Passerby clutched their children close (some with quite a bit of shock in their voices) and looked straight ahead, terrified- or at the very best, uninterested.

A few hours later I shut my little paper novel, devastated. It was all over. I had finished the book. But really, I hadn’t finished it. Because the author had ended the book in the middle of the story, is why. The seventeen year-old girl was very literally about to be eaten by a bunch of vampires. At her birthday party, no less. After falling into a pile of broken crystal dishware. I guess that’s what passes for a ‘cliffhanger’ these days.

I stuffed the book away in my pack and sat up straight on my rock, staring down the quiet parking lot. The empty sky, all of a sudden, seemed to be suffocating me. There was nothing happening. Not a thing. Only my solitude, and the last dregs of patience. And it had all ceased, somehow, to be charming.

I stood up from my rock and paced in the gravel, feeling like a hermit crab in a glass aquarium. If only I could get on the internet, I could post a craigslist ad and maybe get a ride out of here. As it was, I was stuck. Folks that came here wouldn’t even look at me or my sign (OREGON!) and they were all just going to Phoenix, anyway. I needed to get past phoenix. I needed to get west, west beyond all this desert! If I could just make it to California, everything would be easier…

It was two in the afternoon. I sat back down on my rock, and eyed the finished paperback in my pack. Something akin to withdrawal rippled through me, like the best piece of pie I’d ever eaten had been taken away mid-slice. I needed something else to read, dammit, and fast! I had Annie Dillard, sure, but that was more of a kale-salad-with-fresh-basil-from-the-garden-and-homemade-goat-cheese book and less of the stale-pecan-pie-with-whip-cream-from-a-can sort of writing whose constant drip I’d quickly grown accustomed to. With no adolescent vampires to fixate on, with nothing but the empty parkinglot to stare at, with no internet for a dozen miles in any direction, my mind was starting to pace in circles, picking its scabs, biting the base of its tale until it had a bald spot.

What I needed, was a walk. And some fish oil, I thought, popping a few gel capsules into my mouth. Screw this two-horse truckstop. No rides here anyway. Shouldering my pack, I set out across the highway overpass, my anxious thoughts quickly falling away with the good old-fashioned movement of my legs. On the other side of the blowing highway (I would walk right on to it and hitch there, if it wasn’t for my pesky AZ bench warrant) was another truckstop, a mcdonalds, and a circle K. And stretching out beyond them was the cracked skin of the earth itself, naked but for a bare thorny bush or a patch of busted concrete, way way off to some low grey mountains and a smear of smog. It must be phoenix, in the distance.

I set out into the desert, walking aimlessly in an easterly direction, everything too open for me to ever get lost. After a moment I found some low shrubs and dropped my pack behind them, resting the cardboard sign on top as camouflage. I walked away with just my water bottle and then cut off to the left, toward a dirt road and an old stone building, a sort of vacant church from long ago, very Spanish looking. There was a trailer next to it, bright and new, and a wooden walkway. ARIZONA VISITOR INFORMATION, read a sign that had been zip-tied to the fence. I climbed the wooden walkway, dogshit mud falling off my boots in clumps.

The elderly women inside looked up, surprised to see me. Hundreds of pamphlets were lined up on wire racks throughout the trailer, immaculate and bright. One of the women had been taking pamphlets out of a cardboard box, the other one sat at a computer. I eyed the computer hungrily. Maybe they would let me update my blog here?

“I need information,” I said.

“Well,” said the woman at the computer, pleased. “how can I help you?”

“How far is the closest town?” I asked.

The woman got up from her desk and shuffled to the back, plucking glossy pamphlets off the racks. I wandered over to another rack, and stared, fascinated, at the pamphlet in front of me.

Jaguars in Arizona

Jaguars (Panthera onca) are once again reclaiming parts of their former habitat in the southwestern US. Motion sensing cameras have captured images of at least four jaguars that have roamed across the Mexico border into areas of New Mexico and Arizona during recent years.

There are jaguars in Arizona? I thought. How cool is that! Big cats, stalking this endless desert. Where do they hide? Where do they sleep? I put down that pamphlet and picked up another- Living with Javelina. Javelina, apparently, are a sort of hoofed beast, reminiscent of a wild pig but smaller, forming packs from two to and many as twenty, and are most active at night. Food for the jaguars? A sort of nighttime ballet, out in the dark desert? So much action, on all this cracked dirt!

The woman came back with a pamphlet she’d opened and folded back so the map part was showing. She’d drawn a blue line from where we were to the nearest town, Casa Grande, and circled where the grocery store and the wal-mart were. It was a good dozen miles away, as I’d already suspected.

“Sign our guest book?” She said. It was more of a statement than a question. I bent over it with the ballpoint pen she offered me. Carrot Quinn. Destination… Phoenix?

“You staying around here, or just passing through?” She asked me.

“Just passing through.” I said. “Thanks for the map.” Shoving it in my pocket, I pushed open the trailer door and clomped down the wooden ramp. Turning left into the desert I walked back towards where my pack was hidden, enjoying the feel of soft earth under my feet. I saw some movement to my left and looked over at a group of dogs, three of them, cutting in and out around the thorny trees. One was black, and two were brown. They kept a bit ahead of me as I walked, and soon they reached my pack, pausing as they did to smell the fabric and nudge the cardboard with their noses.

“Hey!” I shouted at them. I didn’t know how I felt about these feral desert dogs. Did someone feed them? How did they keep so healthy? Hunting Javelina? The dogs looked up at me, bored, but trotted nimbly away as soon as I neared my pack. “Hey!” I called out at them, again, but they kept moving, disappearing into the desert. Why, I thought, Would any dog want to be slave to a human, when it could live free like that, in the desert? With a pack, no less?

