There’s much more that I wanted to write about than I have so far, but I thought I’d at least provide some reading material to start with. More to come.
Sunday, 12-18-2011
Night has fallen, and I’m riding in the Red Dragon heading west. Ethan is beside me, in his “road trip zone;” steadily focused, with no stops besides gas until we reach the destination, and accompanied by an enthusiastically selected playlist streaming from the iPod. Trailing behind us is my car, packed like a 3-D Tetris challenge. We’ve been on the road for six hours now, so I’ve settled into reflection mode.
Ten months ago I was traveling alone, heading east, striking out on a new adventure into the unknown. That drive took me four days on the road, one rest day, and four nights of sleeping in beds. On my first day driving, my reflections bounced around between the topics of sojourning, gratitude, and various ways I’ve surprised myself in the course of my life. The second day was filled with observations of billboards I found humorous (whether they intended to be or not). The third day was a chance to catch up with friends of mine & my family, so of course lots of telling people what I’d been up to lately and what I was doing next. The fourth day I started freaking out. I had finally reached a part of the country I didn’t already have a level of familiarity with, and it really sank in that I was moving all the way across the country without any guarantee of a job to move in to a house where my primary companion would be someone I’d only met once (Ethan’s Mom), all for the purpose of finding out if a guy (Ethan) who had entered my life in seemingly Providentially-orchestrated fashion would end up being the man I share a lifetime of future adventures with. All the conversations from the day before must have settled in deep overnight, because when I say I freaked out, I mean I stopped at a rest stop & took some time on the phone to process it more and relax a bit. Thankfully, by the fifth day, I was finishing the drive with excitement.
When I’m not writing about things, my other form of documentation is photos. So, as I look back to the first set of pictures I took, I laugh. The day after my arrival, Niki left on a business trip and Ethan returned to classes. I was all by myself in an unfamiliar place and I recall going through more nervousness as I unpacked & settled into my new room. So a day or two passes, and then what did I photograph? The huge bug I found on the laundry room floor. It was a case of “Ew, what is this? Maybe if I take a picture of it, I can look it up,” but I think I was able to just ask later. The answer: a tick. Now, having spent time in the backcountry of California, I had pulled a tiny black tick off me a time or two before, but this thing had clung to one of the dogs & feasted before turning into a bulbous grey and brown-dusted alien and falling off. Future “welcome to South Carolina” encounters weren’t always photographed, but were frequently given notable consideration. Coming from the rugged west I had learned to be cautious with the vegetation and wildlife, but this humid south was a whole new world to learn. In Arizona, when I went out to work in the garden, I had to wear sunscreen. In South Carolina, I had to bathe in bug repellant. In Arizona, if the trail was free of vegetation, it was clear to pass. In South Carolina, if the trail was free of vegetation I still had to make sure I wasn’t about to walk into a spider web (the largest I encountered in this fashion was occupying a height from waist-level to above head-level and spanning a distance that I’m sure a golf cart could fit through). In Arizona, enough of the plants are shouting “I’m pokey!” that I got used to just avoiding contact with them. In South Carolina, the lush attractiveness of the beautiful greenery was sometimes deceptively distracting from little bristles. In California, I had occasionally gotten a couple rash spots from poison oak, which I nearly expected because I was constantly brushing past it. In South Carolina, I broke out in a poison ivy rash and have no idea how I came in contact with it. In Arizona and California I was alert for deer on the mountain roads. In South Carolina, the deer were prolific right in our woodsy neighborhood.
Back to the current drive, the shuffle has resorted to cycling through these songs now on their, oh, I don’t know, 5th or 6th time, so I’ve got to take a break from the stationary state of staring at my screen. I’m not sure if the link between those two things makes sense to anyone else, but for me, right now, it seems to.
Monday, 12-19-2011
Monday morning. Dawn seemed to last forever before sunrise finally broke behind us. It was an uneventful but still rough night, so we were both glad for the daylight. I have the luxury of sleeping whenever I feel like, but it isn’t comfortable, and I’m hoping the stretch & coffee break I just got helps this headache. Ethan has taken a couple rest stops for short naps, and is feeling alright for now. Last night we passed the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, and it seems smaller than what I had imagined it would have been for functioning as the initial center for Hurricane Katrina relief. Ethan reminded me that they did rapidly overflow. We just crossed into Texas a few minutes ago, and will be spending the rest of the day traversing these 900 miles on I-10. Ethan’s mood has shifted to match the “bigness” of Texas. It’s rather entertaining for now. He has commentary on everything, good or bad. He’s really enjoying the billboards we pass, & is especially drawn to anything food related.
So, back to South Carolina. Having moved to the state only knowing two people, it was comforting to be so warmly welcomed by folks I met in daily routine. Anytime I mentioned being new to the area, there followed questions and conversation and well wishes, even at the grocery store. I quickly got a part-time job at Crooked Creek Park in Chapin with the afterschool program, and was integrated right in. I eventually secured a second part-time job in the mornings with Starbucks, and during my training at a downtown store most of the regular customers were patient and encouraging. When I settled into my “home” store, the regular customers were genuinely interested in who I was, and we’d have conversations as time allowed. By late summer, I reached a point where, between the kids at CCP and the regulars at SBux, I had quite a network of familiarity and would run into people I knew outside of those two settings. As luck would have it, it turned out that I also already knew several of the young adults in my local church congregation! And the folks who composed Ethan’s local congregation (in Georgia) during the school year were so glad to meet me, that we comfortably bounced back & forth between them. Finally, Ethan’s family, both immediate and extended, and his friends, all did their part to make me feel a part of them. The sum of all these social experiences was a sense of community, a feeling that the world isn’t too big, and a refreshed view of people genuinely caring about others, even if they just met.
~*~
The second sunset of this trip has long passed, and we’re still in Texas. Just over 200 miles to go before we’re out. At one point this afternoon I tried entertaining myself with an alphabet game, but by halfway through the alphabet we were out in the middle of nothingness and my self-imposed rules restricted qualifying sightings to the letter being the first in a word (or standing alone) and not on vehicles, so my patience was tried with “Q” and I finally gave up after an hour of waiting for a valid “X.” I think I’m a fan of this writing-in-the-car-after-dark thing. It’s a good time of day for thinking, and I don’t get carsick from things in my peripheral vision whipping past. Having a power inverter powerful enough to keep my computer running is a treat, too.
Saturday, 12-24-2011
It’s my first Sabbath morning since leaving South Carolina, and I just got to watch the sun rise over a desert landscape. No, I’m not in Arizona right now, but rather California, just outside of Joshua Tree National Park. A group of friends arrived here yesterday evening for an annual week of wintertime rock climbing. Some years we camp in tents, some years people are in hotel rooms, this year we rented a house. It’s now 7am, so in a couple hours I’ll be helping the other early risers get breakfast going, and I’ll have to have showered & dressed before then, but right now it’s relatively quiet.
Tuesday, 12-27-2011
Over the past several days there have now been over a dozen witnesses to my consistent crash-at-8pm-but-be-the-first-one-up routine. I believe the surprise of it has passed now, and they just appreciate that there’s already coffee made by the time they’re up. :-)
~*~
