Roadtrip Blues: Part 2
Morgantown, West Virginia to Nashville, Tennessee (8 hours; 540 miles)
This post is a series.
If you haven’t read the night before Sam left and part 1, I suggest you start there. 🫶
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We wake up at our normal time, but our bodies can feel we have been robbed of an hour of sleep. My eyes are groggy, and I shivered through the night.
We bundle and get in the car and hunt the windy, quiet-cold streets for hot hot HOT coffee. In the daylight, Morgantown is a series of tightly winding hills knit together with houses stacked on top of each other.
We take the recommendation of the beautiful septum pierced local and go to X joint. I ordered very large, very hot coffees and breakfast sandwiches. Sam parks illegally across the street and we cross our fingers that the cops are just as sleepy and chill as the rest of the town.
On this sleepy Sunday, college kids made us our breakfast and had the early morning conversation of what happened the night before. As they plod along and make our to-go order, I listen as they revel in the dramas that consume most college kids ( apparently someone at school was faking an Irish accent, and everyone knew it but couldn’t call him out on it. They just deemed him insufferable and avoided him). The same minor stake stories I would have been gossiping about at their age. I gave a sad smirk at the minor gossip. As we stood only a few feet apart, I felt so distant from them--a wall of rigid responsibilities and heavy decisions between us.
Sam and I hop in the car, and Sam puts the car in reverse. Here in the south, spring started to show herself.
We obviously played Joni Mitchell, and her creaky, high pitched good morning Morgantown played out as we began to exit the city. Her voice fills the car. Sam and I are silent but can feel each other’s moods. This song is the reason Sam had wanted to stop in Morgantown.
Sam has this thing about wanting to visit the towns that people write songs about. On our last road trip, Blubaru huffed and puffed her way up the Rocky Mountains as we made our way to Telluride, Colorado to the tune of (this band) singing about the rare gem of a mountain town.
I like to think Sam tries to tap into some magic the musician felt while being here– a clue on how to be here or helps channel some mystical energy, a riddle in a song. Only back then, Telluride was a place we were both excited to go to.
As I turn to look at him today, it’s the blue ridge mountains that make up the background of his window. Blubaru winds around the serpentine highways lined with budding trees.
Joni starts the second verse in her high pitched twang with the guitar picking underneath her, and I begin to tear up knowing what is ahead of us. Why are we driving on a Sunday morning to Tennessee? Why aren’t we listening to this song on a record player in our cozy apartment as we both read the New Yorker on the couch with hot coffee Sam has made us? I don’t want to be in motion. I want to be enjoying a still morning together where we are drinking coffee out of one of the mugs our moms have made us (both gluten intolerant potters from Long Island). Or we could be in a house upstate that we don’t know yet, but we will feel it the moment we get in and make it our own.
I sometimes get whiffs of the house we are meant to live in- the yard, the small path of stones that lead out to the podcast studio in the back. I watch you out of my window as you come in and out of it. The quiet peaceful serene space that we will one day carve away from all the noise of the city.
I can see it in my mind’s eye, and I don’t understand how driving out to the desert is going to get us back upstate. This feels like the longest detour away from our dream. A dream we had discussed over and over during the four years we had been together. A dream I was nervous Sam was giving up on.
Why the fuck are we drinking coffee out of paper cups in a car headed to Nashville?
What the fuck are we doing
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Joni made me wallow in our fate. I let the tears fall. I knew I would be crying a lot this week, so I avoided wearing mascara.
We dig deeper into the music. We play more Joni, other serines of the 70s, and inevitably put on Country Roads– the only song every American can sing but can’t name the singer. We go on an Americana kick and belt out Country Roooooaaaaadddd take me hooommmmeeeee (YES TAKE US HOME) to the plaaaaaaaace I beLONNNGGGGG.
I am longing for something, anything, other than what we are doing right now. How could I leave my favorite person on the other side of the country? What do you mean I am going back to an empty apartment?
I put my head in my hands, elbows on my knees, and just weep. Maybe listening to melancholy music so early in the morning wasn’t a great idea for my nervous system. Sam grabs my hand, the other firmly on the wheel.
