So You Think You Need A Camper Van, Day 2
Mar. 13th, 2004 01:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI dream I'm directing the next hit movie. My stars are crowded around a desk, facing a camera, saying goodbye to the audience in their final scene. Courtney Love, wearing a loose wife-beater shirt, turns to the side and faces Paul Newman. She sticks her elbows out, folding her arms up so she can insert her hands into the sides of her shirt. Hands under her shirt, she palms her breasts and bounces them around, weaving back and forth so they face everyone. "Give it up for my boobies," she orders Paul, and everyone else. "Love my boobies! Love 'em!"
Then, she walks out of the studio. Pauly Shore says something funny, and everyone grins. I make a "tchssshh" noise, indicating a cymbal-crash to punchline his joke. The actual sound will be dubbed in later.
I get up from my chair. "That's a wrap," I shout. "Thanks everyone." Then I, too, walk out of the studio.
Outside on the street, I catch up with Courtney and kiss her. Everyone is staring at me. Why? Oh yeah, I remember. It's because I'm Kurt Cobain.
Courtney and I have a talk about our relationship, and decide it's not going to work out. To get as much distance as possible between her and myself, I jump through a magic mirror at the end of the block, and find myself in a densely forested valley, between steep hillsides. The foliage is tangled and alien.
I look around, and spot a Japanese schoolgirl. She's walking up the valley. More schoolgirls thread out of the woods and fall in step behind her. Each is holding a bow with one arm, and a single arrow in the other closed fist, like religious artifacts. They are marching to war.
I make an "inspirational" speech about war, addressing them all as they march by. "Most of you will not come back. War can be scary, yes. But it can also be fascinating. Since you may not have the lifetime you imagined before you left, now is your chance to pour into the next few days a whole lifetime's worth of anger, thievery, brutality, aggression, and bitterness. Hold nothing back. Pursue your enemy until your bodies cannot move."
Yeah, very "inspirational". What is going on in my head?
I wake up hunched over in the bed, with very cold toes. The pile of laundry and blankets was just not thick enough. I haven't slept well, but I know I won't be getting back to sleep.
I shower to warm up, using all the hot water again. While sorting items into my backpack and suitcase, I notice that I haven't dropped a deuce since I left Santa Cruz. My body has decided to hold on to every scrap of solid food. I wonder why?
In daylight, I snap a few pictures of my surroundings, to remember the worst motel I've ever stayed in. I snack on grapes and browse the desperate terrain, rattling down the main street towards highway 20, and then drive, drive, drive.
Around noon I stop in a random town and search for a tire station. The Ford dealership on the hill looks promising, but the manager tells me that they don't have the equipment to put tires on wheels. They just sell entire wheels. He directs me to the Main Street, running north towards the 'business loop' of the highway. He claims I'll find at least three tire stores along that route.
The first store is closed. The second has a sign in the window, reading "For Sale by Owner", and is also closed. The third, a Firestone at the end of the block where the road meets the business loop, has been boarded up, and has old tires stacked in front of the swinging door.
Oh well. I turn left onto the business road. At the edge of town I pass by a pair of ragged truck dealerships. The vehicles are parked on uncut grass, high enough to brush the wheel wells. I spot an extended body Dodge van, and make a U-turn. Now's my chance to compare the extended-body Ford with its Dodge counterpart. It's already too late since I've made my purchase, but I'd still like to know. I meander into the lot and park, trying to line up the noses.
The Dodge van always seemed so much longer to me. Now that I have the two side-by-side, I see that the Dodge actually is a few inches longer than the Ford, but in every other respect is a smaller vehicle. A dumpster is resting in the yard of the adjacent house, and I stand on it for an aerial shot, holding the camera up over my head.
Two more hills beyond, still lumbering over the frontage road that business 20 has become, I spot a remarkable house on my right. When I pull onto the side road, I find myself in the parking lot for a tattoo parlor. This building, too, looks remarkable. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd find in Texas - a precise combination of architecture, decoration, and product - that you would never find in, say, Oregon. Including the tin shack built on one wall, the patchwork house on the other wall, the full-size rusty satellite dish in the side yard of the house, and the junked car out front. Right down to the two dogs barking in the yard, the little one and the big one, and their humorous warning signs.
