Chapter Five

The following is chapter five from the as-of-now unpublished novel Chasing Sunsets by Matthew Osgood

V.

“Takes away the coffee flavor”

“When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like.” – Anthony Storr

I felt a combination of being a stranger and lonely for the first time on the trip. Driving these roads was isolating; I had never climbed these hills, may never climb them ever again, I thought, and I wanted to stop and marvel at the landscape. More so, I wanted to share these views with someone. Pictures taken from that trip do not do justice to the experience mainly because the shots were taken while driving and through a windshield. Looking back now, I wondered why I was in so much of a rush that I didn’t pull along the side of the road to take more pictures. I’d like to say that it’s because I was a lonesome traveler, but when I was joined later on the trip, the camera still went unused for the most part. I wanted to create a scrapbook of the places I would see, but we all have these grandiose ideas that go by the wayside for a variety of reasons.

Atop the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, looking south through the clouds hovering over majestic colored mountains, the sun setting opposite over the horizon is where I came up with the phrase, “The places I’ve met and the people I’ve experienced.” There were cars of strangers gazing out over the vista, cars with plates from Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Massachusetts all taking in the same experience. I decided no longer to go places as a stranger, not pretending to be a local, but trying to experience what the locals do. I would not just rush to touristy sites, gathering in all I can read in brochures, but I would try to become one with the land, ask questions of natives. I wanted to try my best to meet these places, to know what they are about.

The best way to look at a situation sometimes can be from a complete outsiders view. Without an affixed opinion, the questions asked and the first impressions are a little more genuine. To come into a scenario where you believe you understand all that there is to be understood, you tend to miss out on important facets of what is going on around you. I tried to approach my trip like this. The desire for learning about the places I visited and the people I saw was not artificial. If my host wanted to show me the sea, the city, the mountains, or the bars, I felt glad to go.

It was strange being part of a situation beyond my control. Looking at all these people who resided in these parts, knew these streets, knew these people, it’s fascinating how little I knew. There are the roads that people travel every day and know so well, and here I am, a wanderer struggling my way through roads and cities of the country, somehow navigating strange streets to find familiarity. I enjoyed when people came from different areas of the country to visit with me because I could show them the sights and sounds from my hometown. Here I was now at the mercy of others, living as an outsider trying to fit in.

Likewise, with people, I’ve found you need to experience them. Meeting someone consists solely of an introduction, small talk, maybe finding a common interest or two. The best way to experience someone is to ask questions, listen to the tone of their voice when they talk, and listen to how they say it. Look into their eyes and see their sincerity or insecurities. Pay attention to how they laugh and what they eat. Let them take you to a local restaurant, especially when traveling. There are Applebee’s and TGI Fridays on every corner in America. A local pub or restaurant elicits an image of who someone really is, an in-depth look at who the person surrounds themselves with, and where, and how they conduct themselves.

The trip to Kentucky was to see a friend Ashlee I had met in Florida. On Spring Break actually. Amazingly, during the trip to Daytona Beach, Florida during my senior year, we had only just hung out one night. I had approached her at a bar and hit it off immediately. We had some drinks, did some dancing, then exchanged numbers. After that, however, we didn’t talk for the rest of the trip. Upon returning home to school, I deleted her number from my cell phone and went on with my life. Returning from class one day approaching graduation in May, I had a voicemail on my phone from Ashlee, in her southern twang asking if I remembered who she was, that she had had a great time hanging out with me and to give her a call sometime. I actually distinctly remember blowing it off, citing that I would never see her again, why call her. I showed a roommate the voicemail, probably just to let him hear the cute accent she had. He implored me to call her. He knew the girl I was referring to, and because she was cute, seemed genuine, and possessed the sexiest accent we’ve ever heard, I called her back.

It turned out we had a tremendous amount of things in common despite our geography. A southern Baptist, she was a junior in college, and the stereotypical Southern belle: 5’0 tall, no more than 100 pounds, strikingly bright blonde hair, blue eyes and a vulnerable disposition. She was amazingly gorgeous and polite. She was extremely genuine on the phone.

