Life has been a blur since the night C. and I left our car in the driveway of the little house we rented on the edge of the Vegas sprawl. We flew back to Ohio on a jam-packed redeye to collect our belongings. Traveling on Spirit Airlines is a mythic test of a person’s spiritual fitness, and I spent four hours squished in the middle seat, fighting a gargantuan woman for the armrest.

Four days later, I loaded a 15-foot U-Haul with our furniture and pointed it southwest. I drove alone to spare C. thirty hours in a juddering truck. She’ll fly to Vegas in a few days, probably on Spirit Airlines, and I’m not sure who will suffer more.

In Indiana, I drove past the world’s largest mailbox, and I slowed down to admire the holiday lights on a lone farmhouse in the night. In Missouri, I had a fantastic cup of cinnamon coffee at a Flying J before crashing at a Super 8 somewhere in the Ozarks. I followed the path of Route 66, pushing sixteen hours behind the wheel, and by the time I hit Oklahoma, a fugue state had taken hold. Highway hypnosis. White line fever.

A flipped semi burned in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 44. Hallucinatory signs began to appear: Visit the Infant Jesus of Prague. Exit right for Garth Brooks Boulevard. A billboard in Tulsa demanded freedom for women in Iran. As my U-Haul swerved across nine lanes of Amazon delivery trucks, a neon sign asked Are you prepared to meet Jesus? and I was certain I was going to die.

Billboards across the panhandle told me to find nirvana, win a free furnace, and invest in crypto. The radio encouraged me to purchase Patriot Supplies, a bundle of freeze-dried food that will help me “prepare for what’s coming” because I’ll definitely need at least 2000 calories per day. The radio said a record number of guns were confiscated from Americans this year, and eighty percent were loaded. An earthquake in West Texas sent tremors across Amarillo, but I felt only the shake of the truck. I saw a shooting star and a half-moon blazed in the rearview. A sign flew by like a koan: Gusty Winds May Exist.

By the time I left Texas, my vision was vibrating from the stutter and shake of the interstate. Rowdy families, sunburnt truckers, and teenage gangs crowded the Flying J at one o’clock in the morning. The motels in Tucumcari were booked, so I pushed another hundred miles west to my second Super 8, where I collapsed and dreamt about mileage. I woke up in New Mexico near a town called Las Vegas (pop. 13,157) which felt like an omen. A lone cow wandered down the ramp to Interstate 40. I sped across the Continental Divide and continued into Arizona.

In addition to the usual slate of vintage electro and motorik, I soundtracked my journey with an audiobook of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, one of those texts I’ve always felt like I’ve read even though I haven’t. The desert washed past my windshield as the narrator said, “The entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarves, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silence within.”

A few miles west of Kingman, I hooked north on 93, where I was the only vehicle on a Saturday night. Entering Vegas felt like a dream as ‘Fade to Grey’ played on the dashboard while my headlights swooped along shadowy mountains on a vacant parkway. Then a field of light appeared below me, and I remembered Las Vegas means The Meadows.

Visage – Fade to Grey (12″ Version)

Polydor, 1980 | More

The sun went down at 8:49pm, the moon is in its last quarter, and I’m wondering if the health of a society can be pegged to the nerves of its motorists.

First off, I am a phenomenal driver with a solid resume: raised in metro Detroit, six years of food delivery, hundreds of thousands of miles of cross-country driving, and no accidents yet. I’m accustomed to the gawkers, droolers, speed freaks, and road ragers that clutter our highways. But lately, it seems like more Americans are unraveling behind the wheel. 

Cars drift at twenty miles per hour, veering into the gravel and weeds. Yesterday a Jeep came crashing into my lane while I idled at a red light. If I hadn’t reversed, I would have lost the front half of my car. Today a lady chewed my bumper while I puttered along in a column of slow-moving rush hour traffic. I could see her in the rearview, giving me two middle fingers, rotating her arms like a referee. Then she stuck her head out the window and screamed. She drove a Honda Civic and had a professional hairdo, which made the fury on her face more frightening. Where does this rage come from?

Strange, the psychological liberties granted by three thousand pounds of metal and a windshield. I doubt that woman would have given me two rotating middle fingers at the grocery store. Perhaps the expectation of instant access, immediate gratification, and center-of-the-worldness has spilled from our screens into our cars.

The Lake Forest Oasis Service Plaza on Interstate 94 is one of my favorite moments in America. It’s a modern marvel where you can eat fast food on top of eight lanes of freeway traffic, hypnotized by an 80mph river of concrete, steel, and glass. Built in 1959, this tollway plaza just north of Chicago became a destination for motorists, and it was renovated in 2003 to “give patrons better views of the highway.” Last time I was there, a Buddhist monk in an orange robe and sneakers paced in front of the Taco Bell counter, anxiously waiting for his order. An angry man in flip-flops kept saying “shoot me an email” to nobody in particular while he pumped more quarters into the candy machine.

A ten-hour drive out of New York into the woods of the Midwest. I’ve missed the heat and hum of the road. I even enjoyed the endless stretch of Pennsylvania, where the highway is choked with Amazon trucks and speed traps. While pumping gas, I closed my eyes and listened to the interstate traffic. Sounds like the sea.

Crossing Interstate 77 somewhere between West Virginia and Ohio, I thought about the night I drove through this area four years ago when I took my father’s ashes to Saginaw Bay. I listened to paranoid talk radio for hours, and I still remember the frantic voice of a late-night caller who said, “We can’t get the blood out of our eyes fast enough to see what’s coming next.” This observation felt true during those turbulent weeks before the 2016 election. This year it feels like a mantra. Best we can do is keep our vision clear. Do whatever it takes to stay healthy, rational, and present.

Those midnight shows also played a commercial for freeze-dried food with a chipper man who’d say, “Just a few easy steps and your family is eating a delicious meal instead of fighting for scraps in a food riot.” Hopefully that commercial remains insane.

SUSS – Road Trip Part 3 (The Lonely Path)

High Line | Northern Spy Records, 2019 | Bandcamp

You can never see further than your headlights—an old slice of trucker philosophy that makes more sense with each passing year, the way I move through life, pretending that I know where the road is heading even though I never have a clue. Time and again, I must learn that I can get ready for dinner and I can get ready for bed and not much else.

Alessandro Cortini – Scappa

Forse 3 | Important Records, 2015 | Bandcamp

One of the finest night-driving songs that I know.