Day 17 (Or: Not Much To Write Home About)

Kiss my Asheville, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just west of the Eastern Continental Divide, where Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald died in a fire at a mental institution in 1940.

I'm the kind of tired where everytime I look in the mirror even I wonder what I'm so angry about. But my eyebrows are just too tired to stay up and make me look open and kind.

The reason there's not much to write home about is that today was spent driving from Mississippi to Asheville, NC, from where I'm currently writing. A meager 600 or so miles, and yet, 11 hours of driving. Doesn't help that technically, I'm still on central time, even though I crossed over into eastern once I went over the border between Alabama and Georgia.

States traversed today:

1. Mississippi (I should have stayed. I have lovely stories of the nice people at the Alluvian helping me this morning to find my way to North Carolina, giving me water and extra pads of paper and pens for the trip, and the business card of the front desk manager in case I got lost or turned around on the way up here. What hotel in the north would ever do that for somebody??)
   
2. Alabama (arrrghh... I really wanted to see Birmingham, but it was shrouded in fog)
   
3. Georgia (been here before, not particularly sad I missed it this time)
   
4. South Carolina (I was only in South Carolina for like an hour)
   
5. North Carolina (and even less here, although this is where I'm sleeping tonight)
   

I also learned today that there are two kinds of rain. The first one is something like this:

I took this photo during a minor squall, under a little straw umbrella-type hut in Aruba about four weeks ago. This is my kind of rain: warm, drifting, temporary.

Here's the other kind of rain:
Cold. Persistent. Day-long. Alabama-style. It had rained overnight in Mississippi, but when I woke up, had breakfast and went about the other tasks of my day, it was clearing, blue skies and sunshine. Then, about five minutes after I crossed the border into Alabama, there was this. It lasted all day.

Also, once I got into Georgia, I immediately wanted to turn around and head back west. Traffic. So. Much. Traffic. It is the sole reason that I didn't get into Asheville until after 11. At first I was going to just scrap Asheville and try to stay somewhere else, but I really didn't have the desire to do the extra work--it just seemed more productive to keep driving.

I did pass through Atlanta, and it was all lit up and pretty.

And now it's raining again, although the sound of it is beautiful. Seem a little random that I'm in Asheville? Here's why: At this inn, the Grove Park Inn, F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in room 441 in 1935-36. That's all I needed to hear. I'm in room 368 and things are gooood. It's a period-appropriate Arts-and-Crafts style lodge, by far my favorite American architectural period, and thus the room has a lot of texture, color and wood detail, as does the entirety of the other spaces, too.

But to pay for just 11 hours in this room seems like a waste, sadly enough. I thought I'd be here by 8 pm, but no such luck.

*

So the other thing I was thinking about on the road, when I wasn't willing the traffic to clear up, was how this trip has, in a bunch of different ways, represented the different stages of my life, in an eerily accurate timeline, with appropriate watershed dates along the way. Hard to describe here, but it has something to do with how the trip began with me kind of groping along for direction, followed by a period of frenetic learning of the road, the towns, the histories, the culture, culminating in spending time with Amelia, my college roommate, and then the rocky trip back from the west, and then passing through South Carolina, where my first boss out of college was from and now staying at this place which feels like the last great hurrah before I head home, back to my transformed life.

And even if my life doesn't outwardly seem reformed, it certainly is an upside-down version of the way I was living just a few weeks ago. Because every day that I woke up in a new place, was a new beginning for me, with a different perspective. This long road has left me half-fulfilled and half-longing, but I'm not as concerned as I was before I left with immediately finding whatever it is that I'm longing for, whatever it might be that I'm looking to do, looking to be.

I think I finally have gotten that I need to stop waiting for my life to begin, that it already has begun and I need to just accept it and live it. It's not perfect, and if it's not what I want, I have to change it.

My father's best piece of advice this year has been that you cannot hope to change, if you cannot accept that your circumstances are things that you ultimately have created for yourself. I was resistant to that idea, because it meant that I made bad choices, but what are bad choices? A sin? Every minute is a blank slate.

So that's that.

Look at all those logs! I hope they're being combined with post-consumer waste!
The Delta, after a storm.
I wish I was still there.
'Bama.
Raiiiiin.
Grove Park Inn, #368.





Day 17:
Greenwood, Mississippi - Asheville, North Carolina
Mileage: 621
Total: Approx. 7, 890

Also, also: I was getting very, very tired when I was about forty-five minutes away, so I dug deep into the iPod for the dance party songs and came up with Wilson Pickett's "Land of 1,000 Dances," and it totally helped me stay awake, doing the mashed potato, and whatnot. Picture that one.

Good night.