“This sandwich will have three slices of chimkin, and three slices of roast beef,” I thought to myself. Yes, a combination sandwich. For the road. The long journey ahead. Each sandwich I prepare will have a slightly different combination of ingredients. Chimkin or roast beef as the meats. Cheddar or muenster for cheese. Mustard or mayonnaise for goop. All on wheat bread. I will not compromise on the bread. White is for babies. Wheat is the Adult Bread.
A tiny swirl of anxious and unctuous thoughts spiraled around my brain pan. Too shallow to ladle any sort of deeper meaning but deep enough to redden nerve endings and dendrites in the gulliver. I had taken long road trips before. To the west coast, twice. I flew on an airplane from Minneapolis to London. I took a boat from Florida to the Bahamas. Traversing the globe was not a new thing. I recently had a birthday. Turned 37. I didn’t think I was the type to settle into a routine, put on a pair of slippers and drink a hot cocoa and fear the wider world. So what was this little tingle of dread? Why did a finger of unknowing work it’s knotted knuckles into my brain’s bum? Was it because I was travelling with my girlfriend and future wife? I wasn’t the freewheelin’ Bob Deelan of my younger days? Was it a cultural memory of a Wisconsin boy travelling to the Confederacy, but without the fearless leadership of Sherman?
We were headed down there for a wedding, and for a vacation. One of my girl’s college friends was getting married to her longtime beau, and we were also going to explore another part of the country with our paid time off.
The next sandwich I made had six slices of roast beef and cheddar cheese and mayonnaise. “I feel like I’m forgetting something,” said my beautiful wife as we were about to disembark. “Probably nothing that we can’t go a couple days without or buy while we’re there,” I replied. She nodded. We left.
We rented a vehicle for the drive. A mighty steed, a great black beauty of a Jeep. We didn’t want the miles on our own vehicles. I sat in the drivers’ seat. My daily vehicle is 20 years behind in technology. This thing had a tablet affixed to the dash, and many buttons. I sat high-up, as though upon a horse. My mighty steed had very touchy brakes. Well, probably normal brakes. My car has a very different sensitivity. The giant black Jeep even had little lights in the side view mirrors to indicate someone was in your blind spot. We listened to podcasts as we departed Minnesota into Wisconsin. We had a paper bag of snacks (chips, trail mix) and a cooler full of snacks (sandwiches, beef sticks).
We drove through the familiar Northern Wisconsin wilderness. The pine unknowing. Unknown. However, because of our lifestyle of being long-distance lovers of nigh-unto two years, we were quite well-acquainted with this coniferous plantation stretch of US highway 53. The first several hours were routine.
Somewhere around Tomah, cop lights started flashing in our rearview.
“Is this fucking fascist pig, this fucking instrument of capital, this goddamned foot-soldier of the Shit Empire attempting to detain me?!” I asked aloud. At least, that’s what I felt in my heart. I actually asked my wife “Is he pulling me over, really?” I looked down at my speedometer and I was going 73 miles per hour. I rolled over to the side of the road, in a very cool way. I opened the windows and waited for the cop to address me.
“Hey,” he said, rosy-cheeked and probably 24 years old.
” Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
” Your tail lights aren’t on.”
“Oh, okay,” I replied.
I started fumbling around on the steering column of this rental. Jeri explained that his was a rental, and we didn’t know the workings of this machine yet. He was grinning and shining a flashlight around in our car. I eventually found the lights. He went to the back of our car to make sure our back lights were on. He smiled, cutely, and then told us we were free to go, but also he printed out a written warning for me. I could write a written warning for him for being a fucking buzzkill. But then as he was walking away, we made sure he confirmed our booty lights were on. You’d probably imagine my mood was all sorts of fouled-up by this encounter with the police. However, I was relieved. Because he didn’t arrest me for being Too Punk Rock. I didn’t have any warrants for being too much of a rebel.
And darling, I’d love to tell you that was the nadir of the journey. However Hurricane Helene was riding the Appalachian ridge and circumstance was about to bite my buttcheeks. I had eaten about 3 sandwiches by this point. They were pretty good. I think Jeri only ate one of the six sandwiches I made. The mustard was good. Hot in the way that horseradish is, not that jalapeno funk.
The night turned into day, and the rain was falling hard. I had been awake for a long while. We stopped at a sketchy gas station somewhere in the middle of Illinois. I wanted to get gas and smoke a cigarette. Some methed out weirdos appeared at the gas pump next to ours, and I waited for them to leave before going in to pay for my gas. Why? Because I was certain they would ask me for a cigarette, and then also try to sell me some heroin. That was the type of gas station we were at. This was a place where the hard liquor was behind locked cages and there were rolling papers in a display stand at the front counter. You understand.
The rain fell like Noah’s deluge. I drove on. Jeri and I listened to the audiobook of The Mothman Prophecies as the pancake of middle Illinois rumpled up into Appalachia. I only hydroplaned a couple of times for a couple of seconds in our big fat black Jeep.
