I had it in my mind to see the Atlantic. And not just the Hudson River and the Upper Bay with 360 degrees of man-made concrete and steel skyline, but the actual Atlantic Ocean, where I could stand on the sand and look east to see the water filled up to the horizon, and beyond that the lands of Europe and Asia, which I had only dreamt about, and to where my Honda would never take me. The Atlantic, which I had never seen before, was Land’s End on this trip, and to not go there, to turn back after New York, would be like not sitting to the end of the credits at the movies. Which I nearly always do because I love the music, and I love that end-of-the-film feeling, and I love reflecting on it all. (And sometimes I recognize a name of an old friend or two.)

Julie was a tad dismayed that I would ditch out with no convincing explanation or any idea of when I would return, but I bolted off anyway, for the day. I had called a friend in Princeton, Sue, figuring I’d stop by and maybe crash at her place if the day got long and I didn’t have it in me to get back to the city. She wasn’t home, and I went anyway. I had ten or fifteen dollars in my pocket. It was all I had, enough for a meal or two, and still it didn’t worry me.

I stopped at Liberty Park on the way out of town and gazed out at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. My grandfather on my father’s side arrived at Ellis Island at the age of three, and checked in with his father who was coming over from England to stay with his brother in Brooklyn, the address of whom, I later found out, was directly across the water from where I was standing with my camera, with the Statue of Liberty between us.

Albert Hawkins, father of Albert Hawkins Jr., was 31 at the time. He came over from England with his wife and toddler on a ship called the St. Louis. He had $50 dollars in his pocket, so we had something in common, but I can’t imagine it.

I can’t imagine it because I can’t imagine a country so great that it would compel me to leave everything behind and go live there. This was in an age before cars, before television, before all the Great Wars. The only thing they had going for them was word-of-mouth, scattered news reports, maybe a picture of Liberty herself, and the sheer, wide-eyed hope of the frontier on the other side of that watery horizon. I imagine Albert’s brother in Brooklyn sent him a letter that read something like: “This place is good and safe. There is work here. Come on ahead. Bring your family. You can stay with me.” And so went the Hawkins to America.

It’s what made this country great. Because when you think about it, everyone who ever moved here took a fantastic risk. We are, many of us Americans, derived from ballsy men of courage. These immigrants had little more than a wing and a prayer. They had their family. They had the guts to say, “We are going somewhere else. And when we get there, if we find that it is not a better place, we will make it so.” And so they did. No other country can claim this.

But at the time I was standing there in Liberty Park, I knew not of this, and was hardly grateful for any of it. I just wanted to get a shot of me leaning on the front hood of my car, in my leather jacket, looking cool, with the Manhattan skyline and the torch of Liberty held aloft behind me. I’d made it, after all! So I placed the camera on my tripod. I aimed the car and meticulously lined up the frame. I set the little self-timer mechanism and ran over and waited... I don’t remember smiling -but I might have- and just before the shutter tripped on what I was certain would be the most iconic shot of the whole trip, an errant gust of wind whipped up off the river and knocked the camera over, sending it toppling backwards into the mud. I heard it click when the camera was pointing straight up at the clouds, and when I went to fetch it, the back popped open unexpectedly, exposing the film. It was mid-roll. I immediately slammed it shut, wiped off the camera, advanced the film and took another shot, but in the end, it never came out. That area on the negative it is just a big white blotch. All light. No more revealing of the moment than if the negative had not been exposed at all, and was all a starless black.

I still had the day. I got back in my car and headed to Asbury Park, New Jersey. The only thing I knew about the place is that it was where Bruce Springsteen got his start, famously playing at The Stone Pony, all those years ago, sparking that Jersey Shore sound and making famous the Asbury Park boardwalk in so many of his evocative lyrics.

I was a fan, so I killed two birds when I pulled into the quiet town and wandered down to the windswept, desolate boardwalk that afternoon. There was the Atlantic Ocean. I came, I saw. It was as uneventful a moment as the place was empty, and it wasn’t long before I’d had enough of the lonely streets, the biting cold, and the dismal grey day, and got back in my car and headed over to Princeton.

I called Sue when I got there, and she was still not home, so I wandered around town a bit and took in the autumn colors and tried to ignore the very obvious signs of the impending winter. After about an hour or so I called Sue again, and still nothing, so I went in to a cheap looking diner with a broken neon sign that read “PJ’s Pancake House” and ordered a large plate of fries and a cup of coffee. I opened my journal and jotted down a few notes, without writing anything of substance. I thought about scribbling out a couple postcards, but didn’t, and ended up just staring out the window for a while, sipping coffee. The waitress looked after me, but kept her distance, and I remember sitting there gazing out into the darkness and slowly, turning over in my mind, I was having a new thought. Something was occurring to me. Some slow, heavy bubble of conscience was welling to the surface of my psyche, and was quietly making itself known.

