fool with a banjo

Effingham, IL — I sleep through it. Indianapolis, IN — They make us get off the bus while they clean it at 7 am, which really feels like 6 am, since we have just changed time zones. I sit bleary-eyed in the bus station. The bus driver warns us about a couple who live in the bus station who are known for stealing people’s luggage.  Cincinnati , OH — I wake up at some point in Ohio. I have not yet taken it for granted that there are trees now. Cambridge , OH — At first, I think that we are simply in stand-still traffic, and I don’t take too much notice. I knew that traffic would come back at some point as we ventured further north and east. Perhaps more foreign than the landscape of the first leg of my journey was that throughout the entire twenty-one hour trip, there was no traffic. Soon, however, the lack of motion sparks interest and disgruntlement among the bus passengers. There has been an accident on the highway, and not just any small accident—a semi truck has skidded and cras...

  A series of comical failures: I have been messaging an old childhood friend who lives in St. Louis with the intention of meeting up. The first day I’m there, he’s sick with food poisoning. The next day, when we’ve set a tentative time to meet before his work shift, his dad loses his car keys and he has to drive him to the DMV and wait with him. I spend most of my time walking around the city. Unlike a bus which takes you on a predetermined route, I am now an independent agent responsible for making decisions of where to go, what to see. I go to a museum when I realize that I can store my unwieldy backpack in the front and temporarily lighten the load. On my way to the AirBnb, my phone dies just before I read the code for getting in. The sky has already lost most of its light. Desperate for help, I see a mail delivery woman and ask her if she knows of anywhere nearby I can charge my phone. There’s a church across the street that she says might have an outlet.  The AirBnb is a...

I am a bit sad to have only spent a few days in New Mexico, but with the thought of the trip ahead, I feel alive inside.  Tucumcari, NM . We stop here for 20 minutes. I buy coffee and two protein bars and walk around parking-lot land. The first time I had diverted my attention from the window, I was scared that I would miss things. That I would miss the state of New Mexico. We pass fields of green, the first big swaths of green I have seen out here. Green on one side of the highway, emaciated yellow on the other. The distant mountains to the north vanish at some point. Rolling hills. A little stream in the red clay soil under the highway that cows drink from. Distant plateaus, startlingly flat.  Texas—miles of wind farms. Signs advertising seventy two ounce steaks. Signs facing the opposite direction reminding cars that weed is legal in twenty miles, thirty miles, forty miles… signs for getting out of trouble when you get in trouble for weed. Texas flags. Don’t mess with Texas...