Open Road

First inkling. If I had to look back, back to where the lure of some far off place beckoned, really went far back, it would be to the thought of blue. Not the blue of a sky shining with sun or stars, but the first memory of my life, a color, the diamond aqua blue of a mid sixties Plymouth station wagon. The blue the color of where ocean meets sky, catching the sun like water, reflecting upwards the glint of the day off abundant chrome, as we set out for yet another weekend drive.

Does anyone just "go out for a drive" in this day and age, other than me? Do we just drive anymore? When was the last time you got into your car or truck with no real plan as to where the day would take you? Granted $3.00 a gallon makes it hard to justify it, but sometimes I need to just get out and hit the road. Driving simply to drive, not maneuvering from Point A to Point B while I'm also doing other things. Simply getting in my car and heading to where the sky slaps the horizon line. No phones, no TV for anyone in the back seat, no teleconference. Sure the radio might be on once in a while but I'm not trying to send a fax at the same time. I'm not saying I've never talked on the phone in my car, work has caught me there, but it's not attached to my head.

When I go out to see family that I have in Colorado, I drive. I fly enough for work, give me a couple days in the truck driving across a part of the country I've grown to love, the Plains states. With no timetable and no set schedule I'd drive as long as I felt like it, watching high, fat clouds like whipped cream piled upon a flattened landscape, their shadows meandering like well fed cattle across the road. I've taken one of those trips with my best friend, laughing and sharing stories of our youth as we went to see our families, who live just miles apart. Laughter doubled, sorrows halved. On many of those trips I drove across miles and miles of Milo, wind farms standing like futuristic beings on landscape literally unchanged in hundreds of years. Prairie grass burning, it's scent blowing for a hundred miles along the vagrant air of October. The road fled backwards under my wheels, sun on my face, cheek bulging innocently by a old fashioned lemon drop. From the outside of the car I could hear the roar of the wind, from the inside only my breath, and the faint click of my teeth against the candy as I rolled it around my tongue. The truck pushed through the landscape, thrusting it aside while inside the truck was only calm, stereo quiet, my mind turning over thoughts round and round, settling into the rhythm of life on the road.

There are times I listen to the stereo on the drive to work, but not always. It seems as if everyone in a car anymore has to multi-task. Talking on the phone, eating. drinking, reading the newspaper (yes I've seen that), putting on makeup, singing along to the iPod while waving both arms in the air. Usually while one of the rest of us is slamming on the brakes, cursing and giving them that "you're #1" hand signal.

As kids we'd all pile into the station wagon every summer and drive down to my Aunt and Uncles almond farm in Central California. While we were there, our folks would talk and joke and drink cold beer, listen to their generations music and just relax. My cousins and we would play outside all day, throwing stones at bats out in the orchard, swimming in the irrigation ditches, riding the little motor scooter that was the late 60's equivalent of a "four wheeler". But as fun as that was, what sticks out in my mind was the two day drive it took to get there. I remember more of that, than the actual visit once we got there.We also made trips across the desert to visit my Dad's older brother, which were all memorable except for the time I wanted to bring my pet turtles along, and Dad , in a hurry, put them in the trunk in their little water habitat. Five hours later as we left the cold comfort of the mountains for the sizzling hot plate of the Boardman desert flats, Dad remembered the turtles. Turtle Soup. So in addition to dealing with a station wagon with no A.C., a cranky family and 200 hundred miles left to go, Dad now had to deal with a sobbing four year old little girl.

There was another trip, though where my brother and I were little angels and didn't bicker or squirm at all as we set out. So Mom said, at the next stop she'd buy us a gift to reward us. She comes out of this store with two small cactus plants. Remember, we're about 8 years old. What 8 year old do you know wants a Cactus?? We looked at each other, politely said thank you and spent the rest of the drive planning mayhem with mutual conspiratory glances and the words we didn't have to say. . "We were robbed". But you know, we remember it, and we laugh about it together and it's a good memory now. If she'd just bought us a soda or a candy we'd have long forgotten that trip.

But the majority of memories of those drives were happy ones, long treks across new landscapes. There's a time in every trip, no matter how long, where you settle into the drive as a family and for my Dad, the driving seemed almost effortless, as we watched the landscape change from green to brown to mountains and back to brown and we'd hear stories of his youth, of he and Mom growing up together in Montana, the radio off, the only music the sound of my Mom's relaxed laughter, a laughter I can still sometimes hear. For I hear her voice in mine, I'm told we sound alike, and there are days I can crack open the window and the warmth of the wind will blow in and around me, warming my cheeks and the back of my throat and as I look up to a contrail that has caught my eye, our laughter will echo in the wide spaces ahead.

What I recall of those long ago trips other than the laughter was just sitting and looking out the windows for miles, for what was most memorable were the landscapes, stopping when we got tired or thirsty and actually looking and touching the wonders we'd read about in school. The Grand Coulee Dam, the drive through redwood tree. Then back in the car, with postcards and maybe a souvenir baseball hat. I saw mountains and tumbling landslides, and fish leaping against gravity up a ladder, and once even an albino buffalo, kept on a small piece of range on which resided a little restaurant.

I had never in my life been next to an animal that big. He was old, and completely tame, raised by the husband and wife with the restaurant, with a few acres to roam, and enough wild memory to twitch in running freedom in his dreams. I was afraid at first to approach him, almost blind in my fear, but I crept up, drawn by soft eyes the color of a seashell, and the warm flank. Judging by his breathing, the slow, patient release of air, that sound of a concertina, I knew he would not hurt me and I reached out through the fence rails and touched the giant soft kernel of nose, the velvet bones of a face as enormous as the future, as he looked back with those pink eyes, a countenance as powerful as history, as motionless as memory. And we stood there, together, a little auburn haired girl and that lone remnant of a past that's faded to nothing but dust and cornered thought, all alive and all alone

We made our way that weekend, those summers; to happily anticipated destinations. We had no videos, we had no electronic toys, we had no air conditioning. Yet there would always be a point a few hours into the trip, where we would settle into each other, and as a family, settle into the road. Like my long drives today, there was a point where the journey became a game, matching wits against the elements and the curve of asphalt, red barns and giant outcroppings of soil and rock, the flash of a red winged blackbird, blending into a moving diorama of the land. In my car, in those miles, I can find myself without asking for direction. For like in that that old Plymouth wagon, with nothing more than some water and promise, we experienced our true selves; we shared grace and and honest laughter. We had no fixed plans, simply intent on the journey, not the destination.
Years have passed, but for today, I'll just the chores that need to be done to wait for a day. I'll simply load up the car and head out on the road west for a bit, to where the horizon takes me. I'm going to round up Barkley, grab some water and we're going to just take a drive. We'll head out through the fragrant morning, and watch new vistas come into view. I'm going to leave the radio and the phone off. I'm going to just take in the landscape, a horizon that beckons. I'll leave the map put away, for where I'm going is not in any map, places of truth never are. For the real journey, the real adventure, is not simply seeking new landscapes but to see them through the scrapbook of past roads traveled, with an anticipation honed by time and miles and memory.

Because the being and cadence of the open road calls to me, has always called to me, the sound of the car, the roar of an airplane overhead, the movement of life continually cresting another hill, another mountain, hurtling down a path of fluid need. The affirmation and promise of road and open sky has been present with me since those early road trips, and it only takes a long afternoon drive to take me back. Somewhere out there I might meet that horizon I seek, but in the meantime I'll continue on. If I need fuel I'll stop and if I get hungry I'll see if I can find a quaint little Mom and Pop restaurant. Just maybe someone out there still has an albino buffalo