I left Gettysburg the next morning in fog and drizzle that obscured the twisted, switchback roads between me and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I realized my heritage was too vast to distill.  I could only drift in the present and enjoy the float as best I could. It was time to close this transcontinental loop.  Going home takes less time than going to a destination, and I had no agenda left, no places to see. Discontentment drove me east. I thought I had reason to travel and embark on a quest to unlock family mysteries. It was a mission to unravel the perplexities of my character, a purpose that would leave me satisfied upon my return. I was anxious to be home. Visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart, Indiana, and a college friend in Denver were on my way west from Gettysburg, but I was ready to be done with travel.   It took two hours to drive seventy miles from the battlefield park through hillside villages before I burst through onto the Pennsylvania turnpike and joined rust belt traffic.  During that slow morning slog, my conviction hardened to forego distractions as I droves the miles and hours of windshield time ahead.  Periodic turnpike toll booths in persistent rain solidified my reolve.

Gettysburg was Confederate Army’s turnaround.  It had advanced North to lay waste to the Union.  After their failed invasion, Miss Lela’s grandfathers made their way back to Virginia for more battles, destruction, and death until Marse Robert finally surrendered the remnants of their regiment two years later. I imagine both were glad to see the end of the rebellion. A plaque at Gettysburg commemorates the farthest northern advance of the brigade in which both men served. After they returned home to Chambers County, their children married, and Miss Lela was their grandchild.  Her husband, John Thomas, was the grandson of the hillbillies who went to Tennessee and were buried in unmarked graves.  Their children survived in the homes of neighboring kinfolk.  Their mothers disappeared from census records.

I took to the road with unlimited hubris. Fearful of my inevitable sedimentation, I tried to piece together fragments of my heritage because puzzles engage the mind and slow my drift toward dementia. I mapped the journey, but regardless whether I turned right or left, enlightenment remained elusive. I never asked the right questions to the people I met, and their answers never satisfied me. From coast to coast on a loop of more than 7,000 miles, no truths emerged. I was unworthy of nirvana, and time, distance, and solo travel didn’t soothe my soul.

 

My father was one of six children born to John Thomas and Miss Lela. Given what I know of his nature, I doubt he thought much about his great-grandfathers’ involvement in a war fought on the wrong side of history. Neither Mom nor Dad talked much about history. I asked Mom about family details, but she only told stories about the people she knew and loved.  I’m the only one in my family obsessed with the dead. They are always with me. I see them when I look at my children and grandchildren. The dead live in subsequent generations.

My first day out of Gettysburg brought me as far as Medina, a small community in the middle of Ohio farm country. If a town was nearby, I didn’t see it.  Judging from the posters pinned to laundromat walls, I spent the night at an abandoned Christian retreat. The place looked bleak, but after a day driving in the rain and stopping for toll booths, I felt no need to explore.  The next day’s tolls, traffic, rain, and service station food ended with an overnight stop in LaSalle, Illinois, forty miles southwest of Chicago. I passed through Iowa and don’t remember much of it. The next night, I camped the in Greenwood, Nebraska, as flat a land as I’ve ever found.  I was free from the industrialized rust belt.

I climbed into Wyoming. It’s a long state, and I made two overnight stops. The first night I stayed near Cheyenne, and after half a day’s drive, I spent the second night at Fort Bridger, a place to stop because two days remained before I could climb up into the Cascade passes that would drop into my valley.  Mountain man Jim Bridger established a trading post back in the day for explorers, trappers, and tribes. It became the place for an annual rendezvous, a reenactment of it draws thousands of celebrants each year.  I was between celebrations, and there wasn’t much to see at Fort Bridger. The RV park was run by a teenage girl. She tamed mustangs and rode horses.  Made pregnant by a deployed Marine, she kept a shrine to him in the park office. Outside, I walked among reconstructed structures meant to resemble a supply depot for pioneers who were setting out on the Oregon Trail.