I wandered in the direction the dogs had gone, and there I found a concrete platform, in a glittering meadow of broken forty bottles. Across from it was an overstuffed chair, yellow, sitting alone in the shade of a thorn tree. Next to the chair a bag of dog food sat on an upended milk-crate, closed neatly with a rubber band. There was a mattress, too, half in and half out of the shade, soaked from the rain.

“Hello?” I called. Was there a hobo here, sleeping, disguised as a pile of trash? A master of feral desert dogs? An oracle? My salvation?

There was no-one. I turned and walked back toward my pack, acknowledging the folly of leaving my most precious possessions just lying around in an acre of desert that was not, as I’d first thought, uninhabited. I passed another meadow of broken glass, with another sodden mattress, this one nearly fully decomposed, just springs and some yellowed stuffing. The gleaming bottles stretched out in all directions around it, ending abruptly after a number of meters. As far as the hobo could thrown them? Is that what he did? Drink forties, throw bottles, stare at the sky? How weathered must he be!

The sun was sinking in the west. Oh, boy. Soon it’d be too dark to hitch-hike. Oh well. I’d sit out front of the truckstop for a while anyway, feel the cold creep in. Lifting my pack, I marched back toward the highway, and my cold truckstop rock of boredom.

As I waited on my backlit landscaping rock, trying in vain to focus on Annie’s elaborate flooded-stream metaphors (I had yet to get to the chapter titled Intricacy, where Annie would once again grab my attention, sucking me in and redeeming herself as my newfound Strongest Literary Inspiration), a nice man in a company polo shirt came out of the truckstop and handed me a bag of hot breakfast sandwiches.

“Here,” he said. “we have to throw these away every four hours.” He paused. “They’re still good, though. We eat them all the time!”

“Thanks!” I said, surprised. I expect people to kick me out of truckstops, not give me breakfast sandwiches! The man smiled, awkward.

“Can I get you anything else? Cup of coffee? You want a soda? I can get you a soda, on the house!”

“No thanks.” I said. “But this is awesome! Thank you so much!”

He smiled and turned, heading back into the truckstop. The plastic bag of sandwiches felt warm on my lap. There were three sandwiches inside, and a good dozen napkins. So thoughtful! One sausage biscuit, one sausage-egg pancake sandwich, one bacon egg and cheese muffin. I opened up the last one, pulling off the muffin outside and folding the innards into a corn tortilla. So far on this trip, I thought, I’ve eaten more meat than the previous three months combined. I smiled to myself. Well, it was working so far. Whatever it took to power through…

I ate two of the sandwiches out of boredom, enjoying their warm greasiness and staring at the ingredients on the packaging, fascinated. So many additives for one little sandwich! American cheese, for example, seemed to have been created solely as a way of disposing of strange industrial byproducts by tricking the general population into consuming them. I crumpled up the packaging and threw it back into the plastic bag, wiping my greasy hands on one of the napkins. I had decided to save the plain sausage biscuit for morning.

Bored, bored… and with a protein high to boot. Dusk had come and gone, and all was dark in the empty desert. To my left was a backlit palm tree, to my right was the window to a darkened office room, through which I could see the monitor for the truckstop security camera. It was trained on the row of tables in the taco bell. No-one was watching. I should go make the rounds in the truck fueling area, I thought, and let everyone know that if they wanted to jack a hot-plate that plugged into a cigarette lighter or a king-size bag of beef jerky, now was the time.

I missed the vampires.

Finally I decided it was time for bed. Saddling up my turtle-shell, I stumbled off into the desert to sleep beneath last night’s thorn-tree. Bedded down in my cozy nest, I sent out a few fumbling text-messages before drifting off. One I sent to a friend I hadn’t talked to in forever, in a place that seemed impossibly far away- the west coast. Would I ever get there?

Currently bedded down under the stars. Did you know that there are jaguars out here? And wild, hairy pigs? And weathered homebums who sleep in moonlit desert clearings, surrounded by glittering brown bottle-glass?

The next morning I woke up and faced my fate. I was still. Stuck at a truckstop. I had a long day ahead of me of doing absolutely nothing, of getting absolutely no rides. To kick off the festivities, I ate a cold sausage patty on a stale corn tortilla. Delicious. Then I wandered back to the truckstop, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, startling anyone who happened to wander inside. I’d decided to switch tactics today, and fly my sign where the parkinglot met the road to the onramp, in hopes of higher visibility. But instead of getting a ride I sat and felt the minutes tick by at about the same rate as yesterday, only now I didn’t have any shade and the sun was driving me bonkers. Annie Dillard was no help, either. The creek was still flooded, an elaborate metaphor for a cruel and heartless universe, lots of dead things floated past…

At two in the afternoon a man in a pickup pulled up to my outpost and awkwardly rolled his window down. Did I, ah, need a ride?

“Where are you going?” I shouted at him, a bit loopy from the sun.

“Casa Grande.” He said. Could this be true? I still had my map and everything. I climbed into his truck, tossing my pack into the bed. The man was from the four corners area. I’d never been there but my mother had, and I’d seen a picture of her there with her sisters.

“I’ve always wanted to go there.” I said. The man had come to this area to visit his brother, and today he was bored, just sort of “driving around.” Which meant, he may or may not have thought that I may or may not have been a prostitute, but he was going to be polite about it either way. Good enough.

He dropped me off at the white stucco public library in Casa Grande. I felt my heart race at bit as I thought of the public computers inside. Just a few more minutes, and I would be on that sweet, sweet interweb… and not only that, but this was a fair-sized town, and there might even be someplace I could find the next book in the vampire series. I was like a junkie, reunited with my drugs. Salivating.

The computers were, of course, achingly slow. And all around me were teenagers, fresh out of class, clicking away on myspace, blasting youtube videos from their earbuds and shouting to each other across the room. I felt irritation crawl up my spine as I attempted to get my fix. Opening my email inbox, I clicked a response to one of my craigslist ads and quickly skimmed the contents, my eyes catching on the words and then stopping.