The Texas landscape is littered with abandoned structures, and an even greater number of abandoned cars. With so much open space to fill, people are in less of a hurry to demolish the things that their ancestors built. Why waste the effort, when one can build on empty land, and besides, the old buildings will just fall down by themselves eventually.
This leaning shanty of an abandoned building was somebody's fine new house a long time ago. The creek that is now running partially under it probably worked its way over from across the broad valley, a season at a time. It must have been very aggravating to the family. From what I can decipher in the ruins, they must have been able to watch the river sneak closer as they sat at the dinner table.
I snap a few pictures, letting the camera do the work. To my surprise, I hear the gravel hiss behind me, and another car pulls up to mine. Is this the owner of the property, come to shoo me away?
A man jumps out. He's about my age, and is holding a digital camera. He notices the one in my hands. I laugh out loud. He says, "Looks like you and I had the same idea!"
I can't believe it. I stop for a picture on a frontage road in the middle of nowhere, for five minutes, and out pops this guy doing the same thing. This must be a very popular house. While he takes his pictures, he explains that he's going to submit them to the website for the Jones Soda Company, and perhaps they'll get voted onto the label of a new flavor of soda. "Unless," he shrugs, "you get to them first."
"That's OK, you go ahead and post 'em." I ask him for his email address, and snap his picture. As I merge onto Highway 20, I am still shaking my head at the coincidence.
Hours and hours later, I browse around the business section of a town, looking for a Sears, or some other large store that would put tires on the van. I pass an "Eddy's Mini Mart", and a burger joint built between two stone towers. An old White Castle restaurant, under new ownership. Molly's Burgers, or something. I pass a school with complex, sloping eaves and vertical woodwork, obviously built in the 'modern' style of the 1950's. All the urban chaos disorients me, and I stop at gas station to ask for directions.
299.4 miles, and 25.4 gallons, equals a horrifying 11 miles to the gallon. Okay, so I spent a lot of time between 80 and 90mph, which is very wasteful with an engine this size. But still. Damn.
The woman inside gives me good directions to a Wal-Mart across town, and I drive there, suddenly feeling tired. I'm still not used to the side mirrors in the van, either, though the miniature mirror I glued on yesterday does help.
I park at the Wal-Mart service station, and ask them to put four new tires on the van. They have only one kind of tire in stock that will fit my wheels, so I pick that one. The 'Liberator', it's called. Whatever. I add an oil change and a new air filter to the bill, and have them print out two invoices, one for just the two front tires. That one will go to the seller of my van, back at Fleet Force USA.
While the tires are being swapped, I walk around the Wal-Mart with my iPod. The camera cases are promising, but all have serious flaws. I go outside, around the back of the tire center, and find a sunlit wall, and lean on it. I take my shoes off, letting the breeze run over my toes. The occupants of a nearby SUV give me an odd look, but I ignore them. I lie back for a nap with one sock folded under my head, listening to Pete Namlook's "Autumn", and gazing dreamily at the clouds far above the blank face of the wall.
I doze like this until the afternoon sun has moved on. The van service is complete, and I briefly consider just getting in and driving off, seeing as how they didn't even bother to take down my license plate number on the work order, but I recant and march inside.
With the van back in my possession, and daylight to work with, I decide it's time to get the rest of the useless metal unscrewed from the cargo area. This time the cement beneath the van is warm and dry, though still dirty. I undo the last nine bolts with relative ease, and pull the separating cage off. I've become efficient with the wrench, socket wrench, jack, screwdriver, and tire-iron combination. The cage and the built-in gates make a very satisfying musical racket as I hurl them into the rear. This place is too public to just dump them, but now they won't rattle, and that's all I really care about.
The van drives perfectly straight on the new tires, but I still don't trust the alignment. With the tires smooth though, I am now able to isolate the tremor sensation I was feeling last night. It shows up only when the transmission is under load, and when I'm going between 60 and 70 miles per hour. Dependable service indeed. Is this how a rebuilt transmission is supposed to act?
