Just Get in the Car

An Ode to Road Trips

THE TRIALS AND JUBILATIONS OF THE ROAD TRIP

By Christie Matherne

In December of 2005, I was twenty and had just completed my third semester at Louisiana State University when I jumped into my friend Josh’s car with four other people headed to Colorado Springs. The road trip was ill-advised, at best. It was the end of December, our destination was near the Rocky Mountains, only one of us had ever driven in snow, and the car had an oil leak that required constant topping-off. My life would’ve been made infinitely easier if I had stayed home to work more shifts at my restaurant job; and the day we left, I was running a fever of 101. Halfway to Texas, we learned that the car—which was owned by my friend’s mother—was not even insured.

With zero good reasons to go, I went anyway, due to blissful, youthful inexperience. Like the Fool in a tarot deck, I was a clean slate, ready to leap off a cliff—because, why not? Blind to the dark cloud of inevitable risk, I saw only the possibility of adventure. What could possibly go wrong?

In the years to come, I would take many, many more road trips, learning a little more each time about everything that can go wrong by entrusting so many hours at once to a speeding hunk of metal. The biggest lesson I’ve learned in my almost-two decades of roadtripping is that the peace of mind awarded by a trustworthy mechanic and a current membership to a roadside assistance plan is worth every penny.

A Geyser on Pikes Peak

This theory was unfortunately put to the test on a recent drive to Pikes Peak. My parents had flown in from Baton Rouge with my eight-year-old nephew, Garret, to visit my now-husband Josh and me in Denver, where we lived. It was my nephew’s first time in Colorado, and I wanted to make sure he got wowed.

The Pikes Peak Highway is not a road for people who are afraid of heights, or for drivers inexperienced with steep downslopes. The top of the highway is over fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and the drive begins at around five thousand feet. That’s nearly ten thousand feet of ascent over less than twenty miles. There are brake-checking stations for tourists on the way down the mountain, where rangers check each vehicle’s brakes to make sure they aren’t melting.

My parents possess a standard flat-lander’s fear of heights—the kind that makes you subconsciously grip the handles above the door, and let out a queasy “woo!” on the downslopes of a hilly road. But poor Garret was afraid of heights. During the two hours that we ascended from four thousand feet to thirteen thousand, Garret faced his fear in the backseat, talking himself through waves of anxiety. My mom was making a video with her phone from the backseat because we were near fourteen thousand feet, coming up on the final few switchbacks, and Garret was in the throes of awe. He had never seen anything like it.

Suddenly, I realized I had the gas pedal all the way down and nothing was happening. The engine was not shifting, despite the high RPMs. Less oxygen up here, I thought, hoping we could eke just a little further to the top without incident. This happens on Vail Pass too, I reassured myself, and I always make it up that one, right?

Vail Pass is less than eleven-thousand feet above sea level, and we were at nearly fourteen. Pikes Peak is a stress test for any engine, especially for my nearly twenty-year-old TDI engine. Mom’s phone video caught the moment my coolant system blew apart due to a combination of heat, pressure, and a yet-undiscovered broken fan. A plume of steam and a fountain of very expensive and hard-to-find pink liquid exploded from the seams of the hood. I pulled the car over on the next switchback, which happened to be fifteen feet away. That short distance was the only mercy the roadtrip gods offered me that day.

I called AAA through spotty reception as a ranger stopped to help us. When I told the agent where on earth I was, the ranger waved his hands at me. “If that’s AAA, make sure they send a tow company that actually takes calls up here!” he insisted. I relayed the message to the lady on the phone, but she seemed annoyed to hear it. “And make sure they put a rush on this job,” the ranger added, with a concerned glance upward at the suddenly-overcast sky. “Snow’s comin’.” Yes, in June.

Garret, who was working through his fear of heights only minutes before, was in the backseat, digesting this new trauma. While the adults were running through potential scenarios in our heads, he had taken to saying them aloud: “What if we don’t ever get down from here? What if we fall off that cliff? What if bears eat us?”

The terms of AAA state that the member has to be with the car when the tow truck arrives, so I sent my family down with the ranger to wait at base camp for a ride from my gracious husband, while I waited for the tow truck on the mountain. It had been about an hour since the car blew up, and it was no longer a blue-sky summer day. Clouds were rolling in—and at that elevation, the clouds looked close enough to touch. A single snowflake floated down, landing on my nose.

“Shit,” I said to a mountain critter perched on the rock face next to me.

