(a rewrite of some entries from my hitch-hiking journal, 2002)
Here, in New Mexico, there are plateaus.
Back home, where the ground was flat, I learned what the outside world was supposed to look like from a diagram that crammed every possible geological feature into one neatly-labeled color-coded box. Mountain, hill, plain, valley, delta, fill-in-the-blank. The hardest vocabulary word was plateau, and judging from the awkward illustration, I thought they might’ve been made up, just to give public school children something to memorize in Social Studies class.
Though they’re advertised on license plates, billboards, and in roadside souvenir shops, I overlooked my first three New Mexico sunsets. Last night, my boyfriend kissed me under the fourth one. I think the kiss might’ve been staged so I’ll have something nice to say to my grandchildren about the time I dropped out of school and hitchhiked across the country. New Mexico sunsets are pretty, and there are plateaus here.
It’s early morning on sleepy I-25 South, surely one of the most seldom-used stretches of highway in the country. The cars don’t come and, when they do come, they don’t stop. For hours we sit by the side of the road, waiting. Far away there are mountains, covered all over with trees, no tree line. There’s a manicured RV park on the other side of the freeway, before the rusting piles of construction junk further on down. There are green Interstate signs, always, and the same well-known logos float in the sky: Texaco, McDonalds.
The light is relentless, and a broken-limbed black umbrella serves as my parasol. I’m the sitting girl, impossibly still, in my dirty, sweaty clothes. My patchwork sketch-palate jeans are ripped at the knees. A faded yellow head-scarf to hides my greasy, unwashed hair. A dog barks. The bark crosses the freeway from the RV park and settles on my shade umbrella. I try to see myself from a driver’s eyes, a speck in the distance, slowly coming into focus as this skinny, raggedy, overgrown child, rained on by the New Mexico sun. Surely I make for a queer, enchanting sight. Why doesn’t anyone pull over? Perhaps I pass as a mirage.
A few feet away, my boyfriend reads from our tattered, rained-on, duct-taped copy of War and Peace. In his other hand, he holds the sign: SOUTH TO ALBUQUERQUE. His long, matted hair drips over a black tee-shirt, where a gray wolf howls up toward a yellow moon near his left shoulder. On the bottom, the shirt says says “Texas.” It’s from a truck stop - 3 for $10.
He sees me staring and looks up from the book, which was attacked by a pack of dogs after I finished it and before he started, and asks, “When was the last time you remember having fun?” This is an accusation. Our trip was supposed to be a great adventure. We were supposed to be seeing the country. He sighs a lot. I feel like I shouldn’t be expected to be happy.
“Fun?” I reply, “I like playing checkers.”
Occasionally, we play pennies against nickels on a hand-drawn board. We do this in air-conditioned fast food restaurants, filling up the brightly-colored booths with our hiking packs, sleeping bags, water bottles. We sit and play checkers with our change until some stranger offers to buy us a pair of Value Meals. One such stranger complimented my boyfriend on my beauty. Another waited until he went to the bathroom to offer me $50 for a blowjob.
Checkers was a weak answer. I should have said, “When was the last time we had sex?” This is an accusation. We ran away for love.
Not only is he no longer able to view our sex life as a form of escapism, he avoids it specifically to make it easier for him to escape once this is over.
“It must be hard for you, doing this now,” he offers.
I want to say, “You have no idea;” I want to tell him all about it, how I cannot experience anything outside my own skin anymore. How every place we go is the same. I cannot. Instead, I complain. I complain constantly. I say that I am tired, I am dizzy, I am sick, I am hungry, I am afraid. I say these things even though they are obvious. We were supposed to be in love. We’ve been on the road for five months now, and we’ve finally passed the point where things could not possibly get worse.
Today is the last day I could’ve gotten the pill.
We have $65; we need at least $300. The signage blitz isn’t working. TRAVELING AND HUNGRY, ANYTHING HELPS. It was for food, once. We were even happy, in the beginning. We flashed peace signs at the SUV’s waiting at busy intersections on their lunch breaks. We believed the stories we told the strangers who picked us up. But the charm wore off, even before we found ourselves worse off than broke. We fake it now, and maybe the intersection strangers know they’re being duped. Not that there are any intersections to try here. We’re in the middle of nowhere, trying to get to Albuquerque, running around in circles.
“Do you have a better idea?” he asks. “Do you want to try something else? Do you want to call your parents?”
No. My parents haven’t heard from me in months. I ran away for love.
When my mother was pregnant with me, she dreamt she gave birth to a kitten instead of a girl, and after bringing it home from the hospital, she accidentally left it in a dresser drawer, where it died. I haven’t dreamt of children or of cats, only of becoming huge. I am scared I will just wait and wait, until I’ll have no choice.
I want to rest. I want to sleep in. I want to eat something that isn’t from the 99-cent menu, that isn’t peanut butter sandwiches or oatmeal. I want to get away from the sun. I want to wipe out the red, the orange, the yellow. These New Mexico colors are everywhere: on the ground, in the sky. My skin is splattered with this paint. I am tan and I am fire and I am burning and I feel like I’m going to vomit up a sun-baked baby.
I’m sitting on a rolled up sleeping bag. He’s sitting on his pack. A Jeep just passed us by, with talk radio spilling out its windows. If I stood up, I would fall down. One of the floating signs says there’s a Holiday Inn at the next exit. I want. Our water is tinted with Hawaiian Punch, from the soda fountain where we filled up our dented plastic bottles last. It tastes bad and I don’t want to drink it, but I’m so thirsty and my yellow piss says I’m not drinking enough.
I take down the umbrella to write in my diary. The sun squints my eyes and muddles my thoughts. My nose is stinging. My arms are stinging. Sweat drips slowly down my neck, leaving trackmarks in the dirt. Next to me on the concrete shoulder are a small pelt and a smear that used to be an animal. On the entrance ramp, I saw a mummified dog, a grotesque version of the sheepskins that sleep on the parlor floors of the rich, with their heads still on. If I never moved from this spot, this highway’s next rug could be me, frozen in time, melted, the remains of a girl who ran away for love, climbed her first plateau, and died trying to see the country.