Past The Lights (pt. 10 of 10)
*Dear Reader,
My last post was in February 2025 and as of this writing it is now almost July. I know that’s too long, but perhaps you’ll cut me some slack, as I do have a pretty good reason: I was getting sober, which I am presently writing about and will publish on that subject very soon. In the meantime, for your summer reading enjoyment, I’m publishing a series of travel writings I made during a two-week RV trip with my wife and friends to the American southwest in August of 2023 that I originally posted on my social media accounts but have been asked to repost here. There’s a few references to my drinking, which obviously do not represent my present-day lifestyle, but that I left in for historical accuracy and for comedic and literary effect. I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoyed living them, and then writing them.
Past The Lights
Aug. 19-22, 2023 (Days 11, 12, &13). If a day is defined by the abundance of the sun’s light and heat, then I hereby argue that the final three “days” of our epic road adventure that I’m about to describe were, in fact, one 72 hour day with just a liiiiiittle bit of night time in it. That probably doesn’t check out scientifically but I’m going to roll with it because a good writer never lets empirical fact get in the way of good storytelling, Mmmkay? Mmmkay.
Having traveled due west and then roughly due south, we now pivoted our course sharply northeastward, so as to eventually position ourselves on to the mother road, Interstate 40, the elastic waistband of America’s briefs, stretching over the American gut from Barstow, CA to Wilmington, NC, and just off of which our home town is positioned. But I’m getting ahead of myself because first, I must herein impress upon you the fresh hell of driving the harsh and odiferous wasteland that was the road between Roswell, NM to Elk City, OK.
To be fair to two of the three states involved in this drive, it is not the NM or the OK part that I am referring to here mainly, but the Texas Panhandle part, on which the mid-August temperatures surpassed 100 degrees for hundreds of miles. Speaking of hundreds, do you know what Texas has hundreds of thousands of? CATTLE. Do you know what each of these cows makes hundreds of every day? STEAMING HOT POOPIES. Reader, listen…….You may think that you have smelled cow excrement from a farm or cattle truck while driving before and had a temporarily unpleasant experience that faded soon after you got a half mile or so past and therefore you may think you know what I’m getting at and so you may think when I say that what you experience pales in comparison to what I am describing that this writer had lowered himself to the convenience of cheap hyperbole so as to elicit unearned sympathy but you would be mistaken because this stench came straight from the bowels of hell and infected us like the Black Oil from the X-files. Read: IT ATTACHED ITSELF ONTO THE INSIDE OF MY NOSE like a viral spore…..I’m calling it BO-VID 19.
Sam had the foresight to store wet towels, washcloths and bandanas in the freezer the night before when we were plugged into electric at the campsite so that we would be able to soothe our flushed faces and necks on the drive (she smart). Kelly, our food and drink whisperer, used her magic google-iPhone-witchery to find a decent place to eat and cool down before the last hour of the drive. McLean, Texas (population six hundred something) was where we found the Red River Steakhouse, sitting in the back of a dusty parking lot, shaded by low trees that slightly obscured the entrance, which amplified my anxiety as we approached the entrance, as I would not have been surprised to discover bullet-splintered saloon doors that announced our glaring non-belonging with a telltale exaggerated creak.
A polite-enough but unsmiling lady sat us in a nearby corner (clearly segregating us from the belt-buckled locals), of which the walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with license plates from every state, and posters for past rodeos spanning about 40 years. The menu looked like legit ranch-hand Texas people’s food and promised FREE COBBLER WITH EVERY MEAL. For reasons I can only attribute to heat delirium, travel fatigue and possibly methane poisoning, this momentarily seemed like the best news I’d ever received in my life. I had the fried catfish and boiled-with-bacon-all-day green beans and savory corn on the cob that dripped some form of delicious grease into my beard when I bit down. When the check came, we all got giddy for the delivery of the universe’s sweet reward for the day’s perspiratory and olfactory feat of endurance…..but no cobbler came 😳. The dinner staff at Red River Steakhouse of McLean, Texas, sweeping the floor around us in a way one does when you are communicating something non-verbally, sent their unspoken but unmistakable message NO COBBLER FOR YOU, RUFFIAN INTERLOPERS.
Dejected, but too tired and too full to protest, we accepted our lowly status here and shuffled into the parking lot, now mostly dark except for a bright yellow crescent moon and the headlights of passing cars. The last hour’s drive to Elk City, Oklahoma KOA in the cooler night air was a soothing balm that allowed us to recover from the day’s inhospitality as we digested our vittles and eased into night mode. Elk City KOA greeted us with swarms of crickets and cockroaches that covered everything (they probably have some cute local name for them there, to make themselves feel better about having them like Jujubugs or whatever but I know a damn cockroach when it runs over my foot in the dark, by god). The pool was locked, covered and unusable. Our picnic table was warped and wobbly, the showers had only cold water so “to hell with this” I went straight to bed feeling annoyed AF and willed myself into a rigid hate-sleep.
The next morning’s rising sun appeared gently, offering the promise of a tone shift, but soon transformed into a blazing demon cooing “I’m here to torment you today!”. We passively resigned to what would turn out to be another hot miserable drive, which Apple Weather warned would lead us right into a high temp of 105. This was to be a re-run of the previous day, with a tad less putrid bovinity. Arriving at the KOA outside Little Rock, we immediately jumped into the pool, hoping for relief but instead finding over-chlorinated, tepid bathwater.