SO IF u dont have any money can u provide something else like companoinship or> just curious

And then this one, from the same email address-

ok guess ur not intrested in a ride. i know u left me ur number to call u but id like an answer on the sexual fun times since u dont have any money. just curious if u would or not thx

And then there was this one-

hi i can take u since im going to california around that time. im 34 and if u dont mind rideing with a male and yes im sure uve seen some post of mine cause i like to have fun but anyway can u send me a pic and see if this will work thx im in tombstone so

And this one-

hey i havent left yet and hope ur still reading ur emails im hopeing u understand yes im going that way and if ur intrested since u dont have any money to explore some sexual fun on the way. those was some of my ads i was running so let me know if thats ok before i call

And this one…

anyway sorry to be so forward with u but i just love to meet new people and explore not only the world but some sexual fun with someone new i am disiese free and im no scary person just like to have fun. i will wait to hear from u before i call so i know its cool wether or not uve done anything like this is fine its hopeing u have an openmind is all

And the last one even had a picture-

yeah right

It was him. It was the man who’d called me at four a.m. when I was sleeping in the woods outside Dallas. They were ALL him. It looked like he’d found every craigslist ad I’d posted, and responded to them twice. Who the fuck did this guy think he was? And how many innocenter rideshare-ers had be harrassed? This time, I thought, he’s fucked with the wrong bitch.

His name, apparently, was ‘Bryan Dinwiddie’. And now I had his email address. I grinned at the computer, unable to help myself. I had realized, all of a sudden, what the perfect revenge would be for this obnoxious douchebag. It was craigslist that had brought us together, and it would be craigslist, in the end, who would administer sweet, sweet justice.

Continued Wednesday.

Rain, dragons, and finally, turkey

I have a habit of following my intuition. It works well for me most times. Problem is, I start to have unrealistic expectations of the ol’ strong feeling, and want to use it more like a dousing rod than a coin flip. And so this is how I found myself stumbling among jumbled rocks in the dark at the rest stop in southern AZ, a big wet thunderstorm soaking my pack, soaking my wool jacket, and I am too intent to stop and put my emergency trash bag over everything (why do I carry it, anyway, why do I ALWAYS carry it, if not for this?) because I just know that there is a dry spot, there is a cave, there is a dry spot somehwere. I look out at the sloping boulders and my mind does some sort of shady math, prints out a slip with a drawing of a cave on it. There has to be one, somewhere.

Stranger things have happened. I was caught in a downpour once at two-am just got off the train in North Carolina and found an unlocked supply shed behind a burger joint that was being renovated. I slept there. In every fence, a hole- and in every sleeping dragon of jumbled rocks a cave, right?

The darkness thwarted me. If it was only light, I thought. If it was only light. There were cacti too, strange hostile desert plants, and in general I found myself not trusting the ground beneath my feet, and the unfamiliar alien vegetation- some of them shooting ten feet into the sky, some of them flat and blackened as if they’d been struck by lightening. Would I be struck by lightening? Where there giant spiders? Scorpions? The desert, after all, was no backyard sandbox. And now it was so dark…

I gave up and huddled under a tree in the rain. The tree had no leaves, only thorns. I unclipped my bivy sack from the side of my pack and unzipped it, pulling it over myself and my pack like a sort of tent. As the rain fell, I could feel the fabric getting damp where it rested on my head. I pulled my boots in as close to me as I could, and watched the water trying to infiltrate the grooves of my ridgerest. Pulling out my phone, I frantically texted Sam, my fingers working over the damp keys.

Can has stuck in the rain in Arizona, at a rest area! At night! What’s next?! Can has mountain lion?!!

In a moment Sam, always the faithful friend, texted me back, even though it was after midnight.

Oh Noes! No can has mountain lion!

The water was starting to soak through my “gore-tex” bivy in wide patches. The whole thing felt damp. I texted Sam again.

Bivy sac can has leaks!

He wrote back-

I’m sorry! I never tested it!

It’s ok, I wrote back. It was still free!

The water began to run down my ridgerest in little rivulets, searching for a route to the sea. I could only escape via text messaging for so long.

Sighing, I shrugged off the bivy sac and, leaving it to cover my pack, set off on foot again to find a bit of dry ground. The boulder-dragon was behind a tall barbed-wire fence, which I’d found a good-sized hole in. I walked the perimeter of this fence, skirting the tumbled rocks, trying to will a stroke of luck to fall from the sky. I passed it twice before I noticed it- a van-sized boulder that tipped a bit on one side, away from the wind, and left a six-foot stretch of dry sand beneath its modest ledge. It didn’t seem like much, but it had been raining for a good hour now, and the patch of ground was still dry, so I figured it must be fairly secure. Gathering up my things, I picked my way through the mess of sand and rocks to the magic dry spot, just big enough for my sleeping bag. Exhausted, I set up my damp nest, and crawled inside of it, pulling off my shoes (soaked) and leaning them against the stone wall, changing into my fleece pants (! ! !) and draping my jeans (also soaked) over the rock. As I warmed inside my bag the rain tapered off and a few cold stars broke through the cloud cover. It might have blown over, but it might have not. It didn’t matter. Six feet of dry ground, that was all I needed. Six feet, six feet. I was a simple creature, really. I could live anywhere, really.

The best thanksgiving is the one where you remember to buy hot sauce to go with your cold can of beans. In the morning, when I woke up, the sun was out, albeit coldly, and the water still ran in little trickles down the rock. Maybe it always would. Were deserts ever dry? I didn’t think so. Deserts were just as cold and wet as everywhere else. Cold and wet- my mortal enemies. Waiting for me where I least expected them.

But it was, after all, beautiful here, now that I could see it in the daylight. Flat desert stretching on to forever, a stage for the shadows to dance on, with peaked mountains in the distance like anthills, gathering clouds.

