A couple missing papers that
Poul found
Travel Diaries Continued
We’ve traveled enough to have our routines down. Leigh gets up before me and gets dressed and all the other things that women do in the morning. I get up, have a coffee and we pack the trunks. We load the car, Leigh checks out and we hit the highway. This morning I tried to get to the restaurant on the other side of the street. An impatient guy behind me starts honking and motioning me to get out of his way. I pull into the right lane in front of a truck who also honks and he has a really loud horn. Lot of impatient honkers in Joliet. In the rush I see a Holiday Inn to my right and yank off into what I think is the street road leading to it. “What are you doing?” Leigh yells. “You’re on the exit ramp!” Sure enough, the next thing I knew we were on 80 west. A few years ago I would have panicked. Now I figure we’re on 80 west and there’ll be another exit. We drive about a mile, find an exit and pull up to a Cracker Barrel for breakfast. The rest of the day is uneventful. Leigh drives for four hours this afternoon so I have a chance to study the Iowa and Nebraska countryside-- rolling fields like a gentle, humpy sea that solidified and turned solid green with grass, corn and soy. A few clumps of trees stand up like tufts of hair. Everyplace in America is beautiful in its own way. If Poul had to choose his paper-picking place of preference, it
might be here. The land is relatively flat and the picking is easy.
No mountains to get in the way; no swamps to trudge through. August 12, 2004 80 mph, a regular rhythm. Anything slower feels like we’re dragging. We make Colorado in 2 ½ days. Just inside the border, while it’s still looking like the Midwest, Leigh studies the map and says we can take Rt. 24 to circumvent Denver. Neither of us wants to go through the hassle of Denver’s crazy traffic. We did it a couple years ago when we moved our daughter to Aurora. I drove her Jeep with a U-Haul attached and her German Shepherd in the back. The traffic is heavy. The streets are confusing. It’s a sprawling mass of chaos. Yes, anything to drive around Denver. I find an exit. We turn and back-track, take Rt. 24 and drive for two hours over a two lane road through brown and green rolling plains listening to Gordon Lightfoot. Two lane highways are more natural, more intimate. On the east coast, they pretty much follow the contours of the land. Out here they have the luxury of building a road straight – point A to point B. It’s always hard for an Easterner to get used to the seemingly endless tracts of land with a house and barn sitting in the middle like a couple of periods on a huge sheet of paper. I can’t imagine what it’s like to drive 50 miles to the nearest town. We meet almost no traffic. So I decide to put my idea into action. The Perfect Song is about Mendel traveling the country, writing, and throwing his songs in frustration. It’s about Poul who spends his time following, and picking up the papers. What better way to illustrate the book on this site than taking photos across country? I find a good spot and pull off the road. Find some papers and crumple them. Place them around the ground and shoot. Okay. Mendel was here.
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