Everywhere We Go From Here is Forward

With her picture-taking, and the hum of the road, a lot of the snow miles were not full of Maya. The highways north were well-prepared for this normal January weather. From Metropolis Illinois to St. Louis, the way exhilirated me. It was not dark, not hard to work together with the other lanes of drivers. This song is the best way to describe the way I used a 70s Pop Cultural Coccoon to make our inner children feel safe without any conscious meddling. The French Horn reminds me of the way you might remember colorful people you never see again. You remember people you love. Your place in America right now is an introspective drive-by in snow. We're getting further apart, physically, and how can it maybe be, this need only hurt everyone the least, possible, to be my bit of homesickness a few days more I couldn't stay?

The white world of the countryside, we preserved, photos to take with us - one of America's beauties. I didn't pick up on her taking her pants off, did I? Well, she had to change- I'll pass on saying why- so here we were in the humorous position of flying up I-24, over seventy miles per hour, with one passenger naked from the waste down. No truckers got lucky in the few minutes she took to change. You would think driving into snowfall would be distracting enough. Truthfully, it was a straight-away with good road maintenance. I thought it'd slow our trip, but the snow static was perfectly visible. I kept going near the same speed, with careful, careful lane changes. When you are not from snowy lands, the farmlands decorated in white can be quaint. She loved the ice on the bare tree limbs best.

I simply describe the tranquility of the drive up to St. Louis. Then it got a little Daimon Hellstrom because I passed what I could see, too late, is 70 heading to Kansas. I imagine that exit, too far over to the right, would have saved us the part of the trip that came for the next hour, really. It was beautiful, nostalgic, funny, scary in a running-low-on-gas way, and thankfully, over in time for more snow sloshing out of the long road from St. Louis that still seems like you’re in St. Louis, especially after you’ve already driven Lindbergh Avenue enough to see where life is a little tougher. This is the first place I feel we might’ve had our tag taken off with a screwdriver, but we’d been waiting for everything. We didn’t even stay to order anything, just paid for our gas at the pump. But we were supremely glad to get to a gas station. That Phillips 66 was a sweet relief, even if now our shoes were getting the dirty snow. We had driven all the way around the airport, no gas stations, and then tried the exit, Natural Shoulder Original Road. Would you believe it takes you back through the airport area again! Then you loop back out, and there it taunts again, and you say: Damn you, Natural Shoulder Original Road! But that detour started with us passing near the St. Louis Archway. This day couldn't be like the first one where we went inside, but that was the biggest thing we'd ever done besides make love and get married, that first day looking out of the arch.

So our moods were still OK here, but of course, I didn’t like driving in multilane traffic with the Fuel Light on. You cope. Your co-pilot tries to then come up with the closest course, but you keep driving, so it’s hard to get a fix, and you take Lindbergh Avenue just hoping it surely takes you to a gas station. But you’re going to go a few miles yet and need to turn back around, to get it right. Here was probably the overall most stressful part of this leg of the trip. This one is about one half the total.

We got a little turned around when we tried to guess where Taco Bell was off I70 in small town Missouri. We passed a place that sold the kind of not-pot they have in Dalton, Georgia, too. We put our money instead into some late afternoon burritos and…I will have to think, what she likes eating, the fries, cheesy fries is it? You had to go one way, and it was too snowy to park and eat. We had one of our best laughs, thinking about the Stuckwayze again. Imagine the fun of their population signs, city limits, and directions, we said. Our favorite sign was miles down a country road. Officially it would say: You Don't Know Where You Are Now! She was trying to feed me, and we were figuring it out. Then my dirty windshield became indecipherable. I had to carefully find the shoulder, which, fortunately, one for trucks, a big one, loomed right, so, with my water apparently frozen in my wipers, we took the soft drink, I popped out and cleared our view. Can't drive without a faithful window west! But I really did feel the danger of that moment. You realize life is fragile, when you're moving around so quickly and really do not see. You are so glad to get off alongside the highway and have Rom out of danger Oh, yes, ROM has always been our name for the Saturn since the day we bought him/her. The best part of this day, however, had been the first parts, but the belly of the beast stuff gave way to our determination to make it on, to Salina, KS. I enjoyed checking the distances with her. We had to slow down to drive around in Kansas City, which escaped the other drivers, but we stayed straight on while I bemoaned the lack of middle of the road reflectors.

But in the quiet of the snowfall in the daytime, and again as we sought out our safety, in our hotel, I guess you could say I could feel and sense the prayers for us. There were many times, and we agreed aloud there in Missouri, Buddha, Superman, Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, Allah, whomever wanted to help, Thor, we'd take it all! What it took to get us the rest of the way across the snowy midlands, however, from the time we shook free of the outskirts of KC (I was careful not to repeat my mistake from earlier), we at one point put on some BTS, and that energized us, even after we pulled out near that huge Monster Truck billboard for Trump. I really should look for a photo of it, but it was night, nothing doing for us but to muse over how it loomed over this darkened Kansas highway. You would see billboards about Jesus and Gospel radio and Republican candidates, as though that were the very deliberate standard, while windmills loomed impossibly large above.

But with night fallen, now we were uncovering temperatures nearly lower than any other we'd known! Yet, even with the best coffee I could summon, roadside, I had to switch off the heat. It was so low, and she was so patient, as we drove into nine degree Fahrenheit weather, a little like flight in the sky, or evocative of the cold of space. But this kept me awake, in good spirits. Here, in the night, is where she said one thing that made me realize, in the little reality of our car all these miles, we were moving from one dream over to the one new place promising us the most. Everywhere we go from here is Forward.

By that point, I realized we'd have to see which Top Ten things we'd entertained ourselves, saying, on the trip, and that one was my Number One. We did the joke about the Quilt Museum, and anything advertising Quilts afterwards, because we made it a hard-core obsession for a rando character, professing surprise as a surprising source for a love of quilts. But this is the fuckin' Quilt Museum, man! Are you kidding me? We had all the fun with billboards we could manage. Lots of places offering you a pretty nice place to stay and take in the Kansas wilderness. But a lot of that is for Thursday, I just imagine it started Wednesday with the original reference. Around Kentucky, maybe? We kept warm enough, but we used the adversity of the elements strategically, to keep me alert for the exit to Salina's Super 8. We were projected to get to both hotels I originally reserved about an hour and a half after dark, but both nights were more night hawk. I know it was about 11:20 when we got in. I'd turned around while listening to John Lennon's 'Why?' I felt so downtrodden, driving the six miles or so between us and the right exit to our hotel. WE'd stopped one early, for gas, and hadn't found the way back out West. Something in John's lyrics was very funny to me, because it described exactly how I was. No, it's "How." How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing How can I go forward when I don't know which way to turn How can I go forward into something I'm not sure of Oh no, oh no