Road Tripping, Post I

It's Monday afternoon right now. I'm sitting in a Panera Bread in St. Louis using their wonderfully free wireless Internet, trying to update all of you on my road trip as I leave New Orleans. This is my first post outside of the city since November, when I hadn't arrived yet.

The beginning of the road trip has been going well. It was rough leaving New Orleans yesterday, and particularly the first hour of the road trip was uncomfortable. I feel sorry for my fellow road tripper Shelby, who probably got a short and sullen answer to any question she asked in that time. It just felt weird to be driving through the city knowing it was going to be the last time I would see it for a while, and the last time I would interact with it extensively for a long, long while. After a couple of hours though, the terrain changes from Louisiana Bayou to the rural south of Mississippi to the fertile fields of Tennessee and Missouri. The change of scenery made a real difference in my mood.

I've never been through the Midwest, and barely through the south. With the exception of Mississippi, where I did work last March, every state on this road trip will be a new one for me. I imagine this was a good thing for me, because even though I was told constantly before I left that driving through hundreds of miles of flat farmland is mind numbing, I found it rather beautiful. We didn't really hit much of it until Tennessee (which we really just clipped) and Missouri, but green field after green field and farm after farm did a lot to lift my spirits. It was the time and place to roll down our windows, stick out our arms, and let the wind blow through our fingers. Shelby and I talked a bit the first couple hours of the drive, but it seemed that when we got to all that farmland we became quiet, save the sound of the air around our car and the cassette in the stereo.

We were heading for St. Louis. We had planned on leaving around 12:30 to git in by 10, but (unsurprisingly) the final goodbyes and a little last minute packing shipped us off just after 3 30. I got lunch with Abby Sartor, a girl who went to school with me for the first school year after Katrina before heading back to NOLA. This girl is funny and charismatic, and she was often a life raft when the Hands-On atmosphere was, if i may continue this metaphor, drowning me. We got lunch, talked about the future, said our "see you later"s, and I headed back in to Central City to make one last goodbye, this time to Ty Shon.

Ty Shon didn't want me to go. Of course, he didn't tell me this, but it's always been that body language is more telling than his words are. Ty Shon has always put on a front of apathy and a small front of toughness, even if sometimes when you look in his eyes you can see a twinkle of irony. When I knocked on his door and told him I was leaving and that I'd miss him, he didn't say it back. He didn't say he'd call me once a week, or that I was a good friend, or that he was glad to have met me. But the ultra confident, charismatic showboat was unusually quiet. He was fidgety and he was pacing and his eyes were darting, and that was good enough for me. I knew then that he would miss me. Even if this borderlines on the vaguely sadistic, it feels good to know that he will miss me. It feels good to know that I will be missed.

I dapped him off (which, for all you non slang speaking sophisticates, would be the arm-wrestling-position handshake that frequently leads into a hug), and he said alright, and I told him I would see him later. Then I decided to give him a hug so I said "come here, man." And wrapped my arms around him. "Alright, bruh!" "ALRIGHT, BRUH!" he said and pushed me off with a big smile. I'm glad my last memory of Ty Shon was the confident, smooth talker that he normally is.

And then, not long after that, I headed off. I went over most of the action earlier in this post. We got in around one in the morning, a consequence of embarking on a 10 hour drive in the late afternoon. Our lodging accommodation, a friend of a friend, fell through when we called him and told him how late we were coming in, so we ended up parking in a downtown residential neighborhood and sleeping in our car. We slept in (which feels strange to say when your bed is a car seat) and then headed off to the only tourist attraction immediately noticeable, the arch. I have pictures of all of that, and those tell a better story than my words. But we're heading off to La Crosse, Wisconsin this afternoon, and since we probably won't be leaving till about 5 PM, it looks to be another late night. But I'll keep you posted!

Mathias