Cue the music.\u00a0 We\u2019re going for a ride.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hot as Labor Day weekend should be, summer\u2019s last holiday, last chance to boil.\u00a0 We have our windows down and the music is passing between cars and mixing in the space between, pidgin notes and lyrics.\u00a0 The few radio stations not on a constant bulletin loop, CDs and MP3 players sucking up juice from the cigarette lighters, lighting jawlines with little green light, and old tape decks on their last legs.\u00a0 We represent all formats, all genres, all decibels.\u00a0 You could confuse us for a tailgating party.\u00a0 You could confuse us with a parking lot.\u00a0 Half a mile an hour on the interstate that dips down into our city, half a mile an hour memorizing the license plates in front of us on the overpass high above our neighborhoods.\u00a0 Amongst us are the showoffs, the ones who piled luggage on top of 14-inch speakers and expensive amps, bass heavy and proud.\u00a0 Amongst us are the classicists: we need Bach to calm our nerves.\u00a0 Nothing moves as fast as the beats or the trills.\u00a0 Even slow jazz outpaces us.\u00a0 We pull forward in the space between the notes.\u00a0
\n<\/p>\n
No matter when we left that day\u2014the day they told us there would be no help, that all who chose to remain would be on their own for days, no government chances taken for citizens who felt themselves brave enough to take all comers\u2014it wasn\u2019t early enough.\u00a0 We pulled out of our neighborhoods, turned up the avenues.\u00a0 We joined all the others at the on-ramps.\u00a0 The road refused to digest us, the interstate choked on our dry traffic.\u00a0 Some of us headed west, tempted by the branching highways that crossed Oklahoma and Texas.\u00a0 The rest of us felt we were outsmarting someone, racing towards Mississippi and all points north: surely we were in the minority.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 There were two million of us in a cross-country race.\u00a0 There is no road wide enough for that kind of contest.<\/p>\n
A clear sky night, heat from idling engines challenging nature with its own sub-atmosphere.\u00a0 We are all sweating; our animals are panting in their crates or in our laps.\u00a0 When it became obvious, two hours on the road and still trapped inside of the city limits, that we were going nowhere fast, the practical among us turned off the AC.\u00a0 We were tired of watching it sap the tank.\u00a0 Too many of us now are on the shoulder, three miles from home and already out of fuel.\u00a0 We are family convoys siphoning gas out of one van to split with another, stomachs rejecting the unexpected taste of gasoline.\u00a0 We have to watch the poor bastards empty their water jugs and coffee cans and start walking back to fetch gas.\u00a0 We keep our eyes forward when we inch by someone hamstrung by a smoking radiator.\u00a0 We make five point turns on the shoulder to bring our cars face forward with someone else who needs a jump.\u00a0 We curse as we decide which belongings to lay at the side of the road to allow a relative from an abandoned car to fit in ours.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no privacy on the road.\u00a0 Seven people in a sedan, kids in our laps locking limbs and pushing back and forth.\u00a0 We change diapers on the dashboard.\u00a0 We face the guardrail and pee; there\u2019s nowhere else to go.\u00a0 We are watching ourselves, all wards, all neighborhoods, all streets represented, thrown into a jumble.\u00a0 We can see how the other half lives, now.\u00a0 We can see each others\u2019 possessions, what we\u2019ve chosen to preserve.\u00a0 We are all lit by headlights and streetlamps, on display, flirting or fighting, or giving in to the most basic human temptation to turn our heads at someone else moving past.\u00a0 We can see the spectrum of faces.\u00a0 Annoyance, anguish, fright, and exhaustion.\u00a0 Determination, jealousy, and laughter.\u00a0 We can see the fuming anger of a couple who has remembered that they left something behind and argued about going back, retrieving it, getting in the back of the line.\u00a0 There are no placeholders.\u00a0 We notice the few among us with the right skill sets, the camp counselor types who have their cabins bouncing and jiving, trading rounds of karaoke.\u00a0 We are a loud and crazy population, raised on open containers.\u00a0 We have uncorked the wine or even tapped pony kegs, mixed up punch and poured it into plastic cups.\u00a0 Even the drivers sip, confident that they can maintain at half a mile an hour.\u00a0 The only thing that can still us for a moment or two is the rush of the cyclists, clicking by between the cars or along the gritty shoulder, bearing bundles on their backs.\u00a0 They look straight forward, painted with sweat, somehow separate from us.\u00a0 Who knows what their plan is, how far they expect to get.\u00a0 We are not jealous of their temporary speed.<\/p>\n
