Song of the Open Road

Sarah Heady

 

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,
I think whoever I see must be happy.
*
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
—Walt Whitman

 

The Cincinnati Greyhound station was flooded with midmorning autumn sunshine, the kind that slips out and beams from behind the borders of a storm front. Twenty minutes prior, I had disembarked a bus from Columbus, having begun my journey in Cleveland at 4 a.m. Ten minutes prior, I had been eating an egg and cheese biscuit from which I had excised the sausage patty, flinging it into the trashcan. The can was the kind that needs weight to push its plastic jaws open, and the patty (gray) had lingered on the slope before sliding down and in.

I was in Cincinnati because in Columbus I had missed the bus to Indianapolis. I wasn’t bitter; the air in the station was warm, and the next bus was in just half an hour. I sat down on a bench in front of Gate Three (“Chicago, Louisville, Gary, Indy”) and began to write about the day.

I hadn’t noticed the other person on the bench until he said, “I like your pin.” It was a red and blue Kerry/Edwards button on the right-hand lapel of my brown corduroy peacoat, and he was an older white man, with a mussed-up head of thick white hair and a couple days’ worth of whiskers. I thanked him and told him that I was hopeful about November 2nd, that I had faith in people. Then I asked him where he was headed. Indianapolis, he said, for half a day, to sightsee and eat dinner. That city, he said, gave him “a feeling of nature.” His voice was wobbly, sort of like a kid’s. I nodded and went back to my writing.

“Is that your name?” The old man was pointing a thick, quivering finger at the heading on my paper. His nail was chipped. I was reminded of my parents’ warnings to stay away from strange men while traveling, to find a woman or girl my age to sit next to.

“Yes,” I said, and from the shallow left-hand pocket of his blue jeans the man pulled a wad of smutty, crumpled paper. I watched him find an index card already labeled “10/16/04” in green colored pencil and add my full name to an already substantial list (at 11 a.m.!) of items. Next he reached down to the floor and began rooting through his luggage, which consisted of three large, well-worn plastic Aldi grocery bags, the printed pattern of technicolor fresh produce giving into the white of wear. “My name is . . .” he trailed off, still sifting through one of the bags. Finally, he produced his wallet and flipped it open for me to see.

“John Cody,” I finished. Missouri license. Born 1935.

Up until that point, I’d been writing your everyday undercover bus station scrawlings on some slightly idiosyncratic people—nothing special, in short. I switched, without skipping a beat, to John. He seemed the perfect subject: old enough to appear harmless, clearly a character, willing to talk.

Why do we assume the worst? Maybe my heart was extra-open that morning: the sunlight, the freedom of the open road. I took a deep breath and asked John to tell me about his life.

He said he was born in New York and grew up in Cali-forn-ee-a, then moved to St. Louis in 1993 when he realized he couldn’t afford to live there anymore. He felt lucky to have found factory work in Missouri; he wouldn’t have known what to do if he hadn’t. His mother had died in 1990 (“April—and all those years we clashed . . .”). I scribbled in the margins, covering the page with my arm. I’m sure he noticed, but he seemed unbothered by my turn to journalism.

He asked where I was going; I told him Bloomington, Indiana, to visit my long-distance boyfriend Steven, who had just recently moved there. I was on fall break from my third semester of college. “B-L-O-O . . .” and I didn’t have to keep staring at the index card to know that John Cody was writing me down. I didn’t care; I was guilty of the same crime, and here we were, both stealing looks at the other’s lap.

John was very hard of hearing, and he seemed annoyed when I didn’t speak up enough. I had to repeat the name of my college three times before he squeezed it between two dirty blue lines on the index card. “Northeast Ohio,” I also said, several times in succession.

“What’s your address?” he asked. “I’ll send you a Christmas card.”

I wrote his—Iowa Street, St. Louis—on a sheet of loose leaf, the first of five pages front and back where I would go on to take notes about him. Keeping one eye on Gate Three for signs of imminent boarding, I started asking questions and stopped trying to pretend I wasn’t writing the answers down. After all, if one of us was a nosy stranger obsessed with posterity, why not the other? I told him I’d be honored if he’d let me write a piece about him for my nonfiction writing class.