As we rumbled on into the former confederacy, passing towns with names like Peach, Grampaw’s Pipe, and Black-People-Don’t-Deserve-It, we eventually found a slight clearing in the rainstorm. A six-lane highway met me, and some goddamned trucker’s blown tire sat in the middle of the road. I swung wide of the obstacle as best I could, but a coil of wire somehow found our tire, and we got a goddamned flat tire on our 2000 mile road trip.
The modern Jeep is smart enough to alert the driver “You are losing tire pressure,”. “Fuck,” said I. “Goddamnit,” intonated Jeri. Not good.
We were losing about 3 pounds of pressure every half mile. I calculated in my mind that we could probably make the next exit and ask Enterprise for help. Jeri wasn’t so sure. We managed to bomb our mangled Jeep into a Speedway parking lot and call the owning company. “Hewp,” we said. ” Some wires fucked up our whole thing,” It was again raining hurricane shit, there in that bullshit town. Were we going to make it? Well yes. Obviously yes. Obstacles tasted like candy to me at this point. “We’re gonna make it,”
We went to a new Enterprise location after a beer-bellied boy put a donut on our Jeep. Just to clarify, I know how to change a tire. I could’ve done it, given the proper tools. But we didn’t have a jack, or jack-shit in the back. I was fucking soaked at this point. I’d been outside in a lot of rain.
We went to a new Enterprise location and the guy there was like “We have a very small, tiny, little, itsy-bitsy car for you, if you want it,” Yeah. Whatever. I’m fine with it. And it was some gold-colored little Mazda thing. It was incredibly small.
“Oh, Jeri!” I ejaculated, and then I exclaimed, ” It’s low to the ground, a quick little fucker, like my everyday vehicle, except not shitty.” Jeri was not in love with how small it was. But it still fitted all of our shit.
We got to the wedding venue, and it was really nice. I had been hallucinating just a little bit on the long drive, the red warning lights on radio towers far in the distance turned into angry eyes, as the divots in the landscape were jagged tooth mouths, etc., but eventually we made the scene in Tennessee. The couple that was marrying were cute and sweet like a fine peach cobbler. The husband ranted an 8 page typed speech that he swore he pared down from 17, and the wife had a speech explaining her vows as well. But it was cute, you could tell they were in love and destined for each other for a long while. The venue was a little valley in a wooded area you could only get to by gravel roads.
I ate some fried chimkin and Jeri had the brisket. It was a dry wedding reception, which explains why 90% of the crowd had left by 9 PM.
The next day arrived on schedule, and in our little yellow dart of a car, we went to Rock City, Tennessee. Or no, I think it was Georgia. It straddles the border.
We tried the regular road to the place, as described by our GPS. However, what with the hurricane and all, a giant tree was splayed across the road, making it impassable. “Jeri,” said I, “Try a different typing in that machine. Let’s go up north of here and then swoop back down,” Jeri held her lip in consternation. “Fuck this tree,” she seemed to say, “And it’s road-blocking shit.”
We made it to Rock City within an hour, and in doing so had bombed around little weird streets the likes of which I have never encountered in a proper city. A big ass tree was laying across the road and they just chainsawed it in half and spraypainted orange on either end, like “yeah, whatever.” “Don’t hit this tree limb, we are not paid enough to move it off the road.” The road names were seriously things like “Princess Blvd.” and “Fairy Wy.”
We got to Rock City before anybody else. We were the only people in this place. It was foggy, a mist obscured everything. It was an interesting mixture of geographical oddity and curated camp. The landscape was great slabs of stone and twisting trees. We walked down into moss-hewn caverns. Hidden speakers played sparse acoustic guitar music. I was walking into a dream. Each earthen step lead to more grey crevasses, and we walked up and down the trails to find lichen and swooping trees over the trails. Blinking red lanterns hung in places just out of sight. I felt the mystery of the world again like when I was a child. Something wonderful and profound was happening. I crossed a hanging rope bridge. I stood at the edge of cliffs. I squeezed my body between great walls of grey stone and all the while I was looking back into the beautiful blue eyes of my wife.
Then there was some trippy weird fairy tale underground hell world
Don’t want to talk about that much
The next day was beautiful as well,
Makes sense to have Giraffes as the first animals you see in a zoo. They will necessarily look down their nose at you. Look a bit like they are judging you. They are telling you they are not amused. You’re there to see them, they’re not there to impress you.
I also had beef with an exotic bird, and felt a humanoid connection with a gibbon. We ogled their many tortoises and turtles and terrapins and Teenage Mutants. It was a good time.
We drove back home, many hours. A thousand miles in one crack. I’m not afraid of it. I’ve found I can drive a long time if I’ve got the right circumstances. I need to break about every three hours for a smoke and to stretch my legs. I need a really great person in the passenger seat. I had the best co-pilot on this odyssey. I’m lucky to know her. I’m lucky in a lot of ways.
Here’s a lizard I saw:
