FREE PREVIEW "THE ROAD WILD"

Introduction

A small fire of Juniper and Cedar illuminate these pages as I write. The fire is small, but very hot. The wood almost sublimes upon contact. Wisps of smoke curl around the wood. It blows in my face. I choke and flap my hand in front of my face but it doesn’t help. I move my chair over a few feet instead. In less than 4 seconds the smoke has found me again. I move my chair a few feet in the opposite direction. The fire licks out in bothdirections at the same time. I quickly retreat to the van amid a cloud of smoke and slam the sliding side door. I wave away the last bit of smoke that has slipped into the van with me and sit down. I watch the fire through the window.

I think about my first road trip: Pennsylvania to the North Carolina shore in a brand new 1969 Volkswagen bus painted this sort of obnoxious yellow-green color that worked for the Volkswagen but would have looked horrible on anything else. I was 12 years old. It was the middle of July. I lay full length in the third seat – something few cars had at the time – and let the wind from the open window buffet my face as my hair went everywhere. It smelled like summer. The sun spilled in with a comforting warmth. One single sunbeam fell on my closed eyes. I smiled. Up front my father played the harmonica as earnestly as he could but for my older brother and sister who were both in their teens, it was just something else to make fun of.

Later in the waning afternoon, we pulled over at a wayside picnic table somewhere in southern Virginia and cut up a watermelon. All the trees had hanging moss reaching for the ground. I had never seen that before. I watched in fascination as clumps of the Spanish moss, looking more like long, un-groomed beards, waved in the breeze.

We stopped for the night in Nag’s Head, North Carolina. It was after 9 PM and we still hadn’t eaten dinner. We had been driving forever it seemed. We ate at a roadside shrimp shack that was just about to close. I sat at the empty counter, my feet barely reaching halfway to the floor, happily swiveling back and forth. The rest of my family sat in a booth. A guy in the back put some shrimp into the fryer. I heard the hot oil sizzle and spit loudly. Best shrimp I ever had. Afterwards, we walked on the beach before going to our motel. I could have stayed down there for hours, recklessly and carelessly dodging between the waves in my bare feet and my rolled-up dungarees. I had never seen the ocean before either.

The next day we took a ferry from Cape Hatteras to Ocracoke Island, one of the remotest islands in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We rented a cottage on the beach and I swam in the blue water all day long with my brother and my sister while my mother and father went netting for blue crab. Each night, sunburned and dripping wet, I’d stand on the front porch, a long, thick towel wrapped around me and look between my fingers through the kitchen window as my mother took the crabs out of the plastic bag they had put them in, and plopped them, one by one, into a big pot of boiling water. I never watched this part. It made me sick. I cringed with each PLOP! but my brother and sister loved every moment of it. They rolled around on the living room floor, providing loud, sarcastic screams for the doomed crustaceans as they splashed helplessly in the steaming water.

I passed that summer one minute at a time against the backdrop of the bright wash of the sun, the gentle crash of the ocean waves, and the flowery, tropical smell of suntan lotion. Life became condensed into simple things. Time seemed to move more slowly. I would spend an entire afternoon lying on my back in the warm sand and just watch one particular cloud that I would pick out as it made its way from one edge of the sky to the other. Or I would patiently sit in the sand beside a Fiddler Crab hole and wait for the crab to show its face. Or I would race the sandpipers down the beach and only stop when I caught up with them – which I almost did one time – or until I was out of breath.

The summer seemed to last forever. Of course, it didn’t.

A glint of bright light catches my eye and I roll the van window down and take a closer look at the star-filled sky. I think I can actually make out the cluster that comprises the Milky Way Galaxy. It’s like a long trail of high cirrus clouds stretching from one end of the horizon to the other. On other nights I have seen Mars and what I believe to be Jupiter. Jupiter or Venus. Venus tended to be whiter than Jupiter’s yellowish shade so it was fairly easy to tell them apart.

This is how I have decided to live my life; or conversely, this is how life has chosen for me to live. My van is my home and I wander pretty much unencumbered from road to road and place to place, just so I canstare at the stars during the night and watch the strange and eerie shadows that the Juniper and Saguaro cactus make on the desert floor. Or so I can lie anonymously in a small stream in a hidden canyon the entireday, completely complacent, while little water falls rush over my shoulders and the sun beats my skin from white to red to brown. Or so I can drive to a mountaintop in Colorado or Oregon, alive with spring snowmelt and budding wild flowers, and sing with the Aspens and Douglass Fir as they whisper their windy song.

