Dear Kari

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. –Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet. --Dear Sugar.

No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. --Jonathan Franzen, from "Farther Away"

You too can be carved anew by the details of your devotions. --Mary Oliver

One of these days you'll be born and raised, and it's such a waste to grow up lonely. --John Mayer, from "Born and Raised"

Because SC needs the arts, and so do I

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13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 13, Sense

The banded tail of an armadillo disappearing into a bush at the first rest stop in Texas, and Scooter's confused pulling.

The truest tacos in the land, from a food truck in Houston, with cilantro and onions and only $2.

The sky I woke to in Indianapolis, and the morning scent of growth in the garden.

The glass of sangria, rich and cold in my hand, against the couch's intoxicating softness.

The slip of Scooter's fur as he ran past and into the grasses higher than his knees.

The breeze only found atop Mount Oread, gazing beyond the stadium to the haze of Kansas fields.

The turkey on focaccia, greenest stems of daisies, flat tire donut, essence of loved books in Aggieville.

The quiet of 4am, made quieter by a leaving.

The difficulty of drinking hot water.

The pull of speed on flat roads.

The laugh of my mother.

The sweat dripping.

The hugs, all.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 12, Reminder

3. Reminder Stone

All who pass, pause:
from a source inside
we hunt the goal.

This journey you are on--
how far? Look down:
this place?

It may be here.

--from "Roadside Markers for West of Dodge" by William Stafford

Thunderless lightening lit the black sky of Hutchinson the night I arrived. I could see it from miles away because trees weren't blocking the distance. It's one of the things I miss most about Kansas: sky all storm, end to end.

The next night it stormed for real. We watched from inside as the rain slanted sideways and filled the street, my car wading up to its rims. I shivered in the after-air, drove home with damp skin.

I learned there's now a wind turbine manufacturer in Hutchinson. I saw a blade the length of three semis crossing through town, the curvature and gloss what set it off from a wing. My high school has its own 5 kilowatt turbine providing partial power, harnessing wind I wish I'd known how to use years ago.

Ad astra per aspera. John James Ingalls believed in Kansas, and wrote that "the aspiration of Kansas is to reach the unattainable; its dream is the realization of the impossible." Ingalls, a native of Massachusetts, chose to live in Kansas because he believed the state had a bright and promising future. To the stars through difficulties.

I slept under the stars for the first time on the trip, the tent top exposed to a clear sky. Sunset had fallen in rainbow over Cheney Lake, full moon behind. It was light enough I was not afraid. In the morning, we found raccoon tracks along the water's edge and ants all over our food. We listened to the calls of birds we couldn't identify, stood silently with our feet covered in clay, practiced following waves to the horizon.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 11, First

This was in the middle of my nightly coughing fit, when Scooter wouldn't lay down for more than ten minutes, when I watched GIRLS on HBO while I sat cross-legged chugging water on the bed. This was on my first night of the trip at the Motel 6 in Knoxville, where my room was on the second floor and next to the outdoor staircase. Every few minutes someone walked by the door or down in the parking lot. Voices. Coughing. GIRLS. Barking. Then the knock. 9:30pm. I grabbed Scooter's collar to keep him from growling. I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here. This was when I choked back my coughs and hoped the knocking would stop, hoped that Scooter wouldn't need to go out again to the rocky parking lot by the highway, hoped I could speak when you called.

***

I can't tell you how many Jackson Counties I passed through, the name telling me "all these places feel like home." I called you from the one in Indiana, when I got gas at this little shack of a place off the highway. I was shaking when I called, and sweat dripped from my bent elbow. "I'm calling you from somewhere in Jackson County, Indiana," I spoke to the voice mail. "I thought you'd appreciate that." Then your voice mail asked me if I was satisfied with my message, and I wasn't because it hadn't let me finish telling you about the adventure I thought we should have when I got there. No, I said, and laughed at the woman who wouldn't let me finish. I pushed 2 to go back to my message. It asked again if I was satisfied. If I hadn't been nervous about the others shouting directions to each other across gas pumps, nervous about calling at all, I might have left you a series of 5 second messages spelling out firsts we might have, adventures with our eyes open.

***

The first fish was far away, a small white splash I couldn't identify. Then silver leaps created a trail as you ran toward land, and I squealed at the sight your path made. We tried to repeat it again, and again.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 10, Escort

I had accepted the lack of air conditioner as a challenge. I had acknowledged the two pennies wedged in the dashboard to keep it from rattling, the leak in the driver's side door from the way it was poorly replaced before me, the scratches up its side from someone who had angered its former owner. I had been prepared to mildly curse the CD player when it interrupted playback with static of its own creation. I had replaced the brake stop switch and gotten an oil change.

But I wasn't prepared for how the wind would work its way under the windshield sealing and whip black rubber against my passenger window at 70 miles an hour somewhere in Missouri. It's unsettling to watch your car peeling back on itself, thwacking its own side like some masochistic image I'll let you conjure on your own.

I pulled off at the next exit and parked in the lot of the Association of Christian Truckers. For real. I stuffed the sealing back in its groove and it stayed for the rest of the trip, mostly. My grandpa glued it back in, along with the other side, while I was in Hutchinson. And because I had been sunburnt and sweaty and windblown from the windows down across 1700 miles to Hutchinson, my family contributed to my experience by paying to get the a/c fixed. Which wasn't a coolant problem at all, it turned out, but the control box that runs the a/c. Thanks to them, I drove South with a little more insulation, and I could hear my music over the road and wind at last.

I've only ever owned an Escort. Two, actually. Two white four-door Escorts, the first a 1995 off the Laird Noller lot (where my brother just starting working) when I was 16 and the current a 1999 that my brother handed down to me when he bought his first truck four years ago. Not by choice but by destiny. I carried the Escort to South Carolina on the trailer behind the Budget truck, and it carried me back home two years later, with only minor complaints.

The first Escort tried to strangle me more than once. The automatic seat belt attached to the door frame, that moved along its track at each open and close, forgot me and kept tightening back. It constricted my chest, my neck, until I was able to free myself by unclipping the strap. It took months and months to fix, and it was expensive.

But so it goes with cars. They try to kill you, they protect you, they leave you stranded, they take you farther than you thought you'd go. An escort is protection, safeguard, or guidance on a journey. Though I keep threatening to replace it, to stop fixing it when another strange thing cracks, this little Ford four-door economy car has been all I've known and all anyone has known me in. You won't find the KTBSPA personalized license plate anymore, but you'll find evidence of my loves in the decals and little stickers. Not overwhelming, just pieces of my self that I carry, or carry me, wherever I go.

Now the driver's side windshield sealing has lifted and knocked on my window. I stuffed it back in, bought some white duct tape to keep it down at the base, and on we've gone. 

1995 Escort

1999 Escort