And I had the hot sauce. Oh boy did I ever. A little tin can, fifty-five cents worth at the El Paso walmart. I looked at the can as I wrenched it open with the can opener on my leatherman. The can was bright yellow, with a picture of a pepper. Delicious. I pulled out my bag of corn tortillas, soft and pliable with additives, and the can of refried beans. Trucks rumbled to life and pulled out of the rest area as I put together my breakfast, taking my time and enjoying each stiff taco, dropping small pieces of food on the sandy floor. Finally I was full and packed everything away, grimacing as I pulled on my stiff, still-wet jeans. Below me elderly couples paced around the lot, tiny dogs flying like kites on strings. A cold wind was blowing and I put on all my sweaters (my jacket was still wet), my hat, and my scarf, and ducked through the hole in the fence. Dropping my pack at one of the concrete tables, I pulled the lids off the trashcans one by one, looking for a big enough piece of cardboard. The human beings around me hardly looked up, stiff and shuffling. I found a big box, crumpled in half, and I smoothed it, cutting off on of the sides. A few people watched curiously as I colored my sign, my face mostly hidden in the hat and scarf. It was thanksgiving. Fucking thanksgiving. And my pants were soaked. And a cold wind was blowing. I felt like feeling sorry for myself. Maybe that would get me a ride. Maybe if I started crying…

OREGON is what my signed said, in letters as big as I could make them. Satisfied, I propped it against my pack, and sat, hunched, on the picnic table, ignoring the passing people. I opened Twilight and tried to focus, the tips of my fingers cold where they held the pages.

A breeze picked up, and my sign blew over. I righted it, and it blew over again. Now I REALLY felt like crying. No matter! I could cry into my oversized, fake-fur lined hat all I wanted, and no-one would be the wiser. I sniffled back a few tears, sending hateful emotional text-messages to the people getting out of their cars. Just go and have your turkey, I glared. See if I care. Eat lots of pie. I’m fine. I’ve got this nice book and this nice cardboard sign. I’ll just sit here all day and get pneumonia, don’t worry about me.

Mostly Twilight is what saved me. I disappeared inside of it, and thanksgiving was gone. Vampires, vampires, vampires! Hetero-normative high school drama! Thinly-veiled BDSM!

Suddenly it was three in the afternoon, and a man was trying to reach me inside my hat.

“You need a ride? You need a ride?”

He was a truck driver. There were two of them.

“You need a ride? I’m not a creep! You can ride with us to Phoenix! This is a christian truck!”

“This is a christian truck” are the magic words. Whether or not the truck is, in fact, actually christian, it’s the driver’s way of letting you know that he doesn’t think that you’re a prostitute. All I want to hear.

“I do need a ride!” I said, feeling a bit stiff. I had gone a bit numb from sitting all day on that concrete table.

I climbed up into the truck and sat in the passenger seat. The man who’d invited me was sitting on the bunk in back. The other man was driving. The driver man spoke no English but smiled at me warmly, and I loosened my scarf a bit. I started to talk by way of introduction, but the heat pouring from the vents in front of me had melted my vocal cords, and it all came out a bit slurry. No matter, the man on the bunk had plenty talking for the three of us.

“Where you coming from?” he asked. I gave him a vague and wandering version of my itinerary. “Tennessee, huh?” he asked. “You ever been to Dollywood?”

“No, have you?”

“No. But I been to parties at Loretta Lynn’s place. You know she throws huge parties? She has a big place. I used to go to parties there all the time. They love me. You know, they love to talk to me.”

The man talked quickly and with a bit of a lisp. He seemed excited to have me in the truck. Company! Truck driving is lonely business. Every now and then he tossed directions at the driver, in Spanish. To the left! To the right! He was training the driver, he said, to drive a truck. This was his truck. The driver smiled at me again, warmly.

“Do you get paid extra to work on thanksgiving?” I asked the man on the bunk.

“Yeah, we get extra,” he said- excited, and then resigned, as if he’d really rather be eating with family. As if no amount of money, in the end, made it worthwhile. The way most truckers talk about their jobs. (“It’s a great job! Get to travel all the time!” pause. “Sure do miss my wife…”)

The man wanted to know what books I read.

“I love books.” he said. “I love to read.” I started to tell him but then just let him talk. I know my place. I was the therapist, and this truck was his couch. “I need inspiration.” he said.

“You’re bored!” I guessed. His eyes lit up.

“Yes!” He shrieked. “I’m bored.”

I wrote down the names of a few books people like to read, short simple books people find inspiring. Keep it simple.

“Get these books.” I said.

“What are they about?” He asked.

“Oh, you know, inspiration. People really like them. Follow your dreams and all that stuff.” He watched me, expectantly. “Well, basically they say that you should do the thing you really want to do, even if it means taking lots of risks and being poor and stuff. Because what else really is there?” His eyes were glowing like little coals in the back of the truck. He had been waiting all his life for this. Or something. “You know,” I said, “like me…” I took a drink of my water. “writing is what I love to do. So I make it my first priority. Even though right now I’m hitch-hiking because I’m broke, because I don’t like to work full-time because it keeps me from writing and it’s been too long since I worked last.” He was nodding enthusiastically. “If you don’t do the thing you want to do,” I added, “you’re no good to anybody. You just harbor all this anger and resentment inside yourself, and you’re sort of a drag on the world, your own personal bummersville. So really, you have nothing to lose.”

“Yes!” He cried, excited. Whoever said there was such a thing as a free ride? I thought. I pay my way with pep talks. The driver man smiled at me and nodded, as if he agreed completely with what I had said. He proly understood English perfectly, was just too shy to try and speak it.

“My girlfriend, she’s a writer.” Said the man on the bunk.

“Really?” I said.

“She’s a poet! She writes poetry! Mostly in Spanish.”

“Cool.” I said.

