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Saturday, September 02, 2006
Road Journal .9 (Rain)

I stared out the window and watched the raindrops splatter on the sidewalk, the gutters around the curb rushing like white water rivers into the sewer. My money too, was escaping with the water.

Looking out the second story bedroom window at my mother's house, the rain was falling from the dark sky and pattering in shiny puddles on the roadway. I would have no work today. The rain was too heavy. The pool would be closed.

So there I was in my mother's house in Virginia, feeling like a delinquent to be living with my mother even for just a few days; and today I had nothing to do and no way to make money.

Rain had held me hostage a few times already. Driving from Mississippi to Alabama, I'd hit a storm at night and was forced to take refuge in an overpriced motel room that smelled like moldy sawdust.

Riding from Pensacola to Mt Dora, Florida I spent two days traveling through sporadic showers, having to stop every thirty minutes under bridges and under an awning at an abandoned gas station. At the gas station while I sat on a cowhide mat trying to keep dry, a thin black man emerged from the dumpster carrying a black trash bag and balancing a card board box on his head. I don't know what he found in that dumpster but whatever it was he took it with him, waved hello and goodbye to me in one happy shake of the wrist and went off walking the rainy street, his bag in hand, his box, peppered with rain spots, balanced on his head. The showers of those two days transformed an eight hour drive into a forty-eight hour trek. In Georgia, I'd driven through a light shower that soaked me head to foot - even saturated my socks through my boots.

I was no stranger to rain but it depressed me nonetheless. I was in Virginia, in my mother's house, and now had an empty day in which I'd make no money. I felt a million miles from where I wanted to be; not in any geographical way, just a great distance off from the dreams I wanted to accomplish.

I've felt this way many times and one of the great challenges of independent work is dealing with yourself when you fall into these negative patterns. Sometimes the future I was traveling towards felt like a hair's point on my radar. My destination seemed so far past the horizon I could only hope it was out there.

I'd read great literature and think to myself, 'Wow. I just don't have something like this in me. How can I ever write knowing that I can't top this.'

Part of the difficulty of being a writer is understanding that writing is not a competition. It is also not a race. If traveling by motorcycle has taught me anything so far it is that hurrying only ruins the product. Things must be done in their own time and they must exist in their own right -without judgement or comparisons.

Oddly enough, at this time in my life when so much was uncertain -food, housing, money, location, success and future- I learned not to worry. I learned to appreciate the engines humming and not to burn my imaginative energy wondering when it would sputter to a stop.

So I spent the rainy day working on material, reading, and researching things on the internet. At night I went to dinner with my mother and my sister's family. We all piled into my sister's SUV -my brother in law, my sister, my mother and my sister's baby who one month previously had made me an uncle. In the interest of space, I laid down in the trunk, curling my knees to fit and resting a blanket under my head. Out the back window of the vehicle rain still poured from the sky. I closed my eyes and felt the bumps and potholes of the road shimmy the trunk floor beneath me. With eyes closed I felt as if I could have been on a train rolling down the tracks or in an airplane gliding through light turbulence. I could have been on an ocean liner swaying on rough seas.

I opened my eyes and stared at the upholstered ceiling, then looked out the window and up at the storming sky. The night was turning the afternoon sky of grey to a dismal chalkboard black. Once more I was on my back and watching the American sky turn to night.

I'd done this before in Atlanta, Texas in a field beside a dirt road church. I'd done it on a beach in South Carolina, a field in Alabama and in countless other places. Each time I had to reassure myself that everything would be okay. I had to accept that someone might try to steal my gear, that someone might assault me in my sleep, that a farmer might put a shotgun to my temple, or a police officer might try to arrest me.

In those realizations I tried to think of God. I tried to think of the black starry sky as an ornate quilt. Growing up, and even in college, I always kept an oversized American flag pinned to my ceiling just over the bed. It was six feet by ten feet and had flown over the capitol on my birthday. Now that I was on the road, I liked to think I still had it over top of me only instead I had the American night covering me as it does the whole country like a canopy over one vast backyard.

And that night, after returning from dinner, I returned to sleep in the upstairs bedroom of my mom's house, awaiting work in the morning just as I had the ten nights prior. Feeling the soft cotton sheets again on my skin, I knew that things were becoming routine and knew that the routine was about to end. Larry McMurtry, in his book All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, said that life is steady and monotonous but punctuated with giant spurts of change. That's true.

I had only another handful of nights in those comfortable home sheets before I'd set out again into the nomadic life of an expeditionary. But for the time being, food was plentiful, clothes were clean, and shelter was warm.