Unsoothed, and bordering on homicidal, I got out, not bothering with a towel, making a beeline for the igloo cooler from the RV understorage and pounded cold beers like a man on fire (Note: I’m not proud to report my engaging in this unquestionably maladaptive coping strategy to you, but it is an important detail to illustrate the resourcefulness of desperation that one employs when your brains are two degrees Fahrenheit and five clock minutes away from being a cheese omelet with hashbrowns).
The extreme temp/humidity ratio evaporated our will to explore Little Rock, so we agreed- an air conditioned movie theater sounded like heaven. An Uber was summoned and Billy from Greenville, SC, told us as he drove of his hardscrabble life of multiple jobs and side-hustles he worked to satisfy the demands of fatherhood and his high-maintenance Caribbean wife. He was The Blues in human form (if only I’d had my harmonica). The taco place Kelly had conjured had too long of a wait so we looked across the street to an unassuming structure labeled The Pizza Cafe. It turned out to be a truly classic joint, frozen in time with well-worn booths, photos from the 1970s of unidentified faces on the walls that suggested there was a story here, one I’ll have to return and find out about someday. The salads were fat and fresh, as was the pizza. I added to my desperation buzz with a couple of Boulevard Lagers, a brand that Joe told me was a staple of the area. We finished dinner, took deep breaths and set out on the 10 minute walk across the hot lava asphalt of the obviously-a-former-K-Mart parking lot to the Riverdale 10 VIP Cinemas, and bought tickets to see the Barbie movie.
Feeling woozy from the beer and narcotic heat, I needed a pick-me-up but couldn’t stomach a hot coffee, so in the spirit of I’ll-try-anything-once, I drank a Monster energy beverage...Y’all- It was the nastiest thing I have ever put to my lips- how is this a thing? It tasted like cough syrup filtered through a slice of over-ripe watermelon and I silently swore an apology to my kidneys for this and the whole day’s experimental flirtation with pre-diabetes. Yuck. Barbie was a blast, though, while dropping some hard social commentary and satire at a rapid pace that I may have to see again to catch it all. Agreeing that the movie theater cool-down was a good idea, we Ubered back to the Jamboree and slept hard to prepare for our last full day’s drive to Nashville.
While en route the next morning, we decided that since we had all already visited Nashville earlier in the year, and since were on I-40 passing through Memphis, we could spend a few hours in Memphis and still have time to get to the Nashville KOA that night. Booker is a budding drummer (he has been practicing the muscular intro to Nirvana’s “Breed” much to the delight of the over-40 adults in his life) so we first found the famed Memphis Drum Shop, a playground for drummers the way Guitar Center is for guitarists. The staff gave us a good rec for lunch- the Central BBQ food truck (who gratefully sat next to an air conditioned dining room with a water fountain) and was indeed some of the juiciest, tenderest, slow-cooked, falling-off-the-bone BBQ I’ve ever had. We decided we had just enough room in our minds for one last big attraction and decided to make it a tour of the fabled Sun Studios.
To stand in the same room in which Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Howlin Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King and other legends laid down some of their best known tracks and hear the stories of how it all went down had an arresting effect and felt like being on holy ground. I noticed my shoes squeaking on the floors of the studio room, which made an echo that disrupted our guide’s speaking, so I politely scooched over to stand on a rug that was under a heavily-played, seven-piece drum set nearby. I listened to our guide’s stories about interactions between Elvis and Sam Phillips, like how a song they recorded in that room went out on the radio that very night due to the fervent buzz about this kid from Memphis, then she started listing all the performers who the Sun “sound” had influenced, who came back to record there in the temple of their idols.
She turned to point at the drum set inches away from my thigh…”And that’s the drum set that Larry Mullen Jr. designed and played when U2 and B.B. King recorded When Love Comes To Town for the Rattle and Hum album.” (Umm…I am a practically-lifelong U2 fan) The whole room turned my direction to observe me there as I stood with my jaw on the floor, trying hard not to do a Texas Cow impression right into my shorts. Joe knows how I feel about U2, that era especially (it’s the way he feels about R.E.M.) and he shot me the universally understood serious-face guy-sign for “DUUUUUUUDE…”
I kept my decorum long enough to exit the tour but then officially collapsed in the gift shop from TOO MUCH AWESOME. “That’s it. Get me out of here, off this trip, back to the banal mundanity of my daily life- I need the stabilizing effect of boredom to return me to a sane homeostasis or else I’m gonna never come back and poor Henry the cat will never see his Daddy again…” We got to Nashville for one last night in RV campground paradise together and thankfully, the over-sized pool stayed open late and was actually cooler than our body temperatures so in we got and stayed for a good hour, huddled close, recounting our favorite moments of the trip.
I felt a twinge of sadness, naturally, but mostly I felt pride. I was raised to be cautious, to consider the risks of any course of action, and to make wise, safe choices. In many ways, it’s one of my strengths. But after three years of the pandemic and cresting the peak of 50, I’ve considered the costs of this, the most disappointing of which has been a life scant on the adventure my heart requires. Swaying in the Nashville poolwater, feeling full of contentment, and looking up past the lights into the starlit darkness, I said THANK YOU to the universe that had led us here and promised to keep going for as long as I can.