“Your what class?”

“Nonfiction.”

“Spell that.”

▱

When he finally understood and I agreed not to ask him anything “too intimate,” John unpacked for me. He pulled from the Aldi bags three manila envelopes, stuffed and rumpled, the thin metal hoozamajiggies long gone. Only one of the envelopes was marked in blue colored pencil “TO BE SORTED,” but the other two, I thought, were equally deserving of that label. John started rooting through the envelopes, and I saw reams of notes, dated daily, pass from his hands to his lap in a scheme clear only to him. There were old Greyhound tickets, MapQuest printouts, handwritten paragraphs, index cards, phone numbers, ticket stubs, business cards, everything dated. John was looking for something.

“It’s the 14th and 15th of October,” he said, a nervous edge to his voice.

“What is it, John?” I asked.

He said he had written about Cincinnati yesterday, that he wanted to be a travel writer—“But I don’t know if that’s going to work for me in this day and age of cultural meltdown.” And now, he couldn’t find the paper he had filled with southern Ohio. From the manila envelope came two blank pages of music manuscript paper. “It’s just staves, empty,” he said. “I take it along just in case.” His hands were working faster now. He wasn’t finding it. He pulled out library books from a bag; there were papers and index cards wedged between their pages. I saw two titles: “Daily Life in the Inca Empire” and “The Presidency of James Madison.” I thought of the twenty or so folders in my closet at my parents’ house filled with notes, letters, theater programs, concert tickets, drawings, brochures, newspaper clippings, random ephemera that I’d been hoarding since age eight.

And then John started to sing. At least that’s what I thought he was doing—a lilting, goofy sort of hum—but I realized quickly that it was in fact a fretful whimper. The Cincinnati page was missing. His fingers moved jerkily through the files, his voice cracked, and he cried. I watched as the papers got wet with tears, shuffling and sticking. My heart sped up. “Come on, John,” I suggested, trying to stay calm. “I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.” I couldn’t bring myself to pat him on the shoulder. I wanted to be in Bloomington—a place I’d never been—now.

By then, the line for the bus was building, and I needed to make sure I got a seat. “Let’s get in line,” I said. “You’ll find it.” He ended up right behind me, but it took him another five minutes to board the bus. He seemed to be arguing with the driver. I watched the silent film of their conversation out the window. She was reassuring him of something. He finally got onto the bus. There was some ambiguity, at least in my mind, as to whether he would sit with me or not. He seemed to vacillate too, but eventually plunked his grocery bags down on the floor beside my feet and immediately resumed his dogged search for Cincinnati.

He was hunting still with no luck when he pulled out a crumpled brown paper lunch sack from one of the bags. In its wake came several xeroxed Yellow Pages, which he began to rip up. One, two, three, four tears until the pieces were the size of business cards. Then he stuffed them into the bag. I felt vaguely sick—too warm, with a tiny headache. I held my hands together on my lap and tried to look only at them. More of his collection met the same fate: the MapQuest printouts, the Greyhound confirmations, a copy of what looked like an 18th century map with curlicue handwriting filling the page. The only word I managed to read in the seconds before John destroyed it was “RIVER,” in wide, sprawling script weaving between the hills with the curve of the water. And then, with the simple, cleaving action of John’s fingers, anywhere became nowhere.

I heard him murmur things that made me sweat: “. . . self-defeating . . . that’s my inevitable . . .” Then: “Hopeless . . . hopeless.” And I watched my pen move across the page, writing this down, writing the actual words “I am sweating now.” What the hell was I doing? While I was thinking these thoughts—Is he crazy? But what do I even mean by “crazy”? Will he hurt me? I don’t even know him—I was calmly jotting down a few notes, so as not to forget. And while I was furiously recording, John was cleaning house. The old maps and telephone numbers had become useless to him. He ripped them up and stuffed them into the brown paper bag. If I’d ever, in the twenty minutes I’d known John, served him a purpose, I was afraid that I’d become obsolete. Would he rip me up, too?

