King of the Road

I feel lucky that the snow storm that blanketed the Mid-West will only bring a few flurries and lots rain for the weekend. In between the cold of winter and that first perfect week of spring weather is the 5th season of the year -the season of mud. It's at least six weeks of cold and dampness under battleship gray skies.

Right now I would be happy to travel to any place warm. My friend Harrison has been talking about buying a travel trailer and hitting the open road. Harrison is in that awkward place in life where he's a middle aged man with a crappy job and no attachments. For him there's no downside in taking up the gypsy life.

Like any good friend, Harrison has already invited me along for at least an extended road trip. Unlike Harrison I'm totally bogged down with the responsibilities of home and family. My wife is pretty cool and rarely says no to me but I can already imagine the one eyed squint of disapproval she would have.

To bolster his point Harrison quotes his favorite film - Animal House.  In the second half of the film when Delta House plans revenge on the college administration, Otter (Tim Matheson) responds to Bluto's (John Belushi) famous and rousing speech. You know, the one were Bluto asks what would have happened if America quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Otter: Bluto's right. Psychotic but right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could fight them with conventional weapons. That could take years and cost millions of lives. Oh no. No, in this case, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.

Bluto: And were just the guys to do it.     

Life needs the stupid and futile gesture to keep it interesting. Art and history seldom misses an opportunity to memorize such gestures. One such event was a cavalry attack in the Battle of Balaclava, though most people remember it better from the poem,  The Charge of The Light Brigade. It all started over some badly worded orders where the cavalry was suppose to go and retrieve a battery of cannons the Russians were ready to abandon. Instead Lord Cardigan launches a full frontal assault on the whole Russian army. The battle becomes the stuff of legends and Tennyson writes one of the most renowned poems in the English language.   

Any adventure implies some risk. Harrison is ready to go. He's been reading the for sale ads for an affordable trailer and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for inspiration.  It's wryly funny because Harrison doesn't like Hippies or psychedelic drugs but he's enamored with that romantic idea that life should be a risky undertaking every so often.   

If you never read the book, it's about Ken Kesey (wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) and The Merry Pranksters. They drove around California in a bus named Further, had outrageous LSD parties with local folks and the Grateful Dead all before the legislators in Sacramento made hallucinogenic drugs illegal.

Harrison finds another quote to share, this time from the book - "Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don't know that is what they're trapped by, their own little script"  -Thomas Wolfe.

That might be true, currently I'm playing the role of an aging Ward Clever with two sons in college. Harrison has a copy of the Penny Pincher and is pointing to a picture of a small pull along trailer for sale. He wants go somewhere, next year's Burning Man Festival or Route 127 yard sale.

The yard sale thing sounds interesting. It goes from Ohio through Kentucky and Tennessee to end in Georgia. Maybe I'll go, that's held in the summer when it warm and I have few months to float the idea to my wife.

Harrison finds another quote from the book and with dead on seriousness says to me - "either you're on the bus or off the bus".  

As a post note Harrison found a news article where Ken Kesey's old bus is in the early states of restoration

So someday the old bus will be in the Smithsonian -with the paint lovingly restored and all cleaned up.... maybe cleaner than it ever was in the past.

The border line between history and myth is fuzzy one that becomes more blurred in passing years. Our memories soften and we say "oh what a time that was". It's not just restlessness that call us to the open road but also a need to have a story or two in the future to tell and embellish. That's way the tales of Ulysses stay classic, either in a galley ship to Troy or in a bus on the roads of California -it remains the same journey of discovery.