Seattle to Boston

♥️ · October 2020 · 7 min read

The roads are pink and the rocks are purple! Becky, Jordan, and I made it to the Wyoming part of Yellowstone. The trip started off hilariously because as soon as we backed out of my driveway in Renton, Selva noticed that the left tail light of Becky's car wasn't working. So our first stop on this coast-to-coast trip was the Mercedes-Benz service center in Bellevue. But within a couple hours we were back on track. In Coeur d'Alene we walked around a park with lots of families and their kids and touched sticky sap on a tree. Then we grazed the corner of Montana and arrived into Wyoming that night. In the car, I talked about my struggle with setting premeditated intentions. I like to just do things and see what happens. Becky called me a doer. Today we drove by maybe six bison, massive and only a few feet from the side of the road.

I am watching the elk graze on the grass outside of our motel. The stars are out. The elk eat the grass on this manufactured lawn, confined by gray curbs and buildings on both sides. I'm thinking of my studio apartment in LA, where I showered right up along spiders in their webs. We're like the spiders, but our webs are weird gray curbs and motels.

Poop, dongle, canyon, billionaires, Inspiration Point, disposable camera. Jenny Lake. Wall Drug. Staring at the clouds closely because they are always moving. We made it to the Badlands in South Dakota. My first snow of the year. I'm in a bizarre outfit of multiple windbreakers. Watching animals from the car. Rocks with lines, little canyons, bighorn sheep. Eating Chinese homemade jerky and cashews for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Never hungry, but not quite full.

We are sharing a motel room in South Dakota. It has one king bed that cost $11 per person. For $15 per person we could have gotten two queens, but we're really trying to keep costs as low as possible. The water from the faucet here tastes sweet. I had hot food for the first time in four days. The skin on my hands is very dry. We have watched The Holiday, The Proposal, and The Devil Wears Prada. Jordan is flying back to DC for work and leaving us in a couple days.

I can't remember where we were, but somewhere between Wyoming and South Dakota I really had to pee. Last spring, my mom learned she had a health condition that required her to hydrate double the amount of the average person. I'm talking like at least a gallon of water per day. Anyway, I've also been struggling with some health issues, so earlier this month I thought I'd give this copious water diet a try. I brought two 48 oz bottles from REI with me and have kept them filled, much to the dismay of my fellow roadtrippers. Becky and Jordan have had to deal with me needing to pee nearly every hour. They've been very nice about it. Except this time I desperately needed to pee and we were miles away from the nearest rest stop. They kept me distracted. We played loud pop music and I ate some nuts. We finally pulled into a small info center. No one was there. I ran to the bathroom. Locked. I could have cried. I ran back to the car. On my last straw, I crouched down next to the passenger side of the car. Before Becky and Jordan could say anything, my pants were down and I was peeing on the ground of this parking lot in broad daylight.

We drove through Kansas at like 2am, or what felt like 2am. The sky was dark gray. We could see the faint outline of the clouds, black. We must have routed onto a trucking highway because there was no sign of other human life. The only things we seemed to pass were tiny one-room buildings that looked fake and... deer. As we drove by, our headlights illuminated their forms and antlers. They looked strange, waxy. They flanked the road, frigid, staring. Ghost deer. It was terrible and unsettling.

We also saw a few signs that said something like "Hazardous Clouds Ahead" or "Beware of Dust Clouds." It must have been a sort of government-run chemical testing zone or something. We were totally creeped out and on this road for hours. At some point we all needed a potty break. We finally found a pocket of the road that seemed deer-free, pulled over to the side, and squatted down on the shoulder. As I peed, I saw glimpses of several pairs of white, lit-up deer eyes maybe a hundred or so feet out in the distance.

Becky went to college in Northfield, Minnesota. I visited her a few times during our college years and it was always a special reprieve from my own university experience. Northfield, a placid and rural midwestern town with only a few main streets and one burrito place, couldn't be more different from Los Angeles. Anyway, while she was there, her campus job was in the school's herpetology department. Herpetology is the study of snakes. Several times per week, Becky had to take bags of frozen mice out of a massive freezer in the biology department and bring them to the snake room, which was a small 10 ft by 10 ft space. The room was lined floor to ceiling with drawers with clear fronts. Each drawer held one snake, and there may have been at least 20 snakes in the room. Becky fed the snakes these frozen mice. With gloves and a pair of tongs, she fearlessly opened each drawer and let the snakes rise up and swallow the dangling mice. I would watch warily from the door, my back to the room and hand on the doorknob.