This is a story about finding myself but it is also a story about letting go, as I seek my own refuge in the asphalt and the stone, and the forests and the deserts that lie beyond.

Carl Flamm

Colorado, 2018

1

PORTLAND, OREGON

I Buy a Van

It was early Friday evening. One of the car dealerships that I had been talking to while looking for vans rang me for the fourth time in a half-hour. I hadn’t picked up the previous three calls; I refused to let a car salesman push me around this time. I always jump too soon and never wait for the better deal. This time I was determined not to be that guy. I told myself if you get the van, you get the van. If you don’t, you don’t. But I didn’t trust myself and that was why I hadn’t answered any of the salesperson’s calls. But I picked up on the fourth call, not out of fear of losing the deal, (though I had been obsessing about it a littlebit) but because I wanted to go to bed soon and this lady was just going to keep calling so I thought I might as well deal with her now.

She seemed delighted when I answered.

“Oh, I have some wonderful news for you, Mr. Flamm! We got your car payment down to where you wanted. I told you we could work miracles! Sometimes we are in possession of special coupons that entitle us to give just enough help to good, deserving people. I was able to secure the only available voucher and I need you to come down to the dealership right now so you don’t lose this voucher.”

“Right now?” I queried.

“Well we can’t legally hold the vouchers. We have to give them to people who are ready to buy by the deadline and this voucher expires by close of business today. That why I wanted you to come down because I know how much you love that van and all your travel plans and it would just be a rottenshame if you couldn’t get it financed because you didn’t have the voucher.”

I knew that the whole coupon thing was just a ploy. And the saleslady had to know that I knew. So I decided I wasn’t going to be that guy who jumps at the mention of a bunch of bullshit either.

“Damn!” I said. “That is such a shame. I was really interested in that van.”

“I know you were!” she cried emphatically. “Why don’t you come on down and lets get this thing taken care of for you before the opportunity slips away.”

“You know that I haven’t even seen the inside of the van yet, right?” I said, “let alone driven it?”

“Well come down then and we’ll take it for a test drive,” she shot back quickly.

“It’s almost dark out,” I said. “Look I feel a lot of pressure right now and I don’t like it. I had intended to come to your dealership tomorrow and take the van for a test drive and if I liked it, then buy it. But if you have to give the voucher to someone else tonight,” I said smugly because I knew the score. “I completely understand. Maybe some other time. Have a good night,” and I ended the call.

I waited a few minutes to see if she would call back with a counter offer, but when she didn’t, I put the phone down and started to do other things. I was feeling a bit disappointed that I wasn’t going to get the van, but I was proud of myself and how I handled the situation despite my desire.

Then the phone rang.

“Are you really serious about coming in tomorrow?” she asked quietly, her tail obviously between her legs.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“What time?”

“What about the voucher?” I asked, somewhat sarcastically.

“I told my sales manager that you were coming in first thing in the morning and he said that I could hold onto the voucher until then.”

“Of course he did!” I declared. “What a great guy!" One can only take so much horse manure.

For the first time she was silent on the other end of the line.

We said our good byes, agreeing to meet promptly at ten the following morning.

As it turned out, naturally, there was no voucher. It was simply a rebate that the car company had put on certain vehicles and the rebate was available at any time, for anyone, for the next three months.

At any rate, despite my salesperson’s blunders and half truths - like when she walked by me nonchalantly while I was waiting for the final paperwork and said “Oh, by the way, we can’t give you eighteen for your trade-in. But we can give you thirteen and you still get that wonderful lowpayment!” She smiled and walked into her office. Thirteen? I fumed. But I didn’t feel like arguing. With the deal almost complete, I was not going to throw a monkey wrench into all my plans. I was still in shock that someone was willing to finance me at all at this point in my life. So I decided to buy the van. It was the make and model I wanted, had all the extras that I needed – except for navigation, which was strange – came at a decent price, and most importantly, it wasn’t white. Every big van on the road was white. It didn’t matter who manufactured it. It was like going to a Tastee Freeze, craving a chocolate cone, and all they have is vanilla and it just so happens that vanilla is your least favorite flavor. Not only is it your least favorite flavor, you actually deplorevanilla. You get the idea. My van was dark grey – actually the sticker called the color Granite– and I loved it! Now I just needed to learn how to drive it.