I wanted to go home.

***

Julie was glad I was all right. She was worried when I came in late, but knew how I was, and found it in herself to forgive. She had the next day off, so we had a bagel at a deli for breakfast, and pizza in Little Italy for lunch. She showed me around her art studio and introduced me to some of her artsy mates. We took a subway (my first, a thrill) and toured the Museum of Natural History, and finished off the day in Central Park, which I found utterly prepossessing. I told her I was heading out tomorrow, and was thinking I would just drive straight through and skip some of those famous sights I’d had in mind; Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, etc. I wanted to try and get home to be with my family for Thanksgiving, for once. She just laughed at the concept, and I didn’t mind it, and laughed with her. It was Wednesday after all, and Thanksgiving was only seven days away. I must be crazy.

When we got back to her place at the YMCA, I had a parking ticket on my car -one of several I had collected while I was in town. (Amazingly, I hadn’t been towed.) I pointed it out to Julie, “See? This town doesn’t want me to stay.”

It was a happy nighttime drive to New York that night, or so I wrote. I remember taking several odd turns, using my trusty maps, and trying to avoid any highway that would impose a toll. Heading northeast out of Lancaster I was attempting to get to New York at a not-too-indecent of an hour to catch up with my old, good friend Julie. Julie was an art student, so I figured she’d be up late and appreciate the spontaneity of my arrival, since

I never called to let her know I was coming. But I wasn’t sure how she’d take it, to be honest.

I passed through a lot of towns that night that I imagined were very beautiful in the day. I could see the brick in the buildings, the old street lamps, the trees losing their leaves. These were simple things I’d never really seen before, growing up in Southern California, which is known for its Hollywood where everything is fake, clean, and has that reproduced sheen on it, like it hasn’t ever been properly aged. In the movie business, a necessary entity is an “art department”, which has people employed to properly dirty things up a bit, make them look more “real”. Here on the east coast, everything looked perfectly “real” on its own. It was very well done. When you’re from Southern California you compare everything to Disneyland. You go to Europe and walk the aged cobblestone streets and you think, “it looks like Disneyland!” (But it smells like piss.)

At one point that night I drove past a sign that read simply, VALLEY FORGE, and I thought, “No, really? The real Valley Forge?” It was the place where General Washington and 12,000 of his men hunkered down for the winter, fearing the revolution was lost. I knew the old story, but could not stop to appreciate it, and buzzed right past. It was the same with Gettysburg, and Philadelphia, and tens of others of historic places I saw signs for, but I didn’t have the time nor the money. I regretted it, but this was to be a drive across the country and back. A marathon. It was the ultimate road trip, not a sight-seeing tour, if I could help myself.

My collection of AAA maps had become invaluable, and I made my way towards that uncanny, unmistakeable skyline, on a lonely Saturday night. When I first caught a glimpse of it from the highway, I was so stricken by its stately majesty that I pulled off the road and made my way on side streets to a dimly lit district by the Hudson River. I found a place to park and ran down to a little plaza by the water and... there it was: the grand Manhattan skyline. Filling the view from north to south, all those buildings lighting up the horizon and growing it to the sky. It was a wondrous sight, and one I’d seen so many times on flattened pages, but here it was on a cold, clear, breezy night, just beyond the waters, the sounds of boat horns and trains in the distance. I stood there for a few minutes and just took it all in; The Big City. And it was New York City, which is THE city of the world, and the view I was currently admiring, its mere image or notion even, defines modern human civilization itself.

All that way and my little wondrous car had made it. I hopped back in and glanced at the map to find a way over to the metropolis, (it appeared that I would be taking a tunnel) cranked up the heat and rolled down the window, fired up some music (Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”, which I had predetermined and packed in the event of this exact occasion) and headed across to the island, hooting and hollering all the way. Moving through the tunnel astride more taxicabs than I’d ever seen in one place, I had my arm on the open window, and my hand up on the front corner of the roof. I noticed that temple-shaped indentation up there, right there, just below the antenna, and I could run my fingers over it. I’d noticed it before, but it here it was reminding me of everything that was a continent away, and yet remained unanswered. Okay, so I’d escaped. For now. But had I really? It was all right there to touch, in my outstretched left hand. Cold, hard, and unforgettable.