“She’s gonna make a book.” He said. “We were walking the other day, me and her and her kid, and we saw this coffee shop, and I said, why don’t we go inside? Get a cup of coffee?” I looked back at him, nodding. “And we went inside, and guess what there was?”

“What?” I asked.

“People reading poetry!” He said, grinning. “I tricked her!” He shook his head. “She saw that, she said- ‘this is pretty cool!’ She loved it! Next time, she’s gonna read her stuff!”

“And I bet there are enough Spanish speakers in El Paso,” I said, (he was from El Paso) “that she’ll have an audience for her stuff.”

“Oh yeah,” said the man. “It was a mix. People were reading poems in Spanish and English!”

“That’s great!” I said. “I hope she does it.”

We were nearing Phoenix. It was dark now, and raining again. I’d told them that I wanted dropped off at a truckstop just short of Phoenix, so as not to get stuck in a sprawling city without public transportation, everything fenced off, nowhere to sleep. They pulled off into a TA, a mess of bright lights in an expanse of darkness, phoenix still too far away to really see.

“I’ll buy you dinner,” said the man on the bunk. “I’ll buy you a shower. I’m not saying you smell- cuz you don’t- I just wanna help you out.”

“Alright.” I said, climbing out of the truck. I could use a shower. I could stand to space out under some hot water.

The three of us walked, seemingly in slow motion, into the brightly lit truck stop, the ground seeming soft and uncertain under our feet. There was a buffet in back, and the men headed there. I followed, propping my overstuffed pack with its shameless cardboard sign on one of the empty chairs. The waitress came over, pale and tired and disinterested.

“There’s free pie tonight with the buffet.” She said. “Pumpkin pie. With whip cream.”

It was a thanksgiving buffet! I’d get my turkey after all! Grinning, I grabbed a plate and headed to the bar. Iceberg lettuce, olives, cucumbers, ranch. Dried-up turkey (the food, I assumed, had been there since noon), a cylindrical sweet potato. A scoop of mashed potato, a spoonful of gravy. (No gluten! No gluten! No gluten! I thought, as if to work a magic charm.) A serving of overcooked green beans, floating in salty broth. And finally, at the end of the bar, standing alone in a metal tub- purple-red cranberry sauce, half-heartedly broken, mostly still shaped like the can. A Thanksgiving dinner, I thought, as I cut myself a slice, to trump them all.

We ate in silence. I was ecstatic. The men finished up, drank sodas, looked down at their empty plates with mixed emotions. I went back for seconds, sat down and ate more slowly, finally deflected on one last raw, ranch-soaked broccoli floret. The waitress came over and asked us if we were ready for our pie.

“Yes!” I cried. “With whipped cream!”

“A half slice.” Said the man. “I only want half a slice.” The waitress frowned, confused. “I’m already very full.” he said, making a chopping motion with his hand. “One half slice.” The waitress looked to the other man for guidance.

“Half.” He said.

“Give him my other half.” Said the first man. The waitress raised her eyebrows and walked away. I happily stabbed at the ice in my glass with the plastic straw, looked at my empty plate. Moments later the waitress appeared with our pie, obediently cut to order. I ate mine carefully, picking it off the crust.

“I have a weird wheat allergy.” I said when I caught the man looking. “I can’t eat the crust.” He looked away as if I hadn’t spoken, and then stood up.

“I’ll be right back.”

While he was gone the silent man and I finished our pie and leaned back, watching the television over the bar, where one large trucker sat chewing toothpicks and drinking coffee. It was the crack mainstream news, celebrity this and rape-and-murder that. We finally had to look away, and shift our eyes awkwardly, nothing left to eat. Finally the other man came back and handed me a slip of paper, settling into his chair for a cigarette.

“A shower.” He said.

“Thanks.” I said. “I mean it. Thanks for everything.” The man smiled.

“You go out there,” he said, “and you help someone else out.” He nodded. “You help out someone else one day, the way I helped out you.”

“Oh, I will,” I said, shouldering my pack. I left the men to their news and headed for the showers, finding my little room and locking the door behind me. I felt so full I could hardly move. But that’s what thanksgiving is all about, right? I mean apart from all the genocide. It’s about eating. It’s about having enough of everything. Like there’s no scarcity. Like you’ve just discovered a new continent, and there are more trees than could ever fall to the simple ax. Like you can walk across the river on the backs of the salmon. Like there’s enough, like there will always be enough.

I took my shower, standing for as long as I could under the hot water. Outside, I imagined, it had stopped raining. And after this shower I would get dressed, and wander off into the desert, where I would find the most perfect place to sleep. And in the morning, everything would be better. And I’d have gas station sausage for breakfast. And I’d read more of my vampire book. And maybe I would get a ride, and mabe I wouldn’t. But everything, in the end, would be fine.

A break from our regularly scheduled hitch-hiking program, for a moment in the present-tense (Tales of adventure-travel continue thursday)

place: Portland, time: the present

I go to the store to buy some ice cream. I buy cheese instead, some GF pasta shells. I’ve got a craving for milk fat. I eat a few chocolate covered almonds from the bulk bins to prove to myself that it is not, in fact, chocolate that I want. I finally end up at the icecream case, almost as indecisive as the woman next to me. There was a good song playing, something that made me feel alive, but now it’s just an old, tired tune, like a well-meaning friend who won’t stop her mindless chatter. The woman and I take turns opening a glass case until it frosts, picking up an ice-cream pint, turning it over, putting it back. We switch cases, hold the door open a little too long, remember the impending apocalypse, shut it quickly. As usual the flavored ice-creams distract me, even though I know they are never as nice as a good solid vanilla. I finally select my pint and cradle it against my wool jacket, with the pasta and the cheese.