Before I quit work, I drove every morning a twelve-minute commute, turned the same corners each day to an office cluttered with familiar people and conversations.  After my stroke, I had debilitating hours of head chatter, and after weeks of physical, occupational, and speech therapies, I awakened to new directions. I had married well, and my wife handled our family’s finances. She paid the bills, calculated the date and time of payment, and ensured what charges were correct. My attitude had always been that if you pay the bills, people will keep sending them. I funded our accounts buying and selling securities.  I treated currency like poker chips—so long as the stack grew higher, life was good.  My stroke and advancing age slowed my game, and, paradoxically, our wealth increased. I am grateful for luck. There were deaths—family and friends.

After I quit work, I needed a reason to get out of bed.  Fearing inactivity, I planned a road trip. In its execution, I rose each morning, stayed awake, and took notes on each new place. I drove coast to coast on a loop of more than 7,000 miles, and each day’s travel led to another day’s journey. I drove in a circle.  Travel is a distraction, and I found no revelations because I never knew where to look, what questions to ask, or how to define the purpose of my search. Once I turned back west, I traveled fast. From the Nebraska plains and across the Rockies, skies stayed clear, and no rain slowed my drive.  Mike’s apparition kept me from being alone.

This trip and the reasons for it started more than 50 years ago, about 45 minutes after I dropped LSD when I became a different person.  I walked on Ghent sidewalks cracked by more than a century of weather and pedestrians. I sat with friends, got stoned in a park on the banks of Hague Creek, where thin, white gars floated in its water. I drove my car fast. I beat yellow lights and never feared capture when caution lights turned red. Fortune favored me and allowed me to escape when my misdeeds should have been punished. I dreamed in vibrant colors, and fast food was my daily bread. I thought I was hip, and I liked getting high. I was someone to avoid and rejected the path of work hard, get an education, save your money, and praise Jesus as a means to a good life. And I devolved. I became Wally—a man who believed “life is chaos” and lived as though it was, a man who thought he was smart, and those who followed his lead suffered. When I shed his skin, he was not missed.

Forty years later, my head exploded in a stroke. I was deposited into a hospital; my brain stewed in a morphine haze. In those moments, I didn’t care whether I lived or died.  My brain in a short while absorbed the bleed.  I lived.  Eating, drinking, walking, talking, and driving skills returned.  I went back to work, sat in my office, and the phone rang.   Mike was dead.

In Homer’s Iliad, Nestor tells Agamemnon that the gods do not give us all our gifts at once. Nestor, the oldest and wisest warlord among the Greeks spoke truth. Given what we know now about genetics, maybe the passage should say that our gifts are given to us at birth, but we only discover them as we age. It’s a discussion that hardly matters. Lermontov once said, “Youth eats golden cookies and thinks it is their daily bread.” I am old now, wiser, and not nearly as quick to answer, dispute, or talk. I’ve learned that what I have to say isn’t as important as listening to others. Those hesitant senior moments—when I pause to gather my thoughts—are blessings. I excuse my quiet with the old platitude: Better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.  Wordsworth wrote, “The World is Too Much with Us.” He said, “getting and spending” would “lay waste our powers.” Those lines were taught to me by a professor enamored with English Romantic poets. He brightened me in hot, humid Alabama.  I was an impoverished student. Now, I am an old man who knows those  lines were written by an educated man with a talent for rhyme. While he and his contemporaries toured the English countryside contemplating poems, my forebears broke ground in the New World. They lived different lives. Wordsworth was an upper-class twit entertaining the well-to-do with his eloquence. My people cleared fields and grew crops—a vulgar life in comparison.

When I was young, I counted my pocket money and lived small. I lacked wealth but had no checks to balance at the end of the month, and I didn’t count myself to sleep at night by calculating my net worth. I laughed more then than now.  Fate gave me a talent to achieve prosperity, and I quit work when aggravation outweighed its benefits to me. In a thirty-year career, I figured we had accumulated more money than we would spend in the lifetime we had left to live.  We live in a subdivision with city services: water, sewer, asphalt roads, cable TV, high-speed internet, streetlights, and police protection. Shops, restaurants, hospital, and gymnasium are within minutes.  We are circled by volcanoes—geologic time bombs whose eruptions are written in our valley’s topography. They threaten fire and brimstone and stand like sentinels in the mountains around us. Their lava may burn our vineyards, orchards, and golf courses, and turn our waters into steam, and summer wildfires choke our air with smoke.   I’ll take my chances; I no longer wish to migrate. I have no more hills to summit, no more oceans to cross, nor more homes to purchase.  Time favored me with gray hair and false teeth, and fortune has kept me healthy and solvent.   Friends have died, and I wish I loved them better.  I must evolve.

