The Road Trip
Balter’s Essays of Mostly Acerbic Witticisms
The summer after college, my best buddy Adam and I drove nearly 8,000 miles across North America - which nearly ended our friendship forever.
When we ran out of weed, I suppose that's when the trouble really began.
We kicked off by joining a traveling circus, otherwise known as the Grateful Dead's 1993 Summer Tour. A few shows in, in Louisville,KY, my buddy abruptly flew home for a day to attend a relative's funeral, so I snuck up solo to the front row, right in front of Garcia. He sang like a busted set of bagpipes, and when his mouth opened wide, a darkness seemed to spill out; the insides were rotted with decay, tarred, like the retreads torn from a semi on a dirty highway.
By South Dakota, we decided to go rogue and, with little planning, broke our own trail into the badlands of South Dakota. We started at sun up with overloaded backpacks, and hiked straight into the scarred landscape for a few hours; we had our tents set up before noon, preparing for a night of camping under the stars.
And there we sat, under a shadeless 90 degree sun, scratching at dozens of leg scrapes from Broom Snakeweed and Sagebrush.
The land gave us nothing. Eventually, hot, thirsty, dusty, and bored to tears, we packed up our tents and attempted a new route out, only to find ourselves trapped by an unpassable gully. We backtracked for miles, circling, becoming crankier and crankier, only to stumble upon a dirtied 2000 lb Bison standing directly on our bend of trail. It eyed us warily, it's brown beard hanging clumped, like deadening moss, and forced us into yet another detour. We eventually crawled back to our parked 1980s wood-paneled Buick Stationwagon as darkness rolled in, and slept cramped like two sardines in the back.
As for the Weed, that Summer brought upon something of a nationwide drought. What we had was mostly flat, mostly brown, and mostly stems; it smelled oily and sharp, as if it was hustled into America inside a can of turpentine. Still, we attempted to ration it like castaways who had found a dented can of long-expired baked beans washed up on the edge of their island.
These specific beans ran out shortly, leaving us as just two guys on their own island thereafter.
Ten hours down the road, in Bozeman, Montana, we met a cat named Banjo.
No, no, Banjo wasn't a cat, his name was Banjo; but he was cool, just like a cat, ya know?
After previous adventures this felt something of a promised land with promising people, and we contemplated putting down permanent roots but, no, wanderlust carried us on.
At a highway rest stop just outside of Vancouver, behind a crumbling retaining wall, we found a tiny beaten path into a heavenly woods filled with Western Red Cedars and Big Leaf Maples. A mirage of rainforest greens and dappled sunlight patches, merely yards from tanks of diesel fuel and the noise of the roadway, this confirming that it's often in the most unsuspecting of places where you'll find the strangest of lights.
Across hundreds of miles, in multiple campgrounds, one bearded and leathered motorcyclist kept circling our orbit; we formed a brotherhood of sorts, a welcomed traveler on his own journey of discovery. Days and weeks would pass, and he'd appear a rumbling speck in our rear view mirror, only to zip past us, throwing a biker wave, two fingers relaxed downward.
We quested risk, and with frontal lobes still not fully developed, somewhere around Oregon we ate a tiny amount of LSD, and drove through the night into California, a moderate electric sizzle space-caking our car, raining down from the interstate's Cobrahead Lights beaming above us.
By LA, our two-guys-in-a-car shtick, with no weed to distract us and not much of a plan to otherwise moderate our adolescent emotions, blew up. I don't remember what exactly we fought about, but I do remember the final straw had to do with a tube of toothpaste, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the triviality of things.
In a state of stubborn grudge-holding and moderate petulance, we agreed to be mad enough at each other to just end the trip. We drove straight east in complete muteness; not a single word said for nearly 40 hours and 3,000 miles, silently switching driving duties only when we ran low enough on fuel that we were forced into a pit stop.
By the time we arrived to my buddy's homestate of Pennsylvania, the ice had begun to thaw. Sure, there was regret and some sheepishness; we filled the last twenty miles with a moderate amount of small talk about plans for the rest of the Summer.
Mostly, there just seemed to be relief.
Thirty years later and, well, my best buddy is still my best buddy, never better. I can't recall if we ever unpacked that trip; I'm pretty certain there was no major airing of grievances, but I also don't think there remains anything left unsaid between us.
I guess the experience is exactly what it was meant to be, and boys will be boys and weed probably had something to do with it, or really, maybe, nothing at all.
