Tuesday, August 16, 2011

More good intentions

Since I'm a journalist, this adventure will also be something to write about. (OK, it already is.) And that will add a potential wrinkle, since I'll want to take a few notes during my rides with people. Why did they pick me up? I'll want to know. Why did they trust me? Aren't they, like everybody seems to be these days, afraid? Why not? Where do they fit on the quirky, contemporary social spectrum. . .near the isolation side, happy that their phone number is unavailable to anyone, or near networking and Facebook? And when might we stop for coffee?

I envision posting some pictures, narrative and conversation. Maybe I'll write a Travel section story when I get back. Maybe not. But this way I'll have something written regardless.

I'll direct a few friends and relatives to this blog. I'm not interested in a wide following. I'll want a few people tracking me -- people whom, not long ago, I might have sent postcards to -- but mostly I just want to document the trip. That's a personal tradition that goes back more than 50 years, to when my aunt and uncle would take me on their wide-ranging road trips each summer and I'd amuse myself in the back seat by writing down my observations and making maps and lists (states and capitals visited, rivers crossed, animals seen, etc.),  and storing the pages in a coffee can with all the placemats, matchbooks, cocktail umbrellas, motel postcards, wrapped sugar cubes and local color I could collect. I've loved road trips ever since, obviously, and they are funny, astonishing, embarassing and sometimes heartbreaking to recall. And I never, gazing up out of the back window at the endless heave of the passing telephone wires and breathing the smoke from my uncle's cigarettes on those first long trips, imagined I'd one day be that old man of 60, alone along the road west, hoping for a ride. But somehow it doesn't surprise me.

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