The Candy Truck Diaries, Part 2 of 2

“Yes, I'll climb a mountain / I'm gonna swim the sea
There ain't no act of God, girl / Could keep you safe from me
My arms are reaching out / Out across this canyon
I'm asking you to be my true companion”

            —Marc Cohn

Well, it’s been an interesting few days in Kentucky. I’ve learned that the locals either love it or hate it. That the transplants that moved here from cities are usually lonely.

I met a young man from Detroit who moved here because he lost a bet with his father.

I met a father of two who moved here to raise his children–but he misses Washington, D.C., every day.

I met Sarah Nickell, who came to work for me while I was there. She manned a table and gave free candy to all comers. While she did that, she also told me that most of the people she knows are deeply religious and sometimes suspicious of people from the city–especially northern cities. We work in towns like Shelbyville, which has about 10,000 souls but feels much smaller.

I get to put Kentucky in the rear-view after today, but I have just worked a 10-hour day and I have a choice to make: Do I stay in a hotel tonight and leave for New Jersey in the morning, or do I grit my teeth and make the 12-hour drive?

Twenty-two hours of wakefulness is daunting, but so is another night in Kentucky, where a cashier at Walmart tries to convert me to Jesus by offering to sell me a book on casting out demons and breaking curses. Where a man with a stereotypical mullet and an old F-150 calls me a Yankee and a commie (I’m not kidding at all), because he overheard me telling a friendly young man that I support gay marriage and civil liberties. I thanked the man for his compliment and wished fervently for home.

Now, as I’m sitting in Pellinor, trying to make up my mind, the radio does it for me: Louisville’s only classic rock station plays Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” and I miss the East Coast so I bad I can taste it. Besides, there is a beautiful woman waiting in New Jersey, and she says she’s crazy about me. Lord knows I'm crazy about her. 

I’d have to be certifiable to stay here another minute. The road is long and I am weary, but I have many miles to go before I sleep. More than Robert Frost did, I bet.

My habit has been to press the SCAN button on Pellinor’s outdated radio until something good comes on. There’s a wonderful world of music to be heard. People who only listen to their iPods are missing out: You can’t find new music that way.

Scan. The Weepies sing “World Spins Madly On,” and the sun is in my eyes. The road rises on either side, transforming laterally from farmland to mountain. Streetlights disappear and are replaced by forbidding walls of stone that shout a challenge to the rock climber in me.

“I watch the stars from my window sill / the whole world is moving, but I’m standing still,” mourns Steve Tannen, his voice full of a melancholy that seeps into my pores.

Scan. Van Morrison is shouting out raucously, joyously.

“From the dark end of the street,” he rails, “to the bright side of the road. We’ll be lovers once again, on the bright side of the road." I check my watch, check my arrival time. It’s true. If I push through the night and only stop for gas, I will get back to New Jersey just as the sun is rising. I will hurl myself into my lady’s arms. This gives me purpose. Thanks, Van.

Scan. Ke$ha.

Scan.

Whew! That was close.

The sky is darkening now. I find a classical station again–I don’t know why, but chamber music keeps me alert.

I’m still in Kentucky and am driving through Daniel Boone National Forest. I’m no arborist, reader, and unsurprisingly, these trees aren’t a type I handily recognize. Their bark is pale, though, their leaves sparse, and in the deepening gloom they seem to stab out of the earth like bony fingers scrabbling for purchase in the soil. They become the searching hands of skeletal giants, their bones the foundation on which we stand.

I’m scaring myself again. Once in a full moon I catch myself writing horror fiction to exorcise the demons my imagination plagues me with. This time, I blame Beethoven–one of his moody symphonies is railing in my ear and making me see specters where none exist.

Scan. The countryside is changing again. I’m starting to see names I recognize–Huntingdon is the first. Welcome to West Virginia, the sign says, and on the radio, Green Day shouts “Welcome to Paradise.”

Well, if it isn’t Paradise, at least it isn’t Kentucky, either. I exit the forest all of a sudden and emerge into a field of stars. Not really, but a few miles of city lights after a few hundred miles of wilderness can feel that way when you haven’t stopped moving in 18 hours.

There’s an odd sort of calm growing in me now as West Virginia drags on. I feel a kinship to the other drivers. These roads are dark; you navigate with your high beams on whenever possible. It’s just me and the truckers tonight, and when we see each other we flick our high beams off politely. I nod to them, knowing full well that they can’t see me. I imagine they do the same. I drive.

My efficient autopilot carries me through the state. I cross into Cumberland, Maryland to the tune of Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms,” but by the time I hit Baltimore, I am tapping the SCAN button repeatedly to avoid a veritable plague of hip-pop and mournful modern country.

A public radio station plays “I’m On My Way” by Rich Price just around the time I hit the northbound I-95. I’m flagging, but the thought of her–my lady–waiting for me at home spurs me on, and I’m able to ignore the cries of my stiff body and the building pressure behind my eyes. I vow to myself that if I feel too tired, I’ll pull over and sleep for half an hour, but I know that I won’t let it happen.

The radio hurts now, so I turn it off. I listen to the music of the road. It’s contemplative. It stirs me. I’m alert but dreamlike, and in my pseudo-delirium I feel like I understand why there are so many words wasted trying to explain the Road. Why Kerouac hits you so hard the first time you read him. The Road–capitalized–that cuts through everything, connecting booming metropolis to bucolic village to the woods and wilds.

I’ve been thinking too long. I take my eyes off of the highway and look around. I’m in New Jersey, traveling north on I-295. I switch the radio on.

Scan. The radio is a prophet tonight. “Four more exits to my apartment,” John Mayer says. “I am tempted to keep the car in drive.”

I am, too–not because I want to keep going, or because I don’t want to go home. I’m tempted because I’ve been driving for 12 hours without stopping, after working the previous 10, and it’s already become habitual.

I merge onto Crown Point Road in West Deptford. I sit stopped for a time at an interminable red light, and my body feels magnetized to my house, as if, were I to release the seat belt and steering wheel, I’d simply be pulled through the driver’s side window toward home.

I turn onto my street, and as I do, I am utterly blindsided by an epiphany: Where I am and where I’ve been aren’t different. Not really. The streets, the trees, the radio stations are all different, but the bones of the place are exactly the same. Things work exactly the same way.

There’s a darkness on the edge of town here, too. The only difference is that this darkness knows who I am, and I know it as well.

I turn off the engine. The silence after 12 hours of rushing wind and static-filled radio is crushing. My head pounds immediately, and I stumble from cramp as I unlock my door. I leave my suitcase in the cab; I’ll take care of it tomorrow.

Tonight–after six days, 1,043 miles, 14 greasy meals, five secluded gas stations and several thousand sample packs of fish-shaped gummy candies – there is only the sweetness of sleep and the comfort of a true companion.