After holding this campus job for a while, Becky built a great relationship with the department chair and was able to work out an adoption of one of the smaller snakes that the college didn't need anymore. We stopped in Northfield for the day between South Dakota and Chicago. Becky picked up Shybones from the department chair. Shybones is skinny and white and admittedly quite cute. Shybones rode in the back of the car in a box for the rest of the drive to Boston, except when Becky would take him out to play from the passenger seat while I was driving.

We stayed the night in Madison, Wisconsin. This morning we walked around, got coffee and pastries, and ventured through local shops that sold things like stickers with progressive mottos in bubbly fonts and oblong ceramic things. It is cold but the city is pretty, at the intersection of several lakes. Everywhere is a lakefront. The sidewalks have little dandelions and weeds poking out and people ride fixies. I like Madison a lot. I could see myself living here, or somewhere like here.

In Ypsilanti, Michigan, we met up with Becky's friends from college, Chelsea and Chae. We were all to stay one night in an old-fashioned, wooden Airbnb. We got in around 5pm but it was pouring rain. Becky's Benz could barely pull through the flooded roads, and the parking situation for this house was difficult so we had to park down the street. We got soaked in the couple trips back and forth from the car to bring our luggage up. Becky caught up with Chelsea and Chae while I lied down and scrolled on my phone, my damp hair draping off the arm of the couch. I admired the trinkets on the chests and dining table. There was a musty smell about the house and this made it hard for me to sleep.

Starting in Michigan, the four of us took two separate cars since Chelsea had met up with us in her car. I rode with Chae and Becky rode with Chelsea. Chae and I both love Ariana Grande. But not just like recent Ari. Like old Ari. Like belting the words to Piano from Yours Truly Ari. And girly pop and Disney movie soundtracks.

In Northfield, I found myself in a bookstore on their main street opening a collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson. Of all the books on that shelf, I'm not sure what made me grab that one. I didn't love "The Lottery," the only Shirley Jackson I've ever read, when it was required for school years ago. And though I can appreciate southern gothic writing, it's not my first affinity.

The first story was called "The Possibility of Evil." It's about the daily errands of an older woman who lives alone, including buying groceries, stopping by the library, and anonymously mailing horrific and scandalous letters of gossip to her neighbors, to keep them on their toes and cause chaos in her small town.

I'm in Cambridge, Boston now, staying at Becky's new apartment for a couple nights before I drive down with Chelsea to New York. I mailed some postcards this morning. On my walk to the post office, I remembered the woman from "The Possibility of Evil" mailing her grating notes. I viscerally felt the feeling of a mildewy old town. Jackson also wrote some haunting food scenes in there that came into mind and couldn't be abandoned. For the rest of the walk home, I felt repulsed and itchy, like my capillaries also found the story despicable.

I made it to New York. I'm staying with Brianna in Greenpoint in a sort of last-minute switch-up. I was planning to stay the first leg of my New York stint with Suraya in Manhattan before coming out to Brooklyn with Brianna, but Chelsea, who drove me to New York, is in Crown Heights and the drive into Manhattan to drop me off at Suraya's would have been insane for her and the Ubers tonight are also exorbitantly expensive. So Brianna was gracious enough to let me stay a few days ahead of schedule. Her new place is a lovely railroad-style apartment. Street-facing kitchen, a TV room, and a spacious bedroom where she has a projector setup to watch movies from bed. We are planning to watch the Woody Allen film, Manhattan. I think we both agree that watching a Woody Allen movie is not something to boast about, but we were curious and it seemed thematically fitting for my visit. It's like secretly accepting more cash for something than you expected but not returning it, or eating some cheese while you're vegan or something. Probably worse.

The drive into New York with Chelsea was pleasant. Chelsea had been listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks throughout the roadtrip. She was midway through the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so we listened to this most of the drive. At the last rest stop area before arriving to New York, we decided to get Taco Bell for dinner. I haven't had Taco Bell in years. I got a Crunchy Taco Supreme. We went back to the car, ate, then pulled into the gas station. As Chelsea pumped gas, my body caught up and also realized that it hadn't had Taco Bell in years. I dodged into the gas station and bought Tums and a couple rolls of Rolaids. Second dinner. In a case of perfect timing, we finished the audiobook as we drove through the Eastern Parkway into Brooklyn, getting in tonight around 8pm.

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