10/4/26
He had conveniently forgotten about the handgun under the tire jack, and I’m certain he hadn’t counted the roll of hundreds since he’d placed them in the lower cargo pocket of his zip-off pant-shorts combo. And when it came time to make declarations, he hollered, “I gotta piss, where’s your commode?” You see, Larry had a swagger that only comes from dying and reviving, that no border policeman, grizzly bear, or social convention could diminish. After the interrogation, we were rolling down the road again singing along to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, happily flubbing lyrics that spanned thirty years of American history and another thirty-year gap between the two of us. We were different versions of the same person occupying the only two seats of a Dodge diesel time machine, with eager eyes pointed on the horizon of what’s to come two times, on the way there and then again on the way back. “Somewhere past those mountains is a McDonald’s,” he said, “but I hope yer a good swimmer, 'cause I think it’s in Russia.”
Our “Big Macs or Bust” campaign ended at the water’s edge sans happy meal, somewhere closer to Tokyo than Indiana. Wayward Larry and I settled for gas station snacks and strange adventures until we had grown weary of the West…not quite homesick but alien…lost. And when we finally turned away from the end of the road and back toward the mountains we’d crossed over, we could see the path we’d taken to get here, a curvy and undulating snake that slithered between two peaks and eventually pulled itself taut between flatter land and our four tires. “All roads lead home,” Larry says.
But when we made it there, nineteen days later, we were mostly ready to leave again. I guess we liked the assurance of home more than the comfort of being there. The roads were seemingly paved to tempt us with the prospect of adventure in spite of convention. “A rollin' stone don’t have no moss on it,” he would say. Larry had a way with words. And as we pulled into my driveway, late morning, some fourteen hours since our last stop in Nebraska, we found my neighbor stuck in the ditch, buried to the lug nuts on his riding mower. “Where’d you run off to?” he barked over his shoulder as we pushed him from the muck. Larry chimed in before I had a chance to think. “Here,” he said with a grin. “We took the long way here.” My neighbor was confused but Larry wasn’t wrong. Every path that has led me far away has also brought me back home again. I'm on a continuous round trip, I guess...a scenic route to the same place over and over...going just to get back...rambling. I’ve always taken the long way here.
-Wyatt LeGrand
