Road Dog: Life on the Road

Adventures of my Cross Country Journey, July 2023

Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash

Well, I’m sitting at The Bean Gallery on 637 N. Carrollton Avenue in the “Mid-City” section of Bayou St. John in New Orleans. It was a four-minute drive from my glorious Air BnB studio apartment—which is stupidly cheap and massive—and since it’s 97 degrees out and 60% humidity it sounded like the wisest choice. Oh, and the kicker: They’re open until midnight. Were this Santa Barbara, say, or Lompoc, or even many parts of the Bay Area, I’d be shit out of luck.

I got to New Orleans—a city I’ve heard about endlessly for the past two-plus decades and have always wanted to visit—this afternoon around 1:30pm. I’ve been on the road for 10 days. Britney and I started from Lompoc, California (where we live) and drove across the nation over the course of a week to Portland, Maine, a la I-15, I-70, I-80, I-90. Aka: The Northern Route. This is the route I’ve done probably half a dozen times in the past, hitchhiking once as well as driving and taking Amtrak several times, all during my lurid, reckless twenties. I’d always wanted to travel through the American South but never had.

Britney and I loved Chicago so much (I’ve been there several times, including for a week during the winter of 2017) we’re seriously considering moving there next year instead of the Bay Area. It felt like the NYC of the Midwest…only people were friendly…dare I say it…human. It always bothered me that NYC (well, Manhattan, anyway) has that sort of desensitized, feral, zombie-like indifference which everyone possesses, especially on the subway trains, as if they’re all robots and get plugged and unplugged by The City at will. Chicago had something in the air, something much more vibrant and blood-pumpingly sane. Something which held luster and a slim glaze of kindness. Rare for a mega-metropolis like that.

After Maine—where Britney devoured a whole lobster—we drove south to Boston. We stayed in an Air BnB which claimed to be “in” Boston but was actually in Dorchester about 20 minutes south of the actual city. It was a little rough there. Nothing too crazy. At least the parking was easy. We had a room in a multiple-story house. But we were woken up rudely just before 8am the next morning to two Black men arguing with each other down the hall. It became increasingly loud and erratic. One called the other “weird,” which we found slightly amusing…yet the word had been charged with an edgy violence. N-words were hurled back and forth, and not in a friendly way. Suddenly their voices raised much louder. They seemed to be literally just outside of our room, a foot outside our thin closed door. Britney looked at me with fear in her eyes. I remained calm. I’d lived in Manhattan for two-and-a-half years, and specifically a rough part of East Harlem for one of those years. This didn’t worry me…too much. Yet. But my hackles were up. I remembered going through Covid in East Harlem, having eyes in the back of my head, my head on a bobble, more aware than I’d ever been before. Read my ongoing fictional memoir (prologue and first few chapters free, the rest paid) about this experience HERE.

I worried when one guy, outside our thin door, said, “Get up outta my face, N_____.” Some yelling ensued. Britney looked like she was about to leap out the second-floor window. Then one guy said something—I forget what—several times and walked off, going into the bathroom and slamming the door. The other guy yelled threateningly, You’re gonna pay for this, N_____, You’re gonna pay for this,…

Anyway, we went out for the day and then I got Britney a Lyft to Logan International. I was back on my own. Britney and I had enjoyed an incredible, totally satisfying trip. We travel well together. We both love and crave travel. I’m more of the risk-taking adventurer; she’s more of the practical one. We balance each other out quite nicely, both in life and while on the road. I spent the day walking around Boston, from Back Bay to downtown and back, partially in a thunder rainstorm which felt fantastic due to the humidity.

*

The following day—July 28^th—I had planned to stay a second night in Boston but decided instead to head out. I woke up with adrenaline pumping, ready to go, at 2:45am. You gotta obey The Inner Urge, so I say, so I got up, quickly packed, and left. I was on the road by 3am. I plowed through New York, New Jersey, Philly. (By the way: What in the FUCK is going on with the incessant, never-ending toll booths in Jersey??? Seriously: What the HELL???) I considered dropping into Manhattan to meet a good sober writer friend of mine, but it was damn early (he is not an early riser) and I knew the traffic was going to snaggle me and the whole fiasco would set me back hours. So I burned rubber. I pushed through Maryland and into Virginia. I ended up going into Richmond, VA where I found a cool hipster coffee shop ironically right next door to a bookstore. I of course bought two books, because I’m a bibliophile—a thin volume of The Upanishads, which I realized would probably get cancelled today by the fringe lefties if they noticed in the very opening pages it uses the word “niggardly,” and the novel London Fields by Martin Amis. They were used and cheap. I paid in cash. The kid behind the counter was too cool for school: Redheaded, maybe 21, no eye-contact. I love this generation!

