Going Home Road, Road away from Home
- Dec 7, 2018
- 5 min read
by Rick Kempa
Flagstaff to Tucson to Flagstaff, Going Home Road, Road away from Home — my parents,’ that is; I had none, unless it was this concrete strip I travelled restlessly, relentlessly, sometimes recklessly in the decade of my twenties, south-bound, north-bound, nowhere-in-particular bound.
Bumble Bee, Rock Springs, Bloody Basin, Stoneman Lake: In how many notebooks did I write these names, scribbling in the dark in the trucker’s cab, making him nervous, or standing on the shoulder just past the on-ramp, my pack propped against the Merge sign?
Toltec Road, where my little red VW seized up for good in the dead of night, 1979, and Nelson, whom I picked up in Santa Fe, and who became, I thought, my road brother, eased it to the shoulder and, wise to the first whiff of trouble, grabbed his backpack and the booze bottle and tramped off into the desert, leaving me there, fucked up and frozen in the front seat, a newly minted college graduate with everything I owned in back, until a cop came and towed my sorry ass to the junkyard.
The overpass at Casa Grande, where I paced back and forth and back for a day and a night and a day and wrote notes on the pylons for the next poor fuck who would live and maybe die there and envisioned an entire novel and revisited all the chapters of my life until then and wondered what was wrong with me that no one helped me.
Bob Marley shaking the speakers of some big old boat, rocking and rolling with Andy and Beth across the desert. High summer, the three of us in the front seat in tank tops and shorts, the windows down, wind whipping all around, she in the middle leaning into me ever-so-slightly, even though she was his girl; the tingling of our intermingled arm hairs, the sticky contact point of our thighs.
And in the concrete vortex of downtown Phoenix on the cusp of rush hour, desperate to snag a ride anywhere out of there before the police snagged me, a girl on a little motorbike pulled over. I hustled up. A thousand times since then I’ve pictured this: her sun-bleached, wind-blown hair, the storm of freckles on her nose and cheeks. She smiled, inched forward on the little seat; it would barely hold us both. I wanted more than I had ever wanted anything to climb aboard and wrap my arms around her skinny waist and lean into her, my body glued to her body to steady us. But the great pack on my back swaying insanely above the rear wheel would, it seemed inevitable, upend us. She was willing to risk it, sat straddling the bike. At last I shook my head and she shrugged and left, and I turned to meet the cops.
Ah, Phoenix, that blight, that travesty, that hell on earth — all Nine Circles of it: whole days, entire life-spans lived and lost there, desiccated under that dreadful sun, requiring every ounce of wile, guile, karma, luck, to survive.
God be praised, a Mormon on a mission picked me up once at the southern fringe. He tried his bait on me. I bit — in fact, I feigned an urgent need to find immediate meaning in my forlorn life; thrilled, he forsook his own day’s plan — declaring “Nothing matters more than this!” — and taught me the ways of Joseph Smith for more than an hour to the far-side of that god-damned sprawl and left me with his blessing and a Book of Mormon — small weight to bear for my deliverance.
Driving north one summer night, something weird going on, a cop car on every exit ramp, making us edgy, making us drive slow. Suddenly, brake lights in both lanes, a jolting stop, doors flying open, men on foot, guns drawn, storming the car beside me, smashing their way in, dragging out a dude — an exquisitely-staged capture over and done in ten seconds. Did it even happen?
Camp Verde. Somewhere around here, that coming-home time, half-drunk and totally stoned, even though I took fake hits from the pipe passed nonstop around and around the hippie van, I stumbled in the blaze of afternoon into a roadside ditch and lay there, dead-weight, face-up.
And the woman who whipped out of the fast lane to claim me, saying “I thought you were a chick,” but kept me on anyway to entertain her little girl in the backseat so she could smoke in peace, then asked if I would share a room with her and watch the kid while she turned tricks.
The electrified atmosphere of monsoon nights — backlit thunderheads, blind bolts, windblasts buffeting the car, sudden sweeps of dirt, the arrival of the water wall, thundering hail, useless wiper blades, tires sluicing through the flooded road, blinding light, saguaro silhouettes, nostrils flaring in the aftermath.
That fevered night in Black Bear City, where water from a stalled storm poured off the Mogollon Rim in a muddy maelstrom that took out a bridge and several cars an hour ahead of us; me in the backseat in a delirium of hammering rain and flashing lights and grinding windshield wipers.
Another night, another flood, John and I walking for miles, beyond tired, in the fast lane of the empty road — the bridge over the Gila River behind us closed.
And that morning of thick black billows belching like smoke signals, walking for hours towards the source, a tanker burnt to a black patch on the asphalt.
Tangerine Road at the edge of Tucson where time and again my father dropped me, always with the same words: “Good luck, take care, write your mother.” The exquisite long-shadowed dawn, curlicues of cool air, sweet scent of water in the arroyo bottom. There I would stand, Mom’s bacon-and-egg breakfast in my belly, the twenty Pop gave me in my pocket, and survey the crisp horizon-line, with a slant of left-over storm, perhaps, or a wedge of rainbow or a whirlwind sliding across the desert floor — all things possible!
And the truck driver whose eyes brimmed with tears when I bummed a dime to call my dad, thinking of his own son, perhaps, or of his father, or maybe of the skinny, empty kid beside him who hardly said a word for hours, returning beat and busted and devoid of dreams to the only place left to go.
Rillito, Red Rock, Picacho Peak, Eloy: Names on road signs never change through thousands of journeys of sun and moon, millions of screaming tires. They signify not place, but time: solitude and intersect, boots worn thin. Flashes like sheet lightning seared in the brain: Something happened here and here and here and here. There is no map for this.
Poet and essayist Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Recently retired after thirty years of teaching at Western Wyoming College, he is embarking on a path of full-time writing and walking. Other essays of his can be read online at Blue Lyra Review, Ducts.org, Hippocampus, and Watershed Review. For more info, see www.rickkempa.com