We spoke on and off throughout the remainder of the school year, but lost contact as the summer began. I still hadn’t decided that I was going to embark across the country, so I figured her a passing acquaintance. It was fun while it lasted.

After I made the decision to move to San Diego, I began looking into places that I could stop along the way for visits. I knew that Springfield was definitely going to happen because I still had friends there, or friends that would be willing to travel and send me off. Visiting Elisha in New Jersey was also a given because I knew the drive from western Massachusetts to New Jersey had the distinct possibility of creating some traffic problems for me. The city driving would be terrible if that happened, and would take too much out of me. I had also already decided to stop in Chicago to visit my friends Eric and Marisa. They would then drive with me west. I toyed with St. Louis for a little while, but crossed it off the list. Even the decision for Wilmington came just two or three weeks before the trip even began.

Whose idea it was to go through Kentucky, I don’t know, but it definitely wasn’t mine. I suspect it was one of my friends, who, and I agreed, had intentions that bordered on me being a scumbag. I was, surprisingly, as a single 22-year old, very okay with that. So I called, she agreed, and I was headed to Williamsburg, Kentucky.

As the mountains evened out, my anxiety rose. I hardly knew this girl despite our long telephone conversations and drunk dancing on some Daytona Beach dance floor. However, I was committed to going. Alongside the highway I could see a giant cross signaling my entrance into the Bible Belt, but chuckled when directly below the cross was a XXX Porn Superstore.

The town of Williamsburg was everything I imagined a Kentucky town to be. It had a very intimate feel, a small main street snuggled between the only signs of civilization, a small Baptist college and a McDonald’s. Ashlee and I reunited then I followed her to her one bedroom apartment atop the foothills. She was everything I remembered her to be, except she was a lot prettier than I had envisioned. I just hoped that my appearance had the same effect on her. I called a friend to tell him about the goldmine I had just discovered as I followed her home. There was no absence or awkwardness of conversation during those crucial first moments. In typical southern fashion, it was a necessity that I meet her grandmother and aunts before they consented I stay the night. I trusted that I’d be sleeping somewhere else should I make a bad first impression. We spent the night meeting her family, where I exaggerated the Boston accent and charm. Later that night we laughed over drinks at dinner, making plans to make our way to the Fried Chicken Festival the next day. Only in Kentucky.

The World’s Largest Skillet was a disappointment, but we had fun roaming the streets at the festival. She ran into many friends, and, ignorantly, I felt like the smartest person in town because I was the only one without an accent. Or, more factually, the only person with an accent. On the guys, I thought, the accent makes them sound outrageously dumb. On the women, however, vulnerably attractive. The two of us became surprisingly attracted to one another despite our legitimately short time being acquainted. Somehow, and I believe she feels the same way still, the two of us worked. We were complete strangers, and almost complete opposites. We were from different worlds, held different beliefs, and were headed in different directions yet neither of us wanted this short, three-day visit to end. Back on the Smokey Mountains, we took photos of the two of us, figuratively and literally in the clouds on top of the world. Ashlee and I held hands, the conversation never stopped, and we spent all three nights in the same bed.

We kissed goodbye and the finality lurked ominously. We’d probably never be in the same place again. She had found a notebook in which I was writing, and scribbled in a hidden back page instructions to “never forget those who can’t join” me. I found the note only after I arrived in California. Ironically, leaving Ashlee in Kentucky wasn’t as hard as I would have imagined in the previous days. With every mile west I felt like I was cleansing my soul from a previous life and starting new, like erasing a full chalkboard piece by piece until there is nothing but blank space remaining. I would cherish the memories we made, but not dwell on the misfortune of the prospect of never seeing one another again.

As a matter of fact, we did keep in close contact in the months following the trip to Kentucky. We spoke on the phone a number of times a week and arranged a trip for another visit which actually happened. One drunken night, we had talked, and apparently I decided it would be a good idea to book a flight when drunk. Upon my arrival, we were very happy to see one another. However, the next day, she received word that her grandfather had passed away and she needed to leave for Florida that day. She dropped me off at a hotel near the airport, where I stayed alone. I flew back to California the next morning on my dime. After about a week of unreturned phone calls, I heard back from Ashlee. She had driven down to Florida to her grandfathers’ funeral, whereupon she met up with an old ex-boyfriend. They wed on a nice ceremony by the beach at the end of that week. I never talked to Ashlee again.