In the city, it was a good laugh driving my car up and down all the boulevards. There was all the expected honking and so many cabs, just like in the movies. (Who owns a car in New York?) I laughed at the sight of it all, and raced along with the flow of Big City life, trying to find my way to Julie’s, block after block after block, all one-way streets.

Julie was staying midtown somewhere, at a YMCA, of all places. She was actually a Franklin and Marshall student, but had taken a year to do some art studies in Manhattan and found herself momentarily shacking up at the Y for a time. I was no stranger to YMCAs, having been a camp counselor there for a couple years, and after locating a parking place, (no small feat in New York) I made my way through the building without disturbing security and found myself standing in front of Julie’s door. I took a breath, hoping this wasn’t a terrible mistake, (I had no idea where I’d go if she wouldn’t have me) and then -I really, really hoped she wouldn’t be mad- I knocked.

She was home. She opened the door, looked up at me with a deranged blank stare, like she was trying to place this very familiar face, and then... I ran.

I feigned panic and ran down the hall and turned the corner, which was when I heard her scream, and then I slowed up and turned back. She laughed. We hugged. It was good to see her. We talked for a bit, got some stuff out of my car, while she just shook her head at the shock of it all, and then we went out for a bite. We walked the city, chatting away. It was clear she loved it here, though the YMCA could use some improvements, and she showed me all the sights she could in a night. I had just driven in minutes before, and here we were walking down Times Square, past Rockefeller Center, Central Park, Trump Tower, and the Plaza Hotel -it was like a dream. We stayed up talking, another long night for me, crashing out at nearly 5AM.

The next day, we walked through the Park on what was a near perfect fall day. The sun was shining and the trees were bursting with color, and there was a glimmer in all the windows of all the buildings that I would never forget. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and stared at the Rembrandts for a while -and she stared good and hard at them, I will never forget. We got some Chinese takeout and headed back to her place, where I just about passed out in my dumplings, I was so spent. 

Monday I had all to myself, (Julie had school) and I just headed out walking, with my camera. Julie had lent me a tourist map and I just wandered all day until my legs couldn’t take any more. I headed south and eventually passed the first capitol of the United States (I had no idea it was here) and the New York Stock Exchange (which let me walk on in and see the floor -as long as I checked my camera) and then I moved through Wall Street and went over to see the Brooklyn Bridge, which I consider eternally impressive.

And then I found myself in the plaza between the World Trade Center towers. Eyes drawn upward, I caught a snapshot looking straight up at the imposing, awesome structures. I had reserved ten or fifteen bucks for a single tourist excursion, and I was trying to decide between the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or the World Trade Center, but for some reason, when I saw the towers there, I was drawn inside and  slapped down ten bucks and took the elevator to the top.

I suppose I thought that it would be the best view of the skyline. The Empire State is mid-town, and you can’t see the whole city in one clear shot, and the Statue of Liberty tour, if I remember correctly, was a bit expensive and time-consuming, but for some reason I went up to the top of the south tower to see the view. 110 stories, 1362 feet. I remember going outside, way up on that rooftop deck and looking over at the other tower, so close, and then the vast city beyond. I never took a picture. I can’t imagine why not. Sometimes things are just too big.

Of course, I remember where I was on 9/11/01. It was a Tuesday, like today, only I didn't have a family and a home and a business to run. Not a lot had noticeably changed in the eleven years since that road trip. I was housesitting for some friends in Pasadena, and doing odd jobs to pay off some over-the-limit credit cards. I was staying up late pretend-reading literature, drinking beer with my buddies, still driving around the beat-up old Honda. I'd stayed up late on the 10th, actually, and slept in on Tuesday, waking to the phone ringing. I got the message "how terrible it was what happened" and turned on the news to see it all at once: the planes hitting the buildings, the buildings going down, the confusion. To be honest, I don't know if I had even turned on the TV before the towers had fallen. All I could see was everything at once, like coming home to your house burning down and arriving at the same time as the firefighters.

I remembered being at the top of the tower eleven years before, and here it was crashing to the ground, utterly pulverized right before my eyes. The world stopped turning for a moment. I remember going surfing in Huntington Beach the next morning and there wasn't a plane in the sky. All the freighters were lined up offshore, not allowed into L.A. Harbor -there must have been fifty of them, massive super-tankers with nowhere to go. It was an unforgettable sight. But it wasn't until a couple days passed that the real gravity of it all got me. That Friday in Pasadena there were people on every street corner. A man came into the brewery I frequented and played “The Star Spangled Banner” on his bagpipes, and the whole place shut up, for once. And then people started saying "Never forget", and spelling it out with their finger on dusty car windows, and then, eventually, putting it on t-shirts and bumper stickers. And everyone had their flag out. That is to say, they had a flag out. I think September 12th was that historic day in America when a lot of people realized that they didn't own a flag.