On the bike ride home I am not thinking of you, for once. For once, I do not know who to think of. For once, there is no one, and I realize what a distraction it is, to think of someone. There is only the early dark, now, too big to hold, eating more of the light every day. It makes me feel like sleeping, it makes me feel like sewing scraps of fabric on carpeted floors, rubbing my eyes from the cat, reading for twelve hours straight. But tonight, I am too bored for that. Tonight I wish I had a woodstove again, a pile of too-green alder, a new ax from the hardware store and a bottomless Christmas sky.

I don’t know what to do when I’m not thinking of you. I guess you were never there anyway, just a sort of entertainment for my idle mind, stories I tell myself, creation myths and How The Carrot Got Her Heart In A Tangle. It makes good fodder for nights like these, at least it did for a while.

G. is at home and I offer her some ice-cream. Then she runs a bath and puts her feet in it while it fills, fully clothed, reading a book. I head upstairs to the room I’m squatting, with the cat hair on the carpet and the lumpy futon and the good windows that get the light. The staircase is dark and I feel my way to the top, cautious, even after all these seasons, even after all this time coming back, coming back, a different person every time- the first time, years ago, in the basement room, when I had scabies and Marion still lived here, before she moved to Asheville to follow her dreams and fall in love with a man who learned to make fiddles- the second time in the spring, a few years later, in the room at the end of the hall, with the blowing white curtains that where, somehow, an illusion of endless time- the third time this February, fresh from the country, to try and force myself to be someone I wasn’t, to try to go to school and live in the city and be happy. And date you. Somehow, that was all part of it. The first half of this year was maybe the hardest time of my adult life. I’d listen to Dolly Parton over and over and eat the slowest breakfasts I could manage, watch the sun rise higher every day and feel my nervous system try to crawl its way out of my body. Sometimes I’d sit in the metal folding chair in front of my desk and try to write, but I couldn’t write. Not a thing. It’s the city, it’s the city, I’d say. I’ve got to run away. I let everyone down and got a job as a cook in the woods east of Salem, and I was right. After two weeks I felt better. The insomnia went away and the anxiety with it, like I’d finally found a key to turn off the car alarm in my brain. I still don’t know what happened but it makes me afraid of spring, it makes me afraid of lengthening days and deafening birdsong and love affairs. Mostly, of love affairs.

I think loud thoughts to myself as I climb the stairs in the dark, clutching the wall that seems to tip with each step. Maybe I’ll be poor forever, I think. Maybe I will and it doesn’t matter. I am who I am, I have the soul of me, intact, and I’ll have that for as long as I want it, until it flies out of my body as souls are sometimes known to do, precious ethereal things that they are. And maybe I’ll be Annie Dillard one day but I’m no Augusten Burroughs, and Phoolan Devi lived twenty-five of my lifetimes in her measly thirty-three years. I’ve got a copy of The Writing Life now, thin as a pencil, and earlier I began to read it, and got stuck on one yellowed half-page, wondering, the way only a writer can wonder, how many football-fields of courage were cooked down to make these dozen sentences, and at what cost:

“A shoes salesman- who is doing others’ tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours- is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe salesman fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. Your manuscript, on which you lavish such care, has no needs or wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already- worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it? Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?”

-Annie Dillard, from A Writer’s Life

Texas, part two- also, did you know this is my 103rd post?

On the commuter rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth lies an adorable little town called Irving, a sort of middle-class Latino community, lots of single-family homes and brick-lined walkways and good-humored Texans hammering elaborate webs of brightly-colored Christmas lights on their roofs at two in the afternoon, a twinkling chicken-wire doe out front in the dry grass, head nodding up, down, up, pretending to graze. It’s the kind of place where the bank and the public library and city hall and the bus depot all rub elbows with each other downtown, which is perfect if you’re on foot and carry your house on your back like a turtle. There’s a park downtown with a canal or a river running through it, in these dry parts of the world I never can tell which one. Bright fountains humidify the air and joggers lope along in the golden eveningtime dusk. There’s a supermercado as big as a walmart, and a coin laundry on every block, the warm smell of dryer sheets giving the place a homey, glade plug-in sort of feel. It’s the kind of place you’d want to move to, just to move somewhere, but that you wouldn’t, because you’d be afraid to ruin it.

I chose this place via sheer magic as my destination for scumbag travel errands, aka go to the Laundromat get online at the library go to the foodstore figure out what to do with my life/how to get home. I posted a handful of ads on the craigslist rideshare board at the library, fishing for good-natured folks driving roomy vehicles in a general westerly direction who could drop me off somewhere other than Texas. I’d given up on the train at this point, my reasons being

1. Too cold
2. Too little directions
and
3. I have a bench warrant (for train riding) in Arizona.

Also, I hadn’t bummed rides over long distances in a good amount of time, and even though I secretly hate hitch-hiking, maybe this was just the path of least resistance that would get me home easiest, which was all I really cared about at this point, having been on the road for two months now and really just wanting to be some place already where I could take up space with my stuff and wear a different pair of jeans.

After the library I went to the foodstore and wandered, dazed, among the crazed holiday shoppers. I’d forgotten it was just two days till Thanksgiving, aka Genocide Day, aka Thingstaken, and folks were wheeling metal carts with determination, or else desperation, looking stressed, tired, and unhappy. I found some greens on sale for cheap and some snowpeas in a bag from Chile and an avocado and then found myself, somewhat mysteriously, in the magazine aisle, staring down a four-dollar copy of Twilight, which I’d read the first chapter of outside of Nashville on the second coldest night of my life. My battered Annie Dillard served me well but sometimes, what I needed was escape. I shrugged my shoulders and added the trashy paperback to my basket.

Next was the Laundromat, run by a nice Chinese man who spoke no English and peopled with customers who spoke only Spanish, methodically folding the wash and watching high-volumed telanovelas while tiny pigtailed children (twins!) sailed wire carts across the room like skiffs in a high wind, crashed into the walls, cried. I love Laundromats. Have I ever told you that? Second only to public libraries, or maybe first- because everyone watches TV together and folds their underwear. The mainstream american livingroom I never had.