The stomach rumblings started about four hours into my drive away from my initial trip to Kentucky. Not a breakfast person by nature, I can survive on coffee, cigarettes, and desire to get to a certain destination. As the scenery driving north changed from the rolling Appalachians to the plain lands of Indiana, I could see for miles. Although I still traveled well above the speed limit, life seemed to slow down just a bit as, through the landscape, I could stare into the lives of farmers from generations passed, envying them for roaming these same farms, not knowing a thing about the fast life we’re all so accustomed to living.

I deciphered a bit in my head where I was, how much longer I had to travel until I reached Chicago. Maybe now would be a good time for a lunch break and regrouping. I was about halfway to Chicago, and just a few hours from finally having some companionship on the trip. Staying a few days with some friends would be good for my psyche. They would then join me for the second half of my trek.

Doubling my need to fill my stomach, I also was looking to fill my gas tank and empty my personal tank. The next exit in Crawfordsville, about 20 miles north of Indianapolis, offered both food and gas, so I pulled off the road and into the parking lot of a small diner.

Upon entering, I could see that the place wasn’t exactly a hub for healthy eating, but I sat down anyway. The place reeked of stale coffee and overnighters. Actually, my initial reaction was to turn out the door and look down the road for any sign of a chain restaurant. My conflict was interrupted by the blonde tending the mock-50’s café style bar.

“Just you, sweetie?” she inquired from her post, stroking just one menu.

I nodded wearily. She smiled, and I forced one myself and offered to take a seat at the bar. After taking care of a bill for a young couple, she came over and handed me a menu saturated in grease, ripped at the edges on the one page selection sheet, one side with the choices, the other with a brief family history behind the place, which I read was erected and established in 1957 by local farmers looking to raise a few extra bucks after a flood wiped out their crops earlier that summer. It was still town owned to this day.

“I’m actually ready to order,” I told her. “Just some white toast, some scrabbled eggs, and some sausage. And a coffee please.”

As she filled my cup, she offered sugar and cream, and cringed while I declined both options. “Takes away the coffee flavor,” I smiled.

“And makes your breath smell wonderful,” she winked. She had a charm about her I couldn’t place. The accent made her appeal raise a couple notches, as she leaned about three feet away, looking over her tip money. She smiled a lot, I thought, for someone stuck in a place where another house couldn’t be seen for a few miles. She turned to me, and positioned her elbows in my direction on the counter, palms to her chin, and we chatted seamlessly in between the few customers coming and going.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” She asked, as the cook placed my order on the window connecting the kitchen from the bar.

I laughed, and told her I wasn’t. I told her that I had just graduated college, and I was driving across the country for no reason whatsoever, just to “see what I can.”

“You’d be amazed (making the word three syllables) that I could probably tell you the names of all the regulars,” she laughed. She was probably about 20, pretty, too, with pigtails accentuated with tiny blue ribbons at the end. I was impressed, and charmed when she lit a match to counter my increasing propensity for a smoke with my coffee.

“Oh, I’m Jenny,” she said rolling her eyes, mocking. “And I’ll be your server today.”

Her nametag said “Alice” but she mentioned that it was her mother’s name. She had forgotten her name tag this morning.

“I was trying to refrain from the Brady Bunch jokes,” I said, quickly realizing the corniness of my joke, and my eagerness to keep the conversation going.

“I’ve been here since 6am and I’ve heard that twice, and of course people have made the ‘wow, Alice, you look a lot younger today’ jokes too,” she countered without a beat, secretly stealing a drag from my cigarette, since the last of the customers had walked out.

I told her where I was coming from, and that for a while there, I thought I was lost. I had stopped seeing signs for Chicago about an hour ago. “I was getting worried,” I said. “and on top of that I was hungry.”

“Sometimes being lost can be a blessing.” It seemed like she was flirting. “It helps you make sense of why you’re going exactly where you are.

