The Weekly Meat

How to Road Trip

In my teens and twenties, I managed to put in a lot of time on the open roads between jobs. I've driven cross country and back several times; twice, solo; been up and down the East Coast; done the Canadian route through Quebec and Ontario and back down through Michigan's U.P..; hit every state in the continental U.S. but for Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. Hell, just two weeks ago I did the 16-hour drive from Chicago to Boston.

Mostly, my time on the road was before cellphones and the interwebs and WIFI and, yes, even before widespread ATMs — and so I developed my own "best practices" (as these sorts of things would come to be called later in my professional life). Since Memorial Day weekend marks the official start of road trip season, here are the hits:

• Plan a route. Out are the days of grandma's AAA Trip-Tick, and in are the days of the ubiquitous GPS system. Still, you need context, and it's incredibly helpful to have a decent map. That said, skip the fold-out state maps in favor of an atlas that you can actually balance on the steering wheel and study while eating truckstop jerky and doing 85+ across Montana.
  
  Interstates in the U.S. are laid out in a logical manner that one would not expect of the U.S. Department of Anything. Odd-numbered roads run north/south, while even-numbered ones run east/west. Further, the road numbering goes up from west (where you can drive I-5 from San Diego to Seattle) to east (I-95 from Miami to Bangor, Maine) and from south (I-10 from LA to Jacksonville, Florida) to north (I-90 from Seattle to Boston). So when you wake up groggy at the intersection of routes I-70 and I-35 (Kansas City), you'll know to order the ribs.


• Be prepared. Nothing worse than locking your keys in your car. Take it from someone who has asked a bush pilot, a mechanic, and a cop (all successfully) to break into his locked car, and save yourself the aggravation by keeping an extra set in your pocket or in the pocket of whomever else is in the car. Door locks are much more problematic for the keyless than they once were, and car windows are not as easy to break as Hollywood would make it seem.
  
  Don't trust your gas gauge. Figure out what your average cruising distance (a full tank of gas) is on the open road. And remember, in stop and go traffic, or if you are driving with your air conditioner on, it will wind up being considerably less.
  
  Keep change for tollbooths, or better yet, get an EZ-Pass transponder (see also, I-Pass, I-Zoom, Fast Lane, etc.) — which, on my recent Chicago-Boston jaunt was accepted in every state but Ohio, and which saved me much hassle, and at least a half hour at the tollbooths.

  Know where you're headed, and who else is headed there. Passing through Boston on your way to Cape Cod on a Friday afternoon in July? Bring some reading and a bottle to pee in, because you'll be sitting in traffic. Just happen to be in South Dakota during the first week in August (as I have)? Well, drop on in to Sturgis (as I have). Camping in central Maine in the next few weeks? So are the black flies. Bring DEET.

• Sleep for cheap. A road trip is about the road, about quests, about destinations. With that in mind, stay on the cheap for any intermediate stops. Once you get to your destination, relax, put your feet up, drop a bit of cash. I'm not a big fan of sleeping in the car — even for a night or two — mainly because there are far better alternatives. Camping is my go-to M.O. (though I have a soft spot for the sort of national chain motels that leave the light on for you and advertise their prices on billboards by the side of the interstates). A few thoughts on camping:
  
  • Get a tent you can set up alone, within minutes, while it's raining. Because it will rain.
  • If you'll be near two or more national parks, buy a year pass.
  • Favor national forests over state parks — especially on weekends, when locals take over state parks.
  
  
• Prepare for the worst. If you roll in a 15-year-old hoopty-ass Camry, like I have until recently, any mechanic worth their salt can fix it, as long as there's a place nearby for parts. But if your car is a hybrid — or was manufactured in, say, Sweden — print out a list of dealers so you'll know where to get it serviced. Because in middle America, few are gonna know how to do anything but change the oil on that rig.
  
  Also, two things will happen — as they inevitably do — at some point during your travels:
  
  1. Your battery will die. Take jumper cables and know how to use them. If you have a manual transmission, know that you can do a rolling jump-start in second gear.
  2. You will get a flat tire. Take a full-size spare, and know how to change it. Know where your jack is hidden, and forgo the car's standard tire iron for one sturdy enough to stand on — because there are few things more stubborn than lug nuts that have been tightened with a torque gun.


• Pack smart. Use the car's storage space to its full potential. An extra blanket or two stowed under the trunk are manna to the wet and weary. Put a roll of toilet paper under the front seat and I promise you it will someday be needed (and soon after that day, thank me with beer). You'll get stale from being on the road long before a brick of packaged peanut butter crackers, and they're instant energy in a pinch. And it's always good to have bottled water around. At summer car temperatures, it may not satisfy, but it will certainly keep you (or even your car) hydrated. And money; a ragged twenty in the glovebox will go just far enough on a Sunday when you're in a dustbowl town with only one cash machine in town, and it is FUBAR.