But back on that day that I was up on top of the tower, in November of 1990, the mere idea of the coming devastation would have been a laugh, or a creative enterprise, like some impassioned pitch for a far-fetched a science fiction film. I was just a hapless young guy impressed with the view enough that it didn’t occur to me to get a snapshot of it. And I’m sure that same guy was there that Tuesday morning 11 years later, and met his death. 

Within a year of September 11th, 2001, many of my friends would be married and moved away, and a few months after that I would be married and moved away myself, and the country would go to war in Iraq on the eve of my wedding. Looking back, September 11th is that pivotal event in my life that folded everything in, and sent it sailing. For me, that's the day that marked the beginning of the serious changes in my life. The day the old passions started being replaced with real convictions. The day frivolity died.

And everything before that was just a road trip.

I keep going back to the journal to recall little details here and there, and it’s just occurred to me that it was exactly twenty years ago from today that I was out there sojourning on the interstate, an artless highway sailor led by a double yellow line and a blue, white, and red Chevron sign. But the journal is nearly worthless in its utter dearth of anecdotal content and simple adjectives, and it hardly passes muster as even a log of events. Every day I write that I am worried about the car breaking down, concerned about not having any money, and grateful for so-and-so who bought me a sandwich. So I turn to the photos.

I climbed up in the attic and dragged out a file box brimming with old photos and negatives. Somewhere in there is a pile of pictures from the trip, I know, and I have to wade through a marsh of a thousand memories from before I was married, before I did anything important, to get to them. All these photographs of me, my old life, my old friends, and all my other adventures, they mean nothing to my wife nor to my children. To them, these are just like pictures in a magazine -advertisements for things you don’t need, with smiling strangers in sometimes extraordinary places. But mostly the photos are just ordinary things, all their meaninglessness in full color.

But not to me. The box is a relic, pre-dating the digital era, when we used to employ elaborate light-catching equipment to capture 1/500th of a second of history and expose it to a special paper which we had kept in complete darkness until the exact moment when its whole use would come to light. Then we’d have a professional service wash it all in unpronounceable chemicals, where the images magically painted themselves on a myriad of tiny translucent canvasses, and then were projected and cropped onto reflective paper. Photographs. Real photographs. Nowadays, it all sounds too crazy to believe.

I find the pile, and the accompanying negatives, and begin to sift through them. I am immediately struck by the fact that I didn’t take a single picture of anyone I stayed with.

No smiling faces of my friends and their friends and their colleges, no shots of us in front of famous sights or statues. No, most of the pictures are of the road or the horizon. Exposure after exposure of various American landscapes bisected by some highway, and, every once in a while, a shot of my beat up old Honda Civic on the shoulder of that highway looking like some old, forgotten, beaten-down Indian, after the last of the territories was declared a state.

I only find four rolls, but it appears that’s all I took. About a hundred pictures over the span of a month or two. Today I would carelessly rattle off a hundred photos of my kids in a matter of a few hours, and then thoughtlessly delete anything even slightly out of focus. But twenty years ago a hundred pictures was a sizable amount, and I remember being careful about each one I took, since I couldn’t afford it otherwise.

The hundred pictures amounts to only a few per state, and some states it seems I skipped entirely (having crossed them at night.) There’s one or two of me, where I set the camera on a self-timer and then posed in the landscape wearing my leather jacket, or Stetson, or both. I’m embarrassed, to see them, and can’t imagine how I got away with any of it. My hair is long and I’m wearing some old faded Levi’s, and I’m usually holding a can of Coke. And I look lonely, but like I’m trying to hide it. Or maybe I’ve just given myself over to it, and I didn’t know or expect anyone to really be interested in accompanying me anyway. In any case, the bulk of the pictures are soulless, empty panoramas of a variety of locations that stretch across the continent. And I imagine these spaces look the same today, this very moment, as they do in these photographs taken exactly twenty years ago.

Going through these pictures I find myself wondering just what it was I was trying to capture. Was I merely recording the place I’d been? Or was there some deeper substance to it all? Was I trying to express something of significance, or define and communicate some feeling, or concept, or belief? Or just... well, where is everyone?

I am older now, and perhaps I am partially jaded, but I admit some weariness at the pretenses of my youth, and anything ostentatious I no longer have time for. These things fade fast, with a business to keep up and a family to provide for, and so looking at these pictures I suspect there is no gist or nuance or metaphor at all. It’s just a view from a young man with a camera, time on his hands, in a pretty place. Satisfied to go it alone.