“Sorry, I’m taking a philosophy class at the junior college around here,” she added quickly, sensing my raised eyebrows at her sudden disposition of psychologist.

The cook leaned over the open hole in the wall with my eggs and sausage, which my new friend handed to me. I laughed because there is nothing funnier, in an immature way, than making fun of someone for ordering sausages because of their phallic appearance. Today, however, I had no one but myself to make fun of my order.

She disappeared for a few minutes and I ate alone, contemplating how this casual experience with someone would agree with my theory that these solemn encounters are what life is made of: meeting people you will never see again in places you may never return to. There are so many different people with their own interesting stories and backgrounds, who enjoy life just as much as anyone else, regardless of where they live or what they do. I knew Jenny and I would never meet or talk ever again, but in our time as “single-serving” friends, I hoped that she would at least smile at the end of the day, as I would, at good company early that Indiana afternoon.

She came pouncing through the kitchen door.

“It’s on the house,” she confidently whispered as I started to pull my wallet out of my pocket. I tried to argue, but she was pretty adamant about not letting me pay the $4.62 I owed.

“You’re a stranger; you’ll never be back here. Besides, your eggs were watery anyway,” she sincerely smiled. “Please, good luck with everything.”

As I reached into my pocket for tip money, I told her that I was a writer, and that perhaps should she look for her name in the acknowledgement section in my first book. “You know, for that ‘lost’ quote that I might steal one day.”

I casually put a $10 bill on the table out of her sight then started for the door.

“Hey,” she sounded. “Don’t think about the tip before you even look at the menu.”

“Good advice,” I said, turning back to her, understanding the analogy.

“Philosophy,” she shrugged.

Chapter Four

The following is the fourth chapter of the as-of-now unpublished novel by Matthew Osgood, Chasing Sunsets

IV.

A perfect day for driving

“…Until it spoke only to me, Impersonally, like someone gradually retreating, Not so much from his life as from its settings, From the country he inhabits; as the darkness depends in the weeks after the solstice.” –John Koethe “Morning in America”

My objective for the next drive, where I would be meeting up with my friend Elisha, was basically to beat the New York City traffic. I was heading to central New Jersey, where she was a medical student. I knew the traffic would be terrible if I hit rush hour driving over the Tappan Zee Bridge, and I understood that should I fail my mission, I would be facing a critical two hour delay.

Cops rarely patrol Rt. 91 through Connecticut, so I kept cruise control around 80. Lost somewhere in the surroundings, I must have missed the exit I needed to take for the bridge. Luckily, having been through New York City a bunch of times, I could navigate my way to get at least through the city and into New Jersey.

Amazingly, missing the Tappan Zee Bridge was nothing outrageously new for me. I had been given directions twice now instructing me over the bridge. Both times I’ve missed going over the bridge, and still to this day I do not believe it really exists.

I passed through New York with recollection of the many times I’ve been there in the past four years. Many of my friends from college lived in or around “the city”, such is the way my friends refer to Manhattan, as if it’s the only metropolitan area in America, so I’ve been fortunate to have an enthusiastic ensemble of hosts around the place.

New York is a beautiful city in many ways. The skyline rockets out of the concrete, so tall that it stands alone like Yao Ming in a Beijing elevator, everything cowering sadly below. The magnificence of viewing the buildings from afar on the Throgs Neck or George Washington Bridge is awe-inspiring, and only amplified at night when thousands of lights illuminate starless evenings. The true effect of the cities regality strikes when standing at the base of a building 80 stories high, staring straight up, and feeling queasy at the realization of the structures’ awesome size and adequate ability to crush anyone or anything within ten blocks should it topple over. Almost as much as the absurd size of the building, what impresses me about the city of Manhattan is the culture. New Yorkers claim the city as their own, yet they share it with millions of visitors a year. There’s an innate sense of ownership to everyone in the country and after the terrorist attacks on September 11^th, 2001, the world saw America’s ability to rally behind a place, uniting New Yorkers with everyone else in the country. There are very few cities in America, or the world, that have the ability to overcome such tragedy with such tremendous aplomb.

