Road Dog #2

The End of a Road Trip

Downtown Memphis

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Well, my friends, a road trip slowly comes to its inevitable end. I’m in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Yes. You heard right. Yesterday was a 12-hour ass-kicker of a journey from Memphis, Tennessee, through Arkansas (a la Little Rock), Oklahoma via Oklahoma City, and what I call the “penis head” of Texas a la Amarillo, all along U.S. Highway 40 west, terminating in Santa Fe, NM, off Highway 84.

Memphis was madness, as I more or less expected. Not compared to New Orleans, though, which had been like a jolt of cosmic heroin to the metaphorical veins. NOLA was fun: Live jazz outside on the streets; old French colonial buildings; narrow, bumpy roads with cracks and broken, chipped sections wherein I almost fell face-flat several times; blasts of cold A/C gloriously smacking you briefly in the face until you finally gave in and, covered in sweat from the 97-degree humid weather, you gave up the ghost and entered one of those coffee shops and sat down.

And this I did several times, at one point writing for four hours. Had I lived in that town in my alcoholic tortured, tumultuous twenties I’d have died, no question in my mind. You can feel the grotesque, hyperactive, alcoholic/drug-addict energy wafting through NOLA like a gang of thugs looking for prey at 3am in East L.A. It’s simply that old familiar wild urban cowboy energy.

But anyway I didn’t die, because I’m 40 and sober and on a road trip by car, versus thumb, and because all I wanted to do this time around was to see it all, the circus, the whirling anarchy that is NOLA. Like a she-wolf you can’t ever tame and don’t even want to.

The following day (I’d been in NOLA two days, staying at a spectacular, spacious, cheap Air BnB) I hit I-55 North aiming for St. Louis. But the day felt long, hot and slow. I took my time, going 70 in the slow-lane much of the time, listening to my audiobook of Rousseau’s Confessions (I read the physical copy at night when off the road), as well as The 5^th Column podcast. In the end I decided to quit in Memphis. I paid for parking. It was around 7pm when I got in. I was right by Beale Street, the famous, popular downtown area. Just what you’d expect: Divey blues bars  reeking of piss (B.B. King and Elvis related, of course), historic signs about the town (Ida B. Wells, Jerry Lee Lewis), etc. I walked up and down and then looked up a coffee shop (most were closed), got lost, and then found one inside the Hyatt Hotel called Talk Shop. It was perfect. I ordered a Chai tea latte, grabbed a table, set up my computer and everything I needed, and wrote.

I had no idea what I’d do for sleeping. I like traveling this way: The mystery; the unknown. Unplanned. Or vaguely delineated. I looked up camping spots. Everything, of course, was closed. That didn’t matter. I’d camped after hours several times already on this trip, most recently south of Richmond, Virginia. I located a spot which was only six miles away. I walked back to the car, getting some stunning iPhone shots of the downtown area at dusk.

Memphis, Beale Street

I considered it. Man: What thoughtfulness; what kindness. From a total stranger. Look at that. All this supposed political and cultural and racial division and here’re two strangers in Memphis acting like humans. I think this is the real universal American Truth. We’re all brothers and sisters. Don’t let the media lead you astray. Choose love, not false, manufactured hatred.

Memphis looked different physically and culturally than I’d ignorantly expected. I’d thought of semi-white trash ex-rockers, old farmers, cowboys. And for all I know those people are there. But what I saw were… Black people. A lot of them. Black cops strolling the streets. Black musicians. Black restaurant employees and bartenders. Black homeless. Etc. And a speckling of white overweight tourists. The city itself was small and mostly rundown, it seemed. I saw old abandoned buildings, windows cracked out and boarded up. Graffiti. Hoods eyeing the weird wide-brim-hat-wearing pale White Boy who clearly wasn’t from around here. Crumbling, bumpy streets.

Getting to the camp was…interesting. It felt like going through “The Ghetto” and ending up in Yosemite. Ok. Not really. It wasn’t exactly “the ghetto” and the camping area was no Yosemite. But getting there did have a sort of North Oakland feel, and the camping area was quite lovely. It was closed and half empty. By the looks of it as I drove slowly around looking for the right spot I was one of the only white people around. Right on. Why not?

I found a good spot and parked. I’d already eaten so I wasn’t hungry. I kept the engine on a while and blasted the A/C. The heat wasn’t too bad by then: Low 80s and medium humidity. But the cool air felt good. The engine does an auto-turn off after a half hour. So I didn’t even have to worry about it. I could just lay down in the back of the Kia and read. I did just that, this time reading my new book I’d bought in NOLA, a brilliant collection of essays from 1950 by Lionel Trilling, the professor at Columbia (and author/critic) who’d inspired the Beat poets back in the 1940s when they went there (Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc). It was an essay about the connection between Freud’s psychoanalytic method and literature. (The connection between the two, and how the former helps one understand on a deeper level the latter.)

After a half hour I closed my eyes and passed out.

*

I woke in the morning a little before 7am. It was very quiet. Green surrounded me, thick forest. I got up, yawned, threw my shoes on, sniffled, got out of the back of the car. I stretched a minute, gazing around, seeing RVs everywhere. It was sunny and still relatively cool out, probably low 70s. I wanted to make green tea using the Jetboil stove, and then I figured I’d head out, paying at the admin office and then finding a local coffee shop before hitting I-40 west towards Arkansas.

But first I wanted to turn the car on and feel some A/C. Just for a moment. And maybe splash some cold water on my face. I opened the driver’s side door, sat down and flipped the engine on. Only the engine didn’t turn on. I tried again. And again. And again. Nothing. Zero. Negative. Nada. Finally I sat back in the seat, frustrated and confused. Glancing around I searched for lights on, anything on. Nothing was on. I thought back to last night: I’d had the engine on for a half an hour with the auto-turn-off thing. For light to read I’d used my backpacking headlamp. It didn’t make sense. I pushed the button again, and then five more times. Zilch.

Campground, Memphis