Across the Plains of Texas, Prelude

A 2,000-mile road trip with a lover scorned . . .

. . . what could possibly go right?

“Two people are alley cats; we have an unhappy cat
He is restless, needs attention, loses patience, seeks affection”

A drive from northeastern Ohio to El Paso, Texas, through nearly two thousand miles of nothing but the results of the American experiment, marinating in its vast petri dish for going on two and a half centuries. Such an effort ought not to be left to one person to endure on their own, I had told myself.

That dubious chivalry was all I needed to decide it would somehow be anything other than a shockingly inappropriate idea to undertake a cross-country road trip alone with a girl who I'd met just weeks earlier, when doing so meant willfully waving aside the distress such a decision would rightfully cause in my relationship with my significant other, who had remained back at home while I completed my undergraduate degree a few hours away.

There was substantial overlap in our respective circles of friends and acquaintances. Over a span of three years, Bea and I had attended a number of the same social gatherings—on two different continents, in fact—and we figured out later on that we had even been in the same room at the same moment on multiple occasions. Yet somehow, we had never knowingly crossed paths. Then, in that mischievous streak bordering on sadism that it so loves to flaunt, fate intervened to correct the fluke of our avoidance two months before we were slated to leave Ohio for good.

In the all too brief period between my pledge to act as copilot for her return home to West Texas and our designated departure date, we accidentally grew dangerously close, developing an intimacy that any decent person in my position would have have consciously acted to head off. A kiss, stolen in a doorway at a fuzzy, mostly forgotten apartment party snowballed in short order into flimsy excuses for staying out late and clandestine predawn escapes so as not to arouse suspicions from inquisitive roommates.

I knew, deep down, that the charade would eventually have to come to an end. I gutlessly chose to wait and use what I figured—or, more accurately, what I desperately hoped would be the natural parachute that the culmination of our journey would provide. In spite of an escalating series of confrontations with the Girl Back Home, I defiantly and cruelly decreed that I would still be going forward with the trip. I submitted as my justification solely that it would be wrong to desert someone to execute a colossal task without crucial assistance that had been promised.

My most honest rationale, however, arose from far more egocentric roots than this grotesquely twisted altruism, or even the genuine affection that I had undeniably come to feel for Bea. At its crux, my motivation was purely self-serving: I just desperately wanted the adventure. Hell, I'd convinced myself that I needed it.

The unquantifiable privilege of having gotten to live for four months in the foothills of the Swiss Alps the previous spring had injected a daily dose of wanderlust directly into my veins. Since returning stateside, the ennui of my little corner of the globe had once again descended upon me like an allergenic blanket of pollen.

A final academic year spent trapped in an unremarkable college town in the hinterland of several asphyxiated Rust Belt cities. A summer job in the low-wage morass of a local amusement park, night after night of accepting soggy dollar bills tugged from the nether regions of bathing suits and bras and dishing out sweatshop-produced stuffed animals if some inane feat of menial skill was successfully achieved. A relationship, initially born of a newfound confidence the likes of which had eluded me for so much of my young adulthood, but perpetuated a year on out of comfort and concern that its dissolution would reverse what I feared had been fragile gains in self-esteem.

The way I saw it, this Groundhog Day existence lay like a pit of mud under the tread of the vehicle whose engine had been immutably revved by my once-in-a-lifetime experience overseas. I was finding it impossible to accelerate away; any attempt resulted in a whining skid that yielded nothing more than the acrid stench of overtaxed rubber. In this potential odyssey with Bea I saw the winch that would haul me from my bog of tedium.

Never before had I been presented with the opportunity to roam between the Mississippi and the Rockies. An entire third of the country, empty pages in the gazetteer of my mind, waiting to be filled in with scribbled observations and anecdotes. It was a drive that could feasibly have taken as little as two and a half days, but in my single-mindedness I commandeered the planning process and devised a much more leisurely itinerary that would span a full five days and four nights.

Meanwhile, the weather turned, summer's stifling air bringing with it a deep-seated inkling that this was a season of infinite possibility. It welled up from the depths of childhood nostalgia for those carefree years when with the heat and humidity tagged along what seemed, to an unjaded boy, like unparalleled liberty. This feeling only further primed my heart with aching anticipation for my forthcoming quest.

And so I counted down to my flight, whittling away the seemingly interminable procession of sticky nights at the park, Lee Greenwood's cloying jingoism emanating from loudspeakers and washing over the concourses strewn with powdered sugar pared from overloaded funnel cakes. And then, at last, one morning towards the close of June I was gone, Buckeye State bound, with the sun at my back.

Bea's car, a blue crossover that she had christened "Bubble," was ready and waiting, every available inch of space occupied by compression bags crammed with most of her earthly possessions. A cargo pod strapped precariously to the roof handled the remainder. She had by then correctly sussed me out as a selfish coward and now viewed my presence through sideways eyes as a necessary evil for splitting the daunting number of hours behind the wheel to come and certainly not as a worthy companion for the ensuing week.

She drove first. Rather anti-climactically—not to mention rudely—I abandoned her to Ohio's monotony and slept most of the way to Cincinnati.