My first trip to New York wasn’t very long ago, but they’ve come very often in the past seven years. While visiting friends, I’ve seen the Knicks play in the Madison Square Garden and traveled to all parts of Long Island, including a yearly two or three visits to the eastern end of the island, known laconically as “the Hamptons.” However, nothing can ever top the first time I was there, the first time I stood beneath skyscrapers taller than all the buildings in my town stacked on top of one another.

The summer after my freshman year in college in the summer of 2001, I went to Long Island to visit some of the friends I had made the previous year. We visited some of the popular bars around Nassau County during the first couple of nights. On the Saturday of my visit, my college friend Kristen and I took the train into Manhattan to do the tourist thing.

The city was enormous and inspiring, a man-made wonder. Immediately upon reaching street level, I saw Madison Square Garden, which houses the hated New York Knicks, but is a historical venue I always wanted to see. The city seemed so new, commercialized, and updated, but I marveled – and still do – at the cities’ ability to keep its’ unique charm and history intact.

We spent the afternoon walking along the city blocks, snapping pictures and watching street performers. We shot hoops at the NBA Store and pretended to be Heisman Trophy candidates at the Radio City Music Hall. The two of us cooled from the heat in stores along Fifth Avenue in which we clearly did not fit in. When our feet got tired, we hired a horse-drawn carriage to bring us to a late afternoon lunch. After an amazingly overpriced lunch, Kristen and I walked the short walk from Times Square to the Empire State Building.

The sun was beginning to set on a sweltering afternoon as we stood atop the Empire State Building. It felt as if we were on top of the world, the people and cars below just ants in our kingdom. The two of us looked south towards the World Trade Center buildings and the Statue of Liberty.

“Is it too late to take a cab down to there?” I asked pointing south towards lower Manhattan. Kristen turned around to me in the haze atop one of the worlds largest buildings.

“We should probably be heading back to Long Island,” she responded. “It’s getting late.”

“Okay,” I said regaining my gaze over the now tiny buildings of New York.

I conceded defeat of the day. We had taken in as much as we could during a 12 hour span of walking around the city. During one last meaningful stare through the haze from my towering perch, Kristen approached me from behind.

“Don’t worry,” she said nonchalantly. “Next time you come visit the city we’ll go see the World Trade Center.”

“Deal,” I said. I turned towards her and the way to the elevator.

She continued, “It’s not like it’s going anywhere.”

#

Luck hit me when I reached New Jersey. Far off my course, I was ready to give up on my manly intuition and stop for directions to the highway I had somehow misplaced. In the land of jug handle turns, and wanna-be New Yorkers, I felt oddly out of place. When the sun began to dip below the horizon, I found the road I was looking for. I was on the opposite end of the road from where I should have been, but I was able to alter the plans accordingly.

Around 8 o’clock I arrived at Elisha’s house, where she lived with a roommate, both of whom were studying for an important test. That fact didn’t hinder any plans, as I knew that this one night stay would be more for rest and relaxation. We ate in, stuffing ourselves with sandwiches and cheesecake.

Outside sharing some laughs and a couple of cigarettes, I recognized that Elisha was my last link to my hometown, the last person I would see who reminded me of being on Hampshire Circle.

“I’m happy that I’m seeing you today,” I told her. She had been dating my friend for the better part of ten years now, and living with the family, which was just a few houses down. “I won’t see another person from Methuen for I don’t know how long.

“For years I have always had the concrete knowledge that I could go to that little piece of property on the Spicket River, and find friends at all angles. I had the comfort of knowing I had a place called ‘home,’ where I could go and my brothers would be there, my friends weren’t far away. Now I’m going a place where I don’t know anyone, really.”

She assured me I’d be fine, but I had to at least play devil’s advocate with myself if no one else would. I’ve been in many situations where I’ve needed to make life work on my own and succeeded. I had little doubt I could make things work in California, but without doubt, there would be no such thing as confidence.

I woke up early on the couch in New Jersey, the sun dancing just above the maple trees surrounding Elisha’s house, the sky colored a blue only defined in a color wheel. A perfect day for driving.

