We loaded up that small Honda to the gils. Ryan had dropped an Acura motor in it and it was fast, sleeper fast. The car looked old and faded on the outside but the heart and soul-the engine-was ready to cook any ricer willing to race. We were going to need it to get us from California to New York for summer camp. It wasn’t necessarily a trip dedicated to reaching that destination as much as it was about the drive for us. That morning we got up at six because we needed to get to Salt Lake City by night fall. We had put a lot of thought into this. We had our cooler replete with p. b. and j. that we’d prepare at rest stops, skipping the drive thrus. We had our case of water and our clothes and our peanuts- most importantly peanuts, which served as our entertainment from Lincoln Nebraska to Eerie Pennsylvania. With the windows down, doing 70 mph on I80 we would put the peanut shells on the tips of our fingers, and the wind would keep them there. The waist of the shell fit perfectly into our finger tips. At one point we both had five perched on each hand, and kept them there for at least five minutes.
The miles piled up on the odometer and every night the motel 6 room served as a welcome rest. He’d smoke his cigar, I’d sit on the bed and think about life back home, escaping from a messed up relationship. All the wrecking, it had been done back home and it was very much time to leave all that behind. It was a relationship that I had jumped into, and slowly, over time, realized my mistake.
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Ryan was the best to share a journey like this with. Things were simple between us. We were good at simply existing together. We’d just sit and talk or maybe just sit in silence. We’d listen to music, Anthony Green, Ben Gibbard and Rocky Votolato became our soundtrack. We learned things about the people in each state as they passed quickly. In Cheyenne the cops were on horses and in Utah the people were well behaved and in Eerie, folks just seemed happy to be living in America. In Chicago most folks were too busy, in Lincoln just the opposite. Toronto felt lonely, huge and hectic; cultures thrown together and mixed in a huge vat of eccentricity. Niagara was great but when we tried to pass through into Canada I guess we looked suspect because they had us pull off to inspect our car. Two California kids with long hair, probably reason enough to look for pot. They used the dog on our little Honda. They didn’t find anything.
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And we did more than just drive. Utah sticks most clearly in my mind. In Utah, we found an odd little spot near the Great Salt Lake where we pulled off 80. The undercarriage of the Civic scraped the protruding salt rocks as we inched closer to the water’s edge. We looked at the lake with wide eyes and decided we needed to take the plunge. The salt seeped into our pores and covered our bodies with a thick white coat. Our eyes and mouths burned from the intense salinity. Ryan’s hair became glued together, mine stuck up like steel wool. When we hopped back into the car, our backs stuck to the seats. We couldn’t rub off the immense mess that it had made. It would take a while to get rid of the evidence of the lake. We had jumped in, gone under and then immediately realized our mistake.
