A Recent Roadtrip
Denver to Madison, April 20-21, 2006
I recently took a trip from Denver to Madison with a crazy older woman, two backpacking drifters, a gigantic 11-year-old golden retriever, and one smaller service dog for the lady.
Through a wily chain of events, I had been somewhat stranded in Colorado for roughly a month's time. I traveled to Boulder with a friend from Wisconsin, who had planned to stay a week for spring break. Once in town, I ran into an acquaintance that happened to be traveling to Chicago a week after the Wisconsin lad. He agreed to drop me in Madison in route to Chicago, if that were my fancy. As two weeks is always better than one, I agreed to accompany the fine sir.
Well... a day shy of two weeks, and Mr. Chicago crashed his car and had to cancel the trip. In an ironic chain of events, my friend from Wisconsin also totaled his car on the way back the week before! Indeed, he needed to get towed into Creston, Iowa, and barrowed his little brother's 1978 hearse to get back to Madison. Perhaps Father Fate had twisted my arm into not going back as scheduled.
As my traveling mate was a mammoth 11-year-old, tumor-ridden, beast of a dog, it would be a dilemma to get back to Madison car-less. It seems Greyhound isn't too keen on that bread of rider. Thus, my efforts turned to internet ride-shares, and I was able to find a ride going to Madison, but not for a whole month. It turned out to be a really swell month, so that wasn't a real big deal...
The driver going to Madison was one of the most eccentric characters I've encountered. Margaret was in her early 50s, and on a huge mess of anti-anxiety medications-- Ritalin and the whole works. We had several lengthy conversations before the trip, which were more exhaustive accounts of her recent ugly divorce than anything to do with traveling. Accompanying her was a small service dog, (services for which I was never quite aware, but apparently dealing with the woman's frequent anxiety attacks). Also here for the ride were Heidi, the most claustrophobic transient I've ever met, and her partner Fish, a long beard with dreadlocks.
This was to be an interesting trip. It took us well over an hour to leave Denver. Margaret made two unnecessary stops, and then drove back to her house fearing she left the door open. Once on the road, she talked a mile a minute, whizzing wildly out of town at speeds approaching 95. I was sitting in the middle of the back seat. Huge old dog to my left, claustrophobic Heidi to my right. A few times each hour, Heidi would ask me to move over three more inches, but it was simply beyond all realms of reasonable science.
Somewhere in rural Nebraska, we stopped at a truck stop to look at the map. Margaret ordered a pot of coffee and large chocolate malt (she ate nothing but chocolate malts the entire trip). The couple ordered breaded cauliflower, and I a standard eggs and toast breakfast. The three of us spent over an hour watching Margaret rant and fidget over the best possible route. She had picked up numerous hotel broshures, and had Fish go through them to find the best possible rate. "Make sure it has a hot-tub and sauna!" Margret keep bellowing to the stoic hippie. Heidi and I sat and smiled at the whole affair. The diner was almost completely empty, and the wait staff merely stood behind the counter and stared, trying to anticipate every parched throat or craving for strawberry jam.
It was determined that we would stop at a nice Comfort Inn in Omaha. Neither Heidi, Fish, nor myself could remember staying anywhere fancier. Margaret agreed to pay for the room, in exchange for us paying most of the gas, and hemmed and hawed her way to some sort of amazing deal at the front desk. Fish had done well in his efforts, and the poolroom was completely equipped with "authentic tropical setting."
The four of us all promptly got into our various bathing gear to head down to the pool. Heidi had some sort of hand-made Socrates-style gown. Margaret worn an outfit dizzyingly too revealing for her age and girth. Fish said that he always wore swim trunks as underwear, and simply took off his pants. The closest thing I had were a pair of cut-off suit pants, but that seemed to be sufficient. It made me proud to be part of that well-traveled, eccentric four-some. I wondered if those Nebraskans had ever seen such a rag-tag posse lounging in their hot tub...