The trip, according to my map, followed I-95 about 700 miles down through the nations capital and the eastern seaboard. I remorsefully blew off a friend in southern New Jersey in order to make better timing on my trip, but at the time I was eager to get the trip started “for real.”

I hit traffic around Baltimore, but it got me to reflect on the time I had spent there when I fell in love with the city.

Two years previously, a couple friends and I went to Baltimore for a journalistic conference. While the conference in itself was lame, we made due by drinking bottles of Jack Daniels and wandering the city. Baltimore’s inner harbor and Fells Point are where we spent most of our time, stumbling around drunk, meeting locals, and egging on the serial sniper that was lurking the area at the time.

We had a hotel room overlooking Chesapeake Bay from 20 floors up; we spent the evenings forgetting what we learned at the days’ workshops, and I always vowed to go back to enjoy the city as a visitor and not a conference goer. Driving through the outskirts of the city, now I wondered if I’d ever be back.

The scenery down I-95 is filled with football and baseball stadiums, historic landmarks, and a remarkable transition from the hustle of northeastern cities to the trees outlining the highways leading to the site of the Confederacy. I passed the site of monuments in Washington D.C. and started down towards the Mason-Dixon line. When I passed the border of Virginia, the speed limit increased to 70 MPH, the next time the speed limit would dip below 70 again was in California, I spotted a sign for Manassas, VA. I called my friend.

“I just wanted to let you know that I am now passing the site of the first sniper shooting,” I told my friend Ted. He laughed.

“You’re a complete asshole,” he responded, “but that is the shit I want you to call me about. I don’t care about you seeing the Grand Canyon or anything like that. I want you to find the most asshole things you can, then call me.”

I had a lot of requests to call people when I passed significant milestones on my journey. One friend wanted me to call him upon the arrival of each state and I did a horrible job of it. Eventually I called him up somewhere during my journey and said as fast as I could, “Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska….” Before he cut me off laughing,

“I got it, thanks, asshole.”

I merged onto I-40 towards the coast of Carolina. I’ve always had a romantic fascination with the state of North Carolina and I don’t know if there is any particular reason why. The relationship between North Carolina and I developed somewhat into a crush, where I envisioned something in my mind that was probably better than what it would have been in real life. I battled with going to school in Charlotte before deciding to stick around Massachusetts, but my visit there was an experience I’d never forget and one I wanted to actually live out.

I think the reason I had such an appreciation for the state was the idea that if I had chosen to go to college there, I would have been far away doing something none of my friends were doing, like I’d be taking a risk into self-dependency. I saw the possibility of going to school in North Carolina as a chance of getting away from where I was from, starting anew somewhere. Since the day I decided to stay home, I guess I may have felt like an opportunity slipped away. When my friend Leah said she was living down there for her last physical therapy clinical, I saw it as a great opportunity to spend time with a friend and the place I held in such high regard.

As I turned into Leah’s driveway amongst the mangrove trees and the rigs on Cape Fear in Wilmington, she sprinted out of the little seaside home she was staying in and jumped into my arms like a little kid racing towards a father home from a business trip. Leah and I had spent our college careers on different paths, but our extra-curricular activities were almost all the same. Despite the fact we didn’t hang out nearly as often as we should have during our four years in college, we became great friends. She is someone who I sought out at all of the similar clubs we were a part of. Her apartment senior year was just a 50-yard walk from my own. I was looking forward to spending a couple days with her. She was lonely living alone, and enthusiastic to show me - her first visitor - where she had been living.

Leah has a dancer’s build, and she’s a pretty blonde from a small-town in upstate New York. She went to college solely as a dance major, but a car accident her freshman year derailed those dreams. She was now focused to help people recover from similarly damaging injuries in the field of physical therapy. Isn’t it odd how we make small consolations for ourselves? For instance, once I figured out I wasn’t going to be six-five, 250 pounds, I gave up on the dream of playing linebacker for the Penn State Nittany Lions and focused on telling stories about people who were. She was doing the same thing, which is never compromising or abandoning what you’re passionate about.