I drive on, leaving the large city, and cruise through a chain of progressively smaller towns. The 20-to-10 interchange is out in the middle of nowhere. The chain-link towns give way to a coarse distribution of trailer parks and farmhouses, nothing large enough for a name.
Anyone who drives around the trailer parks of Watsonville or Aptos, and exclaims "My word, what an eyesore!", should try driving around Texas for a while. Texas is splattered with wee ramshackle towns like bird crap splattered on hot asphalt. Some back yards are stacked so high with the shells of appliances and automobiles that you'd swear the residents were trying to farm them, or breed them like cattle. This is not so far from the truth: Those that haven't melted entirely into the red soil act as animal dens, storage bins, trash cans, and the occasional chicken coop. After a while you come to expect them, as signs of civilization. The detritus of a pragmatic community spending decades trying to keep the water boiling and the wheels turning in the middle of nowhere.
The standards are different here because the essential problems are different. When your car breaks down for the last time, where you gonna haul it? Even if you hauled it two hundred miles from here, you'd still be in basically the same place. If you lived on the coast it would be different. You couldn't just pitch your trash into the sea, for example, because the waves would spit it back out at you. (Or turn black and stinky, which is even less pleasant.) Hauling your junk elsewhere becomes the standard. We have to haul away cars, garbage, recyclables, building materials, brush, dirt ... even the dead. The new stuff comes off a boat in the harbor, and the old stuff goes ... inland.
I wonder how much of it ends up here.
I take a call from Sherrila, and chat about my trip and her weekend so far. I eat some more of the delicious food she packed for me. Then I switch on Terry Pratchett's "Strata" audiobook, and drive, drive, drive.
By the time the book is over, I've driven far into the night. The distant sky, usually black, is flickering with the blows of a gigantic thunderstorm. There is no rain.
I stop in the town of Van Horn for the night. Before I pack up, I look at the GPS on the laptop and realize that I've picked a hotel at the exact southernmost point along my entire route. This is the closest I've been to Mexico.
This hotel is 15 bucks more expensive, and much more posh than the last. I draw the shower curtain and sit cross-legged in the tub, thinking about the day, and peeling an orange. The smell of orange almost burns in my nose, carried by the hot steam of the shower.
This world is teeming with people and opportunities. When I was younger I thought I understood this, but it was only a conceptual understanding. Now the understanding has weight, a presence around me like the pull of gravity from a billion planets. I'm passing so many cars on the road, so many houses, so many lives that I could get involved with. The irony is, they might as well be empty to me, since all I can think about is getting home, back to the tiny subset of people that I already know.
Part of me sees this as a weakness. It's my failure to live up to the standard of godhood that I aspired to when I was younger. I wanted to take over the world. And now, here it is. What happened to my desire to conquer it? Why aren't I obsessed over its corruption or preservation? Am I somehow settling for less than I wanted? Less than I should? Has the world forced me to compromise?
No, I don't think there was force involved. But I did compromise. I compromised a lot of my own independence and toughness, by choice, so that I could learn to enjoy things that I used to consider weak and wasteful. Like dancing, romance, and crying in the arms of my beloved. I compromised my weirdly strict standards about people, so I could enjoy a variety of friendships. I compromised my black-and-white stance on religion. I dropped my obsession with video games. I've sabotaged relationships and projects, scrapped plans, betrayed my childhood ambitions -- all by choice, when the world presented me with other opportunities.
One could argue that I had no choice, but I believe that, as far as a mere human mortal can be capable of making a choice, I have made mine. Given that I aspire to nothing beyond human, I feel alright about this.
I rip the sheets off one twin bed and spread them across the other. Tonight I'll be warm enough. Sitting on the edge of the bed in a bleach-white hotel towel, I miss my home terribly. I call Sherrila on the phone, and from a thousand miles away, she sings me a song, and tells me stories. Yes, I have compromised -- I have decided to allow myself the luxury of missing her, of feeling lonely and needful for this moment, so I can feel the kindness in her voice, and experience the simple one-to-one radiance of our human love. If I betray old-school masculinity or godhood by this, then ... good.
