The negotiation was finished and I was feeling good for having knocked him down a peg for the (unmentioned) water damage to the trailer. The batteries were dead too, and his excuse was that it had been sitting outside in the Michigan winter. $100 dollar bills and a title changed hands, and I hooked it up to our new trailer hitch. Off we went.
At the start of the great covid migration it was tough to find a teardrop trailer anywhere, especially in a major market like New York. Michigan might be just the ticket; and sure enough, when I looked on Craig’s List there was a teardrop trailer for sale near a town where I grew up. The last day of our summer vacation we drove to Harbor Springs and worked a deal for a sweet little unit with dead batteries and a leaky roof. But the price was right.
Two months later we were out of New York with dog/cat/our belongings in tow and headed West to adventures unknown. The trailer spare tire bungeed to the roof of the trailer was slowly working its way loose from its stanchions. But I was driving, oblivious.
The panhandle of Texas feels like it takes forever to cross. We were at the western edge of a 100+ degree humid heat wave, a meteorological marriage of an early season New Orleans-centered hurricane and typical late summer heat that had cut a wet, hot triangle up the middle of the country. I had doglegged north to miss most of this mess, skipping not only torrential rain/wind but also a planned Ozarks drive-through as our official entrance to Route 66.
The previous sweat-drenched night at the Tom Sawyer Mississippi River RV park was on my mind as I pulled in to a panhandle gas station, where our tire found a pothole, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed motion in my rear view mirror.
As it turned out, our bouncing trailer with incorrectly attached shocks and a poorly thought through 75 lb. spare tire on top of it had been slowly demolishing our cheaply fashioned trailer roof rack, and the plastic skylight window below it, piece by roof rack piece for the last hundred miles or so, with metal sections falling off behind us on the interstate. The tire had mercifully hung on by a literal metal thread, the front edge resting/bouncing on our now shattered skylight. 🙏
I tossed $20 to the station owner to let us dump our now useless trailer roof rack in her dumpster behind the gas station, watching for snakes as I hid the illegal dumping remnants under several trash bags. Re-arranging the stuffed backseat of our car to now also hold our spare tire, my mind drifted to the Blue Whale of Catoosa, our first official stop on the Route. And then further back, to the longtime center of my musical universe, NYC. Mile by dusty mile, further in the rear view.
***
The main reason for doing Texas was the infamous Cadillac Ranch. Don’t get me wrong. I was just as irrationally excited to see the World’s Largest Soda Bottle at Pops Soda Ranch, visit the Rock Cafe where we scribbled our heart on a bathroom wall, take in the Milk Bottle building in Oklahoma City, and be locked up in a 1-room jail in the Texola Ghost Town (no website - it’s a ghost town!)
But the Cadillac Ranch(!)…umm…Bruce Springsteen anyone? American history! Come on!
Shortly thereafter we were on our way to Tucumcari, New Mexico (because?…the Freedy Johnston song! Stay with me…oh and also the Blue Swallow Motel, our last stop on Route 66). Freedy had described to me in not-very-endearing terms that Tucumcari was “one of the more dangerous towns in the southwest”, and yeah desperation hung thick in the air there. We grabbed to-go burritos and took off.
Apple Maps suggested two routes to Santa Fe, one that was indirect freeways, and one that was faster, and straight, and the obvious shorter choice. The sun had set, so we set off on the faster 60 mile chunk of single-lane road that is probably beautiful during the day. At night it is Unlit and Unoccupied and is *not* a great place to be in a desert thunderstorm in the dark towing your life behind you [editors note: years later writing this made me think of the hiker who followed Google Maps and almost fell down a mountain] Pea soup fog came after that, and with my face pressed to the front window we climbed slowly out of the dark desert on a mountain road littered with foot-sized chunks of mountain that had washed from the hills. But it was too late to turn back.
Sal and I pulled into Taos late, and I fell into a deep, musical sleep. I dreamed of the pull of the Rockies. We were on our way.
***
That trailer followed us through the next 2 years of adventure. Crater Lake is in Southeastern Oregon, and we spent a cold but spectacular trailer camping eve there. But at some point we decided we just weren’t using the trailer enough, it was filling our tiny garage, and it was time to move on.
Then, Joni Mitchell came to the Gorge. Well, the Gorge Amphitheater, which is confusingly three hours north of the Columbia River Gorge where we live. When I was in college, I wore out a vinyl copy of Miles of Aisles. I had pretty much written off ever being able to see her because of her stroke, and when she announced her recovery and two 2023 dates, I snapped up four tickets. In early June, we loaded up our teardrop with plans to meet and sell it to a computer programmer from Bellevue the morning after the show, and off we went.
The show took place in one of the magical concert venues on the planet. The photos below speak for themselves I think. I’ve had friends ask me to post video from the show, so here’s “Amelia” which was one of my favs that Joni sang and is my vid, “A Case of You” with Brandi Carlisle on accompaniment, and “Ladies of the Canyon” sung by Annie Lennox were posted by others.
Wednesday morning we pulled out, $100 dollar bills and a title once again changed hands, we disconnected our little friend (David and Lee called it the Love Shack, which was funny if you saw how small it was inside for two adult people), and I watched it slowly disappear down the road behind a Ford F-150.
The drive home felt different. We’d left one of the few remaining pieces of our eastern history behind, the car and my brain felt lighter. I came over a hill, and the buttes of the Pacific Northwest spread out before me like an oyster opening, full of opportunity, expanding and inviting, begging me to drive onward and see what was around the next bend.