It was about midnight and Donna and I were driving around in Des Moines, listening to KCBC's "Street of Dreams" show on the radio, which was mostly all those syrupy emotional and lush songs from the thirties and forties like "Blue Moon." I was moving my stuff to Iowa City the next day to go to back to college after the summer break. And then the idea hit, Donna said yes to it, and off we went to Iowa City. It was wacky, since she had to be back in Des Moines for work at the phone company at 8 a.m., but we decided to go ahead and drive my stuff up there that night anyway.
So there we were a half an hour later, heading east on interstate 80. I have to admit that it wasn't so much that I enjoyed driving around with Donna as the fact that I knew that the only place we had to stay in Iowa City was in my new one-room apartment, which may not seem like much, but it beat the "drive around in my car or yours" syndrome that had always been our lot in our parents' town. I think that one of the main reasons more kids don't get into bed with each other at an early age is that they just don't have a bed of their own to get into. But we weren't in high school anymore. Now we were of college age. And it was obvious that if she went to Iowa City she would be staying with me, sleeping with me, even if only for a few hours. In a real bed. I mean, who knows? Anything could happen.
It was rather late, however. We were lucky to make it to Iowa City, too, since I was so tired I must have been weaving a bit, and a semi-trailer truck in front of me vigorously flashed his rear lights at me in an apparent effort to awaken me. That did alert me a bit. That and sticking my hand out the window now and then to cool off.
You would think I could have driven it in my sleep, however. As the road from home to college, college to home, I saw a lot of Interstate 80, Des Moines to Iowa City. 112 miles. A couple of hours. Hitchhiking home, you stand on the entry ramp headed west off of Dubuque street. It's a long walk out there from town, and you do better if you are carrying a sign lettered "Des Moines" than you do with just your thumb. You get rides all the way to Des Moines. You get rides a few miles up. Sometimes you get dropped off at an obscure stop and you pray for another ride before dark.You always hitch from an on-ramp.
Sometimes, just after you've shaved your head and even your eyebrows in an attempt to put those hippie days behind you, and you're hitchhiking home avoiding sunstroke by wearing a straw cowboy hat, an exceptionally beautiful girl picks you up and you sit politely and talk about your haircut for a few hours until she drops you off at the Des Moines exit. And you walk into town to a gas station and call your dad for a ride, you get home and your mom is upset at your new look, but your dad just smiles and says, "Well, it's got possibilities."
Sometimes you don't stop in Des Moines. Sometimes during Easter break you drive right on through and help three or four other people drive all day and all night to Berkeley and some couple makes love in the back seat under a blanket and you pretend not to notice and later the car overheats while you're driving at four a.m and the owner gets mad at you and threatens to abandon you right there in Colorado but doesn't and then at 7 a.m. you stop at a truck stop just inside the California border and wonder why everything looks so strangely green like a post card and then you realize it's green because it doesn't matter that it's still grey all over back in Iowa, in California it's always green.
And sometimes you don't stop in Iowa City. You roll on east, through a succession of other flat or "rolling" states, until you get to the Pennsylvania turnpike, where that nice wide grassy area that separates you from the oncoming freeway traffic disappears and there's nothing but an angry looking metal divider and you are assaulted by roving bands of wild semi-trailer trucks that have gone through a bizarre transition such that they no longer politely ramble along, gently easing in and out of lanes, no, they barge in and out of your way, with little or no signal, like a group of mad middle linebackers lurching down the aisles of a grocery store, chasing some halfback who found a new way of escaping the pileup.
Or sometimes you just go home from school and back. You bring your laundry, if you have a car. After a while, every curve, every hill, every exit sign gives you information about your location. When you get to Grinnell, you know you're just over halfway home. When you get to Newton, you start to feel like you're almost there. And then you get to this place just east of the Des Moines exit where there's a long incline up to the horizon. Sometimes, if you arrive in the evening, there's a long line of red tail lights leading a couple miles ahead of you, and a long line of white lights coming down the hill at you. It's a last dramatic sight before the Des Moines skyline comes into view and you start deciding on an exit. And then you're home.
But if it's 7:45 a.m. on a Monday morning and Donna is barely awake in the passenger seat and you are dragging yourself back into Des Moines after a two a.m. arrival in Iowa City, three and a half hours of total collapse until the alarm clock's big moment, and two hours of driving back to Des Moines, it ain't dramatic. And it ain't romantic, either. I don't care who you are, and I don't care how beautiful and sexy and perfect Donna may be, dead people ain't romantic, and we were dead asleep the moment we crashed in Iowa City. Dead in the same bed, certainly, but still dead. The only miracle was how she stayed awake all that next day at the phone company. But that's her story.
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