Sherrila croons me to sleep, and the phone slides from my hand.
Then, she walks out of the studio. Pauly Shore says something funny, and everyone grins. I make a "tchssshh" noise, indicating a cymbal-crash to punchline his joke. The actual sound will be dubbed in later.
I get up from my chair. "That's a wrap," I shout. "Thanks everyone." Then I, too, walk out of the studio.
Outside on the street, I catch up with Courtney and kiss her. Everyone is staring at me. Why? Oh yeah, I remember. It's because I'm Kurt Cobain.
Courtney and I have a talk about our relationship, and decide it's not going to work out. To get as much distance as possible between her and myself, I jump through a magic mirror at the end of the block, and find myself in a densely forested valley, between steep hillsides. The foliage is tangled and alien.
I look around, and spot a Japanese schoolgirl. She's walking up the valley. More schoolgirls thread out of the woods and fall in step behind her. Each is holding a bow with one arm, and a single arrow in the other closed fist, like religious artifacts. They are marching to war.
I make an "inspirational" speech about war, addressing them all as they march by. "Most of you will not come back. War can be scary, yes. But it can also be fascinating. Since you may not have the lifetime you imagined before you left, now is your chance to pour into the next few days a whole lifetime's worth of anger, thievery, brutality, aggression, and bitterness. Hold nothing back. Pursue your enemy until your bodies cannot move."
Yeah, very "inspirational". What is going on in my head?
I wake up hunched over in the bed, with very cold toes. The pile of laundry and blankets was just not thick enough. I haven't slept well, but I know I won't be getting back to sleep.
I shower to warm up, using all the hot water again. While sorting items into my backpack and suitcase, I notice that I haven't dropped a deuce since I left Santa Cruz. My body has decided to hold on to every scrap of solid food. I wonder why?
In daylight, I snap a few pictures of my surroundings, to remember the worst motel I've ever stayed in. I snack on grapes and browse the desperate terrain, rattling down the main street towards highway 20, and then drive, drive, drive.
Around noon I stop in a random town and search for a tire station. The Ford dealership on the hill looks promising, but the manager tells me that they don't have the equipment to put tires on wheels. They just sell entire wheels. He directs me to the Main Street, running north towards the 'business loop' of the highway. He claims I'll find at least three tire stores along that route.
The first store is closed. The second has a sign in the window, reading "For Sale by Owner", and is also closed. The third, a Firestone at the end of the block where the road meets the business loop, has been boarded up, and has old tires stacked in front of the swinging door.
Oh well. I turn left onto the business road. At the edge of town I pass by a pair of ragged truck dealerships. The vehicles are parked on uncut grass, high enough to brush the wheel wells. I spot an extended body Dodge van, and make a U-turn. Now's my chance to compare the extended-body Ford with its Dodge counterpart. It's already too late since I've made my purchase, but I'd still like to know. I meander into the lot and park, trying to line up the noses.
The Dodge van always seemed so much longer to me. Now that I have the two side-by-side, I see that the Dodge actually is a few inches longer than the Ford, but in every other respect is a smaller vehicle. A dumpster is resting in the yard of the adjacent house, and I stand on it for an aerial shot, holding the camera up over my head.
Two more hills beyond, still lumbering over the frontage road that business 20 has become, I spot a remarkable house on my right. When I pull onto the side road, I find myself in the parking lot for a tattoo parlor. This building, too, looks remarkable. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd find in Texas - a precise combination of architecture, decoration, and product - that you would never find in, say, Oregon. Including the tin shack built on one wall, the patchwork house on the other wall, the full-size rusty satellite dish in the side yard of the house, and the junked car out front. Right down to the two dogs barking in the yard, the little one and the big one, and their humorous warning signs.
The Texas landscape is littered with abandoned structures, and an even greater number of abandoned cars. With so much open space to fill, people are in less of a hurry to demolish the things that their ancestors built. Why waste the effort, when one can build on empty land, and besides, the old buildings will just fall down by themselves eventually.
