my first road trip / the turn of fate / technical notes #10

	current cycle	total trip
miles	1481	16852
gallons	72.7	721.5
dollars	194.5	1866.2
mpg avg	20.4	23.4
costpg avg	2.68	2.59
days	23	245

it is hard to believe that just five days ago i was haunting a cold city in a warm bed with a beautiful lady next to me. but, there are many things about this life that i find hard to believe. as a matter of fact i find the whole idea of life a hard thing to believe. but thats not something i am set to talk about this day. this day, i am set to talk about little rock, dallas and my shitty truck.

i woke in little rock yesterday and it was pretty awesome. the feeling of somewhere that you have never seen in the light just waiting beyond some thin doors. i went to a coffee shop and sat there for awhile, writing. and then i was off to explore little rock. it is a place i have been before...and you know what that means! you will get to read some rambling story of a life that i existed in many years ago, one that i have a foggy memory of and then just make a bunch of stuff up. who is ready for that!

anyway. after the coffee shop i made my way to the natural first destination. as with any capital city, the capitol building is the first stop. capitol building are so easy to find and i like their architecture so much. i also like the mostly marble and limestone construction, the smooth cold walls and often ancient woodwork and craftsmanship. it is definitely a draw. so i drove and found the capitol very easily, i stowed some of my metal objects in the truck and set off up the hill to the building. thats another thing i like about these places, they are most often situated on top of a hill. very pretty.

the arkansas capitol building.

i have been to quite a few of these building on my trip and the worst part, generally, is going through the metal detectors. i carry so much stuff with me and i am just standing there unloading and then reloading for a minute or more while this police officer is just checking me out. it isnt enjoyable, but once i get inside i enjoy the experience very much. usually there is a guided tour, and those are the best, the guides will answer so many random questions and give the darnedest facts - things you would never think of.

but it wasnt so at this building, there wasnt a tour for more than two hours and i wasnt prepared to wait that long. so i took the booklet and embarked on the self-guided tour. it is much less interesting this way. in the shadow of the portrait of bill clinton i sat and wrote some postcards. long overdue, it has been months since i sent my last postcard and i have many more to write and send out. i meandered throughout the building but there wasnt very much to see in there. when i made it back to the lobby i asked one of the officers there about things i should see in little rock.

with some vague information i set off for downtown. my destination was riverfront park, my goal was to find "le petite roche" - the littlest rock. i dont think that is an accurate translation but in my searches i consistently muttered to myself 'where is the littlest rock.' and i carried on an internal debate if the littest rock was actually going to be a small rock or if littlest should exist in quotes and the rock would actually be quite large. these are the types of things i think about as i am walking around in random cities attempting to be a part of life.

as it happened, i never found "le petite roche" and i am convinced that it doesnt actually exist. later i learned that "la petite roche" wasnt necessarily even a rock, it was just the site where little rock was originally founded. i would guess by the french. but i have no substantiating evidence to back this up. what i did find was public art. and a lot of it.

i was pretty surprised to find so much in a place like little rock. i know that is assumptive, but i was surprised. the problem with public art is that usually i dont find it to be very good and certainly i would rather see cities spend money on things like housing than public art. i was in this place called peabody park and there were dozens of pieces of public art. the best of which were

the plane! the plane!

some sculptures of the transition of a piece of paper into something else. one went from flat paper to a paper airplane and the other from flat paper into an origami star. there were also little pieces like a horse, an owl, a lady with a rose, some things that i didnt really know what they were. and, amazingly, one of bob wad and his dad!

then i continued walking and ended up in the president clinton presidential park. i am pretty sure that is the name for it and that whomever named it wanted to make sure that everyone knew bill clinton was once the president. it is an expansive parks of rolling hills, right on the river, there is a large presidential library and a decommissioned steel bridge that runs right next to it. the bridge was really the best part. eventually they are planning on turning it into and walking path and that will be nice...as if i will ever see it!

something i was surprised to find is that little rock is also headquarters for the international martial arts association or something. they had a nice little public park with lots of art and chinese gates at the entrance. it was a tranquil little place that really has no purpose being somewhere like little rock.

