Jed Wolf

The call of the open road beckoned me backwards. After eighteen years of jumping from one relationship to another to avoid being alone, I 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.

At thirty-eight, I wondered what it would be like to pull over for my sixteen-year-old self. “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 back then. “Don’t worry, I’ll never drop you off,” I said, remembering the day my dad did.

“There’s no place to stop,” he’d 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. 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 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 pickup. No matter how I tried, I never made my father proud.

My first taste of the road came earlier, 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’s drop-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 removing his exploring hand from my leg, 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 this 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.

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 mustache, 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. 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 to the driver. Getting off on acid was like truth serum until too far gone to speak. Unlike pot which made me paranoid psychedelics had turned me into Tarzan. Faster, smarter – an incorruptible, Superman when I was able to resist the kriptonite of needing attention. I could sprint from the math teacher like a confident deer and hide equally well, until I couldn’t.

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.

The summers between boarding school held their own stories, many lost to booze, I barely remember like driving the Trans-Canada to Vancouver Island in the little red truck my father bought me after I trashed his Land Cruiser. My parents had rented their house that year, and with nowhere to go, I took off. Lonely, I picked up hitchhikers for company. If whoever sat next to me didn’t find me attractive, I was adrift, and terrified I wasn’t cute enough for the world outside of boarding school, I blasted the radio while racing across Saskatchewan and Alberta toward the Pacific.

Gothic-like columns of red cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir drew me toward glacial mountains. I’d never imagined anything more perfect but raced past that as well. At an empty dune parking lot at sunset, gazing at the Pacific, I realized there was no way to fill the emptiness. It would follow me through Washington and Oregon, where I picked fruit just to be among people, and perhaps catch a glance before screaming on to northern California to visit another former teacher Peter Fish, but that’s another story.

The road brought up things too difficult to talk about with anyone, but my childhood friend April. Her family moved her to Southern California. Our bond made me stick out my thumb in Connecticut.. Pulling back onto her road with my dog beside me, I felt desperate but still not ready to answer the questions she asked with her eyes decades before.