Roadtrips

I think I was designed for Roadtrips. Long deep breaths of space. Barbed wire fences cookie-cutting the landscape into playpen borders. Postcard views that your city-self loves to hate. Reflections in dams, wind-pumps in wheat field, a small woolly explosion of sheep on hillside. Following the drawn out lines of black telephone cabling as you head out, the thinning strings of your city attachment. Slowly the cross-hashed formality of the city block, the system of the Right-Angle, the square on square, dissolves. A purring Bakkie 2.8 TDI Diesel keeps calling you back to the conquering. The hot rubber over the hot tar over the hot green hills. Now that explorer, a mini Bartolomeu Dias, gets let out on a rope. You’re locked into the roadtrip timezone. A clock ticking only to Diesel fill-ups, weathered stop street markings, sun-drenched afternoons and Blackberry fits as you cross a patch of GPRS.

I’m trying to camouflage my big city numberplate and all the assumptions that go with it. Here people judge you by what’s following your C not by what’s following your @. He’s from The City, blasting The Black Keys, boxy amped guitars and double-beats, scrawling through our small town scratching the tree trunk of our peaceful weekend. Here people seem softened by a great big sponge of nature and space. The people per square kilometer barometer drops. Lately my natural co-efficient seems low, very low.

I’d be tempted elevate this dusty accelerator pedal moving steering wheel B&B chips-in-the-back GPS-based exploration into something spiritual. An opening up of possible worlds. Roadtrip life takes on this incredible immediacy. You seem to suddenly live ‘out there’. A blending of internal and external choices that have have limited risk and maximum adventure. Just turn around and come back. But then I’m no buddhist. And I don’t drive a Nissan.