Heading to Vegas to Pick up James

The week in wandering, diners, and friends

Me ’n James

A few summers back, my friend James and I were camping. It was evening, late summer, still warm, the grass in the wide field in which we sat still smelled sweet. James is very soft spoken and peaceful—lots of water in his astrological chart, he says. He sat on the ground, leaning back on the heels of his hands, legs outstretched, Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers crossed. I was asking him about his love life; specifically, I was asking him why. Why get involved with these particular people; why have a love life at all. James says I have only fire in my chart, and that my entire approach to romance can be explained by the fact that I have some highly practical planet in whatever is the astrological section or quadrant or house of love; he says that between the practical planet in my house of love and all that fire everywhere else, it makes sense that I would see love as both hazardous and fraught with the potential for unscheduled interruptions, but I think it makes sense simply because nobody ever wants to sit down and have a calm, reasoned discussion, and make a list of pros and cons, and agree with me that love is just never a practical choice.

Anyway, James was dating someone who seemed, as they say, like a lot, and I wondered why anyone would want to be involved with a person who is a lot if they don't also get a lot from it. I've wondered that plenty of times in regard to myself; I am in fact a lot, in many instances I've driven people with whom I've been involved insane, which has 100% made sense to me, and I've said Ok that's cool, then let's part ways, and they've said, Wait, no! you don't understand. You just have to stop being a lot. And I've said, But I don't want to. I like who I am and I like being who I am and maybe you should just be with someone else? No harm no foul, old chum, carry on? And they've said, No, I want to be with you, I just want everything about you to change; I just want you to be less. And then I get mad because they're being illogical, and then they get loud because there is a widely held but baffling conviction that being more loud is the same thing as being more right, and this conversation goes in circles for a couple of hours, and right around 3 a.m. I throw the pink flamingo suitcase in the back of the truck and hightail it out of town.  

All that being the case, I said—and James has his own version of it, his own variation on the How Shit Goes Sideways theme—why bother? Why start in the first place? Why date, why look for love? Why go wading back into the weeds of it, right back into the hip-deep of it, into the murk of misunderstanding and heartache, into the clangor of clash and complaint, when you know—you know—where it's headed? Why, I asked, do you persist in going down this same old road when you know damn well where it ends?

James responded mildly, "Because I get lonely and it's nice."

I was stunned into silence, and we watched the sunset in relative peace.

---

I was thinking about James because it's his birthday today, and I'm on my way to Vegas to pick him up. I-80 is clogged with road closures all across the Rockies, so I've got to loop south; I'll head back across Kansas, drop down to Albuquerque, pick up I-25, cut through northern Arizona, and catch the Red Rocks right around sunrise 20-odd hours from now.

It's not just that it's his birthday; I was thinking about James for a couple of reasons. We've traveled together a bunch these past few years, gone nearly border to border and coast to coast, and our friendship—like any friendship worth its salt—has grown tough and durable, soft and weathered, like a quality saddle, or a good baseball glove. I could tell you stories about James, and friendship, and why the love of friendship means more to me than any other shade or variant of love, but this one pretty much sums it up:

Once, camping, late fall, the morning after the first hard frost in a northern state, James was underfoot. He was big and lunky and everywhere at once. It was early. We were running late. He wasn't helping. I was exasperated. I stormed around, stuffing cords into bags and hoses into bins, chocks into boxes and gear into the spots where gear goes, and finally James hollered, "Tell me what you want me to do!" and I hollered back, "See what needs doing and do it!" and he did.

That was it. No further explanation was required. No further debate was had, and that is why I'm driving about 1000 miles out of my way to get to Vegas to pick up James.  

---

Me ’n Anthony, Billy’s Cafe

Yesterday, the last day of a stopover in Omaha, I met up with my friend Anthony, a wanderer by nature and a trucker by trade, as he headed east to deliver a truckload of trucks. We teased the waitress with two sleeves of tattoos and she kept our coffee cups full for hours, let us sit there long after the other patrons were gone, let us sit there even after she reached up and turned off the OPEN sign.

We traded stories. We talked about this country we both spend all our time skidding around, and our shared sense that something is coming, something seismic, something maybe neither of us could have named. We talked about what it was, in each of our lives, that tipped us off to the fact that there is no someday, no one day, what it was that told each of us it was time to start living this life, here, now. We talked about the pandemic and how it feels—still, every day—like it turned people inward, let them forget how to be human, forget how to reach out, how to offer, how to give; it trained them to keep a sharp eye out for what's wrong with everyone else and stop attending to what's broken in themselves.

What did you do during the shutdowns? I asked Anthony.

First few months? he said. I slept. Learned it in the military, you know? Nothing going on, you sleep. Shut it down. After that, I couch surfed a while.

I eyed him: easy 6'3," jacket size, if I had to guess, probably a 56. I said, Do you even fit on a couch?

He laughed. Sure, he said. Put a foot out a window.

One arm up the chimney, I offered.

Make a ramp from the pillows so I don't notice I'm half on the floor.

The waitress filled our coffee cups and Anthony asked her for a burrito to go, extra cheese, extra eggs, extra meat.

You know what I loved about the pandemic? I asked him.

He grinned. Nobody on the roads?

Yeah, I said, grinning back. Nobody on the roads.

