The road calls

I live in Nebraska for 35 years, as a kid, a housewife, a waitress and a college student, before I hop in my Ford truck one day and drive away.

I have no destination. I'm just going. This decision elicits dire warnings. It's dangerous to travel alone. Look at all the awful things that happen on TV. Carry Mace. Carry a gun. Take a tape-recording of a vicious dog barking. Put a big pair of men's boots outside your tent.

I am fairly terrified by the time I start out, but whatever happens, I resolve to accept it. I'm not the first lone wanderer to hear the call of the road. I'm just one of few former housewives from the Midwest to hear it at 35.

My first night out I spend with two of my mother's sisters in Kansas. It is the most perilous thing I do. I haven't seen either of them in 25 years. They tell me stories about my mother I'm much too old to hear. I barely escape with my illusion of reality intact.

I make my way to Tulsa, Okla., where I stay with friends I haven't seen in 10 years. Becky was a nurse and Jerry was an oil rigger when I met them. He is now an emergency medical technician, recovering from a confrontation with a Mac truck while working an accident on the freeway. He shows me photos of the imprint of his body on the grill of the truck. I leave reminded that God takes care of her own. This I appreciate, considering the condition of my pickup, which concerns me more than any evil that lurks in the hearts of men.

The mechanic back home told me the Ford would be fine as long as I stayed on flat land, but Jerry says I have to see the Kiamichi Mountains in southeastern Oklahoma and I believe him. I strike my first solo campsite in the mountains at the Winding Stair trailhead, where I again face danger in the form of smoke inhalation from trying to start a campfire with damp kindling.

I address Christmas cards from Daingerfield State Park east of Dallas, Texas. It is off-season, but warm. Mine is the only tent in the park. The entire hamlet of Daingerfield is immediately aware of my presence, as are the only other residents of the park - Texas Rangers and state patrolmen on retreat in some cabins across the lake. My demise here seems unlikely. I dispense with the notion of setting out decoy boots or resorting to tape-recorded barking dogs.

My next encounter with the dark side materializes in a little town on the bayside of Houston, Texas. I've arranged a job interview here, thinking it would be nice to live on Galveston Bay, not knowing this stretch is an open sewer for every toxic effluent known to man, generated by a few hundred oil refineries jammed into a handful of square miles south of Houston. I drive through an area I later learn to be the humiliation of the term, "Superfund."

I push on south to Galveston Island, a coastal sandbar on the Gulf of Mexico. Here, I pitch the tent and set my propane stove on the tailgate of the Ford. This attracts flocks of nearby mobile home-dwelling retirees who threaten to feed me and put me up for the night. I avert this menace with assurances that I am fine "all alone in a tent."

The night is unseasonably warm. I am alone in the world and have never felt safer. No one warned me about this.

Monday, January 25, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.