Chapter Seven

VII.

The farthest west I had ever been

“I know what we call it

Most of the time.

But I have my own song for it,

And sometimes, even today,

I call it beauty.”

-James Wright “Beautiful Ohio”

The hustle and bustle of Chicago trailed off in the rearview mirror, as the terrain started to get a little flatter on Interstate 80 through western Illinois. Sweeps of infinite cornfield erased memories of strip malls and skyscrapers haunting the corners.

Marisa had decided to nap in the backseat, which was packed to the roof, leaving her just enough space for a seat behind the passenger. It also provided her with ample cushion to easily drift away. Her sleeping became a major theme for the first ten hours or so on this trip.

Eric and I had a lot of catching up to do. Only twice since Florida had we seen each other: one time when he and a friend drove to Massachusetts to surprise Concord, NH native Marisa, and another for his 23^rd birthday for a weekend of drunken behavior at my college.

#

The airport was still reeling with security six months after the terrorist attacks on New York City. Eric was arriving in Hartford to stay with me for the weekend, which I was sure would entail telling old and creating new stories. As I pulled into the short term parking lot, I was driving my girlfriend’s car. A stone faced soldier waved me towards him, and as I crept up to him, my good mood clearly shown.

He asked me to place my hands on the wheel, and interrogated me.

“Where are you going?” He asked.

“I’m picking my friend up in terminal B.” He scanned the contents of my vehicle, which were various papers and boxes containing research material for my girlfriend’s thesis paper.

“What’s all this stuff?” He asked. When I told him he shifted his attention to the concealed objects in my trunk. “What is in the trunk? Do you have any weapons in the car?”

With a swift flash of martial artistry, I swung my hands like a ninja, struck a karate-style pose and laughed, “Just my hands, officer.”

He didn’t laugh at my joke, nor was he amused when he motioned the gate to open to let me in. I had survived my first militaristic interrogation, barely, but I picked Eric up at his gate and brought him back onto campus.

A few of my friends from home came to visit that weekend and we filled my trunk with drunken expectations and a few 30-packs of Bud Light. We played drinking games, almost knocked over a statue on campus right in front of the President of the college, and narrowly avoided coming to blows with members of various athletic teams. We shut off circuit breakers in the dorms, and tried to push each other down the 30-foot hill on campus. The latter part of the first night we spent binge drinking and concocting plans for the subsequent evening, an evening in which we might become criminals.

Due to the outrageous success of the Playstation 2 game Grand Theft Auto, we decided that it must be relatively easy to steal a car. (Who says video games are harmless? Here we are, twenty something college students planning to steal a car. Of course, we meant no harm by it. We just wanted to joy ride and say that we did it.)

“Here’s the plan,” I said. “We call for a pizza, and when the delivery guy comes to give us our pizza, Eric, you go and steal the car. We’ll all jump in.”

The plan seemed foolproof until we botched our first attempt. Apparently the delivery guy caught on to our plan. When we ordered another pizza to the same address, the guy came again. When he saw us sitting behind bushes like a lion devising his attack, he took off toward his car. We chased after him to the car, which was idling in the driveway. He sped away and my friend Ted threw a full beer can at the disappearing taillights. The latter attempts yielded Dominos telling us that they were no longer delivering to our house.

Back in the car we had a good laugh about these incidents. We laughed at how ridiculously young we were then, and how our plans would definitely be more elaborate nowadays. By this, I think Eric and I were hinting that we would have succeeded at stealing that car given another chance. Maybe it is better we failed our first – and last - attempt at grand theft auto.

We continued west toward the signs that read “Des Moines.” With each mile west we traveled, we encountered land I had never seen. Each second, each inch of land was the farthest west I had ever been. Upon entering Iowa, we approached the Mississippi River. A longtime favorite book of mine, like many English aficionados, has been The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The brown water seemed to stretch forever at this point in the river. Steamboats were still traveling up and down the river, and motorists sped around on jet skis. I felt myself looking back in time to when Huck and Jim crept away in the night, and all the real life slaves who made the escape on these very waters. Everyone, throughout time, has made escapes over, around, up, and down this river, whether the circumstance be the harsh condition of slave labor, or just looking west beyond the life we knew previously. I smiled as I passed the setting for some of the most remarkable literature, and made a mental note that as I sit down to write soon, I make note of how impressed I was by the natural phenomenon. Little did I know that a few of these things would be visited upon me on this day-long trek.