Hours and hours later we have made it to the separation point.\u00a0 Cars begin to pull away from each other by more than a few feet and shift into higher gears for the first time all day.\u00a0 We feel reinforced by speed and breathing room, by being removed from a constant audience.\u00a0 We pull into all night truck stops, pull open the doors and dive into the false fluorescent dawn inside.\u00a0 We open the refrigerated lockers filled with drinks and stick in our heads.\u00a0 We need sugar, coffee, salty snacks.\u00a0 We need the bathroom line to move faster.\u00a0 Some of us have never been this far out of town before, and we need maps.\u00a0 We need help to understand this unlit country.\u00a0 In the parking lot dogs are running loose ahead of their owners, exerting pent up energy.\u00a0 We are thankful for the break, but we know we can\u2019t stop long.\u00a0 Who knows if we we\u2019re ahead or behind.\u00a0 The real push could be coming up behind us, the high point of the bell curve.\u00a0 They could arrive at any moment and wash the gridlock miles ahead of us like a swift high tide.\u00a0 We gather the kids and kick the tires and throw our trash on the ground and rejoin the road.<\/p>\n
We hit the crossover for contraflow.\u00a0 The interstate seems mightier now that both sides are only open to one direction, as if it were a river that has flooded its banks.\u00a0 The kids have their noses to the window, watching the mirror image of their journey across the wide median.\u00a0 We grip the steering wheel a little tighter, those of us on the wrong side.\u00a0 We feel like we are on an amusement park track, pulled forward no matter which way we steer.\u00a0 We brace for someone unaware, some southbound escapee to come and split us all with headlights and horns.\u00a0 We pass state troopers leaning against their patrol cars with the blue lights on: guards over the frenzy, Mississippi laissez-faire.\u00a0 We can\u2019t see where we are, can\u2019t get used to the road signs with their backs to us, disowning us.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t really matter.\u00a0 Places don\u2019t matter now, only mileage.<\/p>\n
We drive all night.\u00a0 Dawn sneaks up on us.\u00a0 Even if we\u2019ve passed turns at the wheel, there\u2019s just not enough energy.\u00a0 All the stress of the previous week has come to collect its outstanding debt.\u00a0 We were so distracted with worry\u2014what to do, where to go, what to pack\u2014that we didn\u2019t prepare reserves for the drive.\u00a0 We pass through rest areas filled to capacity, cars pulled up onto the grass and into employee spaces.\u00a0 We test the limits of the welcome centers of other states, see how far their hospitality goes.\u00a0 We take exits no one but the locals would recognize, pull into church parking lots, turn semi-circles behind shopping centers.\u00a0 Crack the windows, brace them with hot pillows.\u00a0 Everyone be still now.\u00a0 We need a nap, just a brief, full stop.\u00a0 We hope no one will knock on our windows, that no one will ask questions.\u00a0 But our kids can\u2019t help it.\u00a0 They are cranky, itchy underneath their sweaty clothes, sapped by on-again-off-again sleep.\u00a0 And what can we tell them, anyway?\u00a0 We don\u2019t know where the storm will land or what kind of destruction is on the agenda.\u00a0 Are we far enough inland?\u00a0 Will it be like the last time?\u00a0 How long will we be gone?\u00a0 Just shut up.\u00a0 Everyone shut up.<\/p>\n
We can see the same self-portrait off of every exit between home and Houston, Atlanta, and Jacksonville.\u00a0 We leave behind the same wreck at every convenience store between home and Meridian, Little Rock, and Memphis. \u00a0We are the reluctant locusts.\u00a0 The bathroom floors are covered in half an inch of liquid, tiled with a hundred dirty footprints.\u00a0 The employees have just stacked rolls of paper towels in the corner, sandbagged the walls with soap dispenser packets.\u00a0 We have emptied two million gallons of piss across the southeast.\u00a0 Trash cans overflow everywhere, filled with our wrappers, our bottles, our tampons, our broken glass.\u00a0 In the burger joints they are running the fryers non-stop, they are running out of fries.\u00a0 We bring the wait with us, we bring the lines.\u00a0 Clean locals stand between us, suffering through the stress-fashioned stench that we\u2019ve gotten used to over the past twelve hours.\u00a0 New Orleans Funk.\u00a0 Some of us run cons\u2014a few of us have to.\u00a0 We talk fast in local accents, confuse the used-to-idling clerks, distracting them from the gas pumps as our partners sneak away.\u00a0 We are emptying the soda fountains of all their ice, we are leaving mini-mart shelves bare.\u00a0 We say, Hay, man, I gave you a twenty, not a ten.<\/p>\n
We bring with us old fears and cause new prejudices.\u00a0 Even the blossoming sympathy can\u2019t dissuade the demographics.\u00a0 Outside, in the open, stretched across a thousand miles we reveal our racial ratios, the blacks far outnumbering the whites.\u00a0 We nominally manage in the city, we know how to dart our eyes.\u00a0 But far removed, it can look, to small-town minds, like an exodus, a march, an uprising.\u00a0 The sheriffs park cautious squad cars as they see fit.\u00a0 We might as well all be Section Eight.\u00a0 And beyond that, on a more fundamental level of good old American common sense, we catch a few proud looks of What did you expect?\u00a0 Why even go back to live below the sea?<\/em><\/p>\n Just another couple hours now, depending.\u00a0 We turn the keys, and the songs rejoin where they left off when we stopped the car.\u00a0 We readjust the luggage, the pets, the children, our thighs.\u00a0 But not the mirrors.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need to see behind us, now.\u00a0 It\u2019ll all be on TV when we arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cue the music.\u00a0 We\u2019re going for a ride. It\u2019s hot as Labor Day weekend should be, summer\u2019s last holiday, last chance to boil.\u00a0 We have our windows down and the music is passing between cars and mixing in the space …<\/p>\n