You\u2019d Prefer and Astronaut<\/em>). They had eaten oatmeal everyday for three months.<\/p>\n\u201cIt sticks to your ribs\u201d Daphne said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not the only thing it sticks to.\u201d Ashby starred at her and eventually, self-consciously, spit on her bare foot, which sent Maggie skipping across the clearing in a joyful mock rage. \u201cShe has a lot of energy in the mornings, but I like the night.\u201d Ashby was preparing to embark on a lifestyle-training program (covering diet, media consumption, sleep and exercise schedule, meditation regiment, and so on) evidently inspired by ancient Mayan texts, or else somehow orally linked to the practices of presumably sagacious Mayan elders. Thus, she was determined to thrash to her heart\u2019s content in the remaining weeks of their freedom. Her ceremonial initiation into the order (likely some torch lit hundred-year old Vermont barn affair, which numerous registered Socialists in attendance) was in fact the only event which stood to limit the length of their current road trip.<\/p>\n
On the road again, they let the hitchhiker drive, something they seemed philosophically opposed to, but allowed, in practice, and only against their better judgment, still, to belay the insecurity, the commented continually upon the situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re letting the hitchhiker drive.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know, it\u2019s sinister.\u201d Though they both enjoyed that hot car state of sleeping and waking, heavy heads falling with each turn in the road. And the enormous trees awed them. Shane attempted to promote their ease.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m an excellent driver. I had a commercial license once.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThen why are you hitchhiking?\u201d Daphne was the more skeptical of the two. Her road-trip romance was already successfully concluded, whereas Ashby was still in the process of completing that youthful and liberal requirement, and, in her ongoing evaluation of Shane, was growing more optimistic by the hour.<\/p>\n
The pulled into Yreka and Shane filled the Volvo with 87, pumped and paid for it. This garnered serious praise from the Vermonters. His driving eligibility would no longer be questioned. At a \u201cgreen mall\u201d the trio was confronted with a distinct California predicament, as their funds were limited, they could pursue only one of two attractive activities: eat soybean and pesto sandwiches on organic rosemary bread or stagger into the oxygen bar for a legal dose.<\/p>\n
Daphne and Ashby decided upon the food, Shane the oxygen. When offered a variety of flavors, he hesitated.<\/p>\n
\u201cLavender.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLavender?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell it\u2019s just, it\u2019s usually a feminine choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t aware flavors of oxygen were gendered.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere are your from anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust gimmie my shit OK?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRodger dodger.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he stepped out into the light he was so focused he could stare through the pavement, discerning subterranean microorganisms in their deathless pursuit of nourishment. Daphne and Ashby were sitting on the hood their automobile, the sun hanging brightly above them, shoeless, they smiled, licking their lips, breathing deeply the air of such possibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you high?\u201d Ashby asked, looking deeply into Shane\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s high,\u201d they laughed to each other, and Shane laughed, and there they stood, the girls eating and the boy looking up at the jet streams. They regained the highway, southbound once more.<\/p>\n
Shane, still high on the lavender oxygen, attempted to explain himself to them. He began historically, materially, but within minutes had transgressed deep into his present ideological state, his feelings of betrayal by the left, his latent homosexuality, his second-degree bourgeois guilt.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, can I ask you a personal question?\u201d Shane moved her eyebrows together, ever so slightly.<\/p>\n
\u201cFire away.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you do anal?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course. You know the male orgasm isn\u2019t as simple as you might think.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut doesn\u2019t it hurt?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly at first.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I did anal a couple times with my boyfriend. You had better be really relaxed, or else\u2026\u201d
\n\u201cOr else what.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOr else don\u2019t plan on sitting down for a while. Definitely don\u2019t plan any road trips.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYour boyfriend, is he beautiful?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh he\u2019s a hunk, sho nuff, but, there are problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course there are.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, you don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a hot day, Shane took off his shirt in the backseat and fell asleep with a blade of grass protruding from his mouth.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a bit of a hunk,\u201d Daphne said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy boyfriend\u2019s a bit of hunk,\u201d Ashby replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat does that have to do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has everything to do with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI see. Nonetheless, he\u2019s hunky. The hunkiest hitchhiker yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes. I might sleep with him tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHell\u2019s fire Daphne what do you think I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI see. What about\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe slept with other girls. I told him not to, that I didn\u2019t like it like that. Then he kept doing it. So it\u2019s only fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that why you want to fuck the hitchhiker, so things will be fair, cause once you open that door Thor knows what will follow.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHmmm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shane woke up from a dream about Adam Smith, the historical accuracy of which he was less than comfortable with.<\/p>\n
\u201cAdam Smith was kidnapped by gypsies, briefly, as a child.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs he the one who said you would be as sheep among wolves?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIsn\u2019t that the bible? Adam Smith is the father of economics.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t have economics in the bible?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a good question.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyway, it\u2019s right on, about the sheep among wolves, word is bond.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou feel like a sheep.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah.\u201d Daphne stuck her arm out the window and let her hand rise and fall on the air, opening and closing the spaces between her fingers to manipulate the forces of lift.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a wolf.\u201d Ashby looked at Shane and Daphne rolled her eyes.<\/p>\n
They stopped at an ocean beach somewhere in Mendocino. Ashby ran to the sea like some kind of Baywatch hippie, removing her clothes, which drifted slightly with the south wind and fell in a cinematic trail behind her. Daphne walked slowly up to a giant piece of seaweed, which she picked up and began twirling above her head. The centripetal force made a great whooshing sound that started a small flock of gulls into flight. Ashby was afraid of the ocean.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s time to face my fears,\u201d she said to herself, aloud.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you afraid of?\u201d Shane was right behind her, naked, his penis shrunken like a thistle in the briar.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour penis, it is, so small.\u201d She laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot all the time. Sometimes it is impressive. Is that all you are afraid of, the ocean and small penises?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am afraid of black holes, and nuclear power. I guess my own ability to be mean is scary. I can be so mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cExample.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike in the car, earlier, when you were sleeping hunkishly in the back, Daphne was singing a really beautiful song, an Odetta song or something, and I told her to stop singing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t seem so mean.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
