THE EPIC TRAIN SAGA
I was awoken at 6:35 a.m. by the blood-curdling squeal coming from Emma’s evil t-shirt drawer. I cringed. Not only did my ears now feel like they had been violated with a corkscrew, but it was also five minutes before my alarm clock was supposed to gently lull me from my slumber with its incessant, high-pitched beep. The demon drawer had played it dirty, cheating me of the final five minutes of my unconscious bliss. I lay there bitterly, unable to go ahead and get up out of spite, but unable to enjoy groggily snuggling in my bed, knowing that any drift into dozing would just as soon be cruelly ripped away from me like a needle out of an addict’s arm—or, you know, something less dramatic.
When my alarm clock finally broke the sound barrier, I crawled out of bed and, because it’s lofted so high that I misplace ceiling tiles if I breathe too hard, I vaulted off (nailing the landing, I might add). I brushed my teeth, pulled my rainbow-colored hat over the bird’s nest on my head, and slipped my coat on over my pajamas. Driving someone to a train station that early in the morning didn’t require much more preparation than that.
I pulled my car up to the curb, loaded her bags into the trunk, and we were off. We rode in silence—not the invigorating, “let’s think about life” kind of car-ride silence, but the strained, “there’s absolutely nothing to talk about this early in the morning” kind of car-ride silence, like when your estranged step-mother has to drive you to school because you missed the bus (not that that’s ever happened to me, but I imagine it would be a similar level of misery)—silence, save for the brief exchanges about directions. Our first turn was a wrong one, but somehow that did not portend the way my morning would end.
We eventually got back on the right track, and drove for miles down a twisty-turny road whose name changed at least six times. It’s like whoever designed that road was some hillbilly (evidence for this assumption will present itself later) who thought it’d be a whole mess-a fun to screw with non-natives like myself. When that death-trap ended, we had to turn onto another twisty-turny road, but this time, like a feminist newlywed, it kept the same name. At the end of that road was a maze of streets named after NASCAR drivers with intersections regulated by flashing yellow stoplights and drivers ignorant of the meaning behind flashing yellow stoplights.
When we finally made it to downtown Kannapolis, I was pretty sure it had been ravaged by nuclear war during the sixties. Not a soul was walking the streets, not a car was cruising the boulevards, and the lead paint on the moldy buildings was peeling like a groovy, taupe-colored sunburn. It was frightening.
The train station was in the heart of downtown—the cold, dead heart, but the heart nonetheless. There was a single car in the vast, icy parking lot, giving me hope that other human beings may exist within a close proximity; however, there were no trains anywhere that I could see, so that car had probably been parked there since the nuclear attack. I got out of the car and helped Emma with her bags—well, more like watched her unload her bags while I complained about the cold weather—hugged her goodbye, and quickly drove off in case a nuclear war zombie caught a whiff of my fear and had a new human meatloaf recipe it wanted to try out.
Driving off, I was relieved to have the car to myself. Now I could jam to techno remixes of Ke$ha and Taio Cruz, because I only knew of one radio station in the Charlotte area that wasn’t devoted to country or bluegrass or folk music. As I tried to retrace my footsteps—or tire tracks, as I suppose it were—I had every confidence that I could find my way back to good ol’ Davidson. No problem.
I maneuvered my way through Dale Earnhardt Wonderland and was successfully traveling back down the twisty-turny road with only one name.
After a while, though, I began to panic. These places I was passing—well, more like landmarks than “places,” which has a certain connotation of civilized life—were completely unfamiliar. A turtle farm? I seriously would’ve remembered that. Another trailer park neighborhood? Surely I hadn’t passed that many. A red tractor? No way. I needed to turn around and find the right street and just be home. It had been a long enough morning already, and I didn’t need to start joy-riding down Desolate And Neverending Farm Land Road.[1]
I pulled into the first driveway I saw (and what looked like the only driveway for several hundred miles) and attempted to turn around. This task was not easy, as, amazingly, there was actually a fair amount of traffic on Desolate And Neverending Farm Land Road—probably due to aliens who built fancy vacation homes in the area, because the farmers would have been driving tractors and people who own trailers don’t need to own cars when they can drive their homes around, right? In waiting for an opportune moment to work my quick-gear-changing-magic, I began to wonder if the people whose driveway I was currently occupying might be watching me from the windows. My windows weren’t tinted, so they would be able to see the fear and vulnerability on my face, and, since (contrary to that whole misleading concept of “Southern hospitality”) most hillbillies are not fond of strangers, they might have been readying their shotguns to take down such a rare and easy prey. I had to escape as quickly as possible.