This leaning shanty of an abandoned building was somebody's fine new house a long time ago. The creek that is now running partially under it probably worked its way over from across the broad valley, a season at a time. It must have been very aggravating to the family. From what I can decipher in the ruins, they must have been able to watch the river sneak closer as they sat at the dinner table.
I snap a few pictures, letting the camera do the work. To my surprise, I hear the gravel hiss behind me, and another car pulls up to mine. Is this the owner of the property, come to shoo me away?
A man jumps out. He's about my age, and is holding a digital camera. He notices the one in my hands. I laugh out loud. He says, "Looks like you and I had the same idea!"
I can't believe it. I stop for a picture on a frontage road in the middle of nowhere, for five minutes, and out pops this guy doing the same thing. This must be a very popular house. While he takes his pictures, he explains that he's going to submit them to the website for the Jones Soda Company, and perhaps they'll get voted onto the label of a new flavor of soda. "Unless," he shrugs, "you get to them first."
"That's OK, you go ahead and post 'em." I ask him for his email address, and snap his picture. As I merge onto Highway 20, I am still shaking my head at the coincidence.
Hours and hours later, I browse around the business section of a town, looking for a Sears, or some other large store that would put tires on the van. I pass an "Eddy's Mini Mart", and a burger joint built between two stone towers. An old White Castle restaurant, under new ownership. Molly's Burgers, or something. I pass a school with complex, sloping eaves and vertical woodwork, obviously built in the 'modern' style of the 1950's. All the urban chaos disorients me, and I stop at gas station to ask for directions.
299.4 miles, and 25.4 gallons, equals a horrifying 11 miles to the gallon. Okay, so I spent a lot of time between 80 and 90mph, which is very wasteful with an engine this size. But still. Damn.
The woman inside gives me good directions to a Wal-Mart across town, and I drive there, suddenly feeling tired. I'm still not used to the side mirrors in the van, either, though the miniature mirror I glued on yesterday does help.
I park at the Wal-Mart service station, and ask them to put four new tires on the van. They have only one kind of tire in stock that will fit my wheels, so I pick that one. The 'Liberator', it's called. Whatever. I add an oil change and a new air filter to the bill, and have them print out two invoices, one for just the two front tires. That one will go to the seller of my van, back at Fleet Force USA.
While the tires are being swapped, I walk around the Wal-Mart with my iPod. The camera cases are promising, but all have serious flaws. I go outside, around the back of the tire center, and find a sunlit wall, and lean on it. I take my shoes off, letting the breeze run over my toes. The occupants of a nearby SUV give me an odd look, but I ignore them. I lie back for a nap with one sock folded under my head, listening to Pete Namlook's "Autumn", and gazing dreamily at the clouds far above the blank face of the wall.
I doze like this until the afternoon sun has moved on. The van service is complete, and I briefly consider just getting in and driving off, seeing as how they didn't even bother to take down my license plate number on the work order, but I recant and march inside.
With the van back in my possession, and daylight to work with, I decide it's time to get the rest of the useless metal unscrewed from the cargo area. This time the cement beneath the van is warm and dry, though still dirty. I undo the last nine bolts with relative ease, and pull the separating cage off. I've become efficient with the wrench, socket wrench, jack, screwdriver, and tire-iron combination. The cage and the built-in gates make a very satisfying musical racket as I hurl them into the rear. This place is too public to just dump them, but now they won't rattle, and that's all I really care about.
The van drives perfectly straight on the new tires, but I still don't trust the alignment. With the tires smooth though, I am now able to isolate the tremor sensation I was feeling last night. It shows up only when the transmission is under load, and when I'm going between 60 and 70 miles per hour. Dependable service indeed. Is this how a rebuilt transmission is supposed to act?
I drive on, leaving the large city, and cruise through a chain of progressively smaller towns. The 20-to-10 interchange is out in the middle of nowhere. The chain-link towns give way to a coarse distribution of trailer parks and farmhouses, nothing large enough for a name.
