Go Vagabond

Mississippi/Alabama/Florida

I woke up in the still cold of an early Mississippi morning, exhausted. I would have to leave, though. The truckers had all started to abandon their parking spots. I would be obvious.

I drove on to Crystal Springs, a quaint town constructed as quaintly as many other little Southern towns. A few gas stations on the highway, a grocery store, a drug store, and then a vintage, worn-out downtown that looks like it came straight out of the 1950’s. I parked in the drug store parking lot, to get my bearings straight, to try to wake up, but I was in a fog. It was a hazy malaise, and I sat there for a while waiting for the drug store to open up. I went inside to use the bathroom, then I decided to go for a bike ride. The town is beautiful, most notable for being the hometown of Tommy Johnson, an influential blues musician, whose namesake and backstory resemble the character of Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (including that bit about selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads). I found a recording of his “Canned Heat Blues” on my iPhone, and listened to it while sitting in the gazebo in the center of town. There was something about it, something in the eerie, wallowing intonations of the man. No one else was near enough to hear the song, and I was just sitting in the center of the tiny town, watching the traffic flow languidly across the pot-holed asphalt. Perhaps Johnson had written the song very near to where I was. Perhaps his high falsettos and deep vibratos had once rang out through to the purlieus of the dusty town. I don’t know. But there was something—a keen, hallucinogenic misery in his voice, the sounds of gloom, of poverty, of the faint but ardent spirit of the cast-down, rising sorrowfully in an otherwise languorous Mississippi town. And, at once, I felt connected to the past and present of Crystal Springs, the gradual procession of its daily life like the slow drip of molasses in an hourglass. Slow time is psychotropic, heavy like the intoxicating sterno (“canned heat”) that was Johnson’s vice, and you could see it flow, or feel it flow in wavy, humid, disorienting lines.

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The South

I was in Rayville longer than most people would care to be in Rayville. I think I spent three or four days there walking around, riding my bike, doing next to nothing. It’s a town of about 4,000, and there’s honestly nothing unique to do there beyond eating at a local restaurant. Part of the fun (for me, anyway) is just observing how much daily life differs from place to place. Acquainting myself with the back roads and shortcuts and different establishments. In fact, I got so familiar with the place that, at one point, I was mistaken for a Walmart employee by another Walmart employee. I happened to be wearing a plain blue t-shirt in almost the exact hue of all the employees’ plain blue t-shirts. I was coming out of the bathroom, with my backpack on at about 8:30. And an employee asked, “Are you ready to go home?”

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The Vagabond Crawling

I wrote this on March 5th, the day before I left.

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A cloud, a universe,
we float inside floundering
cloistered,

travailing a great long while,
seeking the edges
to emerge, resurface.

To burst through,
a cold, dead lightning strike
to nowhere:

an ill-favored countryside,
burnt rocks and trees
and rolling hills for eras,

and there is discomfort there maybe,
in the wandering haze,
in the emptiness

of separation. The confusion—
postpartum—wariness
of the vagabond,

crawling, alighting upon
a beacon, a place unfamiliar
on fuliginous knees.

Whether to settle down
or pass through.
Or to pass through

eternally to jeers,
with a smile,
with no end.

Arkansas/Louisiana

After Paris, Arkansas, I drove a bit to a town called Dardanelle. I knew there was a state park nearby, and I figured I would see how much it would cost to camp there. It’s called Mount Nebo State Park, and the road up is windy and incredibly steep. My little car was on the verge of overheating, but I made it up safely. From the peak, you can look out over the entire towns of Dardanelle and Russellville. Also within view is Lake Dardanelle with an adjacent nuclear power plant (reminiscent of the Simpsons’ Springfield). It was somewhat disconcerting to see signs around town denoting the nuclear evacuation route, but, in any event you’d be safe on Mount Nebo. Unfortunately, though, the Visitor’s Center was closed, and the posted regulations were confusing. You were supposed to register with them or something, but since they were closed you’d have to complete registration in the morning. I didn’t want to do that, so I went down the steep, windy hill back to town. I drove around in the dark through the empty downtown full of worn-down buildings, and then made my way to the Walmart, where I slept well.

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A Little Catching Up

I have a tendency to be really long-winded when I write, so I’m going to try to cut down and summarize the trip all the way up to the present (I’m nearly a month behind as it is).

So, anyway, I stayed 4 days in Artesia, sleeping in a nice bed, showering in a nice shower, watching TV, playing video games, staying up late, playing with a dog, and eating way too much food. My aunt and uncle are always cooking. They make every meal like an event, and after having eaten nothing but sandwiches, fruit, canned goods, and fast food for the last month, I was grateful for the feasts.

I went to the Carlsbad Caverns with a cousin and her friend. It was amazing, expansive, underground. Stalactites. Guano. Iceberg Rocks. And stuff. Later, we watched Aladdin, and this is important information because Aladdin is a street rat, much like myself. I just wish I could have my own magical Robin Williams.

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Deming/Rockhound State Park/Columbus

In Deming, there was very little I wanted to do. I was still tired from all the hiking I’d done the previous day, and I just drove around town aimlessly for a while. I stopped in the Walmart parking lot and read a little bit before I mustered up the energy to go on a bike ride. I was right across the street from the visitor’s center, and I rode over and picked out a bunch of pamphlets. There was a museum in town that I thought I’d go see: The Deming Luna Mimbres Museum. The place closed at 4 and I arrived at 3:30. The volunteer there told me I hadn’t left myself enough time to go through the museum. I said I’d come back tomorrow. But I wondered how long it could possibly take to go through a small town museum.

