Travelin'

There’s some sort of mathematical theorem out there , I know there is, in regards to the ratio of amount of eye makeup a young woman wears to miles away from a major urban area.

There’s strange gas stations, a lot of pressboard and none of the snazzy beer marketing, in strange little corners of the state, none too far from Seattle. Little bastions of civilization 10 miles from I5, found on a corner named, but supporting only two buildings, one of which seems deserted. Inside, I come across an older man disciplining a younger one who had apparently made some disparaging remarks to the Asian woman manning the register. Young man escapes to his truck full of muddied all terrain bikes and older man purchases his half rack of Schaeffer, which I didn’t even realize they still manufactured. I look at the laser sites and bullets available as impulse items on the counter where you would normally see breath mints and dried beef products. I walk back out to the car through a steady rain.

There’s these towns along two lane highways through the western wilderness that exist for a mile or so before thinning out to weed choked plots that used to be a parking lot or a mini mart of some sort. They’re these same little towns that you remember from passing through them a year before, somehow so vividly as if coming up in a town like this. You remember dreams where the geography is made up of these exact sort of places.

There’s an inordinate amount of bears made out of chainsawed trees.

There’s a number of towns up and down California’s northern coast; just stretches of well lit fast food signs and beckoning hotel/motel ads is all you would really see as your car passes through. We stop in one for the night, you can smell the ocean and I get that sort of winsome feeling of nostalgia realizing that I missed those windblown cypress trees from my time here. I walk past a kid on a smoke break from the McDonald’s right off the freeway. He sits sort of hunched, head down toward the asphalt. He glances at me for a second as I pass then takes another hit and eyes back to the ground. I wonder if he counts down the minutes until he can escape. I wonder if he resents the folks who come through to buy hamburgers and speed on out to somewhere else. I wonder if he wonders why I’m here, walking to the Safeway. I realize that maybe he’s happy to call this home, that he takes pride in a place where people know your name and nod hellos when they pass in the street. Maybe he dreams of opening a business, of raising a family, of petitioning for the freeway to move ten miles east and leave his town unscathed. Maybe he has vaguely disturbing dreams about sharing space with skyscrapers and ports, about how goddamn easy it is to hide in that anonymity of city living.

There’s a lot of beauty to be found in this country.


Rocktober song of the day: “C’mon Billy” by PJ Harvey