gas station coffee roadtrip

The latest of my pre-China adventures has been an almost-cross-country road trip with a carful of friends to Arkansas, which taught me several things:

- Short-legged creatures will never understand the plight of tall people in small cars. My deepest sympathies to those whose heads brush the roof, but I just cannot relate.

- Highway patrolmen likely rank high on the list of most-loathed Americans in probably every single state.

- That grimey feeling you get from sleeping overnight on a train headed to Germany…you can also get it in a German car headed to Arkansas. I think this speaks to the wonderful unity of ride grime across all borders.

- Humidity is a real trip.

- There’s something about gas station coffee that tastes like travel and I like it.

We drove pretty much straight through and straight back, armed with granola bars and fresh produce, making those intermittent gas/coffee/pee stops reliably every four hours or so, always talking about how good it feels to stretch and how ugly/pretty/hot/windy/humid it was outside. And occasionally we’d stop and actually eat something, which exposed to the wonders of Waffle Houses, Cracker Barrel and of course where one of my hubcaps was discovered missing. Le sigh. We moved on.

I should apologize to the state of Texas for insulting its grammar, spelling and political practices. Texas: I am sorry. Someday I hope to understand you. In the meantime, I appreciate your kitschy expanse of land and cows.

So, anything east of Murrieta truly is just desert, straight through Arizona to New Mexico, where it changes into magical cool mystical desert until Texas happens, at which point dead roadside armadillos begin attesting to the general overarching nothingness. And slowly but surely Oklahoma convinces you that America does, in fact, have more to offer than dead armadillos (which I think we should pronounce arma-dee-yos) and oil wells. However, along with those plains and creeks come indigenous pick-up trucks with beds full of live animals and small children. Anyway, before you know it you’re in Arkansas, which is so green and full of trees. And the air is so full of humidity that you feel like you should be able to drink it, but you can’t, so your whole body just feels kind of soaked and soft. Then, the fireflies are incredible. They've gotta be magic or something. The south is a very sweet place.

Driving through the night stretches on forever. Once the sun goes down, there goes your book and your journal, and on comes either Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion or Mumford & Sons or Explosions. And every twenty minutes or so you drive through a smattering of those orange streetlamps, which means a small town where everyone’s asleep, including the mothers and fathers and preachers and brothers. Or a truck stop with those big white lights, where everyone’s awake. Sometimes you drive a really long stretch without seeing any lights that God didn’t make, but the big wide sky is full of stars. If you can’t see the stars on those stretches it’s probably because those thunderclouds are doing their thing, every few minutes flashing lightening, which you might see hit the ground in one bright fracture line or stay rumbling in the clouds, showing off the edges of the cloud in front of it. Very beautiful.

I love certain things about America, I really do. And I’m glad I got to see some of it this way before leaving for a little while, scrunched up in my grimy small German car, checking out what’s outside the windows.