[ East Bay | Metroactive ]

The Untrodden Path: Get loose and fancy free on the open highway. Queen of the Road It isn't officially summer until you've taken a road trip By Jill Koenigsdorf About this time of year, certain whiffs of summer start working their way into the subconscious. You're driving down the road at eight o'clock at night and you realize it's still light out. Next thing you know, you're hanging up the hammock, buying little six packs of tomatoes and basil, and imagining warm nights eating outdoors in a few weeks time. Women usually feel a strong desire to paint their toenails or cut their hair. For men, perhaps it's taking a wire brush to the barbecue grill, amazed at the amount of wintered grease accumulated there. Despite "summer fog patterns" there is still an itchiness, a languor, a giddy yearning to shake off the old routines that sneak up on everyone this time of year. For me, it is not officially summer until I have taken a road trip. Even with gas prices topping the two-bill mark, when the days get longer and warmer I just want to venture down some small highway. It takes all of my will power between May and September not to just veer into Three A's, grab some maps, study them for five minutes, and head off. I believe my fascination with the open road was instilled at a very young age when we still had the old powder blue, cartoon-like Buick. A small hole had worn its way into the floorboards, handily in the backseat under a floormat whose job it was to keep the interior dry when the wet pavement sprayed up into the car. When not fighting with my brothers or asking my Dad if we could stop so I could pee, I could be found scrunched against the floor with my eyeball pressed to that hole, watching the freeway whiz by underneath. There was something thrilling about this, a tiny, reverse taste of what it must feel like to have a convert-ible where inside and outside overlap so wonderfully. The road trips my family went on every summer were our best moments, little reprieves from the daily bickering and suburban edginess that the rest of the year cast our way. The Road Trip was the one time in the whole year where spontaneity was not a dirty word. If we wanted to stop and take a gander at The World's Largest Prairie Dog or the Two-Headed Calf, my father would swerve right into that outpost without hesitation. Pecan shakes at Stuckies? Why not! Horsebackriding in a thunder-storm? What the hey! My fifteen-year-old brother wanting a shot behind the wheel on a remote country road? No harm there! My mom dancing with the owner of the trout hatchery while he gave our whole table complimen-tary cheesecake? No worries! The Open Road Every person has his or her own notion of the ideal road trip. One man I used to travel with wanted us to be so far away from civilization that even the sound of one car driving by on some highway far, far away was enough to make him pack up camp and head elsewhere. This presented grave problems for me, as I am a two-days-out-in-the-middle-of-Nowhere-with-everything-I-might-need-on-my-back/ one-day-at-a-nice-motel-with-showers-and-good-food-nearby sort of camper. I need that reward after roughing it. Yet it was with him I saw the Pygmy Owl blinking out at me from a snag in the Nevada desert at dusk, not flying away, just widening its golden eyes. Hiking with him on the cooling red rocks of Utah, I heard the reverberating, crescendoing symphony of mating canyon toads. So while there are definite up-sides to isolation, a balance is fine too. My friend Beverly and I fair better, looking for places where we can bring our dogs, and as a rule we always stop at huge, depressing malls where cornfields used to be to purchase our "health and beauty aids." These we can't wait to bring out at various dog- friendly motels where we reward ourselves after a long day's drive with masques, pink toenail polish (using those little foam toe-separators to help with the shellacking), small daily horo-scope books that give us advice about the coming months, and copious amounts of cheap lotions that smell like banana bomb-pops for our sun-parched skin. My friend CC and I, however, were veteran road-trippers. She grew up in Texas and came to know the road at a young age, in pick-up trucks. The one time we attempted to cross that state in a timely fashion, she quoted "The sun may rise/ the sun may set/ and you ain't out of Texas yet." All the men were lanky and shy and handsome and called us ma'am and all the diners featured enormous, bottomless glasses of Texas Iced Tea (lemon-ade, sugar and Lipton's). After each pit stop we'd be so wired from these tall, sugary tumblers that the miles would just fly by. Once after driving so long our eyes were crossing, I pulled over because I kept seeing these black bumps on the freeway. They tur-ned out to be tarantulas, lumber-ing out at dusk to soak up the waning warmth from the asphalt. We both had the same criteria for what makes a great trip: water, in its many manifestations. We ran through sprinklers at trailer parks. We filled little misters with water and an ice cube or two plus a few drops of rosewater and it would be the passenger's job to keep the driver lightly spritzed should she start to flag. We used water as our compass, our trip planner, choosing our routes according to where our guidebook said the best Hot Springs were. (The hands-down winner was a riverbank in Montana that actually had underground thermal pools scattered alongside the rushing, icy river water. We could soak in a pocket that was 104 degrees, and then just move over a foot and the chill in the water would take your breath away). Plus: we were aces at sneaking into motel swimming pools. (Once we possessed that standard small white towel and the correct attitude, no one looked twice.) All this plunging required sustenance. Decent truck-stop breakfasts were crucial for stamina. When ordering fried eggs early one Saturday in Nevada, before it heated up too much on Highway 50, The Loneliest Road in America, we asked for them flipped and cooked hard so there was no "glibble," as I referred to runny egg-stuff. The waitress nodded, turned to the fry cook and said, "Two good