“It’s coming apart,” he gasped, his 69-year-old body bent over itself in a childlike way that, even so, scared me. But seconds later, he found it: like many of his scraps, it was an 8 ½ by 11 piece of printer paper folded in half lengthwise. “What a relief,” he said. “I can finally get back to enjoying the trip.” I knew the feeling, but it was difficult to fully empathize. “I’d like you to read that,” he told me, and handed me the page. I asked him if it was okay for me to transcribe some pieces of it for my notes. He agreed, which surprised me a bit. At the top of the first sheet I saw: “The beauty of the Ohio River is one of the most hope-restorative sights I can think of. It is, of course, long-celebrated.” The pattern of fold lines on the page resembled those of a grounded paper airplane.

“Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Sharon, and this is the 11:25 a.m. coach leaving out of Cincy with service to Indianapolis. I ask that you refrain from smoking and, if you choose to listen to music on board, that you maintain the volume at a level considerate to the other passengers . . .” I held John’s Cincinnati paper static in my hands as we pulled out of that city. I wanted to stare out the window before we hit the freeway, and John did, too. Our eyes moved over nondescript office buildings, brutalist parking garages, delis promising New York, factories cum nothing.

“I better get a good look at this city,” he said. “It’s the last chance I’m ever gonna get. I don’t know how long . . .” and he trailed off. The night before, after my first Greyhound left the Cleveland station, I had waited until we were out of the city to take out my contacts and turn in. For some reason I needed to see empty warehouses, pools of streetlamp illuminating dirty sidewalk, the glowing green vertical fields of highway signs. And I, too, felt a loss upon leaving Cincinnati, a city into whose air I hadn’t even stepped but for the three-second walk to the bus’s door.

▱

For the hour-long ride we talked. I didn’t know where we were, not really, and the thought that I would soon see Steven for the first time in two months served only as a sweet sort of humming accompaniment to my conversation with John. I pressed my notebook into the pillow on my lap and chewed on the cap of my pen. I didn’t look over at John very often. I copied down his words, visually slurring them, and they seemed real enough to me, at times even inspirational: “Keep praying for a better America,” he had written, “and for the preservation of the rational parts of our civilization.” How undone could the author of such a sentiment really be?

But I took a picture of John during that bus ride, and in it I can see things that I most likely would have forgotten by now, if I had ever registered them in the first place. John was scruffy, but not as dirty as he could have been, considering. A cream-colored scarf rose out from underneath his navy blue windbreaker, and his wrists were cradled in the ripped cuffs of a navy blue ribbed turtleneck. His hands were dry, rough, and large, and they scared me, which made me feel guilty. His skin was ruddy and loose, hanging off the bones of his face. His moustache was neatly trimmed. His eyebrows were white pitched roofs. His smile was endearingly lopsided, the whites of his eyes were pink, and what must have once been the clear blue sky of his eyes—a big, Midwestern sky—was now clouded over with cataracts.

▱

John’s handwriting was difficult to read—I had to scan some passages four or five times to make them out, and sometimes he had to translate for me. His notes on Cincinnati had included the following sentence, which he read out loud: “The bunches of houses are solid and important-looking, but not brick like St. Louis; rather they are splendidly white, built of frame.” He pronounced this last word majestically, with the same weight reserved for honor or duty, and he used a childish mix of “r” and “w” in speaking it. Even so, “Cincinnati is undeniably slovenly and curiously manqué in that the stores are not stocked as abundantly as in cities up North.”

I learned that John had taken a bus from St. Louis to Cincinnati on Thursday, and he planned to return on Sunday. In those four days, he wanted to see Kentucky and southern Ohio, to take photographs (with a CVS brand disposable camera), to visit the “highlights,” to go to restaurants and read. I almost envied him; it sounded relaxing to sightsee by oneself. As much as I was dying to see Steven, I was nervous about how it would feel to be together after so much time apart.

“Did you know that the buses in Kentucky are called TANK?” John asked me.

“Is that an acronym?”

“It’s an acronym. It stands for Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky.”

He gave me several other pieces of his writing to take a look at. The cities he had visited and rated included Pittsburgh, Dayton, Louisville, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Nashville. There was “a feeling of perfection of humanity” in Pittsburgh, where “people accept people as they are”—it made “all the difference in the world from hypocritical St. Louis.” In Pittsburgh, John was happily “submerged in the tranquility of this East—with good surroundings in just about every direction!” In general, he wrote, “the idyllic years of the American Republic before 1860 are alive in this region.”

