A Marathon Trip Across the Country

A Marathon Trip Across the Country
When I finished Culinary School in 1992, my friend Michael flew out to Portland, Oregon so we could drive back to North Carolina together. We had always talked about seeing the country together and here was the opportunity to ride the ribbon of highway made popular by folksingers and beatnik writers for decades. We ended up making the trip in about three and a half days and barely saw anything except a monstrous storm front that followed us across the country.
I had been in Portland for a year, and, at that time, had been maintaining a long distance relationship with my girlfriend, Margaret, back in North Carolina. She had come out to visit me twice, and those weekends had been like an oasis in a desert of Garde Manger classes and seedy Portland nights. But a year from your gal is a year from your gal, and sightseeing around the U.S. was taking a backseat to the not yet docile hormones of my twenty six year old physiology. In other words I was horny.
At the time I was driving a 1984 Nissan Sentra station wagon with no registration, an expired inspection sticker, bald tires and only three working cylinders. The tape deck worked though, so we had plenty of Dead tapes to see us through. We piled all of my earthly belongings, mostly clothes and cookbooks, into the back of the Sentra and headed south to San Francisco.
After a night staying with my aunt outside of San Francisco, we spent a good part of the day in the wharf area of the City by the Bay. In a year I had seen Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and now San Francisco, and I was sure San Fran was the best one. It was something about the feel of the city and the history. I was enamored at the time by hippy culture and philosophy, as was my traveling partner, and we reveled in going to Haight-Ashbury and walking by the Dead’s old Victorian. God we were tourists!
Now it was time to go. We made a marathon dash to the Grand Canyon. It was like we were bar hopping across the U.S., each sight a different watering hole. We arrived at America’s most famous gash at six in the morning. It was November, and the wind was whipping up the canyon furiously, blowing us and the Japanese tourists back to our cars and down to a pancake breakfast at the monolithic lodge set up to accommodate thousands of gawkers per day. Michael took the wheel after breakfast and I got some sleep as we headed east, to Albuquerque.
Enter the Storm System. After a couple of beers in the hotel room we half heartedly watched the weather report and snoozed off. The following morning we awoke to six inches of snow on the ground. It was still coming down hard.
I wanted to head out right then, but Michael, being a big guy with big guy appetites, was ready for another pancake breakfast. We ate at Denny’s as I worriedly surveyed the winter wonderland piling up outside. Big rigs thundered down Forty as Michael sopped up his blueberry syrup. Finally I insisted that we go, using the excuse that we had to get gas and check the pressure in the bald tires.
After the service station attendant unsuccessfully tried to sell us good tires we headed down the ramp and onto I-Forty. It took us about six hours to outrun the storm and about another six hours to reach Oklahoma City. All the while huge trucks were throwing icy debris up at my windshield and wind gusts were blowing my little three cylinder around like a duck on Lake Erie in January. We crashed at the hotel again and awoke, again, to the storm that wouldn’t die. We had a repeat of the day before, and we finally made it to Memphis, where the weather man predicted rain for the next day. Rain, we could handle rain.
Now I’ve done some driving in my life, and in some pretty hairy situations, but driving through the Appellations in the worst storm system I’ve ever experienced has got to be the worst. After a while I was longing for the snow again. The snow offered a little traction. A reader might ask, “Why in the hell didn’t we stop and let the storm move past?” Actually, that was what Michael was asking me quite a bit by that time, but a year away from your gal is a year away from your gal, and no damn storm system was going to keep me from my gal. We skidded on.
It’s about thirty miles from Statesville, North Carolina to Winston-Salem. The rain was still coming down in sheets but was easing up a little by the time we made it to the I-77 overpass. There was just a little way to go. I was almost home.
In the distance, up the highway, we made out a white sports car, stopped, in the middle of the road facing toward the right shoulder. There was a figure in white waving its arms frantically. We had to stop.
When we got up to the car we found a young woman who had lost control of her car and spun out into the middle of the highway. She was soaking wet and hysterical. While Michael and I were pushing her car over to the shoulder we heard a large crash to our rear, and we realized that there had been another accident. A tractor trailer had rammed into a car slowing down in order not to run into us. This had caused a multi-car pile up. We were going to be there for a while.
After waiting around in the rain to give our statement to a State Trooper we finally pulled onto I-Forty for the last time during the trip. We were soaked, tired, frustrated, and smelly. Oddly enough though this story is the one that Michael and I relate to, and revisit, more than any other in our large arsenal of stories.