The first company AAA called did not service the Pikes Peak Highway, nor did the second company they called—I didn’t blame them. All of this took several hours, and I had to call into the AAA system repeatedly for updates every half hour or so. The ranger had warned me. Since it was June, I hadn’t been anticipating getting trapped in a snowstorm. I didn’t have a winter jacket, nor could I turn the car on without permanently bricking the engine.

The third company happened to have a driver who was new to the area and needed the money, so he took the call without knowing what he was getting into. When he arrived at my car, it was thirty minutes until he clocked out for the day, and no one told him I needed a tow back to Denver—another hourand-a-half away, after the two-hour drive down the mountain. I asked for his PayPal and tipped him substantially.

At home, Josh replaced the hose and eventually found the right coolant after a search involving every Volkswagen dealership within fifty miles of our house. The hose blew apart twice more that week on various Denver interstates, with my family in the car, before we found the faulty fan. The car was fixed, but when it came time for my family to fly home, they Ubered to the airport.

Cross-Country Conversations with Dad

Up until the Pikes Peak fiasco, the car had well proved her worth as a road-tripper. My first venture out with her had been on a visit home to Baton Rouge—for which she performed beautifully, with one small caveat.

“Everything’s looking great. The brakes, oil, and transmission are fine,” Josh had said, washing his hands with degreaser after spending a week tuning up the new-to-me station wagon in preparation for the trip. “But I’m not going to have time to install your stereo.” “Oh,” I said. “Well.” My dad had flown in a few days before to keep me company on the twoday commute. Having never spent quite that much time with my dad solo, much less inside a car, I had intended to play lots of classic rock (Dad’s favorite) and hopefully catch the radio broadcast of a big football game he wanted to watch. I had downloaded a cache of podcasts in case he was interested, or to fill potential awkward silences.

None of that would be of any use without a stereo, especially in the long stretches of nonexistent reception in southern Colorado and northwest Texas. The best I could do was download entertainment on my phone and use a Bluetooth speaker to overcome the diesel roar of my 2003 TDI Volkswagen engine, but I had a feeling Dad wouldn’t be open to fumbling with Bluetooth technology while I drove.

On the first day, we made great time through Colorado and New Mexico, to my disbelief, without a second of silence. I listened as Dad opened his book; he told me about his upbringing, his return to songwriting in his retirement, and his first guitar (a tobacco sunburst Fender Jazzmaster). He spoke about losing friends to time and mortality, about his children and parenting, about the sacrifices he made to raise me and my sisters. How it was all well worth it to him. The scenery and temperature outside shifted from snow and frozen rear-view mountains to the hilly, windy expanses of rural West Texas. What had been frozen that morning had thawed by evening.

We stopped for the night about an hour west of Dallas and enjoyed a whiskey drink over a nutritious meal of Whataburger. In the morning, we feasted on Texas-shaped waffles, got coffees to-go, and headed out.

Day two’s drive began in the maze of Dallas-Fort Worth, where we dodged certain death by flying trailer hitch, and swore we’d go out of our way to avoid DFW in the future. Dad made friends with gas station clerks, spoke of prior years, and thoughtfully opened my drinks and candy bars for me. I soaked it up, fighting the usual second-day exhaustion, while the outside air warmed with each gas station stop. I tried to get Dad’s Sunday football game broadcast through an app on my phone. It didn’t work, so we kept talking.

We safely made it to my parents’ house about eight hours later, Billy’s boudin in tow for Mom. As we sipped cold beers into the night, we relayed our adventures to her. And even then, somehow, he and I hadn’t run out of things to talk about. It’s been a few years since that two-day trip without the stereo, and still, we have never really stopped talking.

Odyssey of the 1984 Chevy Luv

Now that I live permanently on the other side of that two-day drive, in the shadow of Colorado’s wondrous mountain regions and at the edge of the American West—I often think about the road trip during which I fell in love with this place.

It was in 2012, and Josh—my boyfriend at the time—and I had both quit our jobs in Baton Rouge. The goal was to get to Oregon, where Josh had lived for a few years, to collect his remaining possessions from a friend’s house. But so many treasures and friends lay between Baton Rouge and Oregon that we decided to mosey around the West for the entire month of June. We packed his rusted 1984 Chevy Luv Diesel with camping gear and hit the road. I was twenty-six years old, so that truck was older than I was.