• Eat well. Fast food is bullshit. Get off the highway and talk to real locals over real food that you can't get back home. Trust Roadfood, Chowhound, and your instincts. And if you are feeling bold, pick up a copy of the brilliantly titled Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine! and cook while you drive.
  


• Don't get dead. If you're planning on driving alone, try to drink liquids often enough that you'll need to pull over for a rest stop every couple of hours. Pace yourself. Caffeinate, but not overly. Know your car's limits as well as your own. Check your tires and fluid levels. Service your car when it needs it. And don't fall asleep.

Happy trails, y'all.

Truth and Courage

Back in elementary school, my friends and I all thought it tremendous fun to pick the winter sidewalks clear of ice for about a half a block, leaving the rest icy so we could dig out our old-school fixed-gear bikes and strap on our hockey helmets, then ride full bore down the clean sidewalks straight onto the end patches of blue ice — at which point we would jump on our brakes, recklessly sending our bodies wherever the bike happened to slide. And stopping wherever, and in whatever manner, they happened to stop.

Even then, I think we realized how slightly crazy and very stupid we were. Yet we were not the least bit frightened. Flecks of blood frozen into the ice only served to remind us how alive we were.

Blood was just part of the culture of youth. My younger brother once threw an instamatic camera at me, cutting open my forehead and ruining my white turtleneck. I took the blood-spattered shirt to school the next day for Show-and-Tell.

Back then, as ever, fear had more to do with the unknown than the known. Cemeteries were scary, haunted houses were not. Being stranded alone in the woods at night was scary, being stranded alone in the woods in the day was not. Losing teeth playing hockey was not scary, older girls were.

But then.

One summer during high school I traveled through the Rockies with my family. The day after we touched down in Denver, I went off hiking by myself near a family friend's place in Summit County. I climbed a mountain and came upon a series of waterfalls. I was able to maneuver behind one and take pictures out through the curtain of water. It was a beautiful place and a spiritual moment. And then in the time it took to blink, I took one bad step.

I fell and I slid. I turned on my side, dug hard into the wet rock, and still I slid, quickly approaching the next waterfall. The edge fell away sharply to more rock, and water. The fall was substantial and would take more than a second. I could feel the thud and crumple of such a landing. Time slowed down. I grabbed backward and looked forward, and my life did not flash before my eyes; rather, in that moment before certain crushing pain and possible death, I saw with supreme clarity the most probable outcome of the fall.

It was grim and filled with pain, traction, long hospital stays, and a wheelchair with a blow tube. It scared my 16-year-old brain possibly even more than death.

Instinctively, I dug sharply and continued to, until I found a hold the depth of a tack.

My legs dangled over the edge of the drop, and to this day I believe that God entered my fingertips for some fifteen seconds, until I had held and pulled myself to safety.

An hour or two later and altitudes lower, and when the blood was washed away, I sat and studied my fingertips. They were raw to the bone and the nails were completely gone. I cried for the first time in years, and for a full hour.

::::::::

I told this waterfall story in a college acting class during a "private moment" exercise designed to let us bear our souls — or, in a word, cry in front of our peers.

I learned that year that acting boils down to two things: truth and courage.

To be nakedly truthful; that is, to allow an audience to see the parts of your soul and yourself about which you are not proud. About which you are uncomfortable. When necessary, to give yourself over completely and allow yourself to dangle precipitously.

I got worked up, but I was not able to touch the memory closely enough, nor open up enough, to cry in that acting class. I was not that good of an actor. But the memory haunts me even now. And I write about it — as I have periodically — as a form of therapy, as a form of further discerning what happened and how it affects me still. I write as a form of truth-telling.

That day in Colorado, as I washed away the blood, and as I poured hydrogen peroxide over the left side of my body, I cried not because of the pain — which I understood — but because I knew for certain that no matter how I explained the incident to those I love, there would be no way they could understand precisely what I had gone through. They had not been there, and I did not have the capacity to make sense of what had happened nor allow myself to share it properly. And so no one could know exactly how close I had come.

Despite the solitary nature of this event, I also believe that had anyone been there, their screams would have broken my concentration for the slightest blink, and god would not have entered my fingertips, and I would have missed my hold and gone over the edge.

It mattered then, because high school was a difficult time for me, and I had felt a need for recklessness and rebellion as a way of dealing with teen angst and depression. And my near fall began a change in my thinking. It introduced reality and powerlessness into the life equation in a way far different from the fantastic teen glorification of suicide and the like. It made me realize too that there was much to the world that was much greater than I.

It matters now because I feel the need as a husband and a father to remember with unflagging precision how desperately I wanted to live at that moment — and how much more I still want to live.

File Under "Obvious Photo Caption"