I Used to Put a Lot More Miles on Cars

Nov 10, 2007 - 09:21 AM PST

I'm slowly losing my night-driving ability on back-country roads.

Sunday night, Bean and I were winding our way back to Los Angeles from the desert on a dark two-lane highway and I found myself hesitating on curves. I'm starting to suffer something my father complains of; the growing inability to quickly recover from being blinded by an oncoming car on a dark road. My eyes don't adjust like they used to, and I find myself staring at the white lines on the right side of the road, hitting the brakes until I can see beyond the blank black blur I'm left with in the wake of a passing car in the opposite lane. This is good driving technique but rubs the wrong way on something in my soul.

Full moonlight over the desert, good solid open road, a V6 engine, and I find myself balking on turns and curves in the shadows of the mountains.

I used to put a lot more miles on cars.

I've run cars ragged with my need to move on. My first runs were small, to Champaign-Urbana to crash on a friend's couch for a night or two. Then up to Chicago, down to St. Louis, over to Indianapolis. To Hannibal and back for the hell of it. To Madison. Cincinnati. Columbus.

When I was 17 and it was hot August hell in my harvest-choked hometown, I borrowed my brother's Jeep and pointed it east. Didn't have a map, just drove until I hit the boardwalk at Virginia Beach, 900 miles. Crashed a few days, then ran up the coast through Chesapeake Bay up to Philadelphia, then back west down through Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock. Turned north and headed through the Ozarks, made my way to Columbia, Missouri.

I have slammed through the dark over the Rockies and the Appalachians numerous times in bad weather and on no sleep (gotta make Durango, gotta make Charlotte). I've speed-hallucinated emergency vehicles on Austin overpasses, driving to escape an especially dreary long winter, landing on a beach outside Corpus Christi at dawn.

Galveston. New Orleans. Pensecola. Jacksonville. Charleston.

Kansas City. Wichita. Dallas. San Antonio. Brownsville.

Omaha. Topeka. Kansas City. Tulsa.

Denver. Boulder. Fort Collins. Cheyenne. Cities strung like rosary beads, my own personal meditation on the Mysteries.

My moving-on spirit burned out a little on the 2000-mile hike from St. Louis to Los Angeles at the end of 2003 (Tulsa. Amarillo. Albuquerque. Flagstaff. Phoenix. Blythe.) After miles and miles of open sky and open road and cold high desert I put my feet in the Pacific and my soul said "we're tired... and we're home."

I don't feel the need to run anymore, but sometimes I still feel the need to move.