The Chevrons stopped appearing on the highway as I rolled out of Illinois. This panicked me for a bit, until I saw in the fine print that I could use the card at “participating” retailers. It would be cokes and Doritos to the horizon, after all.

Somewhere on the Ohio turnpike, I got pulled over for doing 80. (80? The car worked!) Seeing that I was out of state, the officer asked for the money to cover the fine right there on the shoulder. I didn’t quite know what to say, but I told him I didn’t have it, and he, oddly, confiscated my Auto Club card, which seemed like an even trade since it did rob me of some peace of mind. (A month later, they would send me a bill for the ticket. I have never canceled my AAA membership since, and never will.)

Rain started coming down hard as I made my way across Pennsylvania. I was on my way to Lancaster to crash at a friend’s dorm at Franklin and Marshall College, but it was a challenging drive. At times, the rain came down so thick and fast that no speed on my windshield wipers would do the trick. 18 wheelers would blow past me with such force that a hurricane of wind and water would blast off the front of each passing truck, creating an awful vortex, or some kind of trucker’s slipstream that would cause my steering wheel to shudder, the windshield to go white, and a force that would suck my car into its heady wake. This happened repeatedly, and I would cross myself and grip the steering wheels every time I saw a high set of headlights roaring up from behind.

In Lancaster, I met up with Tammy who I had seen a few weeks earlier at Susie’s service. Tammy and Susie were good friends, and it was clear that she was still grieving some, which was understandable. We talked about it for a while and came to no conclusions about death or life or the meaning of it all, and the only thing realized was the profound sadness we both felt over Susie being gone, and being gone forever. She went off to college just like we all did, but she would never return.

As we were sitting on the floor of her dorm, one after another college kid would enter and it soon became a party, as these things do. Just another day of traveling 700 miles and then staying up until 3AM with a crowd of strangers. I went to bed that night in a stranger’s bed, someone named “Tim” who I would never meet. But I know Tim to be a fun guy because later that morning several of his buddies came in to mess with him, screaming “TIM! TIM!” and I rolled over in Tim’s bed to reveal myself, at which point they exclaimed, “MY GOD, TIM! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?” It was pretty funny, but they showed me to the shower, and all was forgiven.

When Tammy returned from class, she took me out for a sandwich and showed me around Lancaster, driving past old President Buchanan’s home, and looking for Amish folk. In 24 hours, I had met another round of fun, friendly people at another beautiful college, and experienced a camaraderie that I had never found at USC. Everyone I met seemed excited about my story and interested in my cross-country trip. They

congratulated me and encouraged me, and it made me feel simultaneously cheered, hopeful, and yet depressed, because here I found myself envying them. Where did I go wrong at USC? Was it bad luck? Was it the school? Was I so obsessed with my passions that I had alienated myself entirely? I was disappointed that I had missed out on the stereotypical college episode for myself, but hopeful that perhaps I could still get it, somehow.

I drove off that evening, with the sun setting in my rear view mirror, nearly certain that a return to college was in my future. USC film school was out, undoubtedly, but I wasn’t finished being an impetuous, imprudent, and possibly corruptible, young man, and I wasn’t going to waste it at corporate Disney, or corporate anything. I had several years to make more mistakes before I would be beset by adulthood, and yet I drove onward, eastward, to Manhattan, with a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I might be making the biggest mistake of all right now, just doing that.

But I would start all that on some other day, when it really mattered.

Today I was zooming across the Land of Lincoln. I had 4 or 5 hours to go to get to the Chicago suburbs to see Mark. I was nearly to the other side of The Great Plains, and it was a long, flat haul at 65 miles per hour. Who knew how they did it 150 years ago? But I was blowing down the interstate, pulling over only to make myself a PB&J at a rest stop.

After all those lonely days on the road, it was good to see Mark, and he seemed happy to see me, as well. He was living with a few guys in a two-story house outside of Wheaton, where he went to school at Wheaton College -one of the most highly regarded Christian liberal arts colleges in the country.

Mark and I graduated high school together, though the two of us could not be more different. Here was a guy who was tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and likable. In high school, he was the quarterback of the football team, the pitcher of the baseball team, ASB president, smart, funny, charismatic, involved in his church. I was dorky, thoughtless, skinny and long-haired. A dropout. Uncool and uncouth. Mark, I know, mostly tolerated me, but we had a shared affinity for film and a complimentary sense of humor. It seemed we always had something to talk about. Also, Mark was, in my mind, a creative powerhouse. It was never a dull moment with him.

