I wrote two entries on the road down to New Orleans (one today and one yesterday). Since there was no internet in the car, I'm just posting them together now.
On the road.
1:30 p.m., Monday
Once I decided to forego the Greyhound experience to drive my own car to New Orleans, everything magically fell into place. My surplus possessions quickly sold on craigslist, a former roommate texted me out of the blue wanting to know if I wanted company and a co-driver for the trip down, another old friend called asking me to carry a bicycle for her son (at college in Alabama) down to the general region, and those little mini oranges went on sale at King Soopers.
So, fitted with a car companion, two bicycles lashed to my car with copious amounts of bungee cord, and an ocean of little oranges, we set out this morning.
For such a relatively monotonous road, the first few hours have been pretty interesting.
I discovered that, no matter how mature I may think I am, the day I truly grow up will be the day when I can see a car with an Oklahoma license plate without feeling the impulse to break into my rendition of Rogers and Hammerstein. Also I realized anew the creative genius rampant in rural America when it comes to the naming of small towns. Bovina, Arriba and Bethune have been some favorites so far, but we are keeping a list to compare. Also, on the Kansas/Colorado border, a strange hybrid town called “Kanorado.”
I also have learned that when I drive on long, straight and empty roads (as I did for the first 4-hour leg of the trip), I tend to drift, a lot. But that’s still better than my driving buddy, Sarah, who neglected to tell me until 200 miles east of Denver that she didn’t really remember how to drive a manual. (She’s ok now.) Other driving quirks of Sarah’s include sharp braking and highway swerving to avoid tumbleweeds and furious muttering whenever semis come close to us and.
Most of all, though, I’ve been sinking in the sparse beauty of the plains. It’s a really easy place to get bored and start wishing for the mountains or something a little more varied. But, as a friend of mine recently said, the key to situational contentment is in staying present and living in each moment. I’m trying to live in each second of this long, unending plain, and, doing that, finding it subtly and wonderfully beautiful.
2 p.m., Tuesday. Somewhere in Louisiana.
Louisianan impressions: It’s much greener than Texas already. Also, Louisiana has crazy amounts of road kill. Don’t ask me why. But the side of the highway is littered with poor little critters who have crossed one too many speeding Southerners.
Since crossing the border a couple hours ago, Sarah and I have been maintaining a constant high, and keep reminding each other “We’re so almost there!” despite the five or so hours we still have to go before we reach New Orleans.
The drive through Kansas finished uneventfully (very uneventfully, if you count geographic features as events), and Oklahoma passed with almost no features.
It was dark all the way through Oklahoma, so if the car had performed ideally we probably wouldn’t have seen any of it except the road lines. But being the unreliable machine it is, about 100 miles north of Oklahoma City, the engine started emitting a frightening sound as if a duck had gotten stuck in front of the passenger seat and was quacking frantically for release. We pulled over at a truck parking spot and called dads and boyfriends for advice while performing a ludicrous “examination” under the mysterious hood.
It was then, in the pitch dark, that we realized the true extravagant gorgeousness of the plains: without interfering mountains, valleys or trees, the sky was like an incredibly vast upside-down bowl. As Oklahomans don’t really believe in street lights, the thousands of stars invisible over the Denver sky were twinkling and shining in their amazingly bright glory.
We pushed on through to Texas and spent the night with some old family friends. The car made it fine, but thanks to our star-gazing time spent to let the engine cool down, we ended up getting in around 1 a.m. and dragging them out of bed.
We’re both hoping, one, that our excitement at being in Louisiana lasts the entirety of the state, and, two, we would keep our clean record with avoiding local traffic controllers.
