The Reader Travels

When I first started talking about this road trip tour with my friends, they all had ideas about books I needed to include. When one of them mentioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I dusted off my copy and vowed to actually read it this time. The lavendar-colored paperback was hiding in the back room with all the fantasy and sci-fi trilogies, who had been read, but lovingly placed aside for later rediscovery.

Part of the procrastination was the perception that this was one of those “life changing” books like something that Oprah would shove down people’s throats. I expected it to be thought provoking and touchy-feely, and filled with the illusion that the author had some deep wisdom to share with those in the world who were ready to hear it. I’m not opposed to a little eye opening, I just have to be in the mood for it.

But what I found when I read it was that this guy was so far from “together” that it wasn’t really about any wisdom he could share. Instead it was just a look inside his brain. He found his own personal zen in dissecting every thought, every combination of thoughts, every part in the machine of motorcycle and mind. Basically, he was embracing his OCD and sharing it with the world.

So I think about my own tendency to lose myself in compulsive activities like solitaire and Bejeweled, and wallpaper peeling. As I pick and scrape and pull at each tiny little remnant of paper on my bathroom walls, there is peace. I’m going to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling next. Om.

My one experience riding a motorcycle was a dirt bike my boyfriend owned in high school. Of course my mother forbade my riding on it. She knew it would be futile to forbid me to date the wretched boyfriend, but she could hold onto her illusions about the motorcycle thing.

I have to say, it’s always been easier for me to keep secrets than to tell outright lies. If I hadn’t crashed the bike on the dirt trail and twisted my ankle, it would have been smooth sailing. But sporting an Ace bandage and a limp meant I had to come up with something to tell her that wouldn’t have me admitting to the crime.

When you’re a terrible liar, you have to keep it simple. The boyfriend was all about elaborate lies. He told my parents he had been doing some mechanic work underneath his car, when an axle or some other heavy under-body part swung loose and hit him in the head. All so he wouldn’t have to admit that he got drunk at the beach and lost a fight with a guy who was simply talking to me. I don’t remember the lie he expected me to tell when he flipped his car into a ditch and left it there because he didn’t have a driver’s license, all while I waited for him at the Stop N Go, my purse in the back seat of his car. All I knew was that it was just too complicated, and I wouldn’t have pulled it off if pressed about it.

So I kept my little lie simple, to something I could envision myself doing, as clumsy as I am. I can still see it now, even more vividly than the truth of the motorcycle lying on my ankle. I was just walking along the brick steps beside the house I grew up in. I twisted my ankle by stepping off the side of one of the bricks as I had done twice before, for real. The fresh mint was overgrown there because of a leak in the hose, spraying water, so the steps were damp, but everything smelled minty clean.

Of course I ended up married to a great storyteller. If he were telling the tale, I would have twisted my ankle fighting off a large pack of wolves. The wolves would all be dead or severely wounded, but all I’d have to show for it would be a bruised ankle from landing a little wonky after drop-kicking the leader of the pack.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this past summer, thinking it might be a nice addition to my road trip tour. It’s the story of a father and son traveling through post-apocolyptic North America. Along the road, they search for food and for some evidence to support their dream that maybe, just maybe, there are a few good people left in the world.

I enjoyed the book. It’s well written, deep and poetic. But I did have a few problems with it. First off, I just couldn’t understand how they could survive when absolutely no wild life, other than one stray dog could survive. There wasn’t even any mention of cockroaches, which as everyone knows will outlast any catastrophe.

Another problem I had was the absolutist approach that cannibalism could be nothing but evil. It seems a very narrow world view to me, but at the same time, it works for the story, as what they see from the road must certainly be a similarly narrow view. In most travels, what we see from the road merely scrapes the surface of the life beyond the road. And we all know that the locals don’t always welcome travelers for dinner, unless it’s maybe to eat them.

One thing I loved was the images and memories of fish as a symbol of heaven. I guess as Thanksgiving approaches, we really should be thankful for the things we often take for granted, things as simple as the ability to go fishing in a lake or river, to bring home food for our bellies.

Anyway, it’s only appropriate that the movie is out now, during Thanksgiving time. Be thankful for what you have, for it all might be taken away.

My friend M made a 3200 mile bicycle tour from Seattle to Delaware ten years ago with a group called Wandering Wheels. They’re a Christian-based organization, and the trip is like some sort of pilgrimage, connecting with the beauty of nature and stopping to rest at various churches along the way.

I recently got a hold of her scrap book from the trip. She took pains to collect her journal entries, photographs, maps, letters and postcards into a very nice hard-bound volume called, “Are We There Yet?” It was by no means an easy trip, made more a pilgrimage by the hardships endured and the 40-day duration of their travels. At the end, they baptized themselves in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, washing their bodies and their spirits clean.

I’ll share a few things that came to mind as I read her story:

• Horatio’s Drive - The story about Horatio Nelson Jackson and the very first coast-to-coast automobile trip had a lot of similarities to the bicycle tour, lots of flat tires and vehicle repairs along the way. Every leg of the journey was a trial, and his companions made all the difference. 
• Travels with Charley - In John Steinbeck’s classic memoir of his travels across America, he mentions briefly that he went to church every Sunday in a different town. He was most fond of the fire and brimstone sermon, where being told he was a foul sinner somehow made him feel better about himself.
• Wade’s Review of the Camelbak - A few week’s ago, I read a review of the Camelbak hydration system on the Vagabond Journey Travelogue, where Wade said that the thing leaks. When I saw in the beginning of M’s book that she was using this piece of equipment, I wondered what she thought of it. Near the end, she writes, “My CamelBak plug came off and stuff started spraying everywhere. I don’t think I’m going to use that anymore.” So there you have it.

