“The other tables are…rugged-looking men with children. We decided this is a father’s town and probably all the mothers left, looking for more.” – travel journal entry – Day 14

Not a Song

Are my teeth black, she wants to know.

She has just eaten a half a pound of licorice bears.  I let her do these things on long car rides, because when she is belted in she can’t get into too much trouble, and because the car is the only place on earth that it is legal and encouraged to strap your child to something else and make that thing go speeding past other speeding things.

There is one of those dedication-style programs on the radio, and I realize how many brokenhearted people are in the world.

Why do I do this, drive too fast, when there is nowhere we need to go but away, and we’ve been gone for three days?  Why do I drive at all when we both have two perfectly good feet and I, two arms that could carry her another five years at least, keeping her clear of red ant bites and stepping in dog poop and falling off curbs and tripping on tree roots, and most of all, speeding in a metal box on four wheels, which is certainly tempting fate?

About halfway between San Antonio and Del Rio the land starts to change.  All the sudden, the landscape that we saw coming into Texas—flat, flat land where you can see the way the clouds layer themselves—ends, and it starts getting hillier again, but not like Austin’s hilly.  Now it’s rougher and the earth gets yellower and granier until it’s sandy and the plants get coarser and less leafy, more roughagey.

Then you start seeing prickly things and different kind of cacti, and then you feel like you are in another place entirely.  You drive a mile and it’s Africa, you drive another and it’s Arizona, then it’s the moon, then prehistoric times, then you just get overwhelmed because you don’t know how to process it all and you wish there was a machine that could record all your thoughts as you think them, even the ones you don’t think in words—though how would it record those?—record things like what you think the clouds look like and what you consciously and unconsciously love about it all.  Like what it feels like when your daughter smiles at you with black teeth.

Her mother left me for the rest of the world.  Said we’d married young and given up on ever experiencing other loves and other landscapes.  She took the girl’s teddy bear and left the girl, which is the worst thing I can imagine, robbing a kid of both her birther and her bear.

In Study Butte she wants to know why the flowers in Texas look less like flowers and look more like a salad.

She gets pretty talkative after a lot of sugar, but I don’t mind, because she is only five and my reason for being.

When we get to Terlingua, she asks about her mom.  “Mom wouldn’t like it here, but I think you will,” I say.  “There are dogs that sit outside restaurants and wait for their owners like horses in cowboy movies.  Most of the houses don’t have all their walls and people like it that way.  There are four restaurants and people named Superman Jim, Rainbow Brite Girl, and Noodles.”

She reaches over and turns the radio off.

What song am I to you? she wants to know.

I pull over and have a good cry.   Not a song, I say.  You are my peace and my quiet.