All I knew about Iowa could fit on a post-it note. I expected the cornfield and plains, but not the vastness of them. The rolling hills carrying miles of cornstalks elicited as much awe as any coastline, landmark, or mountain did; houses miles apart, embodying a combination of Don Quixote’s swaying windmills and the land I drew in my head while reading In Cold Blood in college. There is not an ocean for a thousand miles either way, nothing significant besides the utter lack of silence in the car. More than any mountain or ocean in the country, the stretches of land throughout middle America impressed me. The land rolls on forever, with nothing but fields of green for miles on every side of the car.

My maternal grandfather Earnest McKenzie lived and worked in Iowa for a time as an English professor at the University of Iowa teaching Geoffrey Chaucer. At my home in Methuen, I have a library full of his old books, classics like Dante’s Inferno, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Plato’s Republic, all first editions worn at the seams by years of reading and re-reading.

Upon learning of his life’s work, I quickly realized where my passions originated. I’ve spent hours looking over these books, examining the binding, smelling books over 50 years old trying to gather some understanding of what my grandfather was like. In 1952 soon before the birth of my mother, he committed suicide in the family driveway, a self-inflicted gun wound.

I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about the entire situation. I’ll never know why he did what he did, why he chose, in my mind, to abandon four children and pull the trigger. Part of me wants to see him wandering the streets somewhere in the afterlife, where I can walk to him and punch him right in the jaw and implore him to give me reasons; ask him why he left before he got to see one of his youngest grandsons choose the same field he did, ask him if he regrets that scenario. Another part of me wants to thank him for giving me the critical thinking, writer’s mind that I inherited from him, sit down with a whiskey – his drink of choice – and talk about our favorite authors and stories. Faith leads me to believe I will one day have that very important decision to make. All I know is that it is frustrating to know that I could have had someone with the ability to read, criticize, and write with on perhaps his final legs, giving me advice from an old to a new author.

#

The smell wasn’t something as unfamiliar as it was unpleasant. And it came in spurts. Iowa had seemed like the longest state to drive through, and it didn’t help that Eric had to use the restroom as frequently as Dick Vitale compliments Duke’s basketball program. We stopped at every rest stop, including the world’s largest truck stop on Rt. 80. Looking at the map as the sun began to set in front of our eyes, we made the conclusion that Nebraska was just as big, maybe even a little bigger than Iowa.

We hit Omaha as the sun was setting before us.

The most unsettling thing about the Cornhusker state was not the size, but the smell. Marisa, who would be awake very scarcely on the trip, would awaken to add commentary to our banter.

“You guys are disgusting,” when we were talking about a difficult decision between family members, “Nice songs, you fag,” when a relatively feminine song came onto one of my mix CD’s, but the most timely of her observations came about midway through the state of Nebraska, a little ways past Lincoln, where the farmland stretched for days, and the streetlights were few and far between.

“What is that God awful smell?” she asked. Eric and I had smelled the scent of shit from the cattle for a little while now, as we were sure Marisa had been, but finally it became so chokingly awful that complaining couldn’t hurt our cause. We stopped for food, so we could take a breath and stretch our legs. It didn’t take us long to realize why the state we were in smelled so bad.

The sign said “Famous Sandwiches,” which was misleading. We did rationalize afterwards that the sign never explained what made the sandwiches famous. We guessed “making people go to the bathroom quite frequently.” Our meals delayed our trip due to frequent visits to the mens’ and ladies’ rooms. When we finally got on the road, we were an hour out of Colorado, where an important decision lay in front of the wanderers.

“What are we thinking?” I asked my passengers. The day had been long, we were growing irritable, and the car stunk of cigarettes, farts, and generally, three people crammed inside a small car.

