The nebulous magic of the road began with clouds sagging over our heads like water sausages. The grace or disaster weather changes bring is a constant concern.
Today we rode with a carefree smiling Southerner cutting our way under a gray misty blanket. Dan from Alabam’ offered us a ride in his loud, dusty old Ford. He pulled over by tropical looking Mississippi woods; kudzu vines clutching, crawling onto trees and fences. Dogwood trees sparkled with their white four petal flowers. Stardust has been sprinkled over these humble trees!
Dan grew into one of those hitchhiking dream characters not unlike Tom Joad. He pulls you along, does his mesmerizing act, then softly draws the curtain to leave you by the roadside again. Mary jumped into the front, I in the back just outside of Corinth, Mississippi. The biggest wad of chewing tobacco I could ever imagine fit into a human being’s jaw convinced me he must have had a bone tumor.
The backseat held his only belongings. Blankets, plastic bags, paper bags too stuffed like turkeys with clothes, a worn edged suitcase, a frying pan, and a cooking pot set in the well with three potatoes rolling on the floor. He was headed to Kansas for a truck driving job. We rode along to Memphis – the car radio blared and crackled loudly, then softly.
“The sound knob is busted”, he grinned.
More than once it came on so fast and loud it was like being surprised by a young child blowing a trumpet in your ear. When he talked to us he smiled as happy as a child seeking approval. He almost burst with a sense of feeling light and free in the expectation of starting a new life.
We then slowly made our way through Memphis rush hour with a few short rides. A darkening rainy night began to take center stage. We slept under a dry noisy overpass of Interstate Forty, after waiting two hours with no luck of going further. In Arkansas, “The Land of Opportunity” no one took the time to give us a ride in the rainy gloom.
The next day Lady Luck was with us. We lounged for the day in Jeff and Lynn’s poor man’s Winnebago, snail crawling the Interstate in their renovated 1952 school bus. Jeff spun stories in a melodic southern drawl as he sunk back in his taped-up seat.
If it had wings that bus would have made the perfect eccentric airplane of Don Quixote, with its jet cockpit skylight Jeff had installed himself on the roof. Lynn portrayed herself to me as a gun-slinging cowgirl. She slung Jeff’s home-made bone handled knife strapped in a sheath on her hip.
I overheard her brag to Mary, “I once had to slice a dude ‘cross the throat. Had a switchblade then.”
We got out on the east side of Oklahoma City and spent the night with a friend of Mary’s. A needed break from the road.
INSTANT NOODLES 