I put my laundry in the wash and sat on the row of orange plastic wall-chairs to eat my salad and then the bag of snowpeas, (Chile, huh? Think maybe they’re irradiated?) opening my book on the side and trying to concentrate above the noise of the telanovelas and the screaming children slamming into each other with laundry carts and climbing inside of laundry carts and almost jumping out of laundry carts (Little girl! Little girl! Oh no, little girl! It’s the Chinese man, come to save the day). I couldn’t help but smile. After my laundry was done I stayed another hour just to read and soak up the atmosphere (open till ten!) but then it was time to go, on the commuter train back to the airport stop where I’d set up camp in a tangled stretch of woods.

Just then I got a call on my cellphone from a man who’d seen my craigslist ad, he was headed all the way to Sierra Vista, Arizona, early the next morning, to have thanksgiving dinner with his family and I could come along if I wanted, heck I could even stay for dinner if I had no other place to be. He had a thick texas accent and promised me no creepy business, just a good-natured invitation to eat with his family or just the ride, whatever I preferred. He said he’d call me in the morning and we hung up.

Salvation!

Back at camp I spent another few hours in my bivy sack, reading my new book by headlamp, and then finally drifted off, to the sound of small creatures in the tangled brush and a creek, off somewhere.

At four a.m. my phone rang, and it woke me up because my ringtone is a trainwhistle, downloaded for two dollars to pass the time in the St. Paul yard way back when. Confused, I looked at the unfamiliar number. Another craigslist ride?

Hello?

The man on the phone sounded remarkably awake, for four in the morning. I myself felt a little foggy-headed, having just been pulled from a pleasant dream that I could no longer remember. He was driving from Tuscon to Portland, he said. I’d posted an ad on the Tuscon rideshare and if this was for real, I could maybe meet up with him when the other fellow going to his folks’ for thanksgiving dropped me off in southern AZ.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“I can leave whenever.” Said the man. “Whenever you want to leave, I can leave then.”

Hmm. He was talking softly, as if he was in the library or his kids were asleep next door.

“Uh, ok,” I said, rubbing my face to wake myself up. “I can’t afford to pay for all your gas, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“That’s fine,” said the man. “I was wondering if you’d be intogivingalittlehead.”

“What?” I asked, not sure if I’d heard right.

“I mean, are you 420 friendly?” said the man, quickly.

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” I said. “I don’t smoke, but I don’t care if you do.” Wait a minute…

“So…” said the man- “I was thinking of taking two days to get there, I was thinking of driving along the coast, and stopping to camp for the night.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever.” I said again. “I don’t care what you do. We can camp. I don’t care.”

“And I thought you might be into havingalittlefun when we camp.”

“What?! What did you just say?”

“When we camp. H a v i n g a l i t t le f u n .”

“Are you asking me to have sex with you?”

“What, you don’t like a little cock?”

“WHAT?! WHAT DID YOU JUST ASK ME?!” I shrieked into the phone, laughing. “Look dude, I AM NOT A PROSTITUTE.”

“I wasn’t saying that you’re a prostitute,” said the man, calm. “I just thought you might like to have a little fun.”

“PEOPLE ON THE RIDESHARE BOARD ARE NOT PROSTITUTES.” I shrieked at him, sitting up in my bivy sack, not caring if any stray commuters in the airport parkinglot above heard me. “There’s a WHOLE OTHER board for that.” I added. “It’s called EROTIC SERVICES. WHY WOULD I HAVE SEX WITH YOU?” I was laughing, a little hysterically. Who the fuck did this guy think he was? Why would I have sex with someone just because they gave me a ride in their car? What sort of delusional world did he live in?

“WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? WHY WOULD I HAVE SEX WITH YOU JUST BECAUSE YOU GAVE ME A RIDE IN YOUR CAR?” I yelled. “AND EVEN IF I WAS A PROSTITUTE, I WOULD CHARGE A LOT MORE THAN THE COST OF A TANK OF GAS! WHY CAN’T YOU JUST HIRE A BONAFIDE PROSTITUTE LIKE AN HONEST MAN? OR IS AN HONEST TRANSACTION WITH A WOMAN BENEATH YOU? WHY DO YOU HAVE TO BE A CREEP? THIS DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE! WHY ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SEX ON THE RIDESHARE BOARD? IT’S LIKE CALLING SOMEONE LOOKING FOR A NANNY JOB AND ASKING THEM TO PAINT YOUR HOUSE!”

On the other end, he was silent.

“So you’re not into having fun?” He asked, incredibly.

“No.” I said. “I don’t want to have sex with you. And I don’t want to ride with you.”

Click. He hung up the phone. I tossed down my cellphone and shook my head in amazement, our conversation bouncing around in my skull like a bad horror movie that you can’t un-watch. What? Seriously? Did that just happen? Really? Now that I’d hung up, new feelings rose up inside me, anger and confusion and frustration, mostly with myself, for not saying more, for saying too much, for picking up the phone at all. Why hadn’t I just let my voicemail pick up? Why did I answer the phone at 4 am, anyway? Groan. Eventually the anger subsided and I was able to relax again, and finally I lay back down in my sleeping bag and drifted off, tossing and turning as my subconscious tried to make right what felt, intangibly, like the most horrible of offenses.

In the morning I was still angry. Non-creepy craigslist man called promptly at eight, and agreed to pick me up at the train station in Dallas. I took the commuter train into the city, turning the previous night over in my head, surreptitiously spreading almond butter on some crumbly GF bread in my lap. What I needed was revenge. But what kind of revenge? I thought about posting an ad on the craigslist rideshare giving all of the potential creeps a piece of my mind. People who use the rideshare board are not prostitutes, it would say. Try Erotic Services for that. Good… but not good enough. I needed something more, something more specific, something that targeted him in particular.