morning breakfasts and stomp on the eggs." I will never forget my first Ortega Burger chosen for lunch in Boyd, Texas, or my first Patty Melt ("it's like a Rueben but with hamburger instead of pastrami and no sauerkraut") in Dixon, California. Summer brings our craving for junk food, or is it comfort food? Salty, sugary things that seem okay to consume when one is spending so much time outdoors, playing. Born to Run And The Road Tape! How to put those miles behind you without appropriate music? Basically, a road tape must have songs to which you already know the words and can sing along with at volumes that can carry over the open windows and eighteen wheelers buffeting your vehicle between their gusts like a pinball. I start every road trip with Jim Morrison urging "Break on Through to the Other Side," at top volume. And, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," "King of the Road," "Born to be Wild," "Willin',""Me and Bobby McGee," "Take a Walk on the Wild Side," "Surfin' Safari," "Born to Run," "Truckin'," and "Like a Rolling Stone," are all de rigueur on road tapes. Why? Because they scream of freedom, running away, being on the loose, taking the untrodden path, and that's exactly what you're after. Of course, it is crucial to turn the tapes off occasionally and surf the static for the local radio gems. One of the most magical moments I've ever had was on some God-forsaken road near Durango, Colorado at sunset. (Everything comes alive every-where in the summer at sunset.) There were mountain goats in the hills above me and I suddenly happened to be in the radio waves of a Native American station playing drums and singing in a language that made me just turn the engine off and sit there until well into dark. Five minutes after I drove onward, I was already out of range. This was a rare treat as usually, you hit Oldies stations or scary talk radio shows that remind you why you live in California. Even decent Country is hard to come by. Once, in Arizona, I actually tuned into a station that played a "Triple Play of Billy Joel!!!" and my friend and I joked for miles in that baritone disc-jockey voice: "ALL Billy Joel, ALL the time." Smelling the Roses Everyone's packing styles are different too. CC and I would pack all the fun, impractical stuff: straw cowgirl hats and sunflower seeds (food that doubles as entertainment, as they must be cracked then their shells spit out the window). We brought sunglasses that made everything look soothing and rosy; candy bars that had to be consumed before they melted; cheap little dashboard fans from Grand Auto that in the heat of the afternoon made us fight over the direction of their air; and books of all sorts: guides to the best roadside diners, guides to the best roadside curios, summer hammock reads (I was always jealous that she was able to hunker down over a novel in a moving car and not feel like vomiting after a few seconds), and those hot springs guides. We kept great, tattered blank journals where we could chronicle what we saw and write down local expressions, ("It's hotter'n doughnut grease out there!") or the evocative names of mobile homes, (Bounder! Weekender! Nomad!), or our favorite Western words: chaparral, arroyo, butte, pon-derosa. CC knew the names of all the cactus we passed (ocotillo being a personal fave: little red blossoms in the Spring at the end of each thorny octopus arm,) and once, when we were trying to hunt down one of the few remaining drive-ins at dusk in Idaho, we drove through a green pasture as the day was cooling off and she sighed "what a great place to be a cow." The drive-in turned out to be showing some wonderful old horror movie and all the locals had brought lawn chairs and coolers with their din-ner and drinks inside. It doesn't get much better than that. Another friend was a master of organization. He could not relax unless firewood, snake-bite kits, water, gasoline, trail mix, sleeping pads, matches, bug repellent, Band-Aids, cutlery, teabags, pit-toilet shovels, you name it, were in the truck. Even things we could easily buy some-where on the road were tucked into his many plastic bins. While this preparedness was comforting, in a way, stopping and smelling the roses was definitely irksome to the guy. It is very important, you see, not to have too many deadlines and agendas on a road trip or it ceases to unfold with its many surprises. The Heat is On And now, it's summer again. Bugs are dancing in the beams of the last few movies being projected at that endangered species called The Drive-In. People are thinking about going bowling or actually ordering and eating one of those large soft-serve cones that contain no dairy products but are nonetheless called ice cream. Ferris wheels are being stopped on slow evenings to wait for pas-sengers and the lucky couple at the top is making out and will never forget those particular kisses. My nephews are playing golf somewhere in The Midwest, their arms tanned and the little hairs there bleached blonde from walking the green. My niece is falling in love with a Bay mare that's almost too big for her to ride but is perfect in every other possible way, named Trixie or Cookie and she is sneak-ing the horse carrots and sugar cubes whenever her instructor's not looking. I am swimming at night every chance I get, the water feeling even balmier with the air outside so cool. Someone's ordering a Campari and soda at one of the few Oakland cafes that's open past ten and she's bringing it to an outside table, where she will slip her shoes off and sip it through a straw. I am wondering if my Jeep, Blanche, has it in her to make it another few times to Utah or Nevada or New Mexico, and what brand new routes I could try. If so, would there still be coyotes and that oasis of a camp-ground we discovered in the shade of an apricot orchard? The one with the very trails used by Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid to hide out from the law? And I'm won-dering what ever happened to my family's old blue Buick, if it's long since been scrap metal and if the new owner ruined it by plugging up that hole in the floor. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]