Despite this off-base characterization of “the antebellum period,” he seemed to know a lot about American history—for example, in the piece about Cincinnati, he reminded the reader that the city was once one of the biggest, most bustling in the country. I never knew that. But what did I know, anyway? He could have been wrong, and I would have believed him. It didn’t matter. John’s world defied reason. He was born in Brooklyn, raised in the Bronx, lived for most of his life in California, and when I asked him which city he liked the best out of all he’d seen, he told me: Dayton, Ohio.

“Why Dayton?” I asked, and he told me he had discovered that “the air there has a bracing clearness.”

Much of his writing—recent, apparently—stood in praise of John Kerry’s “simple decent human values,” although he thought the country could eventually do better. Later, he would give me a page to keep, one small paragraph about Teresa Heinz Kerry typed in 12-point Times New Roman. “What impresses me about Kerry,” it said, “is his flair for picking people. His good judgment in choosing a running mate is only matched by his choice of a wife.”

John was a “strong believer in the separation of Church and State” and was “not sure what to make of internet shopping.” He’d had a few letters to the editor published in his local paper, and he’d done voter registration in St. Louis during the last few days before the deadline. He got ten or so new voters by standing in front of markets and on the Mississippi River front. Of course he watched the debate the other night. He even took notes. Despite his enthusiasm over Kerry and the democratic process, when I asked him if he was hopeful about the election, he just sighed and said, “A little bit.” Then he closed his eyes and yawned, sunk chin to chest and crossed his hands over the manila envelopes on his lap. His slumber, to me, looked pained.

▱

A short while later, when he opened his eyes, I asked him if he remembered anything about his childhood in the Bronx, and I readied my pen, expecting to be inundated with detail. But all he said was that he remembered the 3rd Avenue El. “The elevated train,” he said, exasperated, when I asked him to repeat himself. In an attempt to salvage the conversation, I told him that my grandfather used to deliver eggs for a living in Brooklyn. John was silent. It was hard to tell if he was ignoring me, or if he simply didn’t hear. But I took that opportunity to look out the window, away from the page. Southern Indiana was beautiful. I wasn’t expecting this: the endlessly flat cornfields pocked with stands of trees in turning leaf, the odd white farmhouse, the incandescent gold of the corn in thunderhead-filtered sunlight. It was my first real taste of the Midwest. As an East Coaster, I’d been aware of my derision for the place, but now, a newcomer to soybean fields, I was struck by their elegance. John knew when we were nearing Shelbyville, when we’d passed New Palestine; he’d pull out a wrinkled page from MapQuest and show me. How many times had he taken this trip? And yet we were both seeing this drive on the very same day. These conditions—the light, the air, the cars on the road with us—would never repeat themselves.

I felt more comfortable as the ride went on. John seemed much more stable than he had at the beginning, with a still body and placid eyes. He dozed or simply stared ahead, no longer rifling through his baggage. For a long while, we didn’t talk. I looked out the window, and he rested. But eventually the silence became awkward, at least for me. I don’t deal well with nothing. Now that John and I had established some sort of relationship, it seemed imperative that I keep asking him questions. I was afraid that my silence—my cowardice, I thought—was covering up incredible things: John could have a PhD in neuroscience, he could have been married to Meryl Streep, and I would never know the truth. But right then I was tired, and content to absorb the visuals of this new state, this new part of the country. I didn’t want to miss Indiana.

▱

At one point, John got up to go to the bathroom. He lumbered down the aisle of the bus, and when he got there made an awful, anguished noise as he pulled the door shut. I heard it from the middle of the bus. The people in the back snickered.

When he returned to his seat, I asked him what he did for a living now. He told me he worked for the Salvation Army. He had come to St. Louis in 1993 and hated it at first, but something drew him to stay in the center of the country. “Don’t write that,” he snapped. It was the first time he’d come close to scolding me for anything, and I realized that he was insecure about employment in general. Because when I asked him what other kinds of jobs he’d had, he grabbed the pen out of my hand and wrote in a large, slanted, nearly indecipherable script:

Salvation Army bell ringer 1994 to present
and same kind of work in Turner 2000-2002
GE Packaging 1996-1997
Public Safety 1997-1999—Packing
Other light industrial

It’s probably a good thing I never inquired about his family.