The coffee and breakfast sandwiches turn to trash that I store on my side, tucked inside the door.The light gets warmer; we get higher and the day begins to open up around us. Suddenly, we are driving through the apex of the blue ridge mountains and they are BLUE. The road we tumble down is wide, and there are no other cars on the road. Blubaru glides around these ridges like an ice skater. One of the poorest states, carved up by coal mining, was so rich in views.
I gazed at the steep drop offs of the gorges and winding through the tops of the mountains. When we enter Kentucky, everything flattens out.
We played– what we call– dueling DJ’s: Sam puts on a song and then I put on a song that I’m inspired by his previous song and we go back and forth. The car suddenly filled up with air guitars, and we used each other’s thighs as drum beats. For minutes at a time, I played piano on his right forearm.
It passed the time. After Kentucky came Tennessee.
Where Morgantown is sleepy, hazy with fog and weed smoke, Nashville is LOUD and belligerent. Stag parties and gaggles of bachelorette groups are blitzed out by four in the afternoon. It’s a town where the energy ratchets up to an 11 early in the day. The main drag is one long strip of BBQ joints, cowboy boot shops, neon signs, and country music venues blasting music.
*insert YEEEEHAWWWW*
We get food at X which is fast and served on styrofoam plates. I feel the southern divide. The biodegradable cutlery has stayed up north, and from here on out food and drink will be served on squeaky, throw away, one and done styrofoam. I try not to think about what styrofoam is made of... Our plastic plates are heavy with sausage and brisket, picked cucumber salad and coleslaw. We eat fast.
Sam wants to watch some live music. We roam the strip as I tried not to get swallowed up in a matching white cowboy boots bachelorette party and ducked under wide brim cowboy hats. I almost got swept up and carried away by about three of them.
A reminder I still needed to plan my bachelorette...when would I be able to do that? The idea of our wedding in a few months made my neck hot, and I tried to brush it off.
I tried to find some levity. I walked up to a hat stand and suggested, nay INSISTED, I get Sam a hat that had a built-in mullet in the back, but he didn’t want it, begging me not to get it for reasons I’m still confused by.
Nashville architecture is set up so you can see the performer from outside, big windows for people who are walking by and be lured in to stand idly at the door and watch.
Sam and I get curious over one restaurant with someone singing in the window, and we settle up at the bar. The bar is in the center of the room and is a large rectangle for anyone to sit around and watch the show. People are dressed a little more nicely here. I have no desire to be blitzed out. We both ordered one drink.
Long lights dangling above us and a quaint duo sang covers. They are fine performers but when a server is offered the stage, he slings the guitar on his lap and belts out a tune that lights the whole room up. People stand and applaud when he leaves after one song and goes back to take someone’s drink order.
There was an old couple in the middle of the room holding hands. And my eyes fill with tears. I bit my lip to stop crying. I closed my eyes as the music played and quietly prayed that Sam and I are lucky enough to have that many wrinkles and white hair and still want to hold each other’s hands someday. Why is he being taken away from me?
For an evening, I just pretended we were having a nice drink in a new city together. I let the music notes fill my ears, and the alcohol ran through my blood stream. I rubbed Sam’s back.
His wide, strong back. A part of his body I don’t always pay attention to and now felt like it was a little too late to start noticing. We were just a normal couple out on an adventure. We were just a normal couple wanting to enjoy a nice night of live music. Normal couples make sacrifices all the time, right? Normal couples support each other no matter what, right? Normal couples do long distance all the time for their careers right? Even at the sake of the relationship itself?
Honestly, I let myself let go and briefly forgot why we were in Nashville at all. Those few minutes where we swayed with the music and the crowd and I just let myself be present were the only few moments of peace I felt that whole trip.
Its rhinestone shimmer eased my mind for a night and helped me forget the real pain that was waiting for us on the other side of the city limits.
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This post is a series.
If you haven’t read the night before Sam left and part 1, I suggest you start there. 🫶
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Next: Road Trip Blues: Part 3