Above: We not only drove into the South — we drove into the future. (Photo by Laura!)

So who won? Road or Car? Well, we do not drive off the road and die, and we suffer no car trouble, and we meet with no bad weather, and we make decent time. We travel new routes and do not get lost. We stop to visit relatives and do not seem to visibly offend them. We eat OK road food, listen to ass-kicking road music, sleep in comfortable hotels, shock our lungs with the invigorating country air of ten states and the vitamin-enriched exhaust fumes of a dozen or so interstates. We drive over rivers and under mountains, past snowy pastures and down palm-lined parkways. We consume leftover Thanksgiving stuffing in the car at 80 mph. We resist road fatigue by taking turns at the wheel, eating chocolate-coated coffee beans, and drinking cup after inky black cup of gas-station ghoul-coffee. We see and do things that lazy writers love to describe by resorting to excessive anaphora and a wearying abuse of the first-person plural.

So … it seemed to have been a good time, a fine trip. Technically, Car defeated Road. Having said that, though, I feel in a more general, experiential sense that Road may have won after all. I’m haunted by something I said three weeks ago: that we’ve been fortunate enough to have had our Yanksgiving drive always seem to be: a fun, safe, pseudo-adventurous novelty, rather than an exhausting, soul-annihilating, life-and-limb-threatening slog across a country that sometimes never seems to want to end. “Rather than”? No. This trip was both things.

The fun pseudo-adventurous part was the drive down to Florida, when we spread the drive across a number of days, only going eight or nine hours per day, mostly in daylight. It’s fun! It’s vacation! You travel toward warm weather and crazy people! You check into a hotel at dinnertime then eat and drink and chill out! You drift off to sleep in your starchy hotel sheets with thoughts of exploration, wanderlust, possibility!

The soul-annihilating slog part was the second and final day of driving back to Ontario this past Saturday. It is a little too fresh in my mind right now. The thing of having been driving for eight hours and staring at like seven-plus more hours to go, and the sun has just gone out and now we’re in darkness and stuck on that bleak, purgatorial, never-ending stretch of I-79 snaking out of the mountains of northern West Virginia, creeping for hours up to the outskirts of grimmest Pittsburgh, then inching across the vast desolations of northwestern Pennsylvania up to Erie, then crawling for lightless miles up I-90 toward Buffalo, then finally that last gasping hour over the border to Hamilton … it goes on forever. We get home after midnight but to us it’s been midnight for hundreds of miles. The next day my mind is gelatin and my body is cement. There is some Einsteinian general-relativity shit going on on that I-79-to-I-90 route at night, some serious bad-news bending of space-time, where dashboard clocks and odometers and human body rhythms do not operate by normal Earth rules. We may actually still be driving there, and it may only be a highway-delirium fever dream that I’m typing this.

OK, Road. You win. Our loser punishment is that next November we must fly. (Or maybe, Scott, you unbelievable idiot, you should just split the next drive home into three days so you can have more of your magical country air and starchy sheets and la-di-da dreams of possibility and “fun” and then arrive home on Sunday in what passes around here for daylight.)