Shortly after our arrival, three security guards approached us, and demanded to see Margaret. She was planning on letting her service dog stay in the room for the night, and believed that it was her right under Federal law to do so. The security disagreed. Within a few minutes Margaret and the officers took a wild shouting match out of the pool area and into some undisclosed location. Meanwhile, Heidi had somehow wandered off, and the lights were turning off all around the pool area as a sign of closing. It was now just me and Fish alone in the hot tub.
We calmly talked about the Great Salt Lake, and how much we both enjoyed natural springs. I mentioned that my peculiar father was planning a trip to Northwest Arkansas, where an obscure prophecy denotes the location of the "Ark of the Covenant." Somehow we began discussing working on the fishing boats in Alaska, something we'd both casually thought about. The room was still and silent. The cool blue pool glistened over faint artificially lighting.
Fish was my favorite traveling mate. A cool, collected character with a strong sense of self-irony. He had the look and demeaner of a man anywhere between 25 and 60. As we left the pool, it soon occurred to me that we were somehow cut from the same cloth, bizarre and misshapened as it were. Fish took in his exterior world as an infant, curiously inspecting every new surrounding with whimsy. We nonchalantly roamed the hotel hallways in bathing suits; somewhat familiar with the vague direction we were going, yet not particularly caring for the outcome. With each turn of the corner, Fish would pause and gaze at the intricacies of the carpeting, the grain on a doorway, the way in which conditioned air flowed from one floor to another. We had an extended conversation about the design style of this hotel's particular maintnance man.
Margaret soon burst into the hallway sobbing. It was nearly an hour after we'd seen her, and she was being escorted to her room by a security officer. The dog was now in the car, but she vowed to never return and to contact the hotel corporate offices with her disgust. We still stayed the night. Back inside the room, we found Heidi and began to unwind. All of us wanted a little nip to drink, so Fish and I went out to the hotel bar to bring back some brews. (Heidi had no identification, and Margaret was in no condition to go out.)
The hotel bar was shocking by all respects. More popular than popular culture itself. It seems as though young Nebraskans take in their idea of slick MTV culture, and hyper-realize it like the Japanese are said to. The MC was beat red and bellowed, "Only 45 minutes left to hook up!" and "Gurls, show us yer titties!" Was this really happening? It was packed and rowdy on a Thursday night. One look up at the crowd, and 20 looks of anticipated Nebraskan intercourse stared back. It seems that we'd found Omaha's "lets get drunk and make whoopee" bar. The only white-hairs came from a misplaced elderly couple that apparently found a coupon for brandy in their hotel room. Fish and I stood somewhat perplexed looking over the seen. He asked if I, as a self-proclaimed filmmaker, looked at my external world in terms of filmic potential. I remarked that I certainly did, especially in such a situation.
So, we rounded up the brews, and left after the situation was sufficiently analyzed. We all got a little buzzed and soon dropped like chopped timber to sleep. Well, all but Margaret. She was still talking when I conked out, and God knows if she ever entered the Freudian trance.
We had a large buffet breakfast in the hotel lobby the next day. Fish had his own large bronze spoon that he used to eat all meals. Margaret asked if it ever went off in metal detectors, and he said that his forearm was a bigger problem. Then, to the background drown of Ab-Rider infomercials, he explained one of the most colorfully detailed stories I've heard in a long time.
"Back in mid-June of 2000 it happened," he said, chomping down masses of eggs with each pause. "I was riding the train through New Mexico and was just a few miles outside Flagstaff. There was a military base on the other side of the tracks, and I didn't want them to see me... A road was on the other side, so I didn't want to jump there either... The thing is, I'd gotten really sick the night before. There's so many roaches in the Southwest, that time of year-- big as rodents almost." He paused to stare at the Ab-Rider and chew. "So I got this chocolate cake and put it over on the other end of the rail car, so I could sleep... but I took a big hunk of it, too."