then i went back towards my truck and had to make a decision. i could continue roaming the mean streets of little rock or i could head south. keep on trucking, as it were. it wasnt a very hard decision and i didnt think very long about it. i fired up the truck and set of on highway 30 west. towards texarkana. my plan was to get to texarkana - a moderately sized and well placed city - and enjoy a night there. i figured that it would be somewhat of a place, at least a waystation with, well, things to do. when i arrived i found that my thoughts on this matter were very far from the truth.

lets back up just a moment. somewhere on the way from little rock to texarkana i had to stop and refuel. and this went fine, i was getting decent mileage from these last few days of intense interstate driving, my truck was working hard and i was thankful for that. but when i tried to start up my truck again it made a noise. a protest against my persistence. the noise was, well, like this: screech! just kidding. when your car is already running and you turn the ignition it makes a screaming noise and this was the noise my truck was making - but i wasnt double starting.

i was unhappy about this development and chalked it up to how much work i was putting this beast through. i was hoping that a night of rest would set everything right again. and then i got to texarkana. i was fully prepared to stay here for the night, i exited the expressway and headed south on state line road towards what appeared to be downtown. texarkana is a strange place. it saddles the border between texas and arkansas (hence the name) and it is essentially a ghost town. the downtown area was a few larger building situated around the rail yard but these buildings were unoccupied and the windows were all busted out.

i found a place that i could park for the night, in case the truck didnt want to move again, and then set out on foot to explore this urban wasteland. i walked throughout the downtown area, and eventually to the coffee shop i was aiming for, the place i wanted to sit at it in the morning. however, this place has since closed and i became despondent. here i was with a shitty truck in a dead town in the middle of nowhere. i walked to the post office to mail my postcards and then sat outside for an hour or so reading. at least it was warm out.

with states like these, who needs enemies.

and then i decided i would continue to push on. i came back to my truck and forced it to turn over and got right back on that highway determined to get closer to dallas. i made it to sulphur springs and there i slept in some parking lot off of the expressway. i was still in the middle of nowhere, but it was here that i slept. in the morning i was happy that my truck decided to start again, even if it was getting rougher. back to the expressway.

i had about 70 miles before i would need to refill and dallas was about 85 miles away. i pulled off after about 50 miles, the exit had a hotel that i knew gave free wireless, so i went there and found a place to shoot for once i got into dallas - i didnt dare turn off the engine - and then i went to the gas station to fill up. and i turned the truck off. once the fill up was done so was the truck. it refused to start again. when i turned it over i just got a soft whine - or more like a soft shriek - from under the hood. by this time i had deduced that the problem was the starter. i dont know much about cars, but i whittled the options down to this.

i rolled the truck forward into a motel parking lot and sat there for a few minutes. i got out and popped the hood. i had done this at least three times since this starter noise had began. i still had no idea what i was looking at. i tried starting it again, same thing. i walked around the gas station and surveyed what may have become my new home. there was nothing around, just a random exit on the highway. i contemplated calling AAA and having them come get me and tow me into dallas, i weighed my options. and then i thought to give it one more try.

and voila, the truck started up. the double starting noise was back and i knew that i only had a few more starts in me so i hightailed it into dallas and found the coffee shop i was shooting for and a place to park that would allow me to leave the truck there for a time if necessary. and there it was, i found myself in dallas - for the first time since i was 17.

yes, i have been to dallas once before. it was actually the first road trip that i took - at least that is how i remember it. oh, the internet is such a nice thing. growing up in northwest indiana i always felt there was something more for me, the internet opened the entire world and i ate it up at the time. actually i still eat it up. and it was in my 17 year old mindset that i met a girl named robin on the internet.

we chatted all the time and i thought that maybe she and i would get along pretty good. she was cute, around the same age, and short. i like the short girls. she was short to the tune of 4' 10" and i guess we had some other things in common. i dont really remember too much of it. but i do remember that i was up for the challenge. my car either wasnt working or i didnt trust it enough to make the trip so i borrowed my parents car - the same car that i would steal about a year and a half later and move to new york with.