The car had no brake lights or turn signals, so come sundown they found a little side road and a clearing beside a tributary of the Russian river, and they pulled out their sleeping bags, two of them slightly weightier than the third with the lingering of last night\u2019s dew. They didn\u2019t eat anything. Maggie went to sleep in the back of the car and Ashby led Shane down to the bank where they dropped their bags and she rolled cigarettes of Drum tobacco and even lit his for him. She exhaled.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you want to have a one-night stand with me?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly one night?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we\u2019ll burn that bridge when we come to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhich, presumably, will be tomorrow night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyway don\u2019t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought you had a boyfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want you, I have since we picked you up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want you to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Somewhat mechanically they began making out and engaging in heavy petting. Shane went down on her and then was inside her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to tell you something,\u201d she said. \u201cI come really easily, in fact, I already did. But keep going, maybe I will again.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you want me to put on a condom?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have one?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think so.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, yeah.\u201d He rifled through his bag and found a condom and put it on. She wrapped her legs around him and they made love in the moonlight (somehow it was only ironically romantic, but this bothered neither of them, nor did they speak of it explicitly). Then they lay on top of their sleeping bags and smoked more of the Drum tobacco and listened to the river.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is my first one night stand,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had one other, with a girl who also slept with the history teacher, in high school, at least that\u2019s what she said.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat happened to her?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe moved to Indiana to study opera.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe history of?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, she wanted to be a singer, Bj\u00f6rk meets Maria Calles.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat sounds nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI never saw her again.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the morning they all sat silently in the car. The road had become extremely windy, they had to drive slowly; a fog had settled over the northern California coast.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat will we do when we get to San Francisco?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEat chowder in a bread bowl, ride the cable car, buy a used copy of Reality Sandwiches <\/em>from City Lights, talk to the bums, go to the movies in Castro, buy a spot of heroin, get high in Golden Gate Park, stare into the well lit windows of the Museum of Modern Art in the midnight of an empty downtown.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cHmmm.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOr you could go to the Exploratorium and loose yourself in it\u2019s famed Tactile Dome.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat about you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I could show you a few sights, I\u2019m from there you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moving through coast towns they saw they varied colored smokes of stoves fueled by different woods: oak, lilac, pine. People sat on porches or in truck beds with faraway eyes directed at each other, at the ocean, at the highway and its riders, few and far between. They could feel the strength of community in those towns, it radiated outward from lone gas stations and mini-marts where Chet stopped by to see who was working late, where everyone took the time to stop and speak, and the light in the trees didn\u2019t go unnoticed. Around Bolinas the fog lifted, and as they drove up over Mount Tamalpias, the city stretched out before them.<\/p>\n
They paid a five-dollar toll to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, and rolled the windows down all the way. Ashby was very quiet, her eyes shining. Daphne had ants her pants.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow did all those ants get into your pants?\u201d Shane asked her.<\/p>\n
\u201cSummertime.\u201d<\/p>\n
They parted a day later. Ashby watched the hitchhiker disappear in the rearview mirror. She meant to stay in touch with him, but the little green book in which she recorded her contacts managed to stay in California when she returned to New England. She googled him to no avail, but still thinks of him often enough, particularly when she sees a map of Alaska or California. She is sure he is somewhere in that part of the country.<\/p>\n
Ashby spent four years working odd jobs and being poor before finally enrolling in a remote college to study \u201cHuman Ecology.\u201d She registered for classes such as \u201cThe Mystics\u201d (among them Rumi, Hafez Sirazi, Farid ud-Din Attar, Gurdjieff), \u201cLandscape Design,\u201d and the popular \u201cHistory of Property.\u201d She would\u00a0house sit for friends in the most deliciously\u00a0peaceful\u00a0houses\u00a0in\u00a0the\u00a0world, up in the Green Mountains, nestled below the majestic Abraham. She came home this evening and went for a run in the rain, the sun was shining and the hills and trees were lit up by that rainbowesque lighting that always takes her breath away. When she got back she scrubbed the dirt and sweat off of her body and trimmed her fingernails.\u00a0She turned on public radio and poured herself a class of cheap white wine. For dinner she had buttermilk pancakes and over-salted and over-peppered scrambled eggs.\u00a0She and her man are going to Montreal this weekend. She\u2019s been looking forward to it all summer. The thing she loves most about that beautiful city is the Notre-Dame Basilica. It makes her cry.<\/p>\n
Daphne teaches pre-school in Burlington. She started studying Buddhism and at last went to Asia in search of deeper knowledge. But the ornate forms of practice she found didn\u2019t agree with her austere sense of the religion. She didn\u2019t like the all the Tibetan demons, or the lavish Theravada temples. Though she didn\u2019t make it to Japan, she found Zen most closely resembled what she wanted from an external ideological structure. Everyday she has those magical moments which make her think \u201cI love being a teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shane was killed in a car accident in Jalisco a year later. He wasn\u2019t driving. The authorities found his passport in his pack and contacted his brother, who flew to Mexico to identify the body with the intention of bringing him back to the United States for a proper funeral and burial. Upon seeing the body, however, he remembered how his brother admired Edward Abbey\u2019s burial in the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness, and he set out to do something along similar lines to honor the deceased.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“On the road again, they let the hitchhiker drive…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1619,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1379\/revisions\/1619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ducts.sundresspublications.com\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Willey_baywatchhippies.jpg\" "\\"\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n