We stayed up late nights, watching movies and dissecting them all. We went together to see Cinema Paradiso, which may have been the tenth time for both of us, and we would be so moved at this and other films that we would just leave the theater in silence, not sharing a word. Some great things, we agreed, deserved at least that. Inevitably, we would end up on some hotel rooftop in the city, or some misty train track in the hinterland, and discuss what we thought the day’s film’s greatness was, exactly, and how we’d get to do it ourselves, eventually.

Mark was good at showing me the Chicago sights and letting me tag along anywhere he went. He’d go to class and I’d sit out on the green and write postcards, read my screenwriting books, and ogle the coeds. He’d study in the library and I’d just sit nearby, eyeballing my own pursuits. This went on for a week or so, as I waited on my car, which was out for repairs.

We took it to a guy who knew a guy who knew Mark, and the guy said, “Good luck,” after examining the car a bit. I was hoping not to hear that the thing was toast, for somehow, I actually believed in the vehicle, as if it were some divinely-powered heavenly host. I thought it could be fixed. When I told the mechanic that I had just driven it out from California, he stood up straight, took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked me in the eye and said respectfully, “You have balls.”

Then he directed me to a guy named “Herb” at the Amoco Transmission place next door. Herb was nice, said he could fix it, but didn’t hesitate to add, “Twenty more miles and the front wheels would have popped off.” I took all this as a good sign.

Over the next few days, I followed Mark from event to event, where I watched him charm and ingratiate himself with nearly everyone he met. The guy was a real pleasure to be around, as usual, and it was a daily lesson for me -open up, be interested in others, laugh, have some enthusiasm for the small things. Mark was always thrilled to point out the most irreverent phenomenon at hand, and I found this ever-inspiring.

For Halloween, he decided to “get the band back together.” Some time back, he had formed a band with some friends, because he thought it would be fun -which was reason enough for any endeavor. Forget for the moment that he couldn’t sing or play any instruments, but he was certain that being in a band would be a kick, so, powered only by his earnest zeal and unrelenting passion, he was able to talk a few guys into joining him on a stage. (Any stage. Don’t worry, he’d get the stage.) He got a friend who could play drums, and a couple guys who had guitars, and together they would call themselves “Dungus Mandulainus” which, as translated by Mark, was latin for “eating one’s feces for sexual pleasure.” The Wheaton College Student Development Office was not informed.

Dungus rehearsed several (maybe three) times, and brought back the old Kenny Rogers’ hit “The Gambler” among other favorites. Mark called several Chicago clubs until he found one that would book a band without auditioning them, and then he pasted posters up around campus and the local community. On the night of the show, he and his buddies had a party at their house, rented a school bus, put a keg of beer on it, and then got everyone on the bus and drove them out to the Chicago club, The Stoddola, where they did the show. They packed the place. It was a huge hit. And The Stoddola wanted them back.

“We broke up,” Mark solemnly explained to the club owner on a few occasions, but when Halloween rolled around, the urge to get the band back together and do it one

more time was irresistible. So I joined Mark in getting the event up and running, and I relished the chance. It didn’t look like they could get the same size crowd, and most of the band this time around was people who were merely at the show the last time around -but it didn’t matter. The Stoddola was excited to have them. On the afternoon before the big night, we dropped by the Stoddola to check in and learned that they had booked another local band, “The Sex Kittens,” to open for them. This was a good laugh, as The Sex Kittens happened to be a legitimate band. (They had a record!)

Then we drove around town and procured some ultraviolet lights and fluorescent paint, which the band covered themselves in for the show. Then we got the word out that Dungus headlined at midnight. I was the video guy.

And it was hilarious. Mark performed mostly in his underpants, (and bright green and purple paint) and the crowd was thoroughly spirited and supportive, many in costume. I had an unforgettable time, and drove Mark home at four in the morning, laughing and shaking my head at what I’d just witnessed. At some point in the night I had found an ATM and went to withdraw my last few dollars from my checking account, so I could buy my new friends some drinks, but the ATM sucked in my card and I would never see it again. “Oh well,” I thought, as I walked back to the bar with an I.D. I had borrowed from someone whom I had just met. We had the same hair. It worked.

A couple days later I got the call about the car repair. It would cost $254, which I paid for by calling home and asking my mom to cash out my Disney stock, of all things. It was an awkward phone call, (she was worried about me) but cashing out the stock ended up not being too complicated of a task. (I owned one-and-a-half whole shares of Disney!) So a couple hundred in profit covered the auto problems, but did nothing to repair my bank account.