*(By the way my new nickname is Road Dog. Or R.D. Either is acceptable.)

I digress.

After writing for an hour or so in Richmond and drinking about 17 Sencha green teas, I headed south on some random backcountry roads seeing if I might razzle up a hidden parking spot where I could sleep in the car. We have everything you need to sleep and camp in the Kia Sorrento rental. Yes, even at 40 I have a Road Dog Soul (RDS). Hey: At least I’m sober and not hitchhiking. I did that all through my twenties.

I ended up finding a great little campground about 20 miles south of Richmond. Lake Shelden. I got there after hours so I put some cash into an envelope and camped. Spots were open. I cooked using the Jetboil stove, read and passed out. I awoke at 4am and headed out way before anyone arrived to open the place. I like to drive in darkness, baby. Morning or night, but darkness. Road Dog creeps silently in the night, people.

That day—the 29^th of July—I plowed south a la I-95 (the West Coast I-5 of the Eastern Corridor, which goes from New York down to Florida, like I-5 goes from border to border from Mexico to Canada through California and the Pacific Northwest). I pushed through North and South Carolina. There was a lot of green forest along the highway. Thick. Jungle-like. Many brown freeway signs highlighting various Civil War memorials, museums, etc. I drove on cruise control for much of it, usually between 70 and 80 MPH, depending on traffic. I felt thankful the rental has Arizona—not California—plates. Highway patrol in other states often dislike Californians. I’ve experienced this first-hand.

In South Carolina at one point there was a massive—I mean gigantic, like 15, 20 stories high—sign post, black, with a shady-looking photo of the side of Biden’s face and in thick white letters against the black sign it said something like, “81 MILLION VOTES? YEAH RIGHT. #ELECTION FRAUD.” My eyes grew big and I laughed heartily. I mean, hey, you gotta hand it to South Carolina: They’re not subtle. I’d missed the iPhone shot and considered turning around to pull it off…but alas I kept moving.

After going through Georgia—which was spectacularly gorgeous, filled with rivers and streams and green fields and thick green forest—I stopped for the night in Jacksonville, Florida, just past the Florida border. My first time in Florida and most of these southeastern states. I snagged a campground in Little Talbot Island State Park about half hour outside the city by the ocean and around a series of island waterways only because there’d just five minutes prior to my call been a last-second cancellation. I lucked out. The camping area was nice but it was 83 degrees with 82 percent humidity. Nasty. The mosquitos were eating me alive. I wrote at the campground picnic table, ate more freeze-dried food, and jumped into the car with the engine on to use the A/C.

After eating I called Britney and did a humid walk around the campground and then discovered a random back road and walked down that. We talked and talked. Darkness descended. The moon rose up, three-quarters full and pale and bright. I walked and walked. I went to the beach, watched the lightening striking in the distance and talked to Britney. I got back to the car. We hung up. I turned the A/C back on.

I read, turned the car off, and passed out.

But yet again I woke up at only 12:30am and was raring to go, the blood and adrenaline pumping madly.

You don’t tell Road Dog no.

So I went. By 1am I was on the road. Yes. I’m serious.

I blazed west—finally, beautifully—along I-10, another cross-country freeway that goes from Los Angeles to Florida. The cross-country routes are: I-90 and I-80 (northern), I-70 (central), and I-10 (Southern). I burned through the narrow strip of Northwestern Florida, through Alabama (cutting right through Mobile)—which made me think of the Neil Young song—Mississippi, and at last into Louisiana. The same idea as always: Many stops at gas stations for green tea and to pee and stretch, then cruise-control forever. Music. Podcasts—The 5^th Column, Tim Dillon. The Audible version of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s memoir, Confessions which is absolutely brilliant and I’ve been plowing through via physical book and audio. Phone calls. (Britney, Mom, my senior year English Lit professor and friend who agreed to officiate our wedding in mid-October.)

