When I used to be in college, and would drive, drive the six or so hours back to the town where I grew up and maybe the first few times that I made the trip, it was exciting because I fealt adult, I felt mobile.
I never really had a car when I was a teenager, and I could rarely take it to places farther away than the nearby city. One afternoon, a friend and I had been skateboarding, and afterwards we drove up to the top of the mountain and then off onto the gravel road. We parked at the gate and walked the rest of the way up to the radio tower, all bleak concrete and barbed wire, haunted as it sat on the bald spot on the top of the hill. We just circled the clearing in silence, conversation replaced by the growl of some secret electronic beast deep within that concrete cave and the sound of the buzzards who would light from the metal tower and circle over our heads. As we were driving back down the mountain, I asked my friend how he had found the place and he said that some days, he just drove around by himself. I fealt lucky, after he dropped me off at my house, like he had just shared something very private and intimate with me.
So, the first times that I took the turnpike down, I thought that it might be that same feeling for me, sitting alone in a car with my thoughts charting out some new personal territory. But, I guess, I never really gave it a chance. I stuck to the turnpike and the interstate and only stopped for gas at the bright gas station where you could order sandwiches without ever saying a word to someone by pushing buttons on a little computer screen. After a few trips, the road just got so boring. More than once, in the last hour of the trip, I would be so excited to be nearly done with my drive that I would be playing the radio loud, greeting the exit signs for familiar towns by singing aloud until I would see the highway patrol lights flashing in the rearview mirror. Other times, I would just get this feeling, about how surprising it was to be in control of tons of steel moving at 70 miles per hour, how a slight jerk of the wheel could send me out of my lane, grinding past the rumblestrip, and through the bent old metal railing. And I thought, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, because at least it wouldn’t be the boredom of seeing green signs and white lines pass me by, hour after hour.
This summer, I spent a lot of time riding in a big bus that had a door near the middle that was meant for an emergency exit, but we would clamber out of it, not being able to sit still for one more second. And there were moments when I got that same of desperate boredom, and wondering if this seat on this road was really where I should be and wanting to be somewhere else, not because where I was seemed so bad, but just for the change. I thought about opening that door and hanging out over the side of the bus and watching the broken white lines become one line from our speed, and all the little pebbles in the asphalt becoming one blur, amorphous like dirty water. And I thought about jumping out of that door and I remember half thinking that I wouldn’t collapse into the pavement because the act of doing something as stupid as jumping from a moving bus would take a conviction that would somehow let me float and soar alongside the bus. But, obviously, I didn’t float and soar, because I didn’t jump either, just like the time when I was seven and extorted a pack of baseball cards from my mother by opening the sliding panel door to the minivan and threatening to jump. Which, I guess is a mixed message because my conviction, or at least a believable enough facade of it, was enough to get me something that I wanted.
The last time I saw my mom, a few weeks ago, and let slip how I was planning on living in the next few months (when she asked, “why does everything have to be so hard?”), I wondered if her thought process was the same as when I opened that van door as a kid. If she was trying to decide whether or not to call my bluff, or feeling terrified that I was young or ignorant enough to do it. I guess I use my mom’s reaction to some things as a litmus test for my own conviction. If she, who has seen me make plans, and make bold statements, and bellow and excite throughout my life, believes that I’ll follow through with all my grand plans and the uncertainty that swirls around them, then I can believe that too. Its not surprising, but its sad that what brings me comfort brings her only worry and confusion.