Distant Thunder Rising in the Mountains

Well I'm getting myself steeled for the coming trip. All of me needs this trip. All of me but the financially responsible part. The rest, well, the ayes have it. Time to turn the metaphorical into the literal: time to make a journey in all senses of the word. Time to move on. Time to start that seven year cycle over again. Another chance for redemption, recovery, rebirth.

I leave in five days for thirteen days. A trip to my old stomping grounds, thy area in which I spent most of my time between the ages of five and fourteen, the state of Wisconsin. And the route. The same route that my father drove my two older brothers, my stepmother, and myself. Sometimes four times a year we drove the stretch between Ellensburg in central Washington State to Madison, WI. In a VW passenger bus, a '72 for a while, I think, then a '74. Beige, with a bed platform made to match the height of the back seat. The middle seat removed, the luggage under the bed platform. No seatbelts, the freedom to roll around, play games, read comic books, sleep, dream.

Now three-ish decades later it's me, my '82 red VW Westfalia Camper Bus, same road, same dreaming. Hurtling across the earth I will be, chasing some smoke obscured vision, some sepia toned viscous liquid, honey perhaps, dripping down over my vision, coloring all of it with too large amounts of nostalgia. Chasing the me that lay in that bus. Trying to catch my own tail as it slips away in front of me.

Only now it's more complicated. The kind of complicated that you can't understand if you're a child. How do you explain heartache, betrayal, deep, deep sadness. I'll go on Monday. That is sure. I'll go alone to get my mother and her husband from their home in Milwaukee and to drive them back out here. I'll do this thing. Despite my fears of being in that vehicle with no other person, not even Walter, my dog-the best person I know. No, I'll go alone. I;ll sit in that bus with all of my stink and all of my rotten insides, with all of the offal of a seven year marriage that flew so high so fast and that, in the end, never really was. What was was my desire for it to be. I made it all up, I suppose. All of it. And now I sit here with my pecker in my hand (please, ladies, we're using metaphor here), nothing really to show for any of it but stories that should not be printed here, and all of the associated self-doubt, the sting and bite of self-hate.

I'll go. Yeah, I will go. And really, in the end, there is no other option.