In Dubious Camper or Wearing Hubris Like a Medal (Part 4)

It all comes down to this truth: you have read way too much literature, but apparently some of it, like Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, not very well. Yes, that one was skimmed. In this Depression-era novel, an idealistic young communist struggles to organize a bunch of California fruit tramps to strike for better wages. For his efforts, he gets killed by a goon shotgun blast that shears away his face.

Just like the communist, your ass has been thoroughly kicked. You have orchestrated a perfect sober folly and not even for the benefit of the working class. Your wife knew it was going to happen, but she didn’t issue the rope and she would never issue a stay. You are what your Old Man calls a “loser deluxe.” You are an over-the-header in the classic American tradition of President George W. Bush, the American military command in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger trying to find his soul, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Andrew Johnson after Lincoln, and Orson Welles on a movie set for the first time directing his first film. Of course he made Citizen Kane but you are no Orson Welles and definitely more like Andrew Johnson. You are to this trip what Andrew Johnson was to Reconstruction.

You want to quit right here, sell the truck and camper, or give them away, or roll them down a ravine, and catch a plane for home. You thought traveling public transportation through Eastern Europe before Gorbachev, the Middle East, North Africa, and Mexico had prepared you for the Alaska Highway in a camper with a ten-disc CD changer and a stocked liquor cabinet. Those other trips were fucking cake compared to this one. Lying prone in the camper, utterly dissipated, with Ray waiting to be fed, you pull the curtains open, and look out the window. The sleet has picked up and there are still 1200 miles over even shittier roads to the Arctic Ocean…and 4000 miles to finish the trip.

Now for some wonderful literary irony: you have yet to write a single word. You haven’t set up the computer. No notes. No postcards to former students. No photographs. No field recordings of the colorful locals. No stories from the blue-haired RV tribe that you occasionally intermingle with at diners and gas stations. No talk with The People. No conversations at all except for a 22-year-old gorgeous female Harvard graduate wearing a Buck knife who was assigned to write up a new section of traveling the Alaska Highway for Let’s Go Alaska. She drove a rented Japanese sedan and had about a dozen binders worth of material.

What’s it all about? It’s an epiphany on the order when a laser-guided daisy cutter bomb sprays molten aluminum through a Stone Age fortified position. It’s about a lyric from Aimee Mann’s Bachelor #2 CD, a sublime piece of perfect music you’ve had in the disc changer the whole way and listened to probably 30 times, committing it to memory. It’s a lyric that sums everything pretentious you are as an aspiring writer and this vainglorious camper/writer fiasco.

Wearing hubris like a medal…

And your medal came from Grenada after vanquishing Cuban construction workers or by designing software that more efficiently tracked fuel consumption of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

What is left? What is the plan? You can’t sleep on it because the latitude won’t allow it. You can’t call anyone and what would you say anyway? Rock and Roll sounds irrelevant here and indeed every place on the Alaska Highway. Writing in your logbook might help if you already had a few observations recorded, but there are none. Taking a long walk is impossible because mosquitoes will swarm every uncovered orifice of your body. The prospect of reading a novel to help gather yourself is stillborn. Masturbation is out of the question—Ray will watch. And there’s no booze or a joint because you tossed out all relaxing agents days earlier in some now inexplicable, sanctimonious purge.

You’ve got to rally, that’s what it’s all about. The Quality Lit God never brought forth writing about quitting. Books about death, insanity, or total failure get published, not books about quitting. Nobody wants to read about quitting or not even trying. That’s what most people do daily, weekly, annually, for perpetuity, on matters of personal creative importance. You don’t even have a book about quitting. You’ve got jack shit.

It has all come back to you so very hard, a sledge hammer to a lone human testicle. You got called on your hypocrisy, which for any educator still in the classroom is pretty rare. But for you, the classroom is long gone. There are no lessons here to impart to students. You are now the student and have to learn how everything went wrong and how to undo it all. That seems impossible to conceive at 2:00 a.m. when you feel fake, it’s light outside, you are in a camper, emotionally marooned in the Last Great Frontier, but still mobile as far as an operational V-8 engine goes, with mileage and mileage to go before you sleep to see the Arctic Ocean and return home and possibly reshape the clay to become a writer. Today, at some point, you will get up and you will drive and think about going back across the bridge.