The road is its own sort of drug–something about that mixture of hot asphalt sun, saddlebags hanging from metallic thunder biker leather, the lopping backs of eighteen wheel wagons following the buried ruts of old weather-beaten schooners now the winding arteries of this road-mad nation racing over the plains in a day, over the same hallowed ground that holds within its earthen embrace the bodies of untold settler children that were left in the dead womb of dry dirt plains as family, teary-eyed and aged by the merciless winds of the wastes, headed on west to whatever was out there to great them–maybe the promised land of California golden hills, maybe death itself; the only thing to do–carry on west, whatever may come.
And so I headed west to greet whatever may come, through rainy morning Illinois, over the Mississippi bridge and into preliminary west of Iowa cornfields and blue-hill misty distances. Iowa–the maternal heart of the mid-west, don’t ask me to explain–something about those rolling hills and gentle green reminds me of apron strings and childhood worn Amish quilts. Iowa, like the smile and giggle of the girl next door. Then the next glimpses of the real west of the furnace of hellfire plains and sulfur water–Nebraska: the death of many a settler’s dreams and desires, going from innocent green of eastern cornfields and slowly showing its ragged fury as you travel further into the empty abyss of the great plains–dry grass blowing harsh warnings through malevolent winds, dry and hot like the curses of Sioux ghosts rained down upon the white invader. Nebraska, who would on my return throw her full fury down upon me, trapped in rain-drenched and wind-blown car uttering libations to strange deities, who, like southern Wyoming, reminded me of slow death, robbed of the dignity of privacy, just out in the open beneath the oppression of the white-hot sun.
But how I dreamed of those mountains, and how many rises did I ascend hoping to see those far-off granite gods in the blue-haze of plains Colorado distances? So many times only greeted by the bone-dry miles of ranch grasslands and ghost town windmills pulling mud infused water from the tired earth while grappling with the wind’s talons. Such emptiness I never dreamed of there before me like a memory of complete defeat that stabs at you in the middle of the sweat-drenched night. Mile after innumerable mile, the hours passing like chains in a never-ending link of a prison line. But then, just when the last droplets of hope were about to evaporate into the desert wind, there they were, hidden by the haze so that I mistook them for looming clouds until only a few miles lay between us. My mountains, found again after the elapse of a decade and a half, when last I looked upon them with unsure adolescent eyes, now, with almost fifteen some years passing through the stream of time, again they greet me with their stoic majesty–the impervious Rockies rising like a prayer from the wastelands of the plains.
It seemed so utterly incongruous, to be walking down the streets of afternoon Colorado Springs after having spend hour upon hour traversing that deserted wasteland of the Plains. Though I had experienced it all firsthand, it seemed to me utterly astonishing that I was now at the doorstep of the Garden of the Gods. I can’t imagine what this almost otherworldly transition must have seemed like to the early settlers–it must have been nothing less, I suppose than going from hell to heaven in an instant, or at least to spot heaven’s gates in the darkest corners of hell.
And so it was that I went from dusty roadside cafes of Nebraska and eastern Colorado where it seemed that Hank Williams sr. should have been emanating from some distant, unseen transistor radio to nothing less than the Grateful Dead greeting me as I stumbled through the door of the sushi bar where Josh worked, haggard by the long sun-drenched highway. And it seemed no less incongruous to have Josh stand before me, old friend of way-back Milwaukee, greeting me with a back-breaking bear hug. He sat me down at a place at the end of the bar and before I my eyes could adjust to the lighting, he set down before me a bottle of aged scotch whisky. I was in the Rockies, and they were greeting me with outstretched arms.
