In the morning rain was falling, the first rain I'd seen since early in the trip, in eastern Montana. I didn't like it. Gray and rainy did not help the already unprepossessing Platte River Valley, which runs east-west across the bottom of Nebraska. The region does have attractions, but I didn't have time to follow the Oregon Trail monuments, and the sandhill cranes that pass through in spring in the tens of thousands were long gone. A rainy August drive along Interstate 80 provides little in the way of the sublime, especially after a month in central Australia and two days driving across the southwest and Rockies. In other words, the subtle beauty of the Plains escaped me.
I filled the gas tank at a Pilot station in Wood River; later in the day I did it again at another truck stop in Stuart, Iowa. I can go between 250 and 290 miles on a tank of gas, then I have to stop and spend another fifty or sixty dollars. It would be cheaper to fly.
A large semi-truck charged around me (I stick with sixty mph), with a trailer painted to advertise the "Museum of Funeral Customs." I passed a turn-off to Buffalo Bill's ranch, then another to a Pony Express station. Early on I came to the town of Cozad, where when very young I stayed the night in a motel next to some sort of chemical or fertilizer plant, and I can still summon up the strong and acrid and strange odor, overwhelming and like nothing else before or since. Along the same stretch of highway I changed my first tire when I was fifteen and on a road trip with my mother, and I was quite proud of myself, though a little less so when we got to a gas station and a man there, after praising me, gently pointed out that I had put the lug nuts back on backwards.
North America is so unlike Australia or other places for me simply because I have a history here, a set of memories decades in the making, blanketing the land.
I listened to Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, which I had listened to in Nevada back in June, and I was at moments surprised to look out the windows and see grasslands rather than arid mountains. The author says of his eleven-year-old self, "I was small and squeaky and a lot more articulate than I was mature...." I thought, I've known kids like that.
I also drove in silence for stretches, devoting my self to last day ruminations. I didn't feel quite ready to come to any large conclusions. I felt moved, changed, but I could not say exactly how. I also felt added to, and that was easier to tally. I saw places I hadn't seen before. I ate new foods. I slept in many different beds and locations. Most significantly, though, I had spent time with people I had not seen for some time, and I had met new people; I talked and talked and listened too.
So many of the encounters were brief, a pause on the way or trail. I've written about some of the people, but not all. For some reason today I was thinking about a man I met near the end of the Larapinta Trail, in his sixties with the requisite white beard, and walking alone. His half-buttoned shirt was stained with white sweat lines, and white bits of spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth; his teeth were stained as if he chewed. He had walked the trail once before, years past, and he was unusual in that he was a local, living in Alice Springs. Rachael had asked him for how long, and he said twelve years, but he had also lived in Alice back in the seventies and eighties. He was a hydrologist. He said he owned three houses, one in Alice, one in Adelaide, and one in Tasmania. Rachael said that sounded wonderful, but he shook his head and laughed and said, "no, that means three mortgages, and that means too much work." Most of the people I met his age were retired. His wife much preferred Adelaide. "She hates Alice," he said. "I sort of tricked her to moving back; she'd said she'd never come back, but I told her it would be for just a year. Then I said just one more year. Now it's been twelve." He laughed and shook his head again, as if to acknowledge, I'm a bastard. I wanted to talk to his wife, ask what she had to say about Alice, about the one year leading to twelve. Rachael asked why his wife wasn't with him on the trail. "Oh no," he said, "she's not up for this. Maybe a day hike. Maybe. She likes her comforts too much."
I like mine too, but I didn't find the trail particularly uncomfortable. Actually it got easier as we went along, as I settled into the days of walking, nights by a campfire, and for a home a tent with just the mesh between me and the sky. No, that just got easier and easier. Sometimes it was hard to negotiate in new places, in the cities, but I got better fairly quickly. When I returned to Melbourne I got around without trouble. But I remembered in Southern Cross station, when I walked past the pay phones, how in my first hours even making a call was apparently beyond my abilities. I'm initially an anxious and inept traveler, but then I improve, and eventually I don't want to go home.
Late in the afternoon I crossed from Iowa into Minnesota without celebration. The rain had long since stopped. As home got nearer, I was excited to see Alix and Naomi, the boys, Jenifer and Lea and Kim, and everyone else; but I wasn't looking forward to the end of the trip. After two months I'd settled into movement and the novelty of new places and new people; I had come to take such change as the normal course of my days, rather than something out of the ordinary. What would be strange and require adjustment would be home, the pile of mail waiting for me, the responsibilities of my job and of fatherhood, my own familiar house and bed.
That sounds a bit gloomy. But I was happy to park in front of Naomi and Jenifer's new house and find the boys in the backyard playing. Winston looked at me without recognition, but when I spoke he said, "granddaddy?" I said, yes, it was me, and he asked if I wanted to see how fast he could run, and I did, so he showed me, and then Jackson needed to show me too.
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