The tent diaries 6

“On such a trip as mine, so much there is to see and to think about that event and thought set down as they occurred would roil and stir like a slow-cooking minestrone.” - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

I was wrong about Wednesday's post being my final tent diaries entry. I remember I wrote this kind of sloppy epilogue after I returned to Sarasota. 

People who had followed my journey in the newspaper said I ended things so abruptly with no tidy conclusion or rewarding epiphany. Of course by then it was too late. I had hogged full-page spreads in the newspaper for six weeks. So for myself and my friends I wrote this, a little thank you note. 

I was feeling pretty sappy and as usual, verbose. 

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The Oregon Coast & Thank You
Just did the dishes. Zac cooked bean burritos for dinner tonight. I cut up cubes of cheese and tomatoes. We listened to This American Life. Max won cards. Rachel drank White Russians. Cubbie licked Sadie's ears and teeth and I told some stories about Oregon and Wyoming using accents and flailing hand gestures.

I reached Bandon, Oregon at ten o'clock at night and if I had approached the end of the continental United States the coast of Oregon gave no warning. Like a security blanket, high bluffs and forests shield the Oregon Coast. When you drive from Klamath Falls to Bandon there are only subtle hints of the Pacific Ocean. The dark is pitch dark. (So much of coastal Oregon reminded me of a previous trip to Rhode Island.) I S-curved down highways and through national forests. I constructed in my head the image of the United States. The shape of my country, kind of like a chicken breast.

I rolled down my windows. The night looked like it might feel cooler and it did. I could smell it. The coolness and the ocean. The air felt like cellophane. I hung my arm out the window, flattened my palm and let the resistance turn my fingers into peninsulas. Peninsulas like Florida. I missed Florida. For the first time since moving to Sarasota three years ago, I had, during a phone conversation with Joe, called Sarasota "home." Used the word without hesitation. I missed my home. I missed Joe. This I was sure of. So many nights I narrowed my eyes like Matilda, beaming him into my tent whenever I felt lonely or I wanted to share something spectacular with him. Like, "Hey didja see those wild horses humping each other today?"

I missed my friends and that became more apparent as I went about my daily business without once laughing. I love to laugh goddamit! Without human company when do you laugh? What's there to laugh about? What does your laugh sound like when you're alone in your car, your tent, on the side of a dirt road? It sounds psychotic that's what. Lunatic. Laugh alone sometime without a television on, or a radio station dialed in, or a good book on your lap. Laugh without any of these devices and you're bat shit crazy.

I laughed anyway. With my hand out the window and my fingers like peninsulas, I laughed. Cubbie poked his head out the window and left it there for some time until I took a corner too hard and jolted him back into his seat. If the trees weren't so high I'd have seen stars.

Route 101, the Pacific Coast Highway, runs like a braided ponytail up the coast. I reached it and turned left. I had never seen the Pacific Ocean and now at every traffic light I craned my head out the window — was I there yet? Would I drive off the United States like Thelma and Louise? I could hear the crash of water on rocks. Crashing like tambourines! It was ten o'clock at night and I had traveled the width of my country. Sound the trumpets. Yet no trumpets would sound.

I would reach Bandon, where thanks to Joe I'd manage to get a $200 hotel room for the $60 military rate. Good luck? Good karma? Did I deserve either? I was so sick of the sight of myself. People had treated me so kind along the way. They were what I had expected — good, kind, curious and eccentric. How I like my people.

Before I left Sarasota my coworkers at European Marble handed me an envelope containing $200 in twenty dollar bills. My tent, my table, my cooler, the picnic basket, the propane burner, boxes of couscous, cans of tomato soup … all of them given to me by friends and coworkers. 

On the night before I left Sarasota Zac hosted a dinner where he cooked my favorite author's favorite foods. John Steinbeck's beer milk shakes. Hemingway's gazpacho. He invited my friends over and we toasted my trip from a plastic table set up in our apartment parking lot. Then he handed over a brown paper bag filled with Shell gas station gift cards. The cards took me as far as Chicago, and I saved one for my return trip. Redeemed it in Dade City, Florida. As I pumped my last tank of gas, I kissed the magnet strip. 

The unfolded roadmap on my wall with thumbtacks in it had become more dream than journey. More challenge than vacation. A rite of passage in my own head and in no other. The Mormons go on a two-year mission. I drive alone from one coast of the Unites States to the other.

In Estes Park, Colorado I'd treat myself to a mandarin chicken salad, a People magazine and a Blockbuster movie courtesy again of my boyfriend, who would treat me again to chicken fingers and curly fries at a diner with a name I wished I remembered in Bear Lake, Utah.

In Boise, Idaho I'd eat Cracker Barrel mac and cheese on Susan Holsing, a former European Marble coworker, who bestowed upon me a Cracker Barrel gift card that, if I continued to eat $3 mac and cheese off the kid's menu, would get me from Tampa to Portland.

Today in Sarasota, I met Rog and Ricci for coffee at Starbucks where, thanks to Jason and Jess, I treated us all to iced coffees in the titty-sweltering humidity.

So! This is the last blog. Finito. I did it. I write way too much anyway. I use too many metaphors and too many similes. I abuse similes like a drunk abuses– fuck, see.

I'm listening to the CDs Teisha gave me in Springfield, Missouri. Cubbie will be getting a bath soon. The walls in my bedroom are empty, save for an old drawing and my map of the United States with the thumbtacks in it. I'm debating whether or not to donate my bed to Goodwill as the house I'm moving into in a few weeks is fully furnished. I like my bed. It's a nice bed. Pillow top mattress. But it's a bed. It's stuff. A thing.

I guess what I'm getting at (what I was getting at 1,000 words ago) is thank you. Thank you to everyone who helped me along the way. People are better than stuff, better than places, and I'm ecstatic once and for all to be back in Sarasota with my people.

Thanks for reading.