26 days ago I left to drive east.
While driving for four days out, three days back, and elsewhere in-between, I grabbed a pen and threw thoughts haphazardly into my cheery, red Moleskin anytime the mood struck me, writing precariously with the steering wheel for a desk.
Sometimes I marked the time; oftentimes I did not.
What a vast and amazing country we have.
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(New Mexico)
1:12p MST – Here began a whole lot of gorgeous nothing, bleached skeletons of wooden bones – empty billboards – wide skies, and clouds moving slowly through the heat like herds of great, white cattle.
Traveling solo, I found myself in the awkward, hated position of taking pictures of myself.
2:48p MST – Glad I wasn’t banking on that sign for gas in Tucumcari on 54E, old Route 66.
The Allsup’s bathroom in Logan, NM is so sterile and white you can smell the clorox from outside the restroom by the Doritos.
Calexico over the plains! – I love themed, ambient music.
(Texas)
It’s amazing how little time and its traffic jams and sitting stopped for one-laned road construction affects and stresses you when you make no parameters, plans, or allotments for it.
Driving across these hot, open stretches of highway makes me wonder of the hands that stretched to lay them, the backs that stretched, hunched, over them, and the legs that stretched miles along them. How many years ago was it now that these men worked, leaving their families to dust and depression to earn something – anything – from stretching connections across plains from one tiny town to another? . . .
Pink-tinged dunes between patches of coarse, dark brush of sage and yucca are smooth, bare ripples of sunburned flesh – a sensual landscape of dry ground.
(Oklahoma)
6:34p CST – OK welcomes me with rain – eight drops of it splatting on the dirty windshield – and it is finished.
7:04p CST – Crossed Pony Creek, with no water and two entwined cottonwoods sunk in the sandy bed. I imagine two teenaged lovers meeting after rain – when the creek is full – to climb the same bough and kiss over the water until the stars come out and shift quietly over head.
Mascot of Hooker, OK – the Hooker Horny Toads . . . Somebody sure has a sense of humor . . .
(Kansas)
Kansas is a land tinted gold. Golden sunflowers, golden wheat, gold-painted, black preying mantis-like oil pumps praying to the ground.
Ice in an empty cup – pounded on the face of the steering wheel – makes the best crashing beat.
From the echoing McDonald’s bathroom, the beeping of the kitchen’s ready food sounds like a hospital with multiple codes happening all at once.
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End of day was in Kansas.
Be well. I miss you, open road, and the faces I saw upon you.
– SAWK