There was something warm about the place, something that glowed out into the parking lot on a rainy day from Billy's Cafe, a little extra light coming from the wide-paned window of a strip mall diner where they only take cash, something good that lingered in my clothes and hair like smoke and was still there long after I'd splashed off through the oily puddles of a heartland town.

---

A few years before I went solo, which was a few years before I went on the road, I found myself writing about solitude often, and then more often, then almost all the time. I wrote about solitude when I was supposed to be writing a book I didn't want to write; I wrote about solitude when I was alone and I wrote about it when I was not; I wrote academic papers about solitude as concept and the narrative voice of solitude as point of craft; I wrote about the origins of solitude as philosophical construct and the genesis of solitude narratives as literary form; I created annotated bibliographies of books about solitude and annotated those annotated bibliographies with extensive annotations about the perceptual fallacy of solitude without reference to objective external source; I established the parameters of the solitude that was and was not under discussion, I defined the types of solitude I would and would not address, I wrote essays, I wrote poems, I wrote letters about solitude and letters about writing about solitude, I wrote so much about solitude it became a character in my work the way winter and hunger and time have been characters in other works, but solitude was personified, was palpable, was present in my writing in a way those earlier things were not. Solitude seemed to catch me off guard, announcing itself at unexpected times—a long stretch of afternoon alone, a trip out of town—and I began to regard it the way one might a stray cat that comes around now and then, or a resident ghost: first with mild surprise at its appearance, then with pleasure and delight at its unbidden return. Eventually I began to look for it, creeping around corners, my breath held, in hopes of catching sight of solitude again.

One night I looked at my then-husband, reading in his blue wingback chair, and understood that I whatever I was writing, whatever these meditations on and love letters to solitude were, whatever these pages blooming unstoppably out of my fingers were going to become, I wouldn't be able to write it until he was gone, which meant that I understood that he would be gone, which meant I was already preparing myself for his absence, and then I would know what to write.

I sat down in my own blue wingback chair, next to his. I opened my notebook; I held my pen above the page; and quietly, as I watched him read, I grieved, and let him go.

---

Not long before I left town for good, I wrote a letter to a friend in which I tried to explain why I had to leave. Part of what I wrote was this:

            Say that by some means you've gotten lost at sea. You swim and you swim and eventually you happen upon a buoy. You cling to this buoy for dear life; the relief you feel is immediate, immense.

            After a time, though, of bobbing like that, you begin to realize that the selfsame thing that's keeping you safe, the sure thing to which you cling, is also holding you in place.

            It's an insane metaphor, of course; the risks of letting go are very great, while the advantages are relatively few. You get—what—a few days, months, years, miles, of freedom, of roaming, of seeing what you want to see, of diving deep and breaking the surface, of reaching depths and heights you will never see while you stay in one place; but you risk sharks, storms, rogue waves, the Loch Ness monster, death. Most everyone would forgo the chance to see whatever beauty there might be to see, to witness the magnitude of whatever is, to experience the freefall of fear and wonder, and would choose—sensibly—to stay put, staying afloat, clinging to the buoy that keeps them in place.

            I understand the desire to stay. The fact that I do not share that desire is not a reflection on you. It says nothing about the way you live or the choices you've made; it says nothing about you at all.

            If I am able to acknowledge the wisdom and the humanity in the life you have chosen and the things you need—whatever those things are, however foreign to my own experience that desire may be—why are you unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge whatever measure of wisdom, and humanity, exists in mine?

---

The night that James and I sat in the field—it was my first season on the road, I was still trying to get my feet under me, trying to get a feel for the pull and power of the truck, getting the hang of the camper, getting used to the amount of food and the depth of sleep it takes to keep up with the physical labor of life on the road—and watched the sunset, James asked me abruptly, Do you know the story of the seal women?

I said I didn't.

James told me about the Selkies—elusive, shapeshifting sea creatures who appear in Scottish and Irish folklore. They are most often depicted as seals capable of shedding their skins and taking on human form. At home in their seal form, the Selkies' guardianship and knowledge of the sea is a core part of their mythology and power; in their human form, they are said to have beautiful voices and are drawn to music, especially when it is played near the sea. Associated with benevolence and generosity, the Selkies are believed to bring good fortune to those who encounter them.

The thing is, James said, when they shapeshift, slipping out of their seal skins and taking on human form, sometimes their skins get stolen.

Who steals them? I asked.

People, he said. Fishermen.

Why?

Because then they can't leave, he said. They can't go back to the sea without their skins. They're trapped in the human world, in human form.

I looked over my shoulder. The sun was below the horizon. The grass under my bare feet felt cold.

But—I pressed, sounding stupid—why?

James shrugged. People think they want to keep a wild thing.

I wrapped my arms around my legs and watched the moon rise.  

---

Every journey I’ve ever taken has seemed senseless when I set out; the purpose of movement only emerges once I’m underway, if any true purpose emerges at all. I wander for the same reason I write—I can’t help it. Of course, an irresistible impulse to write does not, in itself, justify putting that writing out into the world, any more than an impulse to travel justifies the journey; there has to be more.

Last week, James wrote to me, "Our journeys are very different but at their core much the same. These insights into yours help me understand mine."

Same, James. Same.

See you in Vegas. ETA ~0200.

xo,

m