Life is a Highway: Exit 1
And all the men and women merely drivers
If I write no new posts for a month in the dead of summer, does anyone even care? A question only you and I can answer, Dear Reader. A question that has become irrelevant with the post I’m writing and you’re reading right now.
Let’s glaze over the boring reasons for my absence—childcare gaps, other projects, midsummer malaise, etc.—and get right back into it, shall we? If you care to, leave a comment about what you haven’t been able to get to in this sweltering heat and consider it a productive form of procrastination, rubber stamped by ME!
I’ve decided I’ll treat you to a weekend of posts—today, tomorrow, and Sunday each with a musing (ew) about a road trip I took during our unscheduled break. We begin with…
I-5 to SAN FRANCISCO
If you’ve never driven I-5 between Los Angeles and San Francisco, I hope you count your blessings every single day of your life. It might be the worst highway scenery in America, and I once rode in a U-Haul from Portland, Oregon to Lincoln, Nebraska (unexpected host city of the International Thespian Conference).
The drive takes about five to six hours. That’s only two hours three times. Or one hour six times. Or a half hour twelve times. This is how your brain will start to occupy itself as it stares directly into the soul of an American wasteland.
If you’ve seen Chinatown (don’t worry, I only saw it two years ago), you’ll remember the plot mostly revolves around water rights (with a smattering of incest and orientalism for good measure). The part of the state that Los Angeles colluded to steal all the water from in Chinatown and in real life is the part that takes up most of this journey. This translates to an unbroken landscape of dry, hot, flat nothingness as far as the eye can see.
Right when all vegetation disappears, I-5 collapses from a healthy six lanes to two. This means you will drive behind the same car for miles, an almost unbroken stretch of semi-trucks to your right. Occasionally some idiotic person will weave through that truck lane and into yours, trying desperately to get ahead of a hopeless situation. So in the midst of the most soul-crushing boredom you’ve ever felt you will also have to be extremely alert lest some idiot sideswipe you trying to get wherever they’re going two minutes faster.
On our trip the temperature hovered around 100 degrees, making it impossible to do anything at each gas station but dash into the air-conditioned convenience store and let our toddler pull things off shelves as we refilled fountain sodas and made weary eye contact with other lost souls. We were a group of people trying to get through an unpleasant experience as quickly as humanly possible, alone together.
There’s not a lot of individual moments I remember from the unbroken heat and the unceasing brown except for a Denny’s near Bakersfield. The Denny’s was plopped between a gas station and motel. The motel had a small, uncovered pool. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen until we saw the stray kitten that lived outside the Denny’s.
Inside the Denny’s, our child ignored her normally beloved pancakes in favor of an enormous cup of milk, which she chugged while swaggering around the unoccupied areas of the restaurant. This may have been why she threw up on herself a little bit when we put her to bed hours later. I’m no scientist but generally I think there’s a correlation between vomiting and chugging milk on a blazing hot day mostly spent in a Honda Fit.
We took this journey because my aunt died, and her funeral was in San Francisco. She was the eldest of my mom’s five siblings—a woman of great humor, impeccable taste, and high standards. She hosted impromptu dinner parties for forty and intimate breakfasts for four with equal élan. She turned me onto oversized Hanes t-shirts as nightwear, something that could, in a pinch be “dressed up with a nice set of pearls.” Everything about getting to and from her funeral was so antithetical to her vibe—the heat, the Denny’s, the general lack of landscaping—but I found myself laughing thinking what she would have made of it all.
Perhaps that the right shrubbery could do wonders for those rest stops. How hospitable is the Bakersfield climate to hydrangeas? She probably would have waxed poetic about blueberry pancakes as an evergreen meal. And in a pinch, I’m sure she could have made a gorgeous charcuterie board from whatever the gas station gods had in stock that day. There’s a retro elegance to a two-lane interstate—like being in a Cary Grant movie. Elegance available even in the most dire of landscapes. Nothing a bit of imagination and good taste can’t remedy.
I think the milk is to the left of the left hand. The last paragraph is transcendental.