I blamed all of my
worries and woes, all of my future disasters and successes on one
moment. The moment was sometime in September 1998. If age isn't a
beautiful thing, I don't know what is, after all, you can have
perspective with time and time equals age. This one moment happened
at SFO. I had told the girlfriend that I was going to return to
Denver. I have no idea what compelled me to return to Denver. The
morning it all went down, she borrowed a car, drove me to the
airport, parked, went in and walked me to the gate. The moment I
blamed for everything was the moment that she walked away from the
gate, I watched her walk away and despite my inclination to drop my
ticket and run after her, I did not. I returned to Denver and
followed a different destiny.
Six months before that
fateful moment, in April of the same year, me and the girlfriend left
Denver in a spring snow storm and took a long road trip to San
Francisco. This particular road trip was nothing new to me, not
exactly. I had made the trip via freeway between Salt Lake and San
Francisco dozens of times when I was a little boy. When I got a
little older and my family moved from Salt Lake to Denver, I made the
road trip between often enough. So, at the age of 25 going from
Denver to San Francisco was nothing I hadn't done before. I just
hadn't done it as an adult or with a girlfriend.
The road has a certain
feeling, a certain romance. If you can do it while young and with a
lover, all the better. For me, that first trip in 1998 was great, it
was two days in the car with someone I was still getting to know. We
listened to CDs and we took our time. And when we finally got to the
ocean, we were very happy.
I took the same trip in
January of 1999, this time with Chris, a moving truck and the
destination, ultimately was Portland via SLC and San Francisco. It
took us about ten days. The whole trip from the moment we filled the
moving van in Denver's Capitol Hill onward was ill-fated. This
particular trip in 1999 was something that never left me. I wanted so
badly to write the road trip exploits and failures in 1999, but it
took almost 20 for it to happen.
I took the trip overland
a few more times: from Oregon to New Orleans via San
Francisco/SLC/Denver in early 2001. There was the round trip Denver
to San Francisco in 2002 for a funeral. I took the 2002 trip alone. I
took it again in 2003 with yet another girlfriend and although I
didn't know it at the time, she was destined to become an ex-wife.
As you can see over a
period of about five years I drove between Denver and San Francisco
east to west, west to east or both a good many times. I would vary
the trip only slightly and that would be the span between SLC and
Denver. Sometimes I would take I-80 over Wyoming and other times HWY
40 from SLC to I-70 in Colorado bypassing The Cowboy State outright.
Over time, and taking the
same or similar routes, you come to pick places of interest. There's
a hotel bar I like to eat in in Rawlins, and a breakfast joint in
Winnemucca I like. There are places I stop. Even though the trip is
1200 miles, you begin to know the road. Even if the road doesn't
change, or change much, over my period of 5 years, and especially at
that time of my life, I changed drastically.
I always wanted to write
a road story, a modern one. A seedy Interstate story about all the
seedy shit along the Interstate and inside Interstate towns.
I finally got my chance
when my dear friends Dani and Ryan moved off to Reno.
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