well, I wasn't really sure what I was looking for, or hiding from, but I was clear nobody would be getting in my way. I was "doing a Melville," and as I had been a wilderness-survival instructor for the previous six years, I was packed up to hide on my island until. I suddenly had way too much money in the bank. My first book was about to be on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Three years ago I was single and had just (explosively) quit my job. As we drive over the bridge, no-man's-land, the dogs sense my unease and begin yelping. Having been arrested at this very place five years and thousands of dollars in legal fees ago, I'm a little on edge. Stephen border, the easternmost crossing into Canada. Spock, Laura Schlessinger, and Kurt Vonnegut, I spoke these words of infinite wisdom: "Hey, stop that." So lying there in a hotel room at this obviously pivotal moment in Stephan's life, remembering all I could from Freud, Dr. When I got married, I figured that taking on a nine-year-old son would probably be a little harder than getting a puppy-after all, I got my dog Bear when he was only twelve days old, so I knew all about bottle-feeding and cleaning up poop. So what do I say to my eleven-year-old boy when he starts masturbating right after the lights go out and he's in a bed just three feet from me and his mother? I pause and pray for just a little divine intervention.
Perhaps add that it is night and the plane has no landing lights, nor any desire to land. I've heard that being a parent is like thinking you can catch a landing airplane in a baseball mitt.
We've been camping out every other night, and tonight we stop at a hotel for showers and clean sheets. "You're taking me to the next gas station, and I want a nice one!" she says. "There's a nice tree, honey," I say at a dog break. I find the need for toilets on long drives ridiculous, but breaking a new wife into the enlightened mind-set of squatting is a fearsome task.
I have our two dogs, who pant and drool on me.
I'm driving my beat-up Toyota truck (third engine, mismatched body parts, and 4 percent structural duct tape). Wendy and Stephan follow in her new Subaru. Receding farther and farther in the distance is a twelve-by-thirty-foot storage garage, the tightly packed, stacked, and compressed mass of stuff I've been calling my life for too many years. I like to think that for the whole trip I've been dragging this enormous eraser behind my truck and it has eradicated all of my past, nothing but dust bunnies in my wake. Summer-hot blacktop, the whining of my off-road tires louder than my radio. We've been driving for 3,260 miles, two weeks through twelve states. By Daniel Hays Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill Copyright © 2002 Daniel Hays.
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