“I think we should stop somewhere,” declared Eric. I got the distinct feeling that he had seen enough for one day. He felt that there was no way we were going to make it to Las Vegas before morning, or avoid a major crash involving three out-of-staters. Even if we were to finish the voyage to Sin City by noontime at the earliest, we’d still be two hours ahead of our check-in time, and all we’d really want to do is sleep.

We had instituted the “volleyball rotation” during our trip. One person drives, the person riding shotgun stays awake to keep the driver amused and alert, and the person in the backseat is welcome to sleep. Presently, I was still driving, which was no bother because it was my car.

“I really don’t care,” started Marisa, “but I would be okay with driving throughout the night.”

The final decision rested on me. The money situation was tight; could I really afford a night at a hotel? How long would tomorrow’s drive be? Studying the map we truly began to appreciate how big this country really is. Colorado was enormous compared to the two states we just traveled through. Ahead of us, as the altitude kept climbing, we could see the mountains lingering in the distance, illuminated once or twice by flashing lightning.

Chapter Six

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

VI.

Far from home plate

Skipping across my first time zone, I felt that somehow I was beginning to cheat the Gods. An unsettling feeling, when you have too much time to think up crazy scenarios, comes when you feel that you’ve done something to upset some higher power. We, as people, are allotted a certain amount of time on this earth. Likewise, our daily dosage of sun or rain is also pre-determined. As I changed the clock in my car an hour back, essentially gaining an hour, I was granted an allowance on my day. I had an hour more sunlight, an hour more of my day. I was cheating as I sped west, holding onto sunlit days, trying to avoid the unrest of the night.

A major car crash slowed my trip to Chicago. I eased my way out of Indiana unscathed and crossed the border into the Land of Lincoln. My trip, so far, had been an enjoyable one, zigzagging across the eastern part of the country. There was no rhyme or reason to the route I took, just an excuse to see people and places along the way and maybe get in a little action while I was at it.

I was ready, though, to get some company because I knew when the days’ trip was over that I was to be reunited with a couple of good friends. I had made arrangements in advance to stay a couple days in Joliet, Ill. with my friends Eric and Marisa. They would take me out on the town, and tantalize my taste buds with some of the greasiest and delicious food the Midwest had to offer.

The three of us had met down in Orlando, Florida in 2001 where we were all taking part in an internship program at Walt Disney World. Eric was the first roommate I met, the elder statesman of the group, and right away I thought he’d be someone I got along with.

Back in Massachusetts, I had followed my older brother from elementary school through high school and even through college, so stepping away from that safety net proved to be difficult. I knew that for the first time, I would be stepping into a world where I knew absolutely no one. Having to rely on just myself, I realized that I had the personality tools to make it anywhere. I had to. It was fight or flight.

Eric was a seasoned vet when it came to the college thing. He was already a senior while I was just a freshman, far away from turning 21. When it turned out my seven roommates and I would all get along, we spent most of the time working during the days and spending an absurd amount of money and time on booze. Our drinking habits were increased because there was nothing better to do. We were in Orlando, where the sun shone bright every day. We were young, having fun, and, because there were 10,000 other college students, most of the nights consisted of drinking until complete inebriation and dabbling in some hookups or throw ups. Even if work concluded at midnight, there was a party you could join, particularly for our apartment, where every night was a celebration.

Somewhere along the line, we established a core group of about eight friends, and Marisa was one of them. She and Eric hit it off almost immediately, despite her boyfriend in New Hampshire. Soon after the program ended, she and Eric fell in love and she moved from New Hampshire to Joliet and they moved in together. The two were married in the fall of 2006.

Of all of the friends that I made down in Florida, Eric and Marisa were the ones I remained in closest contact with. Whether the situation calls for a drunken late night phone call, or a clever recap of the weekend through e-mail, we did a great job of keeping in touch, even after the program ended and a relationship between me and the two of them could have been in jeopardy. A terrible fear of mine is that one day, I will stop referring to someone I used to call a friend, as “someone I used to know.” It’s happened already with friends from Florida, and eventually found its way to my friends from California. Either way, Eric, Marisa, and I began to realize, through distance and absence, how much more we had in common despite the difference in time zones.

