We crossed the Ohio at Wheeling, ducked
past the tourist trappings of the Steel City
like two outlaws, made our Hollywood
escape, determined to get as far as we could
on a tank of gas, the first side of a cassette.
Duritz crowed through “A Long December”
even though it was July, and the air three
feet off the interstate shimmered; we were
spying each other through knee-deep water.
I watched the rough excuse for a finish fade
across Pennsylvania’s uplands, the lumpy
breasts of an old woman who shirked all
forms of pretense and fell asleep on the back-
porch glider. She rocked in time to sparrow
songs as the wind riffled through the trees,
promised a cloudburst to douse her marigolds
and blow away the humidity. I shook my head,
left home in the rearview, turned back to a road,
cut across a table clothed in sweet corn, soybean,
forage for a winter one could mistake for an idle
threat. We charged past a string of checkerboards
broken by tidy houses, rimmed by a stand of oaks,
docile villages crowned by spires—weathervanes
reflecting the neon lights from a handful of bars.
The expanse preached sermons on Manifest Destiny
offered room to wide shoulders used to carry great
expectations studded with unreasonable lies for four
decades. We passed the Wright brothers’ shop, the
boyhood home of John Glenn, hypnotized ourselves
and flew past the Indiana border at twilight. We drove
in shifts, cranked the AC, slept with our faces pressed
to the passenger’s window, where I yielded to 70,000
square miles of inkiness and wondered if all those
Rorschach tests foisted on me as a child had finally
conspired to blot out the existence of the universe.
The cover allowed the Mississippi to steal southward,
an escape compromised by the pallid glow of tourism
bounced off the underbelly of this monument to pioneer
ideals, a span unable to pull in the margins of a nation
fractured by its borders, those fashioned by God and those
we construct ourselves. Over the Missouri, a new day
broke the country into two halves, the green and golden
portion where sunflowers hugged the road, sought
shelter from these dust-blown reminders that our hopes
and efforts amount to little more than entertainment,
distractions from the grim reality of planting, growing
and reaping. We found ourselves closer to heaven in
Colorado, counted the fourteeners, those Rocky Mountains
splitting a continent camouflaged by contradictions. The
white lies above the tree line regarded us like pontiffs,
determined the best means of living with the merciless
nature of the world. We came alongside this state’s
namesake waters near the grave of the physician who
could not heal himself, followed the flow and praised
the strength that split mountains in its attempts to quell
the thirst of a desert. We watched it worm through slate
and slip rock on a mission to lend power to the congregants
huddled between its banks and the sandstone spires, those
compelled to lift eyes and lower knees. Beyond the Hoover,
we found a landscape sucked dry save courses thin as the
streams I scuttled through as a child, these capillaries
nurturing the most-distant, ashen appendages bleached bone
white and gnarled by exposure to the sea air. Seasonal flows,
dangerous then distant—like skittish lovers—tempted me
then dissipated into a broader context. Above the sea, a spit
shook by the thunderous surf and a billion rounded pebbles—
a boneyard memorializing the fact that erosion always wins.
