Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Wabi Sabi: the backstory part one: the road trip

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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