Searching for Kerouac

I cried a couple hours outside of Tucson, alone in the vast Sonoran Desert where boulders as big as small houses were scatterd across the perfectly flat mesa like jacks forgotten by an ill-behaved giant. Some sappy country song set me off, but I knew that really I just missed my friends. It's lonely driving across the country in a U-Haul with your life in the back. I needed company.

The first people I picked up were about my age, just out college. Matt had graduated from Berkeley and his friend Dan was traveling with him. They both had a sort of typical post-hippie look about them: button-down shirts worn untucked, hair that was shaggy but not long. Surprisingly they had no grass. Matt had studied English Lit, so we chatted about books, Vonnegut mostly. I wondered if being a Vonnegut fan was a legitimate connection or just another Gran Falloon. I grinned at the thought and left my new friends in Las Cruces where they were planning on hopping a train to Atlanta. Sounded like a good adventure.

I was jealous of Matt and Dan. Two friends, two small backpacks, and nothing more, the world in front of them. I had a full truck behind me. I thought of Thoreau lamenting the plight of America's nineteenth century immigrants trudging along under their heavy bags, sympathetic because they had so much to carry, not because they could carry all they owned on their backs. I heard Tyler Durden saying, "The things we own come to own us." What inside that U-Haul owned me? It wasn't just the lack of material encumberment that made me jealous of the two travellers. I wanted to be travelling, moving across the Earth freely, not moving from one point to another with immutable purpose and schedule. I wanted to turn left and drive into the setting sun just because I could. I wanted to be doing something someone said I shouldn't. I wanted to be doing something someone said I wouldn't.

These thoughts carried me through sunset and into Albequerque, where I turned east. My mind cleared, and the flat barren land rolled underneath me in the dark almost magically, as if the van were floating while the Earth turned underneath. Dustin Hutches interrupted that smooth rolling like a needle being dragged across a record. I saw a truck broken down and spotted him about a hundred yards later. He ran up to my U-Haul excitedly. He had an American flag bandana and was talking a mile a minute. He was a Christian and a patriot, but he didn't trust the Bible or the government. Translations had distorted the Lord's word; money had ruined politics. He came from Lubbock Texas, the town with the most churches in the world. That's where he wanted me to take him.

I froze up when he asked me if I did drugs or drank. Hestitantly, I told him I smoked pot. After an awkward silence, I returned his question.

He turned at me quickly, almost like a lizard, "I do crystal meth," he shot at me.

Then he pulled something out of his pocket, a plastic cup, like the ones take-out pizza sauce comes in. It took me a second to realize it was full of meth. He said he made it himself. We did some. It was good. Fucking good.

I asked him about making it and he launched into another sermon. He used anhydrous ammonia, that was the magical reactant. That, and lithium. Oxygen was the one you feared. He tried to explain it to me, "Hydrogen and lithium, that's elements one and three, three and one, you can't beat that."

He asked me if I had noticed strange things lately, strange weather. I agreed that I had. He explained to me that the world was hanging in the balance, that good and evil, God and Satan were at this moment fighting for the fate of the universe. The score was tied. He lined up the battle for me. The forces of evil: Satan, Islam, the Taliban, and oxygen, had to be overcome by the righteous: God, Jesus Christ, America, hydrogen, and lithium. I could tell it all made perfect sense to him, so I nodded.

As we were leaving Amarillo, Dustin had a sudden change of heart. He no longer wanted to go all the way to Lubbock. I let him out where he asked and bid him safe travels. He gave me a couple rocks and a "God bless".

The speed kept me alert, focused on the long open road in front of me. The earth is so flat and featureless across that part of the country that driving through it becomes hypnotic. Occasionally the smell of a cattle feed lot or slaughterhouse interrupts the serenity. I will never understand how people can actually live under those heavy clouds of shit and death. It's rare that you encounter a smell so awful it's palpable.

The most interesting thing about Engels was his name. He was a pathetic old man. Sad, lonely, at the end of his rope. I'm only inferring from appearances. He wouldn't talk, but he didn't want to sleep. I asked what he had been up to at my age. After a long pause and a drag from his Pall Mall cigarette, he said he couldn't remember that far back. Any conversation I tried to create he snuffed with a monosyllable. Only one exchange was interesting.

"You drink?"

"No, but it's tempting sometimes."

He never offered any more detail. He never even told me exactly where he was going or why. Just the Oklahoma-Missouri border. I asked if he had family there. "I don't know," was his only reply. We met the sunrise in Oklahoma City, where I left him. As I turned north onto the 35, the highway that would take me back to Kansas City, I wondered if I could ever end up like Engels. I wondered if I could ever end up telling a stranger that I didn't know if I had any family where I was heading, that I couldn't remember back to my twenties. I thought of the friends and family awaiting my return and felt certain that could never happen. I teared up again, but only for a moment. The rolling plains around me looked like home.