Day One: The Open Road

The verdant green of summer in America rolled past my windows.  The green of north Georgia’s foothills, the green of the Tennessee Appalachians, now the deep green grass of Kentucky.  I’d left my office at 12:45 after a morning of focus groups, bound for Michigan’s Upper Penninsula.  With my wife and daughter visiting Anne’s family out of state, I was free to wander.  I’d never been to the Upper Penninsula.  Now it was just me, my black lab Lou, and 1000 miles of open road.

I’d stocked the car for five days of roaming.  A sleeping bag and pillow for me, and a sleeping pad for Lou.  Fishing gear.  A Coleman two-burner propane stove.  Clothes and boots.  Cooler of food and beer.  Soap, towels, toilet paper.  I’d attached a tent to the top of my Subaru that and closed up tight like a luggage carrier when we were traveling, and folded open like a clamshell when we stopped for the night.

We headed north.  Audiobooks have made long-range road travel wonderful, almost meditative.  I’ll listen awhile, then hit pause and think for awhile, trying to apply the lessons of the audiobook to my own life or law practice.  I had a good one going now—Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder—and I was thinking hard about how Fishkin’s observations about founding his own internet company might apply to my law firm.  Great book.  I was absent-mindedly doing 80mph up a grade when the engine quit and the car rapidly lost speed.

I pumped the gas, but that didn’t help.  I turned off the cruise control, but that didn’t help.  I shifted in and out of gear.  That didn’t help.  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the traffic that was already starting to swarm past me as I lost speed going uphill in the fast lane.

Then I remembered that I’d meant to stop for gas.

I barely got my car off the asphalt before my car stopped completely.  When I tried to recrank the car, the engine turned over but the tank was bone dry.  An audiobook can be too compelling, apparently.  I didn’t even know where I was.  It turns out, in case you ever need to know, that neither Uber nor Lyft serves Corbin, Kentucky, and the only taxi service in town doesn’t answer the phone some days.  This was one of those non-answering days.  It was five miles to the next exit ramp, and seven miles to the one closest behind me.  So I cracked the windows for Lou and got out in the ninety-five degree heat to try out the sign I made—a legal pad with “GAS” written heavily on it in a ballpoint pen.  I squinted at traffic and smiled.  Sweat trickled down the back of my neck.  The only breeze was the wind from eighteen-wheelers thundering past.

Fortunately the good folks of Corbin take mercy on travelers who don’t watch their gas gauges and it wasn’t long before two people had stopped—an older guy in a dump truck and a guy about my age in an old Ford Ranger.  The guy in the Ranger drove Lou and me to a gas station.  He kept apologizing for the state of his truck, which he said was his work truck for his contacting business.  The clock and radio were missing from the dash, the headliner was torn, and the jump seat where Lou rode was filled with food wrappers.  I told him it was the prettiest truck I could ever remember seeing.

Dakota from Corbin was a good dude, as you’d expect from someone who stops to pick up stranded strangers on the side of the interstate.  He’d delayed his fishing trip just for me.  I was happy that the pepper spray that I’d shoved into my back pocket would be unnecessary.  Dakota had grown up in Corbin, graduated college, and come back with a business degree to start his contracting company.  Corbin was booming, he said.  After we stopped at the gas station, he pointed out the new developments in town while I put gas in his truck over his objection.  I’d seen his gas needle pointing at E, I said, and there was no use in both of us having to beg rides.  He said the needle was broken.

It seems like every time I drive through the heart of the country, there’s something like this.  Some unexpectedly caring stranger.  It’s an encouraging thing.  Given the opportunity to be kind, many people take it.

I made camp that night in what I thought was the perfect spot.  I’d never camped beside a major river before, and that night I unfolded my clamshell tent on the northern banks of the Ohio River.  We were just upstream of Cincinnati.  As I cooked a burger and sautéed spinach on my two-burner, tugboats and barges the length of a drag strip rumbled past.  I thought about Mark Twain’s adventures on the river that the Ohio feeds into.  Music from a nearby bar drifted over to Lou and me.  It died out about 10:30, but music from another source kept going—pleasure boats, cruising up and down the Ohio.  Playing all kinds of stuff, from country to R&B.  Apparently Cincinnati people cruise in boats, just like my buddies and I used to cruise in cars when we were younger.  I just starting to think about closing the clamshell and moving on when they quieted down.  I drifted off to happy thoughts about kind strangers and another day on the open roads of America.