Which, later that week, was deemed closed altogether as a result of some prolonged overdraft. Also, my Visa had been maxed out and I was down to my last $50, but there was one saving cushion that I would fall back on through all this: my Chevron card. It had a high limit, and it would bankroll me to the Atlantic and back, as long as I had access to a service station. And the Honda, when it worked, got excellent mileage.

After a week in Chicago, I was sure Mark and his roommates were sick of me hanging around, taking long showers and eating their food, so on one cold, November morning before class, the first snow of the season coming down, I hugged Mark goodbye and unsentimentally left town, heading east. He just turned and went inside, unmoved by the parting, and I remember thinking how grateful I was to have a friend like him. I drove off, and halfway down the block lost control of the car on the icy road -but quickly recovered. I remembered about the bald tires, and vowed to drive carefully. Then I watched the snow turn into rain, just like in the Dan Fogelberg song, “Same Auld Lang Syne” (I had noted this in the journal,) was grateful for it, and considered for a moment that I only had fifty dollars in my pocket.

For some reason, it didn’t bother me much.

I got to Carlsbad Caverns National Park early, and in time for breakfast. But I had awoken pre-dawn in the Guadalupe Mountains and climbed out of my car, and up on top to watch the sun rise. I was parked in a small asphalt lot at the base of a dramatic limestone escarpment, formed eons ago -according to the nearby NPS placard- as a

coral reef at the shore of a vast prehistoric sea. But today it was a vast dry plateau, and I was thousands of feet up, looking out across Texas and to Mexico beyond.

I had no qualms about sitting on the roof of my car or standing on the hood, since I didn’t feel any further denting could diminish its appearance, so I would tromp up there from time to time, surprising idle passersby with my automotive insouciance. But here I was, all alone in the Southwest one chilly autumnal morning, standing on my car and watching the sunlight move slowly down the cliff face, unstretching certain shadows to appropriate daytime lengths, and here I witnessed an epoch moving, and eroding away. It was the moment that many of us have, from time to time, when we are there to catch a sincerely beautiful awakening dawn, and always shocked at the inevitably arising notion that this event happens every day, and all along, while we were usually sleeping.

Later, at the Caverns, more heavy-handed symbolism. Not knowing what to expect, I paid the entrance fee and drove up to a typical-looking Visitor Center wondering where the caves were. It was a nondescript building of little architectural detail, and standing in an otherwise boring hilltop locale -uninspiring desert pasture in every direction, and as far as the eye could see. But the building was a holding center, a gateway, and little more than a doorway to an elevator that would take you 750 feet down to the famed limestone palace hidden in the earth.

As a kid, I had always wanted to see the place, with its glistening stalactites and stalagmites, and I was not disappointed. I spent hours wandering the caverns, examining the rocks, and mulling over the circumstances that brought about their creation. I ate lunch in the underground commissary, which was reminiscent of a fifties bomb shelter with its threadbare, concrete design and stale sandwiches, and then I emerged from the actual cave entrance, which most visitors avoid due to the necessary hike involved. I wandered back to the car. I sat, and pondered in my journal how the place was “like our hearts -looking boring and normal on the outside, but on the inside having extreme beauty that’s undiscovered and untold.”

This is the kind of thing that repeats itself in the journal of my great adventure across America. Loathsome, tiring, sappy cliche after cliche. It is awe-inspiring to read in its ineffectiveness, and yet, there is another story.

In the margins and on the backs of pages, I kept notes about what was actually going on. I note how I stopped the car about fifty miles outside of Carlsbad Caverns to pop open the hood and try to find the source of some deranged rattling that was getting me worried. And then I mention how I was constantly paranoid that I was going to get caught sleeping somewhere illegally, or get robbed, or stuck, or hopelessly, irretrievably lost.

Evidently, I drove the next couple thousand miles with anxieties like this. On one page, I am pulling off an Oklahoma road and into a deserted Drive-In theater, where I park amongst the weeds and rhapsodize about dying cinema, my dreams, and various other half-baked yet overwrought metaphors. But on the back of that page, I am at Denny’s in

Amarillo, Texas, buying the cheapest thing on the menu, not leaving a tip, and then standing desperately at a pay phone near the Men’s Room calling home, calling my friends, calling anyone just to hear a voice I can brag to about my auspicious locale.