My dear friend L spent the last nine months walking, preparing herself for the Breast Cancer 3-Day, held this past weekend. She was the very symbol of struggle and determination, walking so much that at one point she broke her foot, just from all the walking.

But she didn’t let it stop her. She got her boot and her physical therapy, and she kept working out even when she couldn’t walk. Then as soon as she was able, she started walking again. She raised her money, she trained and trained, and the excitement mounted as the day drew near.

She started her 60-mile walk on the morning of Friday November 6. She made it through a whole day of walking, exhausted and footsore. She was camping out Friday night when her body told her she needed to stop. Sick and vomitting Friday night and all day Saturday, she had to nurse herself back to health, while her fellow walkers walked on. But she was back on the road Sunday, determined to finish what she started.

This grueling walk is meant to symbolize a struggle, a fight, determination to defeat death, disease and hardship. It was 3000 people walking strong, leaning on each other, for life. I just don’t know how anyone’s struggle could have been more symbolic than my L’s, that she would start strong, then get sick, then come out strong in the end.

Linster, you are my hero.

The first time I walked into my house, it was filled full with someone else’s stuff. The couple who lived here had remained childless and were nearing retirement age. The wife’s mother had lived here with them until she died, and they were alone again, ready to downsize, put everything into storage and move into a one-bedroom apartment.

They had two households full of stuff crammed under this roof, theirs and mother’s, rows of big gray filing cabinets junking up the space that would become my green room, and an unhealthy obsession with big framed mirrors that covered every wall, reflecting and magnifying the wretchedness of all the stuff. It was a house of great energy, choked in Feng Sh*t.

Back on the road with Anne Tyler, Earthly Possessions is a novel about a woman so burdened by all the stuff in her life, she doesn’t so much mind it when she gets kidnapped by a bank robber and heads out with him on a grand road trip to Florida. Like the people I bought my house from, Charlotte Emory lives in a house with two households worth of crap. She’s stifled, trying to climb over furniture and photographs, in search of some tiny space for her self.

I love Tyler’s description of the state of Charlotte Emory’s house and her life before she was freed at gunpoint. If I wanted to leave it all, I’m glad to say I wouldn’t have nearly as many possessions to weigh me down. Of course, it also means I’m not as desperate to get out.

A few weeks ago, vacationing in Dallas, we had this urge to just sell all our stuff, including the house, and buy an RV to take our life on the road. We’d be untethered and free to go meet new people, see new things, visit family and friends we don’t have time to visit with our crazy busy lives. I’d join my man in the freelance writing profession, and we’d have all we needed — shelter, food, adventure and love. Problem is, I still love my house and my job, and yes, my stuff.

I remembered what George Carlin had to say about “stuff” back in the 80s before the politics became so unbearable in his comic routines. If we ever did this, we’d just have to reduce the size of our stuff and move on down the road.

The story in Breathing Lessons centers around a day trip to an old high school friend’s funeral. The couple taking the trip isn’t all that old, but the wife is having some major empty nest issues. That same weekend, she would be saying good-bye to her daughter, who was heading out for college. And driving out for her best friend’s husband’s funeral wasn’t making her feel any younger.

The older we get, the more we find ourselves attending funerals. Funerals for grandparents give way to funerals for parents, and when your spouses and friends start dropping, it just goes downhill from there. I’m at the age where it’s the parents who are going. Three friends at work lost their fathers this summer, including one of my best friends who flew home to China to be with her father in his final days.

Around the time I read Breathing Lessons, I was taking a road trip to a funeral myself. My husband’s uncle had passed, a year and a half after we watched my father-in-law die. I found myself singing again, standing in front of a church full of people who would truly miss Bob, standing in front of his wife and his daughter who thanked me with their eyes and their tears. I took a deep breath, and I sang, so much more for the breathing than for the dead.

I once compared Anne Tyler to John Waters just because they’re both from Baltimore. I want to claim these two among the great southern US writers, who so beautifully capture a culture trying to hide its deepset hairline fractures. The real difference is that Tyler portrays characters who are not-quite-right, while Waters creates those that are just-plain-wrong.

Of course in the US, the north looks down upon the south, and it’s not just because of the way the maps are drawn. But then, British movies still portray the US as some kind of trashy nouveau riche country with no history to back up its big mouth. It just reminds us that we live with these imaginary hierarchies all the time. It somehow makes people feel better about themselves to observe and judge from afar.

An acquaintance of mine once confided that she had been hospitalized for anorexia. Even in this sad mental hospital world of eating disorders, the anorexics looked down on the bulemics. It’s the ones who don’t eat at all that are masters of real control. The ones who scarf and barf are scraping the barrel.

I recently read Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, which takes us on a road trip from Baltimore to southern Pennsylvania and back, a day trip traversing many mishaps, flashbacks and detours. The main character is deeply delusional, but I realize it’s the type of delusion a person can have south or north, new world or old, skinny or skinnier.

As Dorothy was traveling along the yellow brick road, she was passing straight through Elphaba’s life, challenging the green one’s very belief system by introducing something strange and new into her world. Travelers are not always welcome, and it’s not just about territorialism. People are often comforted by sameness, and afraid of things that fall outside of their world view.

Wicked is not the only story about the people beyond the road who are not altogether welcoming to the strangers who encroach on their sovereignty. Another that comes to mind is James Dickey’s Deliverance. These city men travel first a road and then a river, through territory untouched by city folk. By traveling here and bringing their city notions, they are a threat that must be handled with extreme prejudice.

One slightly less ominous journey occurs in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, with a drag queen show that travels from the safety of the big city in Australia, across the unforgiving outback. In the end, they realize that city is a place that protects the travelers as much as the desert protects the people who live beyond that road. But the challenges along the way, those barriers broken, make the lives richer for it.