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.