i highly doubt that i told my parents that i was taking their car to dallas, i didnt tell them much then. and i dont think that i wouldve been allowed to borrow the car if they knew i was going to dallas with it. this was in the summer, i wish i knew how much money i had or a few other details of this. i made the trip in one day, i am pretty sure. i did stop in little rock and in texarkana then, but i dont think i accomplished anything in either place at the time. i rolled into dallas and went to her house. i think she lived in denton but i am not positive of that.

like i said, this was in the summer. and it was hot in dallas. i have never been someone that loves the heat very much and i was instantly sweating. since i was in the car and there was no air conditioning, i decided that i would strip down and drive naked. i was a bit outlandish at the time and this made sense to me. no one could see my lower half, and the expressway was a parking lot. so i took off my top clothes and then wriggled out of my bottom clothes, all while driving on the expressway. i did leave my shoes on. i thought it was hilarious, but i dont think it is something i would readily repeat at this wiser age.

i do remember that the suburb she lived in - with her parents - was posh. i came up to the house and immediately felt out of place, i was wearing tattered clothes and was driving an old hatchback. but she came out of the house, probably perplexed at my arrival, and gave me a big hug. she was a very good hugger and i liked that very much. she invited me inside, i may have met her parents, but we went straight up to her bedroom. and i think this was why i came down there, i was expecting that we would have sex...and this was a big deal for me since i hadnt yet lost my virginity.

but instead, we just talked. probably if i were more confident i could have made some kind of move and realized the things that i wanted, but i am still sometimes dogged by this lack of confidence. i remember her room so vividly, she was very big into tori amos. i was not, at the time i was very much into punk rock and thought her obsession with tori was overwhelming. she was so short and sweet, what added to the effect was that she wore wings wherever she went. like a pixie.

i dont remember us ever leaving her house, but i do remember that i wasnt allowed to sleep over at her house. and that she had a mean boyfriend that she was in the process of breaking up with. so i would sleep in the car in a parking lot somewhere. i think i was only there for two nights. the first day and night was euphoric, we sat and talked on her bed and took a walk, she talked to me about her relationship with the wind and i thought that was pretty cool. the next day i came back to her house and we carried on but she started talking more about her boyfriend and said that she had to think some things through. halfway through the day she said that she needed alone time and asked me to leave her parents house. she said we could resume tomorrow.

my hope was waning. i didnt feel like we were going to get together any longer and i was starting to feel like an idiot for driving so far and so long for something that i wasnt prepared to engage in. and, i didnt know anyone or anything else in dallas so i wasted away the hours in a way that i can no longer remember. walking around downtown, i think i tried to go to a rodeo in fort worth. that night i parked in a parking lot again but it was so hot and the car was so small. so i opened the back door and slept there with my feet hanging out. i can only imagine how it looked. to someone else it looked like i was passed out or dead in the back of this car. and so the cops came.

i was roughly woken up by the police and gruffly informed that i could not sleep here. after they searched the car and determined i was not a threat they left, and left me with a warning. if they caught me again i would be arrested. my mind was stirring. there was a jack in the box fast food restaurant and i had never even seen one of these, let alone been to one. so i went through the drive through and got some food while i contemplated my options. things werent working out with robin, i wasnt having a very good time, and i was probably running out of money. so it was there in the parking lot i set my course back to indiana. i left at 3:am or so and powered through back to my home.

i think i slept for days upon my return. i regaled my friends with my story, i certainly made it into a tall tale at the time, i was prone to do that and no one would know the difference. i am sure i told at least a few people that i had sex with her while i was down there. and as far as robin and i were concerned, our friendship was over. i learned a valuable lesson about the internet: online personalities do not always line up with real life personalities. not that i wouldnt jump off that bridge again, but it was good to know that disappointment is a likely possibility.

i have never talked to robin again, but i wish i knew where she was now, or i had some way to get a hold of her. i would love to see how she turned out, and have her see how i turned out. i have long written this possibility off, i have no identifying information aside from a first name and a metropolitan area that she lived in during 1997. oh well. (and just a note about my lack of memory, earlier i made a post about "my first road trip" to new york with melissa. i think that was actually my second road trip. but, if not, then there are so many bad facts in here, it might as well just be read as fiction.)

and now i am sitting here, trying to find a mechanic to come fix my truck. it will probably cost in the $200 range...so there goes my food budget.