100,000 Miles: Part One

Always, like waves crumbling white on the coast, I wake with sunrise or just before, during the coldest part of the night. Sleeping in my truck, a Tacoma with 190,000 miles, a broken passenger door handle, and a camper shell sheltering a futon, is something I’ve done a lot of. I think of it as my second home and while I watched the sky turn the color of springtime honey, I felt a twinge of regret at the decision to sell. I’ve had my truck since I was 17 and we share almost all those 190,000 miles. And in those miles the only other person to come close is Jarod. 

            I’ve know Jarod since I was 16, he’s lived with me, he was once arrested right out of the drivers seat of my truck, and got back in the passengers seat a few days later looking grim, pale, and nearly dead. Jarod was in my truck with me when the odometer rolled over to 100,000 just outside Quartzite AZ, a desert town whose wintertime population swells with snowbirds and crystal hunting hippies living in converted school buses. On all our fledgling trips to Bishop somehow we always seemed to arrive with a full moon to light the inevitable midnight wander through the chalky candyland of The Buttermilks.

            Jarod is almost certainly the most excited person I’ve ever met; his thrill at living is like that of a Golden Retriever, or like a Labrador puppy. And I mean that in the best way possible. To climb with someone like Jarod, for me, is a great pleasure. I’m about as relaxed as you can be and still have a pulse. The unfathomable excitement of someone like Jarod gets me higher off the ground and I’d like to think that I’ve kept Jarod from spinning out of orbit. There are a few times that he’s gotten pretty far out there anyway, like his goal this winter at a triple back flip on his snowboard, or that time a few years ago when I went back to California for the summer and found out that Jarod had become a pornstar. Every time he came over he insisted on showing me his latest scene and searched the Internet on my computer with a look of concentration like someone cramming for a history test third period tomorrow. But Jarod is much more than a pornstar or a snowboarder or a great climbing partner. He’s a friend, a great one.

            My parents separated and divorced at the beginning of June, just when I finished my junior year and clumsily fell and badly broke my ankle on an approach to a climbing area. I couldn’t drive and home wasn’t that anymore, but a toxic place of loathing. My dad, living in the guest room, wandered around looking like Jarod did when I picked him up after his brief stay in the correctional system. My mom was as distant and mysterious as some planet outside the asteroid belt. My sister slammed her door at all of it. I was sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire when Jarod asked me if I wanted to drive with him to Albuquerque for a climbing competition. I’d only known him for a couple months, but anything to get away from home, anything to find a new one, was worth it to me.

            My truck was the vehicle of choice and Jarod, the only driver. Summer heat rose off the pavement of I-40 like the fumes of spilled fuel. My truck’s speakers struggled to keep up with the roar of open windows. We drank way too many Red Bulls. As the desert rushed by and all the creosote and desert pavement blurred together into a dream, I felt happy for the first time in months.

            “So how are your parents?” Jarod eventually asked. I had only told a couple of friends and a therapist about what had happened. It seemed to me that almost everyone had divorced parents, and that there was nothing special about it. I was almost an adult, I thought. I could deal with it on my own. But the emptiness surrounding I-40 pressed down and I decided to tell Jarod anyway.

            “Actually,” I said, “terrible,” and I told Jarod everything. I told him about the night they went out on an errand and came back, my Dad crying and mad and going upstairs to pack. I told him about the red lights he ran without noticing and my Moms icy distance. Jarod did something no one else had: He adjusted his seat, sat up straight and responded with true human to human compassion.
            “Oh man,” he said, “I’m so sorry dude, that’s awful,” And he was. Jarod listened to everything I said, and he was as shocked as I had been. His eyes were wide and he kept shaking his head. “I can’t believe it,” he kept saying. I looked out the window at the hurried desert, fossilized in a different time but somehow also always in present tense.

            “Yeah,” I said, and felt just slightly better. “Crazy stuff man, I’m glad to get away from it.” I scratched an itch inside my cast. By the time we got back to California my depression would be nearly done and Jarod would be one of my best friends.

            Desert gave way to Pinyons and Junipers, and they surrendered to the girthed Ponderosas growing around The San Francisco Peaks and Flagstaff, AZ, the town I now call home.