Jed Wolf

The call of the open road beckoned me backwards. By 1993, I’d travelled enough to never want to travel again. I’d gone from one relationship to another for eighteen years to avoid being alone and buckled up for the next 2,500 miles with only my dog. Phantoms began awakening on the George Washington Bridge before secrets from earlier road trips stuck their thumbs out for a ride.

I wondered what it would be like to pull over for a sixteen-year-old. “Where you going?” I asked Olive. As clueless and trusting as ever, she looked more innocent than I was when I’d hitched to California at that age. “Don’t worry, I’ll never drop you off,” I said, remembering the day I was.

“There’s no place to stop,” my dad yelled after I kept insisting he pull over. Flying along in six lanes of westbound traffic, I wanted him to let me out before my eyes welled up.

The familiar congestion and white-knuckle intensity of I-80 beyond the bridge made me release a quick sob for the kid Id been when just past the Jersey Turnpike, I noticed a wide shoulder and enough of a gap between speeding traffic to veer off. Idling among familiar road debris, I saw the defeat in our faces. I could taste the asphyxiation. I heard the same sort of truckers laying on their horns and felt myself saying, “Don’t worry Dad,” before he sped away, instead of “Don’t let me go.”

Though I might’ve then, I never called my father an asshole at sixteen or ever. That word was reserved for me. He used it a lot when I first got my license. “All we need is two hundred-and fifty-dollars dad,” I said calling him from a jail in Canada, but all he did was call me an asshole and hang up. My buddy’s mother sprung us. I didn’t know if my father ever paid her back and never asked for fear of sounding like an asshole, yet after tipping over his Land Cruiser twice off a wooded hillside in Tennessee then righting it myself with a winch, he bought me a pick-up. No matter how I tried, I never made my father any prouder.

I rode my first motorcycle hitching to boarding school at fifteen. The eighty-mile trip included twenty miles on 684 from Bedford, NY to Brewster. When a long-haired dude with Harley boots and a ratty bandana stopped, I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t say no to a lot back then and clung to strangers for dear life.

After my father dropped me off, the first car that swerved onto the shoulder was a brown Volvo. I was used to getting rides easily and knew the drill. “Where you going,” the guy asked. “California,” I said like in a movie. “How does Chicago sound?” “Great,” I said, masterfully tossing my pack in the back. Relieved to be in someone’s company, he had his hand on my knee by Stroudsburg.

Eight hours later he’d paid for a room in Cleveland and went to get takeout. I showered and sat on the bed drinking beers and watching TV until he never showed up. Not used to being rejected by anyone other than my parents, I woke up hungover and alone. The previous day’s ride was a dream. We’d covered so much territory and I’d smoked so many cigarettes insisting he be patient while wondering what a life in Chicago might be like with him.

But I was used to wiping away the past, sticking my thumb out and facing forward. Boarding school taught me to act cheerful emerging from the woods so no one would suspect what I’d been learning from one of my teachers. I stood on I-80 more conscious of my lengthening wind-blown hair than anything else.

Passing beneath Chicago the second time, it was unnerving how little I recalled from the earlier trip. Nothing came to mind grinding across the plains except the familiar pull of the Rockies and LSD. I’d felt like a seasoned trucker lugging through Wyoming in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. The driver hadn’t suggested anything in return, not even conversation so I drew his portrait to pass the time and offered it to him. “You should keep that,” he said before letting me out east of Salt Lake City, but I didn’t want memories. Station wagons, staring children, non-stop talkers and perverts could easily be erased. I’d been anxious back then to see April.

The guy behind the wheel of the dented Volkswagen bus, with peeling paint and “sock it to me” adhesive flowers looked exhausted. Unnerved by his unshaved jaw and thick moustache, the familiar-looking weave-covered rubber-band pulling back his hair might have put me at ease if only I’d had enough facial hair to look less like the girls I grew up with, but cancelling the thought I climbed in. After four days on the road, I must have looked cool enough for him to ask if I’d tripped. “Oh yeah,” I said, relieved to not be lying.

Blotter acid reminded me of caps and pictures of me and my sister dressed up as cowboys in Scottsdale, Arizona when we were cute. “Once cute wore off my father took brooding pictures of me posing in trees,” I said, saying too much. Getting off on acid was like truth serum until wonderfully too far gone to speak. Unlike pot which made me paranoid at boarding school, psychedelics made me feel like Tarzan. Faster, smarter, incorruptible, and able to resist temptation, I could sprint from the math teacher like a confident deer and hide equally well. I could certainly keep it together with this guy.

Getting off while crossing the Bonneville salt flats was incomprehensible but pulling off-road toward mirages beneath the fruit-loop-colored ranges was outstanding. At some point after other tire tracks disappeared, we lifted into heaven but that’s all I remember before snow appeared in Donner Pass. “Okay Bud,” he said, dropping me at a ski area near where starving pioneers ate each other.

It felt better heading to April’s the second time. I’d expected memories of my first trip to see her to be far worse and began taking pictures of Olive in the snow.

There were other trips I took alone in summers away from boarding school. I barely remember driving the Trans-Canada to Vancouver Island. My parents rented their house my junior year, and with nowhere to go, I took off in the little red truck my father bought me. I was lonely so I picked up hitchhikers for company.

Sitting on a log near Thunder Bay overlooking Lake Superior, I realized how much I needed to be wanted. If whoever sitting next to me didn’t find me attractive I was adrift, but that was terrifying, so I blasted the radio picking up whoever I could while racing across Saskatchewan and Alberta toward the Pacific where I’d met pervs before. I blew by Calgary and Lake Louise stopping only at restrooms. Though I lost a flute, a down jacket and several pieces of clothing, without hitchhikers, nothing could take my mind off the shame. I remember it well on the ferry to Vancouver Island listlessly looking for killer whales.

Gothic-like columns of red cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir drew me toward a perfection of glacial mountains. I’d never imagined anything more perfect but raced past that as well. When I reached an empty dune parking lot at sunset and gazed at the Pacific, I realized there was no way to fill the emptiness which was to follow me through Washington and Oregon where I picked fruit to be among people, before heading to northern California to visit Peter Fish who always had an answer, but that’s another story.

One of those summers I tripped my ass off with one of New Mexico’s foremost archeologists and the hottest man I ever met who left me at the base of the Enchanted Mesa to get rid of me.

The road brought up things too difficult to talk about with anyone, but my brief phone conversations with April had changed the course of my life I hoped as I pulled onto her road relieved to reunite with my old friend at last.