Some time later I am at a rest stop pulling the tires off the car, trying to find the source of the grinding noise, which has now evolved to sounding like a spoon in a garbage disposal. I write that I am praying -always praying- that the car makes it to Chicago, where Mark is. As a result of my fears of breaking down, I drive long hours, not just without stopping, but without slowing, speeding, or even turning unnecessarily. I don’t stop for historic sites, viewpoints, or landmarks. I give up on it all and just drive, drive, drive. I move furiously -but at a steady pace- toward the shores of Lake Michigan, intent on making it without suffering folly. But when I get to St. Louis on a cold, sunny Sunday morning in late October, and I see that great, soaring, stainless steel arch glimmering astride the Mississippi, I have to stop.

It is October 28th, 1990, and happens to be the day of the 25th anniversary of the dedication of the Arch. Admission is free, and I am impressed by my own good fortune! I park the car and stroll across the park, in my leather jacket and Stetson. I doesn’t matter that I haven’t showered in days or that I’ve been sleeping in my car and subsisting on PB&J, Doritos, and Cokes for the past week or so. All I can think is, “My, what a beautiful day” and “Damn, look at that neat arch.” And it was neat, to be sure, but something else happened to me that day.

If you haven’t been there, you might not know that that impressionable steel icon was part of something called “The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial” which was designated some 30 years before the arch was built. The park was established near the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was just up the river a bit. And right near the arch is what is known as the “Old Courthouse,” which was the site of the Dred Scott case of 1857, the ruling of which aggravated the fragile times that led to the Civil War.

I’d heard of these things in school, so they were familiar, but when I stepped down into the Museum of Westward Expansion and perused the exhibits, I began to feel as if I was stepping onto some sacred ground, some origin of story, some place where real history was made, put down in texts, and then printed and sent out west to my dumb high school.

I had never been east before. I had never seen anything over the age of a hundred years, or so. I was a naive California boy, through and through, and anything older than adobe was ancient history to me. But here I was on the banks of the famed Mississippi River, where goddamned Lewis and Clark actually got on their goddamned rafts and paddled into the unknown, into the west, and beyond the Continental Divide, out to my house! I found it stunning. Overwhelming. That THIS is the place where history actually happened. That THIS is why they built that big, hard, metal thing outside. That THIS was significant.

It may have been the first time in my life where I actually took a museum seriously. The walls had quotes from famous men throughout history, and they spoke to me, all of them speaking of the desire and need to head West. To journey to the frontier, claim the land, and settle it. To explore. The displays celebrated the Louisiana Purchase, and all the uncharted lands that would make America great. All those uncharted lands that I had just charted in my little piece of shit Honda. I suddenly felt like somebody. Like here I was, heading east, in the opposite direction, on some quest to find the source of some profound river of knowledge. And that this was no silly metaphor, but an actual, real quest to discover a nation I’d only really imagined in some vague, sleepy study hour. 

I was 20 years old, young and dumb. And learning for the first time that all that stuff you learned in high school? It was actually true. Here was the proof. And I was going to have to start taking things more seriously.

I know all this because I’m looking at my old, handwritten, pencil-smeared, scratchpost of a journal now, from the high safety of the suburbs, twenty years in the future. I skipped ahead and read the journal of the whole trip, because I am GOD in all this, and, Lord help you, feeble and uncontrolling reader, none of it is as I recall.

I remember that first trip across the continent as a wholly rapturous event. A transforming one, when I left behind all that was youthful, immature, and insignificant. Like college is, for most people. After college, whatever happened to you in your teens, when you were in high school, it all becomes a laugh, and the people, petty inconsequential anecdotes. You have moved on, deep into your intellect, and have new powers of knowledge and authority. This is how I remember that trip. And when I got back... Well... Life begun.

The journal tells a seriously different story. It’s the story of an ugly kid with bad hair and bad handwriting, who has no sense of rubbing two nickels together. He falls in love with every girl who smiles at him, and then thoughtlessly moves on down the road. He considers himself carefree, when he is really just careless. He’s lonely, and it doesn’t take long for him to click his heels repeatedly and wish for home. And all the while, he sees himself a poet, but here is a sample of his unfortunate poetry:

A thousand faces I will see today

But yours is the only one that will turn away

A thousand miles I will travel today

But my mind will echo with the things you say

Elsewhere on the page he has written the word “SHEEPSHIT” in all caps. This cannot be explained.

But perhaps that kid had some idea that he really was full of it, and had some distance to go in the purging. Perhaps that’s why he got in his beat-up old car and hit the road -he felt he had nothing to lose, and only experience to gain. But from this vantage point, the high tower of wisdom in the suburbs of middle-age, it’s clear he was just a kid who wanted to change the world, and all in spite of the fact that he was certain of his youthfulness, his inexperience, and his lack of wisdom. So he drove on. God bless him.