Update on my whereabouts. Made it to NM okay, though just barely. I got out of Lincoln at about 10:30 and before you know it I had crossed all of sleepy flat Nebraska. When you finally hit the sandhills and the landscape starts to undulate off to the right and left, it's really a hell of a surprise, almost makes you jump after all that flatness.
I saw my first ever moonrise. A giant angry orange peel of a moon appeared off to my left, it was so orange and huge that it lit up orange layers of cloud around it.
Passed the fog belching factories of pre-Denver Colorado. By now the moon had paled enough to illuminate scrubby skeleton trees, and throw a ragtag assortment of rail cars standing still on the tracks into sharp silhouette. I thought some deep chord was being struck within me until I realized it was just that activity book they made for me in church as a toddler. Remember the train page with all those different buttons for wheels? Yeah, that's the chord that was being struck within me.
7 am found me crossing the tail of the Rocky Mountains, and the sun rising over mountain fields. An amazing sunrise is crucial to the success of an all-nighter.
Coming down into Northern New Mexico I entered a thick ground-hugging fog. It seemed to be coming up off the ground itself, and for a long time I wondered if I was driving into the smoke of a giant grass fire. Nope, it had rained the night before, and things were warming up so quickly that the grass was steaming, just like the ponds used to steam as I looked out the school bus window on winter mornings.
By Santa Fe, after 12 hours of driving with a few stops only for gas & coffee, the engine was starting to get pretty hot. I waited in a hotel parking lot in the shade for it to cool down. I read a newspaper. But to no avail, the remaining 4 hours of the trip were on pins and needles as I watched the engine temp push about as close to the danger zone as it could come. I called ahead though, and the grandparents, unworried, offered to come pick me up however far I made it.
I arrived in Truth or Consequences, NM at 2:30 mountain time. Grandma fed me & then I had to head off to Las Cruces by 4:30, in order to see the Nickman at his first ever public guitar-playing appearance. I started off in my car but then turned back, as it threatened once again to overheat, and a thunderstorm seemed to be brewing in the west. The grandparents (bless them) let me drive their only vehicle down there & arrived at the coffee shop at 6:00 on the dot, after a paranoiac hour of speeding and then freaking out and slowing down.
Nick & Meghan & I picked up right where we left off last summer, no weirdness or distance having crept in. We went over to see Kent, who now has a broken foot from trying to climb on the ceiling & is an even bigger hippie. At Kent's we met Jason, a Beat scholar who impressed me with his thorough knowledge, but later in the night was to inflict some rather derivative poetry on us. Slept over at Nick's apt. after 38 sleepless hours, and awoke to have great conversations with Meghan too about the evolution of man & America & television & education & growing up & form vs. content. All that wonderful crap. All that wonderful crap which it will soon be our duty to do something about, rather than just talk about.
Took my leave in the afternoon--not to interfere too much with their studying for tests and such. The plan is to divide my time between my Las Cruces friends & the grandparents anyway.
Posted by Alan at March 16, 2004 02:04 AM