Road Trip!

Constant Readers,

I have been back home (sweet home!) in Davidson, N.C. for over a week now, so it's time to wrap up my Road Trip Summer 2009 travel blog, and send it to archives where it will live on for the future reference of posterity (mine if no one else's!) at blogs.davidson.edu/roadtrip (which can be reached geographically on the Davidson homepage by clicking News, then Blogs). But first, some notes:

• I am, unsurprisingly, a couple of shades of tan darker than I was in June, in spite of SPF 85 ritually slathered on every day on the road. (I was especially diligent about my ears, so that I will not have to wear Band-Aids on them when I am an old man. Not a good look.)

The sun-protective Tilley hat I left town with on June 13 turned out to be too floppy for an open car at 75 mph, so I did the baseball-cap-and-bandanna thing most of the way. Additional tip for those without auto AC: A bandanna (pictured) dipped in icy cooler slush helps keep a body cool on those long summertime hauls. Dodger wore sunscreen, too, on the pink parts of his delicate l'il snout. Here at the moment of our return to Davidson, his cruise control is still set on "Squirrel!" (July 24, photo by Bill Giduz '74)

• I am greatly enjoying preparing all my own food, in my own kitchen sweet kitchen. Nothing out of a can shall cross my lips, and lots of fresh summer fruits and vegetables shall cross them often. (That last week of hard driving put me over my annual limit of drive-through gut-bombers and Beanee Weenies in a tent. Hellooooo, farmer's market!)

• At my office sweet office, I'm adjusting to sitting at a desk again (I am up to a half-hour at a time without jumping up and running in circles like the dog), to central air-conditioning (my hands and feet got cold the first few days), and to long pants (creased khakis instead of wrinkled camp shorts that smell like gasoline and antifreeze).

• My laundry is done, my friends are hugged, and the Comet sits quietly in the rain under a cheap spun-bond cover from the WalMart in Flagstaff, Arizona---just until I can figure out how to zip back up the rear window that came completely aloose from the canvas in a high wind on Route 66 near Tulsa. That was a full day, I recall.

Way back in May, as I planned this transcontinental voyage, Carol Higham, adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Davidson and a good buddy, piqued an academic interest in my yen to, as Horace Greeley is purported to have said, "Go West, young man." Okay, I'm only somewhat young, and Greeley is not the original author of the quote. The important thing here is that Carol told me about her new Western U.S. history textbook, Conquests and Consequences, co-written with William H. Katerbery of Calvin College. Even more important, she brought a laser-printed galley proof to my office, for me to pack along in the trunk of my Comet. I could picture the stack of sheets blowing off a campsite picnic table in Colorado, so I paid Central Services in the college union a buck fifty to wiro-bind it.

In my six weeks of drive time across the United States of America this summer, geography was not the only thing I covered. I was all over the musical map, too: rock'n'roll (of course); country (unavoidable, and fine by me---most days); jazz (for short periods); classical (not available in some states); get-it-on blues (void where prohibited); pop (exact definition depends on the town; I heard some fine nouveau-California-pop songs in San Diego that I haven't heard before or since); and that egregious call-in show with easy-listenin', lovey-dovey "Delilah" (you can run but you can't hide). Okay, there was no rap or hip-hop on any of my playlists or stations, so I guess I wasn't all over the musical map. So sue me. Stuff works my nerves.

Tank goodness Antonio, my new bes frend in Pomm Sprangs, fix us up a picnic for the rolly house, cuz it was very scorchy panty panty comin back acrost a dam California desert. We stop at the Colorado River so Him could cool off, but I stayed instinctive away from the warter. My foredogs was hunters, not swimmers. We let them dumb blond retrievers do that! (Hey, you know why blond retrievers can't tree a squirrel? The bark is all wrong. Ahahahaha!) So, anyway, after the desert and the river we clumb and clumb and clumb in the hot rolly house up a canyon by a big warter and come to a pavement city and stop in the only shady spot lef. It was still so hot I felt all squawsh down. Looka here:

Oof. By the time I had made it through all the storms of south central Missouri in my leaky old Comet ragtop ("Dodger, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"), I was very happy to have gotten two last Davidson invitations for lodging on my way homeward. Thanks to Curtis Bickers '93, for a redux of my westbound visit to his gracious Memphis home. And big thanks to my dear, fun and funny classmate Linda Cassens Laforest '85, who had called me up on a rainy, Motel 6 kind of a day earlier in the week to ask when I was coming through Oak Ridge. O, happiness! Dodger and I were plumb tired of Motel 6 by now: Kingman, Ariz., Gallup, N.M., Goodland, Kan., Lawrence, Kan., St. Robert, Missouri... Nice as it is to see that dog-friendly sign from the interstate, it's not home. For instance, I would never have such a thing as that bedspread in my home. Please. Come to think of it, I would never have that bed, either. Ah, well. Motel 6 is, like WalMart, what it is: When you need it, it's exactly what you need, but when you're done, you don't want to just hang out there. So anyway.

My iPod bit the dust. At a Motel 6 in Kansas, I went to update my hallowed Road Trip playlist in order to delete "Smokin' in the Boys Room." The nostalgic novelty of that song, I had found, turns out to be rather paltry. Grating, even. But when, in room 116, I connected my digital drives and mashed "sync," I received, OMG, a stop-sign, exclamation point, "Error 1429" pop-up warning that my device was "corrupt." Well!

When I blast e-mailed Kansas and Missouri alumni before heading east from Colorado many miles ago, Davidsonians came through. My thanks to all who offered to meet for coffee or a meal or more. My only regret is the need to keep the miles rolling in this my last week on the road, so I won't get to visit with you all personally. So many alumni, so little time... One who responded to the call was Andrew Campbell '00. He opened the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History in Lawrence to me for a private tour on a Monday, when they are usually closed. Andrew is collection manager for herpetology, which made for an appetizing tour before lunch. Mmm, tastes like chicken! (Andrew avowed that he has probably heard every tastes-like-chicken joke there is, and with some 360,000 reptilian and amphibian specimens under his TLC, one of the five largest such collections in the nation, I believe him.)

Kansas is a very, very long state, even at 75 mph steady, in a hefty crosswind. Happily, Jesus is everywhere. I missed my favorite shot of Him, plainly and exquisitely painted onto a billboard poking up out of the greening summer bounty of the earth with no verbal interpretation, just a very happy and welcoming, hippie-style Jesus holding a stalk (whatever) of wheat and smiling at me. I liked that Jesus. This more personalized Jesus, below, which I did manage to capture on pixels, runs a close second, even if the godsmack message and Photo-Shopped halo, not to mention the blood-red ray of---something?---shooting off of His---heart?---are a bit much for my tastes.

After miscalculating mileage in a big square state yet again, I had the beginnings of a massive tension headache by the time I hit Topeka from the far western reaches of Kansas, nearly 400 miles of gripping a 42-year-old steering wheel in high plains winds. So as I passed Topeka for the last 15 miles into Lawrence and saw the big, green, federally funded interstate reminder of the KU men's basketball Jayhawks' successful 2008 run, I gritted my teeth and resolved to dig my dirty Davidson T-shirt out of the trunk for my the duration of my stay here. That'll show 'em. It helped that George Thompson '84 had earlier said by phone that he proudly wore his Davidson shirt during that tournament, even tho' he is employed at KU. Anyway, a spritz of Drakaar Noir at my Motel 6 did a fair job of masking the gasoline and other fumes embedded in the wrinkled gray athletic T that I had found behind the spare tire, and off we went for a libation on Massachussetts St., the heart of Jayhawks territory.