It all started Thursday evening. The temptation I’d been feeling to just say “fuck it,” and go had been building steadily. Blame the full moon if you want. Or I guess you could blame her for giving me the best reason to go: the possibility of Love (yes, the capitalization is intentional). Friday, I went to work in the afternoon despite the ever-present desire to leave. Being short on cashiers and bitchy customers didn’t make the decision to leave any more difficult. At my lunch break, I went to a restaurant and randomly ran into my mother, who was taking care of my nieces and nephew. So in an ironic encounter, I got to say goodbye to them, even if they didn’t know that’s what it was. I declined to mention to my mother my plans to leave. I went home, called the Girl to let her know I was indeed making the trip. I called work on my cell phone and told my fellow head cashier that I wasn’t coming back. The phone fittingly ran out of minutes and clicked off before she could respond. So with hastily packed goods, I departed from home on the second Oregon Trail around 7 p.m. Central time.
Insert high speed fun, good music, scenic and not so scenic mileage, dingy gas station bathrooms, and several Sobe No Fear energy drinks.
Our story resumes hundreds of miles later in Iowa, two miles shy of the Missouri border. A state trooper pulled me over for going 85 in a 55. He advised me that 25 mph over the limit in Iowa carries a mandatory 6 month suspension of my license, but he was gracious enough to lower the recorded speed so it was just a $60 fine. Damn traffic zealots demanding tributes to their mythical god Traffic Safety.
Insert more roadtrip fun. Insert several hours of music-listening and random thought-thinking.
In Nebraska, on day two of the trip, the full-size spare, which I’d been using since last week when my original went flat, shredded at 75 mph. I got a ride from an old man from Wyoming to the nearest town, Brady. There we found another old man who worked in an old garage to repair my original flat. The man that gave me a ride asked about the like-new WWII Army personnel truck sitting in the parking lot and mentioned his own experiences in the war. This started a good forty minute conversation/argument between the two old men about MacArthur and Truman and the Korean War and the Bataan Death March, etc, etc. It was interesting and all, but neither would listen to the other. They just kept arguing. I amused myself while they spoke and the one guy worked on the tire by petting the two gray baby kittens who lived in an auto-parts box full of kitty litter in the garage. I really wanted to take one or both of them with me. After the tire was fixed and I got a ride back to my car, I headed west again, into the sunset as it were.
On day three, I finally made it to eastern Oregon. From there I called the Girl and let her know where I was and that I was indeed alive. I also discovered that despite my previous jokes on the matter, I was in fact driving the actual Oregon Trail route ever since I left Missouri. The mountains in eastern Oregon are quite beautiful. I saw a perfect sunset as I was driving 80 mph down a mountain in neutral. The highway then proceeded along a river in northern Oregon, which provided tight turns and a lot of construction work that slowed me down. I committed mass genocide on the bug population with my thermonuclear windshield. I had to clean it off every time I stopped for gas there were so many of them. Finally I made it to Portland. What little I saw as I raced through the concrete canyon the freeway goes through was cool. After Portland I headed south, through Salem, finally to Eugene. Of course I passed a cop doing 85 in a 65 two miles before the exit for Eugene, but luckily I didn’t get pulled over. And so my trip ended in a hippie town in western Oregon.
Then came the part I’d been looking forward to ever since the possibility came up. And the Girl threw me off from the start with being completely casual. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, but the scenarios in my head about the encounter were all wrong. I don’t mind at all. Insert all the details. I told her about the trip. We talked about random things. Fast forward several hours to find the possibility I sought in making the trip indeed fulfilled. Translation: Love. Call me crazy. I am. But don’t call me stupid. That would have been me sitting at home imagining what might have been, wondering what would have happened, and living not with love but only the scenarios in my head that never would have been.
And what’s even more fun about all this is that this is just the beginning…