The cultural changes were amusing. Black women working at gas stations in the South called me “baby.” At one point I spilled some green tea accidently on the counter and the kind, pleasant woman smiled and said, “Don’t you worry, baby.” I grinned. Some of the older white women working behind counters were, how should I say it: White trash. Badly done, faded ink along their wrinkled arms, the glazed look of decades worth of disappointments.

And then: New Orleans. I was excited. I’d gotten a cheap Air BnB for $44/night which ended up being atrociously more expensive due to cleaning fee and taxes which were absurd. But I’d decided to make this my one big splurge. I booked two nights in Bayou St. John a little outside of downtown. It was close to 100 degrees out. The place wasn’t ready yet—it was around 2pm—so I found a coffee shop called C.C.’s off Esplanade and North Broad Streets. It was cool, hipster-y, filled with what appeared to be grim, determined artists, writing, drawing, talking. Perfect. I ordered a chai tea latte and wrote.

An hour later the Air BnB guy texted that the place was ready. I headed over, a five-minute drive. The area was a little…rough. Not rough like scary or crime-filled (though who knows), but rough as in parts of the road were so pothole-filled and cracked open it felt like driving in a backcountry road in Mexico versus the United States. But the place was—and is—incredible. I have my own private driveway. An almost 1,000-square-foot studio apartment with kitchen, laundry, washer-dryer, big bedroom all to myself. Of course I wish Britney were here with me. That’s the only inherent flaw. But that couldn’t be helped. Work beckoned.

I immediately took a hot shower and soaped up for the first time in days. (Hey, Road Dog has been alone and on the road: Why wash?) Then I threw all my travel clothes into the wash. I flipped the A/C knob from 75 to 67 and flipped the fan in the bedroom onto full blast. I lay down on the bed, clean and satisfied. And then I passed out.

I woke around 5pm, refreshed. I got dressed and found yet another coffee shop, this one close by and open until glorious midnight. I knew I needed to write this post.

Being on the road for 10 days like this—passing through states like bad dates on Tinder—has been enlightening and thrilling. I’m a certain kind of man, a certain kind of human being. We all have to do the mundane routine of regular, boring life most of the time. That’s life. Society. Reality. But I’ve never exactly been “normal” or “conventional” in the ways most people think of it. I’ll do the usual work stuff and the day to day, but eventually I need to go off and experience things. I’m not talking about a fun mellow vacation in Hawaii. That doesn’t do it for me (not that I wouldn’t go to Hawaii). I mean true adventure. In my twenties it was the dangerous thrill of wild risk-taking. Now it’s more mature, more sedate, but still very much alive and invigorating. Shoving, bullying my way, through The American Night via the tangled U.S. Highway system.

There’s a sort of routine on the road, too, of course. But there’s also—for me—a kind of spiritual nourishment with this kind of movement that I simply just can’t get from flying to New York or even going to Thailand. I like doing it unplanned, letting the wind take me. I have a general outline of where I’m going, what I’m doing. But that can change anytime. I like that. And I like the challenges you face in the daily unknown on the road. The road feels like the perfect metaphor for (my) life. Ditto backpacking. The ups and downs and in-betweens, the struggles and victories, the clinging and letting go, the learning and the solving of cognitive puzzles.

I’ve thought of my recently-deceased father while on the road, too, of course. Several times I’ve been driving, silent, ogling the road, listening to music—half listening, really—and suddenly a certain song comes on (this happened with Tom Waites’s Ole 55) and it’s like someone jabbed a knife into my gut. Boom: Just like that, all that emotion comes back, the memories of my father, his 23-month sickness with cancer, saying the things I needed to say to him, loving him, the last months and weeks and especially days of his life, weak and frail and dying. And then—perhaps obsessively—going over yet one more time what it felt like right after he died, his plastic-like body in the bed like some sort of soulless mannequin, his blank marble eyes, his stiffness, the blue color of his body. And how we called Hospice and they sent someone over and then the people came and wrapped him up and took him down the steep stone steps and suddenly my father, who I’d known all my forty years, was gone. Snap: Just like that.

But soon the feeling, on the road, would wash over me and pass. And once again it’d just be me and that old familiar and yet unfamiliar, sacred road. Road Dog. Blazing.