I’ve been driving on a lot of long trips lately. I’ve learned to like it as long as I have some music or something to listen to. I prefer to drive at night when the darkness closes in around you, your world constrained to what lies between the stripes on the road. I enjoy stopping at new places along the way: strange fast food franchises, the liminal zones we call truck stops. I like being somewhere else in a few short hours. New surroundings, unfamiliar places.
Thursday night I was chatting with a friend I used to work with about a technical problem I was having and I decided to run to Sonic to get a cherry-limeade before they closed. When I got there at 11:30 they were already closed even though I was sure they weren’t supposed to close until midnight. Disappointed, I got a wild hair to get out of Austin and show up on Jody’s door step. This seemed an especially good idea given the large volume of people fleeing the hurricane who were clogging up the highways. I reasoned that it would be a lot easier to get out when fewer people would be awake and driving. I ran home, threw some clothes into a bag and split. I stopped by work to take care of a few things I wouldn’t be able to do Friday since I’d be gone. By the time I left Austin it was almost one in the morning.
When I hit Waco around two, the traffic got heavy, I guess from all the people headed to Dallas and away from the hurricane. It was weird to see so much traffic so late at night.
By the time I got to downtown Dallas, it was four in the morning. Too early to call Jody and wake her up, so I went to Denny’s and read my book, Foucault’s Pendulum (highly recommended!) for a few hours. It was great reading about the templars and various crusaders so soon after finishing the unabridged audiobook series on Saladin. FP is an amazing book, one that I wish could go on forever. It occurred to me in Dallas, that Austin is very, very different. A veritable oasis of youthful insularity and ease. For one thing, Austin is very white. I remember having this same realization when I moved to Austin ten years ago from San Antonio. I would be curious about Austin’s racial demographics. It may be the case that Austin is just incredibly segregated. At any rate, one of the first things I noticed when I hit Dallas.