So this post is going to function (unintentionally) as a counterpoint to my previous post. I failed to realize, when I wrote all of that shit about how I can't function by myself in polite society, that I would be travelling pretty much entirely on my own for part of July and early August and that my survival would hinge on my ability to successfully interface with complete strangers on a regular basis without any comforting intermediary whatsoever.
I've survived these experiences (so far), and am re-heartened by my continued ability to drive really long distances alone and sleep on the ground and eat plain-as-fuck camp food for a week at a time without losing my mind.* Of course, for much of my recent trip I was in the middle of writhing crowds of thousands of people who were all high on all kinds of drugs as our senses were peppered by laser light shows and improvised music that was funky, jazzy, spacey, and downright spooky by turns, so it's actually entirely plausible that I was completely insane the entire time and just thought I was sane compared to my surroundings.
I was at Phish, is what I'm trying to say. I went to the Phish. I drove down the west coast following a band from city to city with a bunch of hippies. Except nowadays, they aren't hippies anymore. They're all forty years old and travel from show to show in airplanes and rental cars and stay in hotels. They still all party like the asshole frat boys they used to be (or wish that they used to be, or whatever), but people who legitimately drive from show to show, camping on the ground and scraping by, seem few and far between. I understand why, though: it's pretty hard on a guy. But still, I was surprised to find that the people who follow Phish around the country (nowadays, at least) are not My People as I thought that they might be. No big deal, though: the people (in general, not in total) might have sucked, but the band was amazing, and far better than I had even hoped they might be. I saw eight shows, and if there had been more after that, and if I had more money and more free time (and no desire to spend the rest of my summer break climbing mountains, I guess), I probably would have kept going. But, the wonders of the Phish is a topic for another day.
Today, I want to talk about Mother Roads.
Mother Roads is not exactly a cruel mistress, but she can be an icy one. Metaphorically, in the sense that traveling the highway for a protracted amount of time can be a lonely and not-obviously-rewarded endeavor, and also literally, in the sense that sometimes the road gets icy and it's dangerous to drive on. But, since this road trip took place in July and August, I'm talking more metaphorically and less literally.
I spent a lot of time driving back and forth between Ohio and Washington when I was a young lad (a few long years back, in my mid- to late-twenties) mostly because I was hella broke and with my super-fuel-efficient car it was way cheaper than flying. But I also did it because there was something comforting and rewarding about the obviously-masochistic-on-its-face exercise of driving thousands of miles at a time, by yourself, across a country that is so damn physically big and culturally varied that people on one end often cannot understand what people on the other end are saying even though they are nominally speaking the same language.
Now, the last time I did a drive of this magnitude on my own was almost five years ago. I've gone on a few long drives since then, but they've all been with groups of friends and/or with Lindsey. I had an opportunity to drive from Pullman to San Francisco and back last summer (about twelve or so hours each way, over the course of a few days) and ultimately ended up passing it up and staying home, partially because the idea of driving that far alone just seemed hard and not worth it unless it was for some absolutely necessary reason (like, say, getting back to Pullman in time for work starting in the fall so I could keep my job).
In this case, I was driving much further, even, than I would have last summer. To see the concerts I wanted to see, I had to drive from Klamath Falls to Lake Tahoe (6 hours), then from there to San Francisco (4 hours), then from San Francisco to Los Angeles (6 hours), and finally back to Klamath Falls (10 hours). I did this over the course of a week, so there was never any extremely concentrated doses of driving, but there was a lot of sleeping on the ground in cheap, crappy campgrounds (much more nerve-wracking and uncomfortable than sleeping in the wilderness), a lot of eating cheap, crappy food, and a lot of time spent alone, even if only about half of it was spent in a car.
As I wrote before, way back in my original road-tripping days, I find this kind of trip really satisfying in a sort of masochistic way. It's difficult to sit in a car for hours at a time for days on end, alone, with nothing but landscape for company, and yet, once you've been at it for awhile, you're forced into a sort of meditative state. When there's nothing to do but think, even the things you normally don't want to think about or worry about become fair game. And that's good. Having time to myself like this from time to time not only makes me think about things I would normally suppress, it also makes me appreciate what I normally have once I get back home. Basically, it's always ultimately a great experience, but it's hard to get out the door. It reminds me a bit of running: I've never been on a run I wasn't glad I'd done by the time I finished, but I've also never started a run while thinking "Fuck yeah, running! This is gonna be awesome!" Generally, I can count on having had a positive experience by the end, so it's easier to break through the initial hesitation.
In this particular case, the initial hesitation lasted well into my stay at Lake Tahoe. The drive from K-Falls to Tahoe reprised the first half of a drive Lindsey and I took in 2011, from Tahoe up to Pullman, and it's not one of my favorite drives. It's almost six straight hours of flat, dry, near-featureless desert, punctuated occasionally by dried-up salt beds that used to be lakes and dead towns with nobody living in them anymore. I can find pretty much any landscape beautiful, including Hell's Canyon and the channeled scablands of eastern Washington, but this drive just kills me. I was only an hour or so in when I already started doubting my resolve to spend a week driving through (mostly) empty country just so I could see a bunch of friggin' concerts. After listening to a live Phish recording and making my way nearly to Nevada, though, I started to cheer up a bit. I really like Tahoe in general, and the campground we stayed there in 2011 was excellent, so I had high hopes for this stay.
I needn't have worried: the campground I'd reserved a spot in this time was even better than last time's. Despite being a CA State Park campground, there was a lot of space between each site and that space was filled with huge coniferous trees, so even though the entire campground was fully booked, it didn't seem crowded at all, and I spent a good amount of time over the two days I was there comfortably sitting in the shade of a tree, reading from my Kindle and/or taking a nap without feeling at all like I was in the middle of a campground full of people.
I think Tahoe was a good place to start the trip, because it was the only destination that I'd ever been to before. A lot of what sucks the fun out of trips like this for me are things like trying to find the campground, trying to figure out where to park near the concert venue, etc. and I'd already done that once in Tahoe, so I knew (in general, at least) how things worked.
Things went downhill a bit after Tahoe in terms of my ability to walk the path of Mother Roads alone, but that's a story for a follow-up blog post...
* Also, my ancient godddamn car's ability to continue to not just fall apart like all other cars would have done 40,000 miles ago is commendable and certainly helped me bear my burden.
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