"Was it good?" I asked.
"Oh, yeah, it was ok. Kind of dry, maybe..." He stared off in recollection. "Then later that night I got really paranoid, and needed to get off. It'd happened before. I knew I needed to stop moving and just heave it out... There's a special way of jumping off trains, this friend of mine, Anne. You remember her, Heidi?" She nodded. "Anne lost both of her feet riding trains. Another friend lost a leg once... Once you do it a few times, your ok, but at first... There was this young teenage kid that rode with a buddy of mine --there's lots of young kids on the trains-- the kid jumped off too soon and got caught under..."
He paused a moment. A middle-aged, corporately gay couple was eating breakfast with grizzled Nebraskan parents across the room.
"The thing is, I've never been to Flagstaff, and always wanted to go. The train wasn't going to stop there... I could have just gotten off at the next stop... It was a hundred miles, but that's not too bad when you're on the road... And the day before I was jumping off this bridge with friends, these big risk-takers. I didn't think I could do it, into the river, but it seems easy once you just jump. I'd never done anything like that before. I thought that if I just jumped..."
Margaret suddenly asked him to pause while she scurried off for coffee. In the distance, an elderly woman was explaining a misplaced call to 911 some years back. "And when they called back, I said I was just trying to call my sister!" All the nearby old women howled with wheezing laughter.
"I hear it's mostly really old guys and youngsters on the rails," I questioningly mentioned to Fish. "Like those 40 year old guys that look 70."
Fish agreed with a mild grin, knowing fully that he himself could pass as a similar character. Margaret returned, "So what'd you do?" she beaconed.
"...well they say you should only jump at about bicycle speed. That's what they told me. But I was still kind of sick, and had my confidence all built up from jumping the bridge. I thought it'd be fine if I just got into the air... And just before that I was trying to stop the train with my mind."
"Where you on some kind of junk?" Margaret jumped in.
"Oh, no. Nothing like that. I just thought that if really focused it would stop." A smile broke over my face, as I knew exactly the feeling.
"So when it didn't stop... I got all panicky, and thought it was now or never. I'd miss my chance. So I threw out my pack, and watched it hit, imagining how I'd jump it. And then I put my right hand out and just leap... It seemed like I was in the air for a long time, and then everything stopped. I might have blacked out... everything was real hazy. When I got up, my arm was all shaped like a "Z," and I knew it was something bad... I guess there was blood all over my face, but I didn't really notice... There was this guy that broke his leg jumping once, and they didn't find him for about two days..."
"How long where you there?" I asked.
"Oh, well it was right by this road, on the edge of town. I walked back to get my pack and then made it to the road to hitch to the hospital... It was probably just the first or second one that picked me up. I'd been reading this book about bird prophesies just before that, and saw an owl staring at me just before it happened..."
"Remember when that owl chased after me through the woods?" asked Heidi.
Fish gravely nodded. "It can mean a lot of things..."
They were starting to close down the dining hall, and it was time to leave. We walked and watered the dogs, and I took the wheel towards Madison. Fish and Heidi requested to be dropped off at an intersection near Albert Lee, so that they could hitch-hick to Minneapolis. We listened to bad country music on the radio, and had a long, draw-out farewell on the side of a country road exit. We all hugged and said our good-byes. I could tell it was hardest for Margaret. Heidi was clearly amused at how motherly she was towards them.
It would be about 4 more hours to Madison. We stopped along the way for chocolate milkshakes, and Margaret lovingly told me about her 14-year-old daughter waiting in Madison. "Its hard, trying to shape my girl in just a few days... Hormones, school, growing up. I just wish I could do more, but I do everything I can." Margaret had been deemed incompetent to care for her daughter, and was going to Madison to settle a bitter and lengthy court battle.
"Come to my daughter's dance recital in two weeks. It would really make me happy to see you there."
A Recent Roadtrip
Daniel James 2006