Anyone who drives around the trailer parks of Watsonville or Aptos, and exclaims "My word, what an eyesore!", should try driving around Texas for a while. Texas is splattered with wee ramshackle towns like bird crap splattered on hot asphalt. Some back yards are stacked so high with the shells of appliances and automobiles that you'd swear the residents were trying to farm them, or breed them like cattle. This is not so far from the truth: Those that haven't melted entirely into the red soil act as animal dens, storage bins, trash cans, and the occasional chicken coop. After a while you come to expect them, as signs of civilization. The detritus of a pragmatic community spending decades trying to keep the water boiling and the wheels turning in the middle of nowhere.
The standards are different here because the essential problems are different. When your car breaks down for the last time, where you gonna haul it? Even if you hauled it two hundred miles from here, you'd still be in basically the same place. If you lived on the coast it would be different. You couldn't just pitch your trash into the sea, for example, because the waves would spit it back out at you. (Or turn black and stinky, which is even less pleasant.) Hauling your junk elsewhere becomes the standard. We have to haul away cars, garbage, recyclables, building materials, brush, dirt ... even the dead. The new stuff comes off a boat in the harbor, and the old stuff goes ... inland.
I wonder how much of it ends up here.
I take a call from Sherrila, and chat about my trip and her weekend so far. I eat some more of the delicious food she packed for me. Then I switch on Terry Pratchett's "Strata" audiobook, and drive, drive, drive.
By the time the book is over, I've driven far into the night. The distant sky, usually black, is flickering with the blows of a gigantic thunderstorm. There is no rain.
I stop in the town of Van Horn for the night. Before I pack up, I look at the GPS on the laptop and realize that I've picked a hotel at the exact southernmost point along my entire route. This is the closest I've been to Mexico.
This hotel is 15 bucks more expensive, and much more posh than the last. I draw the shower curtain and sit cross-legged in the tub, thinking about the day, and peeling an orange. The smell of orange almost burns in my nose, carried by the hot steam of the shower.
This world is teeming with people and opportunities. When I was younger I thought I understood this, but it was only a conceptual understanding. Now the understanding has weight, a presence around me like the pull of gravity from a billion planets. I'm passing so many cars on the road, so many houses, so many lives that I could get involved with. The irony is, they might as well be empty to me, since all I can think about is getting home, back to the tiny subset of people that I already know.
Part of me sees this as a weakness. It's my failure to live up to the standard of godhood that I aspired to when I was younger. I wanted to take over the world. And now, here it is. What happened to my desire to conquer it? Why aren't I obsessed over its corruption or preservation? Am I somehow settling for less than I wanted? Less than I should? Has the world forced me to compromise?
No, I don't think there was force involved. But I did compromise. I compromised a lot of my own independence and toughness, by choice, so that I could learn to enjoy things that I used to consider weak and wasteful. Like dancing, romance, and crying in the arms of my beloved. I compromised my weirdly strict standards about people, so I could enjoy a variety of friendships. I compromised my black-and-white stance on religion. I dropped my obsession with video games. I've sabotaged relationships and projects, scrapped plans, betrayed my childhood ambitions -- all by choice, when the world presented me with other opportunities.
One could argue that I had no choice, but I believe that, as far as a mere human mortal can be capable of making a choice, I have made mine. Given that I aspire to nothing beyond human, I feel alright about this.
I rip the sheets off one twin bed and spread them across the other. Tonight I'll be warm enough. Sitting on the edge of the bed in a bleach-white hotel towel, I miss my home terribly. I call Sherrila on the phone, and from a thousand miles away, she sings me a song, and tells me stories. Yes, I have compromised -- I have decided to allow myself the luxury of missing her, of feeling lonely and needful for this moment, so I can feel the kindness in her voice, and experience the simple one-to-one radiance of our human love. If I betray old-school masculinity or godhood by this, then ... good.
Sherrila croons me to sleep, and the phone slides from my hand.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-29 12:35 pm (UTC)All this sounds unusually sad, and I could not figure out why so. (Except for 11 miles a gallon.)
no subject
Date: 2022-12-29 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-29 09:49 pm (UTC)Oh. Northern Texas, the foothills of, hmm, hills, is just beautiful. Nearby states? NM? Beautiful. Arizona? Beautiful.