I covered 500 the next day to Winnemucca, Nevada—a gambling and brothel oasis, and my final overnight.   I stopped in Salt Lake for a mid morning lunch and arived in time for a shower and last-night dinner. I walked to the restaurant.  The steak I ate tasted OK.  None I have eaten taste as good as the ones my father grilled for us outside in Norfolk when I was a child.

I had 400 miles left to travel before reaching home, and it was mid morning when I pulled over at one of those half-shelter rest stops in the desert drive landscape.  Mike stood beside the roadside picnic table, his back to me. I got out and walked over to him. He stayed turned from the highway, looking into the desert. We were halfway between Winnemucca and the Cascades. I said:

“Hey, buddy. It’s a lot different than Max Meadows. I thought you would stay in Virginia. I haven’t seen you since.”

From adolescence, he and I discussed who we were, why we were, and who we might become. As hippies, we made up what we didn’t understand.  In our psychedelic streams of consciousness, he might say, “God is difficult.” I loved Greek mythology.  “Apollo drove a chariot. He’s the sun. Zeus threw thunderbolts; he’s number one,” and mike, “Who cares, as long as we don’t fall off the planet.”

Nothing made sense, but in the late sixties and early seventies, nothing did. It was a confusing time.  After college, army, marriage, and children, I studied John Calvin. I liked his certainty. The Bible explained itself—a tautology without argument. Salvation is granted or denied by celestial edict. There are circles of elect and damned, and man is responsible for his sins. We will never understand because there is a way that seems right to man, and that way leads to death. Everything leads to death.

When I exited the military and moved wife, children, and dogs to Chesapeake—thirty miles from Mike’s apartment in Ghent—we had become different people. He was single and scooted to work on a skateboard, a commuting style that was televised on the evening news and became his fifteen minutes of fame. I was married and commuted to work by car. He rented an apartment.  I paid a mortgage on a house built on drained swampland.  He carried a skateboard to work; I carried a briefcase.  Chesapeake was never my land. After ten years living there trying to find happiness and success, I abandoned the East and went West. My wife and children came with me. Mike stayed in Norfolk.  He never left.

On this trip from West to East and back, I pondered people and family I should have loved more but didn’t know how. When I quit my job, I wanted to find purpose.  I expected travel would cleanse my mind and help me find a better path but I couldn’t escape the years I chained myself to convention.  My head chatter increased and left me troubled.

Keeping his back to me, Mike said,

“Looks like you made it.  I thought you were losing it with the  Civil War stuff. I guess you can’t help being who you are.”

I stayed quiet. I wanted to hear what he had to say. He always spoke truth to me. His Celtic look and satyr’s smile kept many from listening.  Not me. We were friends—best friends. He wasn’t finished. He turned,

“You brought me here.  We talked when we were stoned.  We must have said all that we were meant to say.  You left. I’m happy you’re going home.”

Having him with me on this road trip in spring helped me as much as when we drove along Shore Drive that summer morning after my father died.  His ghost distracted me now as he did then.  What more can be expected from friendship than to be where and when you are needed.

“I know you’re an imagination, and I don’t know the right words. Your friendship is a special thing.  I hope you know the rest.”

Then he was gone. No fade, no farewell, just gone.

I made a sandwich from my last chunk of Spam. The meat was cold, and the bread stale. After the first bite, I tossed it out the open door. Let insects and vermin enjoy a feast.  I swept the trailer, bagged my garbage.  Home was over the the Cascade summits, and I’d be there before dark.