I’ll help you meet the unknown. I rather enjoy the unknown. At least some of it. Not all of it. Maybe later I’ll tell you about what specific unknowns I cannot deal with. Every life-form has a threshold limit for dealing with the unknown. It is much easier to meet the unknown in the company of someone who finds a particular unknown not to be unknown. Overlapping knowledge-sets are very helpful in dealing with the unknown. It’s about standing back-to-back or side-by-side sometimes. No one knows everything about everything, everyone knows something about something. And anyone who professes to know more than half about everything will not make a good traveling companion. Likewise, someone who claims they know nothing will likely end up being tedious and disagreeable in the ensuing intimate run of a road-trip. Those who presume knowledge to be a fluid condition, changeable, and in need of constant refinement are the best traveling companions.
The capacity to tolerate indeterminate or unknown situations largely rests on prior experience. But somewhere, deep within the reptilian brain is a realization that to gain the requisite rewards that life offers (are they any more than simply the continuance of life?), one has to move outwards, somehow, outwards, through, across, into the world. Riding differential gradients from less to more or more to less, you never know. This movement presumes exposure to changing fields of external flows. It means sampling those flows, carefully or with great abandon.
I’ll ask you: what kind of clothes do you have? Do you have a hat? driver’s license? credit card? sunscreen? binoculars? sleeping bag, begging bowl and spoon? Rifle, boomerang? Have you got a copy of the I Ching? Have you got a string of little brass bells to hang in the nearest tree or cactus whilst camping? No worries, I’ve got all the basics for two, three in a pinch. And that’s about all my truck can carry comfortably. Two humans. Maybe a dog or so. A couple bikes. I’m glad you’re coming: solo travel is so completely different. All for one, and one for all!
I’ve seen too much rolling pavement. Early-on I got saturated with what the system provided along with its mediated evidence: (un)sustainable, limitlessly abundant consumption. The saturation also led to a need to go beyond, to look through things into essences: to look through movement to stasis, to look between things to see the web of flows that tie them all together, to look at edges closely. All this seeing a direct result of irradiated and mutated DNA—DNA exposed to the warm microwave susurrations of the new mediated life of Cold War Empire. The radiation dislodged numerous conditioned chains of behavior that destabilized normative existence within the old tobacco-huffing, hydrocarbon-burning system. It was also the effect of a mobile point-of-view that gave rise to certain realizations which could not have been apprehended before this augmented movement occurred to the Self.
You still want to sit next to me for countless hours? Facing all this and more? Diatribes, rants, finger-pointing, unwound (manual!) windows, and no air-conditioning? My son gave up on that years ago: given a choice, he will refuse to get in a car with me for a long trip. I can maintain a conversation (not monologue, BTW!) for at least 400 miles with no pauses, except for the pregnant ones when peering through tempered silicon dioxide protection at the rolling view, noting what is passing by. Or, if traffic, the weather, or the road is bad, I’ll have to concentrate on that instead. If the sights are interesting enough, I’ll slow down (I do keep an eye on overtaking traffic for just this reason) or even slam on the brakes at the closest safe pullout. Lately it’s been roadside memorials (or is that Roadside Memorials?) that catch the attention when rolling along. Maybe this is because I have no other passengers, or perhaps that is the reason no one wants to travel with me. I’ve taken more pictures of roadside memorials than of living people in the last year or so.
Like I said, I’m a child of the Defense Interstate Highway System and have a deep military-industrial-academic complex of my own. That combined with an understanding of terrain both revealed at the surface as well as that which is revealed by remote and deep sensing, I carry substantial baggage to unpack, properly, at the auspicious time. And to top it off, I’m a defensive driver!
It used to be that I could make the 32-hour run from Washington, D.C., to Denver, all along Interstate-70: alone, with no caffeine, straight, no stopping except to piss, grab a burger, and gas up. These days, I do make frequent stops—many of them, as I have already mentioned, to imbibe in a visual re-membering of the dead, fallen along these long asphalt strips. But sometimes also to marvel at the extent to which the massive social deployment reflected in the dark gray concrete and black-top has re-structured the world, the earth, ostensibly as a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for Homo sapiens pro-generation.
I do know how to listen and when to shut up, and I do know when to stop the car, especially to acknowledge the end of the road: to step out. I do know when to stop after the afternoon thunderstorm has shed its precious water on the dry rangeland, I know why to walk out into the low sage, pluck a handful of leaves, crush them between palms and let you smell the sweet fragrance—partaking of the unknown in silence, allowing it to seep into the body, thus the soul, and change the Self.
Maps. I’ve got maps. Yeah, those paper things—maps at a variety of scales and vintages and of a variety of places: reductive subsets of the world. No GPS: I’m not interested in Department of Defense satellite connections. Yes, I know there will be places we’ll end up that I don’t have a map of. Traveling beyond the edge of a map is a good way of encountering the unknown. There is signage which can help mitigate the risk, but otherwise, first verging on and then leaping out over the edge of the map is a transcendent experience. As long as the gas tank is full and the spare tank as well, spare tire’s got air, food in the cooler, we are set. “A map is not the territory,” this should be the mantra repeated constantly by every voice navigation system, that and “embrace the new!”