Written by Gil Gildner
The combination of open road and silence is amazing.
These days, it is considerably easier to conquer this primal urge of travel. In ancient Icelandic days they used to hoist heavy sails and pull on straining ropes and navigate around narwhals. Ice caps loomed, and they were surrounded with the loud, pure silence of the North Atlantic. It’s cheaper now. I can merely press the accelerator.
One of the defining moments of my life (I think I’ve had three) was early in the morning hours sometime last August, at some town on Interstate 40 in the middle of Texas.
I don’t especially like Texas; I’m a cold-weather, craggy-mountain type. But this particular town was surreal. I don’t even know what time it was … I was on Los Angeles time and had skipped a few zones. I’m fairly sure it was close to three o’clock.
The town was dead and dark as I exited the interstate, and I had literally nothing left in my gas tank. I didn’t know how far ahead the next station was, and with my needle resting on empty, I prayed for fuel.
The single Texaco was closed and dark. There wasn’t a light in town, except for the flickering halide lamps on a tattered billboard and the little glowing amber readouts on the pumps.
The pumps took my debit card, miraculously, and I stood in the pitch black darkness smelling the dusty odor of nothingness. The moon appeared from behind the clouds, punctuated by the rhythmic clicking of the pump, and cast silver light upon the miles of empty barren dustland stretching into the distance.
Sometime during that moment, while waiting for my tank to fill, I had a defining life moment.
If I had flown it would have (oddly) been both cheaper and quicker. But I wouldn’t have stood at that lonely diesel pump at that lonely Texaco just before dawn, waiting, straightening the old Mercedes hood ornament, staring at the sky, wondering just how many miles I could make before sleep claimed me.
I made it to Sayre, Okla., I think.
Driving helps me ponder. I don’t think people ponder enough these days. It’s something of a sad reality, and probably the only thing that redeems modern society is the existence of long interstates, coffeehouses and strong black coffee, in that order. This is something that the radio has destroyed.
Coming back from visiting my friend, I have to fuel up. It’s a chilly weekend in January, and my jacket is not nearly thick enough. My car is a 1984 Mercedes 300D, which means it takes in diesel and spits out black smoke.
The downside is finding a fuel nozzle that’s not meant for an 18-wheeler, and the upside is an incredible exhaust tone.
There’s a Citgo in Arkadelphia that has a perfectly sized nozzle, and the Saturday night attendant is pretty much the reincarnation of Søren Kierkegaard. He’s actually a good bit more pessimistic than Kierkegaard, I suppose, but at least he’s happily pessimistic.
He’s given me a nugget of philosophical wisdom every time I’ve filled up there. The last time, in freezing wind at about 11 p.m., the pump messed up and diesel spilled all over the side of my car. I was upset (understandably, I might say), but he just took things in stride.
“Well,” he said laconically while he fiddled with my debit card, “crap happens all round.”
I drove in silence for a while and wrapped in my tumultuous thoughts as I usually am, thought about noise and sound. It’s worth it to take the iPod off shuffle and replace the percussion with the rhythm of the tires, the concrete, and the gearbox and (for me) the exhaust.
Noise pollutes, sometimes. There’s a time for everything under the sun, and there is a time to turn my Marshall up all the way and let loose. But constant noise—the noise of music, of social life, of a job, “of Swedish Fish”, of class, of life, of death, of everything, distracts people from the deeper reality.
Ponder. Contemplating life and everything that goes along with it. Realize that the most simple of simple things is not so, but is immeasurably complex. And my grasp of this is so feeble.
Most articles and stories have a purpose, a drive, or a specific end in mind. This one doesn’t, or at least not one that I can verbalize well. I know my intentions, and I know that sometimes an ideology takes more than a few hundred words to communicate itself.
What about the ideology of living life and just doing what’s right?
Is there a philosophical term for that?
Forget existentialism and forget postmodernism and forget fundamentalism. Take into your conscience the simple fact of doing what is right, of being mature, of seeing the art forms of a dishwasher, of reading Flannery O’Connor and finding southern soul, of reading C.S. Lewis and finding British soul, of reading Solzhenitsyn and finding Russian soul. Be a cynic. Be a walking laugh.
Drive in silence for about an hour sometime.