I backed out with a screech of tires, probably angering the hillbilly hunting spies, and threw my car into drive to make my escape. Apparently, because I was not driving a Porsche and took longer than six seconds to accelerate past fifty miles per hour, I was not going quickly enough for the crazy alien-invader drivers in large pick-up trucks. Not once, not twice, but thrice was I passed by these savages, in which time I passed three different “do not pass” signs on the side of the twisty-turny, professional-driver-closed-course, zoom-zoom road. Clearly the aliens and/or hillbillies had not yet mastered the English language.
Their apparent suicide-homicide attempts, as frightening as they were, understandably sent me into a sobbing, heaving rage. After several minutes of dripping snot onto my steering wheel and trying to maneuver the one-named road like Princess Peach in Super Mario Kart (Wii edition), I realized that I was almost back to NASCAR village. Great. I missed my turn again. Thanks, psycho alien/hillbilly drivers. I dried my tears and pulled down a road that appeared to lead to a neighborhood.
It did not.
It led into some woods.
Once again scared for my life, as Paul Bunyan clearly could have been chopping down trees in those woods and mistaken my car for a beetle that he needed to smoosh with his freakishly gargantuan foot, I turned around in the middle of the road and sped back toward some semblance of familiarity. By this time, I was dry-heaving out of rage, fear, panic, and hunger (as I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet). But I had to stay positive: surely this time I will find the correct road to turn down and this road trip may actually become enjoyable. Maybe they’d even play my favorite Tay Swift/Kanye West techno remix on the radio. Just maybe!
As I began to travel in the right direction, however, I was blinded by the vicious, fiery, rising devil-sun. I put down both visors to no avail. I put on sunglasses, but they just made me feel like a victim of cataracts with someone shining a flashlight directly into my eyes. Nothing could help. My eyes watered uncontrollably and little black spots clouded my vision. I swerved along the road, trying not to crash into a trailer park or tractor, yet still attempting to look for the road that would allow me to escape from this fatal danger.
I saw a road that I thought looked right and I turned onto it as quickly as I could. Able to actually see it without the glare of the sun, it was clear that I was dead wrong. (In non-sun-glare hindsight, I guess trusting my sense of sight when I couldn’t really see was probably a bad way to go.)
Okay, I thought, I’ll just turn around when I come to a driveway or some other paved surface that isn’t a crop field. No big deal.
Eight miles later, it was kind of a big deal.
I couldn’t turn around in the street like last time, though, because alien hillbilly drivers were actually driving on the other side of the road, either coming from the mothership or a family reunion, so I had to wait it out. Luckily, about a minute after I started hyperventilating, I came across a small house with a semi-paved semblance of a driveway. I turned around as quickly as possible, paying no attention to oncoming traffic so as to limit the amount of time that I could think up dramatic scenarios leading to my gruesome death at the hands of hillbilly hunter-spies.
When I finally reached the one-named road, I was unsure of which way to turn. Had I gone too far? Had I not gone far enough? Was I even in North Carolina anymore? Who knew? I decided to turn the opposite way that I had been traveling, because anything was better than continuing to slowly and painfully blind myself.
As I began to drive down the one-named road once again, I realized I didn’t know the name of the road that I was supposed to turn onto. Since its name had continuously changed like a territory in Eastern Europe, it could’ve been called anything. I had no idea. I threw my hand into my backseat area and furiously fished for the Mapquest directions that Emma had disposed onto the floor of my car. When I finally found them, I officially felt retarded.
What could a road leading to Davidson, North Carolina possibly be named? Davidson Road. Really? Davidson Road? Okay, I was wrong, the aliens and/or hillbillies had mastered my language and were rubbing it in my face. Touché, hillbilly aliens. Touché. Thinking about it now, it really does make a lot more sense to combine your home and your car into one super-commodity (e.g. trailers, motherships). Maybe North Carolina and the Desolate And Neverending Farm Land Road have stuff to teach me after all.
Or, you know, maybe I really can’t justify my idiocy.
When I finally reached Davidson Road, and turned onto its twisty-turny, paved, tractor-less glory, I was ecstatic. I cried tears of sheer joy and wonderment. Arriving back at school was like a day’s worth of oil lasting over a week: a sheer defiance of the laws of nature. (No wonder those Jews have a party to commemorate such an event.) It was beautiful.
But God help me if I ever have to drive to that train station ever again. If I do, I’m crashing at the turtle farm.
[1] Note: Not actual name of road—name has been changed for road’s privacy.
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