Andy picked me up in a nondescript SUV outside of union station. There was another rider in the car already, a young hippie man with long jesus hair and a fringed leather backpack. The young hippie man was coming from a natural building workshop somewhere in the Texas desert where he’d learned to build a sauna from cob and eaten lots of raw food. He was headed back to his mom’s land in western Colorado by way of his dad’s land in Arizona for thanksgiving. Andy, our driver, was sort of thirtyish and hard to describe, except that he looked like your average straight white Texas dude, with a friendly face and the most wonderful Texas accent. Andy was married and worked as a construction manager, lived in Texas his whole life but had always, always, ALWAYS wanted to ride a freight train. And for a good chunk of the first part of the trip, that is what we talked about. Riding freight trains. It’s sort of a trick of mine, when I’m riding with strangers and I don’t want to talk about myself, or god, or where I sleep at night. I just bring up freight train riding, and suddenly we’re occupied for a good couple hours. I can tell all sorts of stories, they can ask all sorts of questions, and it’s safe territory for everyone.

Early afternoon the train stories finally petered out. We were a good way through Texas now, making great time. Andy asked me if I wanted to drive. Sure, I said. We pulled off into the most wonderfully dusty ghost town, advertising “gas” but having nothing at all. Empty churches, a boarded up diner. The sun warm and dry. A dog chained up, way off somewhere. A single pickup parked down the street.

“This place is amazing.” I said. “I wonder who lives here! One guy! He’s all, Yeah, I live here.”

Andy climbed in the back, whipped out his ‘personal play station’, and pulled the headphones over his ears, disappearing into a parallel universe. I discovered that the SUV had heated seats, and cranked the driver’s side all the way up, my lower back finally relaxing against the leather seat. We pulled back onto the interstate and headed west, the flat Texas desert all around us, not a thing in it but some low, wind-beaten plants, not a cloud in the sky.

Jesus man pulled some peanut butter and a jar of honey from his bag, a loaf of crusty, seeded bread.

“You want a peanut butter sandwich?” He asked me. “Open face?”

I eyed the bread.

“I can’t eat wheat,” I said, “but I have my own GF bread, if you’ll make it on that.” I reached an arm around the seat and grabbed the plastic bag.

“Yeah, that’s fine.” He said. He smeared the weird, shrunken rice bread with peanut butter, spooning big honey dollops all over the top. “This is good honey.” He said. “It’s from my friend’s bees.”

I ate it. It was good honey. Damn. Why didn’t I travel with a jar of honey?

“I was at a meditation retreat before I was at the building workshop,” said jesus man, turning his frosty blue eyes on me, “and this was all I ate. I could live off this stuff.” I watched jealously as he made another sandwich on his big, seeded bread, complete with a real crust and weightless pockets of air.

“That’s cool.” I said. “You like meditation?” He nodded, and I got the impression that he really, really, really liked meditation. Like, meditation was his thing. His uber hippie look was not for show. He was the real deal.

We had some sort of weightless philosophical conversations about intangible, ethereal things after that, but I didn’t take any notes and I’m afraid they’re all lost to my subconscious, which is a shame, because they were incredible. I know we talked about hippie food and western Colorado, which is where I went to high school and where he lived with his mom (You should come see our valley. Our valley is wonderful.) Andy chimed in now and again from the backseat, and suddenly, at some point in New Mexico we were all the best of friends, which is odd but also sort of wonderful, because in other circumstances we might not have given each other the time of day, a young hippie man and a Texas construction manager and a queer feminist train rider (writer).

We’d get into Arizona around midnight, and Andy was going to drop jesus man off at his dad’s place on the way to his mom’s. I looked at a map and decided to skip out on the place to crash and thanksgiving dinner the next day (Even though Andy’s mom called to say that she was keeping some spare ribs warm for us, and that she’d made up the guest bed) because it would put me in the middle of nowhere, even though Andy had half-offered to give me a ride back to the interstate the next day.

“Are there any nice rest areas around there?” I asked. “Where you split off the highway and head south?”

Jesus man’s crystal eyes got big.

“Oh man.” He said. “There is the best rest stop. It’s called Dragoon. There are all these rock formations there, that look like dragons. It’s so cool. Oh man.” He added. “That’ll be so nice for you, to wake up and see where you are. That’ll be so cool.”

Great, I thought. We’d stopped in El Paso at a foodstore and I’d gotten some corn tortillas, beans, another avocado, so I had a little food- in case I got stuck there for a few days, sitting on a concrete bench with my cardboard sign. I wasn’t worried. It sounded amazing there. Heck, if I got bored, I could climb around on the crazy rock formations, see what there was to see.

As we crossed into Arizona, the temperature dropped, and the air pressure did something crazy, too. Lightning flashed across the sky and off in the distance, thunder ripped the air. Oh no, I thought. We pulled into the rest area around midnight, semis idling quietly, holiday commuters overnighting with their seats tipped back as far as they would go. It was concrete bathrooms, concrete tables, and some tall piles of dim red rock, stretching back into darkness. Lightning flashed again. CARACK! As I pulled my pack from the car, fat raindrops hit the sidewalk around me. Shit.

“You sure you don’t want to come crash at my place?” Asked Andy, sleepily. “I told you, you’re more than welcome. Eat dinner with us too.”

“No,” I said, for some crazy reason. Sure, it was raining, but wasn’t this the kind of place where it only rained like two days a year? The rain would proly quit in ten minutes, and I could go crawl off into the rocks to sleep. No prob. “This is fine,” I said, more to myself than to him. “I’ll be fine.”

“You said you had a tent, right?” He asked.

“A bivy sack.” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well ok.” He was too tired to think too much about it. My new friends pulled away, leaving me at the dark rest area. On the other side of a tall fence, the sleeping dragon whispered mysteriously of caves and secret, hidden dry places. The rain fell harder, pounding the shoulders of my wool jacket. Shit.