10/13/2021
My Life as a Johnny Cash Song
There’s a song by Johnny Cash titled ‘I’ve Been Everywhere,’ and I can say with a smile and a shrug, the song encapsulates my experience as a traveler and adventurer. The inimitable singer talks of the many places he’s visited in this country, and I smile in a wistful manner reminiscing about those locales, the adventures I’ve enjoyed, and the folks I have met along the way.
When I was a little boy, maybe four years-old or so, I began paying attention to how we traveled and why we traveled. Every summer, I had at least one family reunion to attend, and we always got there by car. There also might be random trips to visit relatives and as the youngest grandchild, it was always my privilege and pleasure to ride with my grandfather.
My grandfather was my hero when I was a little boy, and I am not ashamed to say he remained the guiding force in my life, even after his departure into Eternity. He fought in WWII, and he explained the wheelchair symbol on his license plate as “something that happened in the war.” His back was permanently injured, and each time he told me the story of how it happened, the tale changed. He was run over by a tank, he was hit by a jeep, etc. It wasn’t until I was a full-grown man that I learned the truth.
While riding in a jeep in Italy during the war, he and the soldier who was driving rolled over a land mine. The vehicle was blown in the air, and the driver died instantly. My grandfather hung upside down in the vehicle for three days, sitting next to a dead man, but he survived, as did the part of him which would become me. I think I’d have liked to keep believing the false tales instead of the truth.
Maybe his experience in Italy gave him a patience and an appreciation for the small things others took for granted. When it came to preparing for a road trip, he was meticulous in his planning. He would fry chicken, make tuna salad, pack the cooler with sodas, and plan the highway route. Between a Rand-McNally road map and a battered copy of ‘The Green Book,’ he knew where to stop for gas, food and lodging, whether we were driving from Chicago to Mississippi, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Cleveland, or Detroit. I learned from him how to plan a trip, and more importantly, how to ease along on the journey, in order to appreciate the little things along the way.
I didn’t get on a plane for the first time until 1994, for a family reunion in Buffalo, New York. My grandfather was seventy then, and I was not yet up to the challenge of guiding a three-car convoy. My grandmother found ‘peanuts’ flights, and my first plane ride was with eight members of my family, similar to the road trips of my youth. On a layover in Cleveland, my grandmother introduced us to at least ten strangers, because she was proud of her family. That trip was monumental because not only was it my first plane ride, I also witnessed the majestic Niagara Falls for the first time, and it was my last trip with my grandparents.
Four years later, at a crossroads in my life, I decided I needed a career change. I thought of my love for travel and open roads, and I enrolled in truck driver school out in Utah. Not only did it fulfill my need to see America, it gave me my career, which has been long and fruitful. I was a cross-country trucker for almost two years, before finding a regional trucking job which would have me home every day and off on the weekends. I’ve been at the same job now for twenty-two years. When my OTR journey ended, I’d visited about thirty states.
Another plus from truck driving school was I rediscovered my love of road maps, and even more, I learned to read them, interpret them, and even now, all these years later, I’m the guy people call when they’re planning road trips or are stuck in a traffic jam while traveling. It’s a gift and a skill, and I will never get lost anywhere in America, even if I have no GPS signal.
When I was a child, I read books about people in seemingly faraway places like Brooklyn, Boston, and London, and I dreamed of someday visiting the streets Francie Nolan described, or walking Johnny Tremain’s wharfs, or seeing the places which fascinated and humbled Pip. I started with those simple childhood wishes, and then began grafting grown-up daydreams to my initial quest; I decided to try and visit all fifty states, and at least twenty-five countries before my time here expires.
I made my list and started planning how I would make my quest a reality, but like all plans, things happen which make us put our plans on the back-burner. My marriage crumbled, and with divorce comes a whole new set of challenges. I was forced to rebuild my life from scratch. Travel was both a distant memory and a constant daydream as the second half of my life began to take shape.
At a high school reunion meeting, I became reacquainted with a former classmate, and we hit it off so well, we began dating a couple of months later. My travel stats at the time were thirty states, and three countries (Jamaica, Canada, and England). Along with all of her other wonderful attributes, my new sweetheart also shared a yearning to travel. The first time we went on a dinner date costing over fifty dollars, we were at a steakhouse… in Vegas, a month after we officially became a couple. I shared my quest and lists with her, and she willingly became not only my wife, but a travel companion with whom to experience the world.
It’s mid-July 2021, and I’ve already booked the trip which will end a personal quest to visit all fifty states. I’ll spend the first week of September exploring Alaska, as well as celebrating a huge accomplishment. It will be monumental for me, and then I’ll focus more on international destinations. I think it will be a pretty cool stat to have visited fifty states and fifty countries. At the moment, I have thirty-seven or so countries to go, and I have made plans to visit five new countries in 2022.
I’m writing this essay while sitting at an outdoor café in Washington, DC. It’s my first time here as a tourist, as I’ve been through the airport on layovers. My mind is playing a slow-moving film featuring the places and people I’ve seen and met in my travels. I think the destinations have been beautiful and amazing, but it is the people who helped make those moments memorable. Yeah, I've been everywhere, man.
This was a travel essay submitted for the Ozark Creative Writers contest on travel articles.
