Sometimes when I am driving on a cool summer night, my window rolled down so I can thread the air with my fingers while listening to a mix of Leonard Cohen, Ella Fitzgerald, and Holly Cole, I want to just slide past my exit and keep on driving…
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NE likes to tell this story about me. A few years ago, I told all my friends I was getting out of town for the weekend – my plan was to get in my car, drive southward, and see how far I could get. I gave myself a good three or four days to go and come back.
I got as far a Virginia Beach – a six to seven hour drive from where I live. It was dusk when I arrived, and being November, the area was pretty much deserted. I found a nice beach hotel and checked into a room with a view and a jacuzzi.
I went to the room and started the jacuzzi, setting it to ‘hot as hell’. I took a look at the last vestiges of a sunset, grabbed a book, and spent the next three hours reading in water hot enough to melt the words from each page.
The next morning I spent some time wandering the empty beach, watching the ocean waves take the sand and studying the odd person who, like me, was standing on the beach in the winter. I cruised the closed ocean stores trying to find a tattoo parlor that might, by some miracle, be open. I had no luck with that, but the drive, in the quiet still of an empty city, was oddly comforting.
Around noon I packed up and headed home.
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During a recent conversation with Magdelena, I was reminded of something. It’s never been about the destination for me, but about the journey. I like to complete my goals because leaving too many things undone can become a habit – but I never start my way towards something because I need what is at the end of it.
NE likes to tease me that I only got a state away on my ‘big trip to nowhere’. But I never intended to go some place. I just wanted to go away.
I know exactly what you mean. I used to have a convertible, and I would pick a cool fall evening, put the top town and just drive. Just music and the wind in my hair :)
I appreciated this general musing very much. It often creates discomfort in others when they know how much I crave time alone (seeing a movie by myself, or eating out alone, or driving somewhere without company)…
Solitude and time away (every where is some where) are critical so that we can know whether we are actually comfortable in our own skin. Most people are NOT comfortable in their own company, and neurotically crave constant companionship.
Ok, point well taken.
Still…I can’t help it, sometimes.
You remind me of a few things too; conversing with you is elegant on many levels.
‘Sometimes when I am driving on a cool summer night, my window rolled down so I can thread the air with my fingers’
I do this. There’s an inherent freedom and innocence attached to the action, and that sense of allowing nothing and everything to slip through your fingers but never elude you.
Beach hotels out of season are perfect. Especially if there is a jacuzzi, fine reading material and a hungry wolf.