On our first night out, we set up camp in Mississippi’s Windsor Ruins, then we drove a full day to stay with a friend in Oklahoma City.* From there, we puttered across the Midwest to Colorado, where we explored Bishop Castle—a castle made of iron, stone, and glass, built over many decades by a single man, the eccentric and determined Jim Bishop. After that, we landed in Pueblo, Colorado, where Josh’s dad tried to talk us out of crossing Monarch Pass in “that truck.” After we made it over Monarch Pass in that truck, we stayed with our childhood friend Brandon in Gunnison, near the Crested Butte ski resort, where Josh jumped into an ice-cold pristine mountain lake. We made quick friends with a house full of hippies and released sky lanterns late at night with them, our bellies full of cheap beer. We drove slowly—because of that truck—through the rest of the Rocky Mountains, and into the Grand Valley. My eyes were glued to the passing panorama outside, not knowing I’d live there one day, but hoping I would.

From the Grand Valley, we trundled through the eastern Utah desert to Moab. A friend told us about a tree in town overflowing with ripe apricots that no one was bothering to harvest, so we went and picked our fill. They tasted like pure sunshine. We took a dunk in the local swimming creek and burned our

bare feet on a slanted red rock face before heading out again. Passing up Salt Lake City, we continued into the Nevada desert via the loneliest road in America: U.S. Highway 50.

The truck’s lack of air conditioning in the desert summer forced us to ice down cans of Jumex—a delicious Mexican fruit beverage you can find anywhere out West—in a small ice chest between us, to maintain our electrolytes. On one stop, the truck refused to restart and nearly stranded us in the middle of the desert with no reception, but Josh rejoined the loose starter solenoid and we were not eaten by vultures. Suddenly, we found ourselves at Lake Tahoe beneath a pastel sunset. We smelled like days of campfires as we sipped wine out of dirty coffee mugs, lounging on a rock, facing west. A tourist stopped near us and gave us $20 to take his family’s picture. The next morning, our drive toward the coast suddenly turned to fog with a fifteen-degree temperature drop. We were in the Napa Valley. Despite our ragged appearance and unwashed clothes, the only winery open on Sunday evenings let us in, and we joined in on the tipsiness of the perfumed California housewives.

In the midst of a violent nighttime storm, we made it to the coast, and drove until we couldn’t see anything through the rain. At that point, we pulled over into a campsite and slept in the truck. We woke up in a forest near the ocean with a note on the windshield saying we owed $30, and I took a luxurious coin-operated hot shower before we left the campground.

I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time that day. As someone who grew up interacting with the Gulf Coast, the sight of washed up twelve-foot-long bull whip kelp made me wonder if I knew anything at all. Everything seemed so much bigger out there—the sky, the seaweed, the campground prices per night—and we hadn’t even made it to the Redwoods yet. I could write for months about the Redwoods, how their fallen trunks make endless pathways through the forest, how they creak in a windstorm like an old house.

When we reached the coast, we had been driving for two-and-a-half weeks. Before that trip, months—maybe years—had floated by without my knowledge or reflection. But for that entire month, it was impossible to be anywhere but the present.

Just Get in the Car

That’s the thing about road trips. They force you to abandon the problems of yesterday and the anxieties of tomorrow, to step outside of the rhythms of everyday life, just for a little while. I once almost backed out of a road trip with friends, just a few days before departure, by allowing the weight of life and money and responsibilities to bog me down. Breaking my boring routine for a long weekend of travel sounded, at the time, just too hard.

They were heading to Oklahoma City for a Flaming Lips concert. I gave some half-reasons. I was broody, like a depressed hen. But one of my friends wouldn’t accept my bad excuses. “C’mon,” he said. “Just get in the car. It’s only a couple days. What do you have to lose?”

The truth was, nothing. I had no good answer, so I went. The trip was a catalyst, plucking me right out of complacency. Oklahoma City was a whirlwind of focus and movement; a much-needed reminder that every minute is worth paying attention to.

After an endless string of daily commutes over the same routes, unfamiliar roads give us something new and exciting to chew on. New places come with new landscapes, new people to meet, new gas station trinkets, new flavors. In Oregon, for example, you can experience an earthen roof and on-tap kombucha at a gas station, and commit a crime by pumping your own gas, all in one stop.**

When you come home, the familiar looks different. Details that have grown fuzzy with routine are suddenly shiny enough to capture your attention again. The longer you’re gone, the more pronounced it is. And this effect alone is well worth the risks taken by going on a road trip—especially if you have a trustworthy mechanic and roadside assistance.

*Camping in the Windsor Ruins is prohibited, don’t do this.

** It is illegal to pump your own gas in the state of Oregon.