“Jean. Jean! I found one!”
“Wait a minute, Vennie. There’s a bar whispering to me.”
Last fall my friend Vennie came down from Albuquerque to meet me in Lincoln County, N.M., as I drove across the country. She’d read about the Little Free Libraries in Carrizozo. These are more than a dozen decorated 36 inch long by 36 inch wide by 36 inch tall boxes around town that offer a Take One, Leave One plan for lending books. We both added volumes to the mix. We took away photos and ended that day at the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan down the road—my choice of pilgrimage—which amused me well enough. But it’s the porch of a bar along U.S. Route 54 that returns to me now when I begin thinking, road trip, road trip. When I framed two doorways there in a viewfinder, I could feel echoes from the past seeming to make adobe walls hum.
Persuading me to hit the road doesn’t take much of a nudge usually. Tell me about a gathering of musicians in Texas, or describe how a Colorado two-lane flows away from the Rockies like a slow motion wave to Lamar and then Kansas, or remind me how startlingly beautiful it is to drive from Durango downhill to Santa Fe and OK, I’m on my way.
One time a friend was headed back to school in Iowa and thought our San Juan River conversation should carry on to Denver where she’d meet a passenger to help drive day and night back to class. I said sure, I could catch the Greyhound from Denver back to Arizona. But when her passenger didn’t show up, I said what the heck and helped her drive all the way to Iowa where I’d never been.
I could use a dose of impulsive now, or a pal like Vennie to meet, because though I mean to get back to Maine for the summer, I’ve been slow to organize the trip. I can see myself there: I am greeting the neighbor Tessie before we walk to the shore of St. George to watch the birds on the mudflats when the tide is out. I’m finding the musicians who gather at the nautical museum in Rockland on Sunday afternoons. I’m sitting in the attic shaking my head at the letters from Finland in the bottom of a trunk.
“I can see myself back East,” I told a friend at a recent antique fair in Prescott, “but I can’t seem to get underway to get there.”
Then my friend Scott handed me a new paintbox, an Aqua-mini Sennelier palm-size tin of eight colors with a brush; he saw it in a store and knew I should have it. Those colors have not been more than three feet away from me all week. Small scenes arrive to a letter in my notebook. Dabs of red on a ketchup bottle. The curve between hairs on a balding head. Green trees waving at blue sky.
It might be that painting again has re-lit my eyes that crave new places. Scenes from American highways of my past are returning to my even breathing before sleep. That place in Oklahoma where someone has collected a yard full of windmills. The Cairo Ohio River Bridge, a bit of narrow erector set construction over the Mississippi River which got me lost trying to find it, but led me to great barbecue and a walk with Indian mounds. And the Blue Ridge Parkway—a drive I don’t do every time I cross the country, but how I do like its curves and viewpoints, its quiet and the gentle way it hands me off to the Skyline Drive to Jefferson’s Monticello in Virginia.
And along the way there will be cafés—the good ones recognized by the clustering of cars outside that look to me like cattle nuzzling the water tank first thing in the morning. Inside the front door, my paintbox at the ready, I’ll scan the tables and booths for just the right place to park myself awhile with eggs and envelope.
If I plan ahead a little, maybe I’ll be lucky to meet a friend again who’ll coax me to an interesting place where I’ll feel drawn to an adobe that advertises EAT and DRINK. I’ll study it and make up stories in my head about the air conditioned days there. Imagine the dark coolness and the smacking cracks of cue balls, the calling out between bar and booth, and dancing. Surely there was dancing. The plywood nailed over windows has caught the dancing and holds it in like fireflies caught in a jar. Stories and movement endlessly swirl under an overhead fan that has long been stilled. I can hear it. Standing on a wooden porch outside a closed bar in a place I’ve never been, I can hear a party inside still moaning with mystery. I didn’t know I’d meet that particular face of a mud wall. I’m very glad I came across it, and I’m glad to move on, too.
Yes, it’s time for me to drive away soon. Perhaps after hash browns on Route 66, I’ll go look around the USA again.
I can use my air miles some other time. Or return to train travel one day when I’m out of steam for driving. And eventually I’ll stay home with a good book when I’ve run out of energy to live at 70 mph and can’t think of anyone to send letters to from cafés anymore. But not just yet.
