The Long Way Home

I get off I-35 in Encinal, gas up, and head straight west on 44, a quiet two-laner with a rumble strip on the narrow shoulder and a wide stretch of sparse brown grass between the road and fence line. While I meet occasional white pickups, all seemingly driven by a sunglassed man wearing a cap, I see no one in my lane — not behind when I glance in the mirror, not three or four miles ahead on the straight flat road. It’s a quiet Sunday morning, and except for that mohawked caracara standing near the fence, I’m mostly alone.

I’ve happily left behind the interstate with its SUVs and pickups flying by at 85 and eighteen-wheelers sometimes filling both lanes. Granted, the fastest way from Laredo to Minnesota is still on I-35, the route everyone gets herded on to by Google Maps, but the saner, less-traveled course — a mostly straight red line on the Texas road map open on the empty seat next to me — is farther west. After twelve miles on 44, I turn north on US 83. I haven’t been on this road in more than 15 years, not since I worked at TAMIU and drove to Big Bend for a week of camping and hiking. Like then, the broad sky, the monte stretching out in every direction, and the unhurried days of travel ahead calm me like a good book.

Beyond Catarina, the highway angles northwest through Asherton to Carrizo Springs, the oldest town in Dimmit County, where it splits — US 277 running west to Eagle Pass and US 83 bearing north. Carrizo Springs is on the fold of my map, so I flip it over. Even though I continue north, I can’t help thinking of points west and of Cormac McCarthy, who died two months ago at age 89. Years ago, I was converted by his Old Testament voice in Blood Meridian and the stripped-down dialogue in All the Pretty Horses. I was rapt by No Country for Old Men — its blunt, spare description of gunfire in Eagle Pass and the bleeding Llewelyn Moss telling himself, “Just keep puttin one foot in front of the other,” as he crossed the bridge to Piedras Negras. And after reading his last works, The Passenger and Stella Maris, published together and slip cased, I went directly back to the first and read both again. Unlike Alicia Western, the brilliant schizophrenic whose conversations with a psychiatrist comprise the substance of Stella Maris and who doesn’t “have the luxury of forgetting things,” I do. And so I read and often reread.

A couple hundred yards ahead, a vulture spreads its cape of black wings, lifts off the road, and rises slowly over the brush. As I get closer, I keep my eyes on the spot where he’d stood on the asphalt, but when I pass it, I see nothing more than the flat, battered hide and bones of some small varmint. In the mirror above the dashboard, I watch the vulture drift down, settle back on the road, and stand, tall as a small child, over the carcass. 

US 83 skips through Crystal City, steers mostly due north for over 60 miles past dense stands of mesquite and huisache and nopales, and runs through Uvalde. South of Concan, on the southwest edge of the Hill Country, the road weaves between long rounded knolls dark with trees. Before and after the sign for Garner State Park, where traffic is steadier, I pass through the shadows of live oaks. Then, the road rises and falls and twists below rocky outcrops before gradually dropping back to the plain and straightening as if someone up ahead had suddenly yanked the slack out of it.

Not far from Segovia, US 83 merges with I-10 West. At 1:30 I pull off the interstate at a rest area a few miles from Junction, go to the passenger side, open the small cooler, take out a brisket sandwich, Cheetos, an apple, and a bottle of water, and eat while standing by the door. I was last on I-10 this far from San Antonio in the spring of ’78 and heading west to the Guadalupe Mountains. I was 20 and drove a 550 Honda motorcycle that I had bought from Bobby Dallman for $800 back when we both worked at the Lamberton Stockyards. At the time, most of what I thought I knew about motorcycles I’d picked up from Robert Pirsig’s 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Sure, Pirsig admits in a prefatory note that “[w]hat follows is…. not very factual on motorcycles,” but his story about riding from Minnesota to the Pacific coast with his young son Chris convinced me — naïve as I was — that I could do this. With the help of a more detailed manual, I gradually learned how to loosen the rear axle to draw up the drive chain, adjust the tappets, set the timing, gap the plugs, and install an oil cooler, windshield, and cruise control. The notion of riding cross country on a cycle in the 70s started out as a purely romantic dream, but at a time when I needed it, it turned into a memorable education about the machine, landscape, money, crosswinds and shockwaves, impulsive people, patience, and endurance.

Near four o’clock, I pull into a gas station in Winters, TX, and shut off the Jeep. When I swing the door open, the heat slams into me, and I slowly get out. My legs are stiff, but they loosen up as I scrub the splattered grasshoppers and butterflies off the windshield while the pump runs regular in the tank. Then, I go inside. A round whiskered young man wearing a cap stands before a teenage clerk at the checkout counter, and a tan middle-aged woman wanders past the glass cooler doors in the back. Then, from speakers near the ceiling comes Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” and I have a sudden flashback to the early 1980s: my 550 Honda parked with the back tire against the curb on Lamberton’s Main Street; the sun glistening off the chrome pipes, spokes, rims, and sissy bar; and from inside the Pitstop the crack of balls on the pool table and Billy Joel’s song played over and over again on the jukebox. 

By late afternoon, I pass through Abilene, and with several hours of daylight left, I press on. North of Anson, 83 veers west, so I take US 277, which continues north and eventually intersects US 283. In Seymour, TX, after I check in at a ten-room motel facing the highway, I drive down the street to Chicken Express for a three-piece dinner with mashed potatoes. Later, I sit in a wooden rocker on the porch outside my room and read Pirsig until streetlights come on and I strain to see the print on the pages of my battered paperback.

In the morning before I leave, I pull the Oklahoma map from the door pocket where I also keep those for Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota and a paperback copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I first read this when I was a high school junior and again as an undergrad in a lit class and later happily discovered that Robert Pirsig packed it with his camping gear and tools for their trip west. I’ve read it several times since then just as I’ve reread a number of other books —  Orwell’s 1984, Gardner’s Nickel Mountain, Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Spiegelman’s Maus, Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, Coates’s Between the World and Me, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front — all in hopes of absorbing them and that they might become as much a part of me as the brisket, that Billy Joel song, and the sunshine now filling the inside of the Jeep.

On the Texas map I check my route on 283 and then get back on the road. An hour later, I drive the long bridge over the Red River and cross into Oklahoma.

From the top of a rise, the empty gray-black ribbon of highway stretches 15 or 20 miles north, first down into a long valley speckled with black cattle and eventually up another grade, hazy in the distance, the thin line of the blacktop rising to the blue sky. I hold the map against the steering wheel and glance from the quiet road ahead to the red line on the paper and back to the road. I still have a long way to go, but there’s no hurry. And I’ll likely be back this way. Returning is, after all, a way to gauge how little or how much I’ve changed. “It’s nice sometimes,” as Pirsig says, “to go over familiar paths.”