(North Olmsted, OH)

Ah, a uneventful seven-hour drive and I'm with the in-laws for Xmas.

I've always loved the long drive, to the point where I have gladly volunteered to assist in no less than SIX cross-country or long distance moves for friends and acquaintances.

I wrote this once about me and the drive:

"I am forever going on long drives through the country. First with my original unrequited college love, Ursa, now with anyone I can rope in. My roommate once wrote a short story about one such drive in which I looked like a beat hero to him, spouting great ideas and playing wild music.

Maybe it was like that to him. I don't know. I used to harbor the dream of being the Neal Cassady of my generation but I always thought that I would end up tangled in a horrible car wreck instead and be forced to piss my own pants while I waited to die or to be extricated by the jaws of life. But the thing was, when I drove, I didn't have the same worries that paralyzed me in my apartment. I could look around at the hills and the cows and the clouds and the old Chevy Nova that was once the pride of some farmer's youth but now was rusting on blocks by the edge of his barn. I made up little stories for myself, like about how the farmer kept looking at the car and feeling a tugging inside until one day he went to the auto parts store and bought the things he needed to gussy the old girl up and moved her into the barn and fixed her up at night and one day set the cows free and drove off in the car. I never wrote down any of these stories, and I didn't really share them with anyone. They just happened.

In the car, I sang along with the songs on the radio, and made up my own songs and sometimes just repeated words or phrases over and over again in counterpoint to the tires of the car hitting the expansion joints in the highway. I stopped at truck stops and sat at the counter and had huge heart-clogging meals of biscuits and gravy and acrid coffee while I listened to the truckers sass the waitresses and waitresses sass the truckers back and I thought I was experiencing some great American moment. But then I thought that every college-educated wannabe writer had probably felt the same thing and I paid my bill and left, because the same thoughts that would make me crazy in my apartment would catch up with me whenever I stood still long enough."

Although I'm away from hy home (and therefore, my library), so I can't find the exact quote from John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley I want to add here, I found this one:

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognised can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this, a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it."

And that's the way I feel. The long open highway is as close as this ersatz Buddhist gets to pure meditation. Although I don't get to the point where I think of a pure big nothing (I still have to keep some part of my brain alert to the actions of my driving brethren), my thoughts acheive something close to the Nebraska drives I've taken: long, straight and supremely uneventful.

I feel ready for Xmas and the new year.