I knew nothing of Wilmington, and almost immediately following the three-minute long tour of her tiny house, we decided on dinner, but first the beach. I nostalgically reflected that the sunset falling opposite the ocean would be the last I would see from the east coast for an indefinite period of time. We waded a bit in the ocean, deciding that we should probably spend a good part of the two days I’m there lounging at the beach during the day and drinking at the bars when the sun sunk down over the horizon.

There is no better view in this world than the sight of a southern girl accompanied by her accented voice. In fact, the limb I will proceed to climb upon is to say that Wilmington, North Carolina has the prettiest girls in the entire country. Of all the places I’ve been, I have never fallen in love with so many girls in such a short amount of time. Truly, this part of the country is a diamond in the rough for women, like finding the perfect bar, right out of view from the tourists.

Being in North Carolina was liberating because I was so far from home. I was 700 miles away from home, and now solidly embedded in proceeding with the trip. There was money to be spent, alcohol to be consumed, and stories to be shared and made. When I decided to make the trip to North Carolina, I had looked for things to do in the area. What I found was a ghost tour of the city, which happened to be America’s first major port city, producing hordes of trade ships filled with supplies from the European countries trafficking in and out at all times. With the trafficking of everyday supplies came pirates, and as fantastic as it sounds, the truth of the matter lies in the ghostly past of the city. Pirates ran the city, plundering riches from sailors, parading through the cobblestone streets that still remain to this day. On the ghost tour, our tour guide showed us homes that were rumored to be haunted, and graveyards directly responsible for coining the terms we’re familiar with. Apparently, when the influenza epidemic hit Wilmington, citizens would be sick and unconscious for days at a time. Thinking these people were dead, and lacking proper medical protocols, family members would bury them, only to find out later that they had buried their family or friends alive. The remedy for this faux pas was to tie a string around a persons’ finger when buried, leading to a bell atop the grounds’ surface where someone would stand guard (“graveyard shift”) who would listen for the bell to toll, hence “dead ringer” and possibly “for whom the bell tolls.”

The city was big enough to be considered a major city in the state, but small enough to remind me of my Boston roots, where it was easy to walk around and revel in the authenticity of one of America’s first big cities without feeling trapped in a concrete jungle. There were trees that had been there for years, not phony trees being replaced every summer. From the graveyards sitting in the heart of the city to the cobblestone streets to the modern America downtown streets filled with pubs and McDonald’s, it was a city I felt eerily familiar with.

People had a strange fascination with the relationship of Leah and me as we hopped from pub to pub on Market and N. Front Street. A street-poet performed a love poem for us as we walked up the not-so-lit alleyways and, as Leah ducked into the bathroom, my cue shot was interrupted by a very intoxicated patron at Longstreet’s Irish Pub saying, “your girlfriend is hot. Interested in a threesome?”

We weren’t, so we walked back to the car after paying our tab. We retreated to her little house near Cape Fear.

The two of us frightened ourselves that night, perhaps it was at one of the pubs where we rehashed ghost stories, or when we returned home where we made inappropriate remarks about the rustling of wind being the presence of haunting spirits.

We sat on the screened-in back porch of her house, talking seriously about a subject long forgotten, and having a night-cap of Tanqueray and tonic. With a slight bit of tension in the air, we listened to jazz and three times made “just one more” drink. Perhaps it was that for a 700 mile radius, we only knew each other, maybe it was the gin, maybe it was lingering feelings, or maybe we were just trying to forget the ghost stories, but we did slept a little closer that night.

A few days later I left the salty Carolina shore. We said goodbye early in the morning as she got ready for another day of work. I honestly could have stayed there, in that little blue and white home with her, for the rest of my life. Forget California. With one last wave and a honk as my car shifted from reverse to drive, I was leaving. Sometimes we really never know how to just stay still.

Milking what I could out of what I considered the best way I could have spent my last east coast hours, I stopped along the road in Raleigh for a coffee and a donut at a gas station. I made conversation with the clerk, and also purchased a $6.99 Bob Seger Greatest Hits album on tape. It had been a while since I had bought a tape. A couple hours later, I was driving through the Appalachian Mountains westward through the swiftly changing autumn of western Carolina and Tennessee.