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Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument

For two hours, I slept at the turn-off in complete darkness and when I woke up there was a bear on top of my car. Not really, but if there had been I wouldn’t have been surprised. There was daylight, but all the trees practically blocked out the sun. I drove the winding, billowing mountain road up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. But there are all these dirt roads that branch off the highway and lead to trailheads or campgrounds in the Gila National Forest, and I kept passing them up with the intention of eventually hiking at least one of them. I pulled over at one spot called Pine Flat, which wasn’t exactly a trail or a campground, just a rough-hewn dirt road that leads up a hill to nowhere. I hiked it because my car wouldn’t have made it up all the sharp, rocky terrain. You get the idea that if your sense of direction wasn’t keen and you got off the road even a little bit, it would be very easy to get lost. The pines are just mesmerizing and you end up looking up, mouth open, like a turkey caught in the rain.

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Freedom

I am in Dinuba, California. This is one of the only planned stops on the route. I’ve been visiting my uncle and and my grandparents while I’ve been down here.

Everyone’s been very interested in the idea of the trip, but I think it’s hard for people to believe that I’ve got almost no destination. The most common question I get is, “Where are you headed?” and when I say, “I don’t know,” I’m generally met with confusion. It’s hard, even for me, to imagine not having an explicit itinerary because itineraries keep you focused and they outline the future clearly. I think we tend to steer our lives toward greater certainty because it represents comfort. It’s certainly more comfortable knowing where you’re going to sleep at night, knowing in what environment you’ll wake up, knowing the shortcuts and locations of places where you are.

But there’s also freedom in uncertainty, in a wandering daze, because there is no defined schedule. Oftentimes we look to the future and everything is locked into place. Our schedules keep us in order. They keep us sane and civilized. And maybe a blank future is terrifying because we don’t work well in obscurity, we don’t work well in the unknown, and I can appreciate that. I would be remiss if I didn’t admit to being at least a little bit nervous. But the notion of a near complete lack of schedules is at least a little bit relaxing. There is no concrete fear, no defined future stressor, no responsibility.

There is this great desire to abscond that’s common in many of us, and maybe it’s juvenile. Maybe it’s selfish. I’m 23 and I’ve got a college degree. I’m skirting around adulthood, but I’m hardly an adult in the traditional sense. I’m still a boy by most definitions. And maybe this is adumbrative of the never-ending adolescence of middle class youths. That we are unwilling or unable to separate ourselves from our childhood, from our reliance on our parents. And, indeed, part of this trip is to forge something for myself, to not be defined by whose house I live in anymore. There is fear there, definitely. And when I come back I still won’t have achieved the traditional markers of adulthood. I will not have a career. I will not have any more independence than when I left.

But, I don’t know, there are thousands, maybe millions of us like this, and maybe there’s no shame in that. There’s sometimes a very limited scope of what constitutes success, and we can work and worry ourselves to death and never feel as if we’ve achieved anything. And that’s maybe why I’m looking to this blank, unwritten future—wandering, finding points of interest, finding freedom.

Go East

I’ll be driving around for a while. I don’t know where to or for how long. I’m more likely going to go to places out of the way, places no one visits, because maybe there’s something interesting there. This is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a child because I’m fascinated by the open road, the open landscape, and small towns. The idea is to encounter unknown places, to see sights that few people have seen or would want to see, to find beauty in a small human settlement or a vast plain of emptiness or even a sprawling, blighted metropolis. I come from a sprawling metropolis myself and, though I try to see the beauty in everything, there is a certain monotony in seeing and doing the same things every day. This is something near a pervasive and existential boredom, although I wouldn’t put it exactly on that scale. I like San Jose well enough and, in fact, there are aspects of it that I love, but I’m moved by this desire to see strange sights, unfamiliar sights, things I can’t just overlook. I want to see the world with fascination, the way a child sees it—glowing, deep, hazy, nostalgic. I want, perhaps, to be less cynical.

There is little aim here, in terms of direction. I don’t know what I’m going to see or which way I’m going to go. It’s all up in the air. I’m not even sure if I’ll like it or be repulsed by it…if the life of the vagabond is too far out of my comfort zone. In any event, I’m leaving today at some point.

I do this with the the understanding that there’s very little mystique left in America—that the concept of wandering across the country is more appealing to retired RV-ers who generally have specific tourist hot-spots in mind. But some of America’s lore was built on travel, on discovery, on a certain mystery in the Wild, Wild West. Some of Horace Greeley’s musings on Manifest Destiny can be paraphrased simply with “Go West, Young Man.” And there is a certain flourishing ambiguity in that sentiment—a sort of glowing optimism about an unsettled land. I myself am a product of either Manifest Destiny or the Dust Bowl—of a great urge to venture out to an unknown and prosperous West. But the reason I say there’s no mystique left, is because Western Civilization (and, really, native civilization before that) has ventured as far West as humanly possible. There’s nothing left to be settled, no unseen valleys or mountains, no inherent danger. We are content to codify our lives in the context of cities—of where we live, where we work, where we have fun—and there is no functional mystery there.

And, so, I’m going back East because I can go no farther to the West. In a manner of speaking, I’m going to rediscover, to see things and to see them differently, to experience things with clarity, with a focus on the unfamiliar. Because, although most of America shares much of the same culture, there are no two places alike, no two exact modes of existence. And I’d like to document that. I’d like to see it first hand.