▱

“My curiosity is alive,” John had written, and as I copied it down, I knew it was true. He was starved for learning. When he asked about the book I was reading and I told him it was for my history class, he squealed like a five-year-old, saying “Oh, you have class? You’re lucky you have class.” A moment later, he pulled out a couple sheets of paper from the manila envelope. “Do you want to look at my drawings?” he asked.

They were done in colored pencil. I wouldn’t call them sketches because, as John explained, they came from his imagination. In green, orange, blue, yellow, and brown, fleshy yet asexual figures faced away from one another, smiling. They floated above the street with perfect posture. They spoke to one another in bubbles of scratch, mute with possibility. Below the asphalt, a pasture of cows dreamt of the city, and a baby bobbed on waves of blue. A cat ran away from a flattened shopping cart. As a draftsman, John’s main problem—like mine—was noses.

“This place is so flat,” I said to John, pointing out the window, “No topography.” And I told him how I grew up near Poughkeepsie, New York, the heart of the Hudson River Valley, that I can see the Catskill Mountains from my parents’ living room window. He told me that the Hudson reminded him of Mozart’s Ninth Symphony. “I listen to lots of good music,” he said. For instance, Beethoven’s Seventh, which “expresses to me the dry heat of the desert—the euphoria of dry heat.” And Bruckner’s Fourth, which, he said with a triumphant chuckle, “expresses the joy of traveling on a Greyhound bus.” I was unsure of the ratio of sincerity to sarcasm in his statement. I told him that my “intended,” as John had started calling Steven, was studying jazz piano at Indiana University. “I play piano too,” he offered. “Schubert sonatas.”

▱

“Welcome to Indianapolis,” the sign said, “The Crossroads of America.” If that was true, then John had been up and down this Fertile Crescent—and all by bus, I realized. Cincinnati was a nice city, he had said: after all, the buses ran on time there. I had asked him if he ever typed up his notes, and he had replied that he used a computer when he could, but “obviously there are no computers on the bus.”

When we disembarked, I tried to say goodbye quickly—seemed easier that way, to make a clean break—but John insisted that he take my picture. For some reason, we had come to matter to each other, and we both needed proof. I didn’t want to forget what he looked like, what he knew, his special brand of truth. Perhaps he felt the same about me.

He led me to the outer edges of the Greyhound parking lot—he wanted me to cross the street, but I told him no—and snapped me with his disposable. The sky was a putty color; the flash went off. “I’ll get doubles and send it to you,” he promised, and then he bumbled over, sneakers shuffling, and gave me an awkward hug. His arms were heavy on my shoulders; he smelled of cold. It was drizzling. As John had written, “The rain gives delight. We’re in the land of much water.”

I believed him, and I hoped his windbreaker would keep him dry. I hoped he would never lose a word he wrote and that he would visit all the rivers he wanted before he died. I hoped I would see a fraction of the greatness he saw in this country three Tuesdays from now, no matter what happened.

 

Author’s Note

Nearly every word of this essay was actually written in 2004, when I was nineteen years old, for a creative nonfiction workshop taught by Lynn Powell (thank you, Lynn!). It’s been satisfying to resurrect it just before the second presidential candidacy of a Republican incumbent in my lifetime. Here’s hoping—upon hope, upon hope, ad infinitum—for a restorative outcome. And here are some parting words from Mr. Whitman, the problematic nature of whose work—even in “Song of the Open Road”—I acknowledge. He contains multitudes.

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d, / I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. // Allons! We must not stop here . . .

 

Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment and a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. She is the author of “Corduroy Road” (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2020), “Niagara Transnational” (Fourteen Hills, 2013), and “Tatted Insertion,” a letterpress chapbook with artist Leah Virsik. She is also the librettist of “Halcyon,” a new opera about the death and life of a women’s college, with composer Joshua Groffman and producer Vital Opera.