Philosophy
from the dashboard
When people
ask me where we're from these days, we usually answer, "We live on
the road." It's not a great answer, and it usually requires further
explanation, but it's the closest we can come to accuracy.
The trouble
is, we don't exactly reside on the road, any more than John Glenn lives
in outer space or Evel Knievel lives in the air between the sides of the
Snake River Canyon. The time we spend actually rolling down a highway
is like the distance between an airplane and the ground when you're wearing
a parachute. It's a roller coaster ride with parking places at both ends.
So where
do we actually live? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, "In
a truck," but that always makes us recall our commuter phase, when
we really did feel as though we lived in cars on Los Angeles freeways.
We didn't ever say it, though. In those days, if someone asked us where
we lived, we had a street address to offer without a second thought as
to where we spent most of my time. It belonged to a house, the place where
we received my mail and stored our lifetime accumulation of stuff. We
made a mortgage payment every month, so it must have been home. Did we
live there? We thought so, mainly because we didn't think about it at
all. We only started thinking about it when "Where do you live?"
ceased to have an easy answer.
Maybe it's
the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking "Where do you feel
alive?" Would you give a street address if someone asked you that?
What if you were John Glenn or Evel Knievel, or someone who likes to jump
out of airplanes? The question would no longer be "Where do you get
your mail and wash your socks?" but "Where do you really and
truly LIVE?"
Maybe we've
been answering truthfully after all. We really do LIVE on the road. The
times in between are fine, too, and necessary. You don't hit the highway
without tires and gas and the expectation that you'll get a little farther
than the end of the block. Any road tripper can tell you that when it
comes to making tracks, "parked" is an important part of the
process.
But oh, those
times when the wheels are rolling, when the telephone lines scallop their
way to the horizon, when the next hill brings the next valley until the
sun disappears. Those times are our cruise in the space shuttle, our motorized
leap over a bottomless gorge, our perfect parachute jump. They're our
chance to feel alive.
Where are
we from? A truck stop, a campground, a driveway, a parking lot. Where
do we LIVE? On the road.
Mark,
Megan & Marvin
the Road Dog