Their location was incredibly practical; as I thought that it was probably about halfway across the country. I was terribly wrong. Looking at a map of the country, now I realize how big of a difference there is between the Massachusetts to Chicago trip and the Chicago to San Diego trip.

The Camry and I pulled along Rt. 7 in Joliet about midafternoon. I thought of how Jack Kerouac in On the Road must have traveled these same roads during the height of his beat generation journey. Kerouac was a Lowell, Massachusetts native, who gained literary acclaim with his semi-true account of a trip across the country in the 1950’s. Little did I know that Joliet would be the first of many cities along the way that we had both stopped. I counted just him and me among the elite company that had been to similar hamlets.

Just Marisa was home as I pulled in. We sat on the back porch swing, smoking cigarettes and trading stories, updating one another on our lives. Marisa seemed happier than I had ever seen her. She had settled into her life in Chicago, far from the rough upbringing she had in New Hampshire. She wanted to know all about how the Red Sox were doing, and we reminisced on times we spent after Florida frequenting local bars. Red Sox fans are transplanted throughout the country, and at the time, neither of us had any idea that our beloved baseball team would be ending an 86-year World Series drought a little over a month later, and both of us would be watching from different sides of the country, unaware of the chaos ensuing at home. In fact, it was Marisa who made the first phone call to me as the celebratory third out was made in Game Four of that series, both of us reveling in the excitement of a Red Sox championship far from home plate.

When Eric arrived, we started making plans for the night. Ever the planner, he wanted to know exactly what I intended to do, when I wanted to leave Joliet for the trip westward, and so on. I told him I planned on spending a couple of days in his town, checking out the food, the people, and the bars. He took this sentiment as “I want to get drunk for three straight days.”

I realized that one of the only things to do in Joliet was to drink at bars and taverns, of which there are galaxies. There are bars on every corner, bars right next to bars, each of which I felt Eric had spent time. In addition to the bars, the selection of eateries could make even Michael Moore’s head spin. Each place, too, would stay open until about an hour after the bars closed, appealing to the late night crowd, which gladly accepted the convenience.

I welcomed the fact that most of these restaurants were, in fact, locally owned places, and almost none of them displayed the greediness of capitalistic America, shooting up fast-food chains every couple of streets.

Despite the fact that what I needed was a day of rest in between drives, we headed out on the town each night. Besides, we had catching up to do. And since Eric had already been to my side of the country twice, he wanted to show me where he grew up, introduce me to friends, and make up for the time we had lost since Orlando. It was a running joke that I would never make it to visit them out in Illinois. I had promised to come on many occasions, but never quite followed through.

After a couple nights of boozing until the early hours of the morning, we called it an early night before the voyage. We decided that we needed to hit the road early. We made sure to get coffee at the Dunkin Donuts by the highway just before the trip started. Despite the tendency to induce a good sit down in a bathroom along the road, a large coffee was something essential to making this trip happen. Eric suggested that we plan our trip around stopping in Denver, but Marisa and I decided it would be better if we played it by ear. Perhaps we should have listened to Eric when the idea was placed on the table, but we took our chances.

It was right as we left Joliet when I mentioned that we’re about halfway to San Diego.

“Halfway there?” Eric laughed as he went to the glove compartment for our map. “You are so wrong, Matt.”

I ignorantly debated with him as he opened the map.

“We’re not even close to halfway, maybe a third of the way,” he measured the difference in distance eastward and westward with his thumb and his index finger. “You could drive back and it’d take you less time.”

Eric thumbed through my case of CD’s, which ranges from country to rap to jazz and soul. I watched him flip pages back and forth, offering advice and explaining the track listings and compelling stories behind the names of the blank CD’s I had recorded myself. He finally picked a country CD, aptly named “Getting’ Lucky in Kentucky.”

I scanned through the tracks, finally stopping midway through the disk to show Eric a song he may have never heard before but might find funny and enjoyable. After the song was over and we shared a good laugh at Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach,” Eric returned the CD to track number one, explaining, “What else do we have to do?”