Onward

At the beginning of this adventure, Win and I committed to a few different things. We said we wouldn’t travel on the interstate. We wouldn’t stay at any chains or eat in any corporate restaurants. No hitchhikers, no weapons, no fried food and we wouldn’t spend more than $500 apiece. We said it was mainly supposed to be about the journey, and that we’d search for moments of grace and spiritual enlightenment along the way.

I find it’s time to confess that a few of those rules got bent, if not exactly shattered. While we haven’t kept a precise log, we know we’ve traveled over 2,500 miles, and that about a hundred of those were out of necessity on an Interstate. We picked up a mouse from one of our fleabags in Arkansas, and carried him around with us long enough for him to eat a hole through the Kashi Go Lean cereal bag and our chocolate coffee. I kept pepper spray in the tent with us in a couple of the campgrounds, and Winnie’s eaten deep-fried catfish and shrimp while I have consumed more than my fair share of bacon. And after our long, despicable night in Tupelo’s Dead Cricket Lodge, and the flat tire which forced us into a g@#!&*! Walmart, we blew 75 bucks and stayed in a Comfort Inn in Oxford.

But we’ve learned a few things on this journey of multiple lessons. We’ve learned that living life fully involves breaking a few rules, spending a little more than you’d planned on and indulging in some grease once in a while. We’ve had to raise and lower our expectations like a drawbridge over an alligator-infested moat – on impulse, without warning. While we tended to speed on past any obvious places for spiritual renewal, we’ve found grace in the most surprising of seats (like fruit stands and diners and Elvis’s birthplace). My most intense, celestial encounter with the divine came while sipping a watermelon smoothie on the side of the road about ten miles south of Vicksburg. While Winnie shopped for fig jam and peaches that (she told me) “smelled like sunshine in the summer in the south,” I blissfully meditated in a blue and yellow room. The Putamayo American Blues CD was playing, a squeaky fan blew the hot air around, and a window decorated with beaded suncatchers looked out onto a cornfield where I am absolutely certain God resides.

It’s true that a journey is about the journey, not the destinations, but it’s also about the people you meet. It’s about the moments of clarity you experience, about glimpsing yourself in unadulterated light and liking what you see. It’s about having your assumptions crushed, your stereotypes blasted, your lies revealed and your truths laid bare.

And if you do it right, it costs about $700 per person.