The Loneliest Road

The last day of my drive west began with coffee, two eggs over easy, hash browns, wheat toast, and two sausage links, paid for with a voucher, just a tiny scrap of paper that for all I know is hand-cut every day. All were quite serviceable; the Garden of Eat’n does what it does very well.

In the next booth over, a white-haired couple helped each other with condiments, while out in the otherwise empty main dining area, a table of construction workers seemed to be waiting out the grey, rainy morning.

After eating my meal, I asked the cashier to change a $5 bill for ones and left two for my waitress. Breakfast is cheap, so I always leave at least $2 a person. I got that from my mom, who got it from my dad. I like it because it takes the math of tipping and installs a kindness floor.

I thanked the cashier again as I passed, once more ignoring the dim gift shop across from her, though I did think twice about the hand-knitted potholders sitting beside her in a small basket with a hand-written sign.

I walked out into the light rain, crossed the lot to my room, packed up, then stopped by the front desk to turn in my keys. I also checked for extra charges, since I had called my own phone from the room phone the night before when I accidentally left it in the trunk, hidden under the suitcase I'd repacked for Atlanta. “Nope, you’re all set!” came the answer, so I wished them a good day and got back in the car.

It's indulgent, but I feel like isolating the minutiae of that morning a bit. Part of the reason, I think, is because if High School Ian or even College Ian got a time-traveling postcard from the Best Western Paradise Inn and Resort in Fillmore, Utah, either of those two hopelessly anxious young men would be very surprised. So much of these five days seems unthinkable even now. In fact, on this flight to Atlanta for my friend Starla’s wedding, I’m sitting next to a pilot who just flew from Paris to Salt Lake City and is now deadheading back to Atlanta. I find that amazing, so foreign that it just took me a few attempts at conjugating the term “deadhead," but even Joe the Pilot found my five 8+ hour days of driving worthy of a “Wow.” I feel like part of a pretty cool club.

Another reason to spend a little time on Wednesday morning is that the day itself will not take long to describe, the last in a series of singular days. My first drive was about the departure, the leap. The second drive felt like a realization, the thought of “I’m really doing this! I’m so far from all that I know!” The third drive brought doubts and fears; the same words as quoted above, but spoken in a panic. And, of course, the fourth drive was a symphony of water, forests, and rock that had very little to do with me at all.

Wednesday’s drive along US-50 simply happened. I do not mean to say that it was boring by any means. I haven’t watched rainstorms from so far off in a long time, perhaps since my time in the Southwest with my dad, and, driving into them, I gripped the wheel and hollered, in my best Fury Road mania, “What a lovely, lovely day!”

The drive was cyclical, is all. Ride a mountain range down into a wide valley, wonder if that shimmering darkness in the distance is a town or nothing at all, fly through said valley at high velocity while watching either rain or sunshine fall on the mountains ahead, then, once the mountains have grown to an appropriate size before me, climb them again in a series of switchbacks at a mere 55 mph, crest the ridge, rinse, repeat.

It deserved the name of the loneliest road. While there were cars enough that I had to pass and be passed a dozen times or so, the roadside signs of life were little. More than once I had to pull off and relieve myself in the middle of nowhere, since I had seen the next valley and knew no relief with four walls was coming anytime soon.

Also, the spotty service that closed out Tuesday continued throughout the day, with the signal availability becoming a physics problem writ large: can civilization, traveling as a wave, reach this single car through the hunched shoulders of rock on either side of the valley? Show your work.

I can’t even say I did a lot of thinking, really. Meditating perhaps. And maybe an hour or so of thinking of how this particular drive through this landscape reminded me so much of the time spent with Dad. That, coupled with the breakfast tipping rule, had the man himself on my mind, and I’ll admit that I chose to lean into the maddening solitude by yelling my head off at him for a fair stretch of road. Good talking to you, Dad.

Otherwise, I just drove, mechanically, letting my inertia from the prior days carry me through the requisite mountains and valleys needed to reach Reno.

Once there, I checked in and stopped in the hotel bar for another, far inferior patty melt, disappointing but a sign of being back in the world, I suppose. You don’t get paper vouchers at the Best Western Airport Plaza in Reno.

Like that, the drive was over, literally and emotionally. For the latter, I can burn across the country until the concerns and cares lose their grip and fly off behind me, but once they do, there’s not much driving left to do.

But I did it. I will accept the “wow” of the deadheading pilot, because I was in New York Saturday and in Reno Wednesday and experienced 2,970 miles in between. I would love to try and summarize more, but I barely had the words for everything I saw Tuesday. So again, I did it.

Now, back to Atlanta for a wedding weekend, then onward to Lake Tahoe.