Daniel drove west, towards the Rockies and the redwoods. The old 65 gave the trip the aesthetic of a Hunter S. Thompson novel, and Daniel felt like he was driving through a dream as the day became the night and the bats came out. Each city he passed became a glow on the windshield and as the hours ticked by each hotel became an enticing chance for rest. Each truck stop diner promised a reprise of a greasy burger and a malted milkshake. It was growing close to midnight as Daniel drove into a Holiday Inn and checked in with the woman at the front desk. The woman was heavy set and had a head full of over dyed bleach blond hair. She never gave Daniel a second look as he signed the papers and took the room key. She informed him that check out time was at noon and that continental breakfast was served until 10am every morning.
Daniel laid in his hotel bed and watched the lights from the interstate light up his walls. He still had no idea where he wanted to go or who he wanted to be when this trip of self-discovery was over. Did he want to return to New York and his congregation? Would he find out who he really wants to be? What was he really doing here in a strange room in a place he had never been?
In the morning as Daniel ate his free bagel and drank the weak hotel coffee, the older couple sitting at the table next to him began to remark upon the fact that there were not enough breakfast options available for the hotel guests and that their daughter had moved too far after graduating from the community college. On the other side of the dining room was a young couple with a map planning what national park they would visit next; every so often the young couple would giggle a bit and lean in closer to each other. The canned music filled the void between the conversations and Daniel sat there alone as the national news played silently on the corner TV.
There was fog on the wind that morning as Daniel continued west toward the coast. The trees began to look more and more like ghosts as he continued to reach the deeper areas of the Blue Ridge forest. With the top down and the cherry red Ford standing out in the fog, Daniel rode past many of the smaller towns on the map and continued toward the desert nights and the hot, straight asphalt that went through the western states and arrowed into California. That was his ultimate destination-the coast of California, the place where he thought he might be able to find his true self.
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There are many books and movies about the west, most of them either dime-store romance novels or the classic shoot-em-up that usually starred people like Clint Eastwood. The west was one of those fantastical places that Lewis and Clark brought back stories of. Of course now, in the 21st century, it was the place with slot machines and middle aged men pickled in their own life. Daniel was going for none of this. He was going to find that little bit of the west that still believed in the buffalo sprit and that the fire was a way to talk with your dead grandmother. He was going for the west that you hear about in books that dotted the travel section in the local Barns and Nobel. Of course Daniel had never picked any of these books up, they were too expensive for him; even so, they always called to him from the shelves, begging him to read them, crack their spine, mark their paper faces, and give them a new life.
The west was the one place that still was mostly empty. There were the few aliens and desert crawlers, but not much else when one was driving on the long black road that crawled through the centre of the entire sand filled kitty box that was right on the other side of the Mississippi. The west was the place that called with no voice but with the lack of voice, and that is the most alluring part of the call: the promise of all the voluminous curves and dark red lips that never called but only puckered in sensuous allure. Daniel had found that allure something he could not ignore any longer, in New York he was empty, but here-oh here he was something else. Not full. But something else entirely.
