the long road that has no turning

and after that we drove in one day, waking up before the sun rose, to memphis, tennessee. we checked into the heartbreak hotel at 2 am, woke up a few hours later to see graceland, and then drove back to atlanta, a new set of people.

i've been back in new york now for about as long as we were on the road, and like they say, everything is different but nothing has changed. looking at the thousands of pictures and thinking about our journey feels to me like what the astronauts who landed on the moon must have felt like when they returned to earth and saw the footage. you knew you were on another planet, your footprints are left there and will be there forever, and yet your world and that other world continue to go on, in their separate universes, pretty much just as they were before you set sail.

there are so many things i used to say i would never do, or things i promised i would. i said, just a few years ago, that no matter who she was, if a woman ran ever for president i would vote for her, i would do everything in my power to help her get elected. most of the declarations i made are of this nature- they belie the essence of who i am, but they inevitably get shifted around with experience. i consider being a feminist essential to who i am, but in this election, i believed there was a stronger candidate than the woman who ran, and i am now doing everything in my power to see that it is he who gets elected.

one of the few declarations i can remember making about getting married was that i was sure i would live with the person before we got engaged. just as a few years ago i never would have imagined that there would be a candidate running against hillary clinton who could inspire me more, i never would have dreamt that in order to simply live in the same country with the man i love, i would have to marry him. it is a catch 22 unlike anything i have ever heard of, and yet, it turned out to be the greatest blessing of my life and will forever remain the happiest moment i have ever known.

i am sensing the realm and reach of my universe expand so quickly that i can almost feel it physically- growing pains, in a way- and it as once terrifying and comfortable, funny and sacred. i am scared of missing chris so much that i can't get up in the morning, but day by day our glorious adventure continues, and i know that next year he will be living here with me and we will enter into the next territory of our lives together. i am so worried that somehow, by some cruel twist or some evil plot, barack obama will lose the election, and yet everyday i spend in that office and every time he responds to fear mongering and lies with dignity and intellect, i am so full of hope that its staggering. i drove across america and what i saw was familiar and foreign, and there is no way to summarize it and there is no category of emotions it could even fit into. contradictions are not new for me necessarily, but what feels different now is an ability in myself to let them all marinate together, to not untangle them right away, to rest with them and let them be.

my mom has a saying that i never really understood, though i asked her to explain it many times. when something surprising happens to someone, usually its something unfortunate, my mom will say "its a long road that has no turning." what caught me up as a child, and even until very recently, was that i wasn't seeing the irony, i wasn't putting the inflection on the right word. the expression doesn't mean that only the long roads have no turning, it means exactly the opposite- there is no road, no matter how long, that does not at some point turn. there is no road without bends, without intersections, without eventual dead ends, and whatever road the road you are on now will take you to, that one, too, will eventually turn.

everything i know in life i learned from a $12 black rubber tube bought at a conoco gas station in boulder

i need to sleep soon, as we have to wake up at 5 am to drive from boulder to memphis tomorrow on our last real day of the road trip, but i wanted to talk about tubing for a minute.

when chris told me yesterday that we would be tubing in the boulder creek, i was ecstatic. the only times i've been in a proper tube i was either being pulled by a pontoon boat in lake martin, or i was floating around in a deep river near lake hiawassee, georgia. basically i had no idea what to expect as we pulled up to a conoco gas station in boulder, colorado in the heat of the day, paid a bitter old woman with silver teeth twelve bucks per tube and then listened to her lecture about how to use the tire pump to fill them up correctly. she was incredulous about people like us coming in for tubes ("since nine thirty this morning!")- "they just get in, go down the creek, get out, and walk em back up. i just don't understand it." and honestly i didn't really either, until i was positioning my bottom in the center of this big black rubber tube in a little river which was approximately no degrees and chris was giving me a push and telling me to keep my butt up.

the creek wasn't that deep, and as i was about to be swept down one of the first little waterfalls i noticed a guy in front of me, an extremely skinny guy with big black glasses on, wince in a look of surprised pain. so i tried to keep my butt up and it didn't work, and then it worked for a little while, and then in between waterfalls i would gain momentum and start being swept backwards. how strange it is not to be able to see what disaster lies before you! and why is it so much easier it is to be toppled over when you aren't facing it?

so i did get toppled over, on one of the last and biggest cascades, and i got flustered and scared and mad at chris for a minute for coming up with this scheme in the first place. and then i wanted to try it all over again, so we got out and walked em back up and we did it again. and by looking at other people and by taking chris's advice (how and where did he learn these things?) i developed some very handy practices, namely keeping my butt up, and holding onto the tube for dear life, and being able to turn yourself around using whatever means possible before you do go down backwards. and by doing it over and over and watching other people- smaller people, fatter people, drunk people, germans- do it and survive, i became less and less scared and after each whoosh i would get the most euphoric sense of accomplishment, and it became so fun.

once these two bratty kids were standing on a big rock watching people go down the waterfall that was split in two- one side of it was the one that ruined me the first go round, and the second part looked much rockier but not as steep. as i was being carried away into it i decided to go down the rocky part and i could hear one of them say to the other "watch her! watch her!" and then i was literally sucked into a seemingly bottomless vortex and i hit my head against something very hard and i thought to myself, still underwater "this is how concussions happen." i finally managed to find the right way up and i assumed the kids would be either laughing or concerned but they were already watching someone else make the same mistake.

i now have a little sore bump on my head, and we have two huge black rubber tubes sitting in the corner of our hotel room. i guess i can see why the woman in the gas station was confused.

the realest wedding

zel bought me the most beautiful flowers i've ever seen, calilillies for the boys and babys breath for my hair. we arrived at the los angeles county registrar's office in norwalk about 11:00, stood in more lines, had lots of pictures taken, kissed and hugged each other, laughed, and finally went into a little chapel with the judge. he asked us if we were doing rings and we said no, and he said thats perfectly fine and asked us to step under the flower alter and switch places. i gave zel my flowers to hold and i was already crying. the judge made a little joke about it- "wait a minute, i haven't started yet!" and i laughed too hard. he started saying that marriage is a contract not to be entered into lightly, and other things i can't remember, and then he asked us to hold hands and look at each other. we hadn't been told what was going to be said, what we were going to be asked to say to each other, so when he asked chris to repeat after him- "i, christopher robert james, take you jessica victoria baxter, to be my best friend..."- and when i saw chris's face and knew he was going to cry, knew he was going to cry in a way i had never seen him cry before because different parts of his face were moving in different directions and he was looking me in the eye- "my partner in life, my companion forever"- we were both crying and tears were coming off my face on down my chest. and then i told chris that i would take him to be my best friend, my partner in life, my companion forever, and the judge said "well then, by the power invested in me by the state of california, i now pronounce you husband and wife" and chris said "i love you" and we hugged and then chris told everyone they could clap now and i looked over at zel who was crying and clapping and octavio and sarah were deliriously hooting and hollering and we cried for a little bit more, and the judge said i can tell this is a couple that will have a long and happy life together, and as we were back in octavio's car, after waiting in a few more lines and taking a few more pictures (us wrapped together in the california flag on a stand in the corner of the chapel, etc.) octavio said "i know this was for the paperwork and it wasn't your real wedding but it was the realest wedding i've ever been to," and i knew that he was right- we do want to have another wedding, a huge party, so that all the beautiful, important people in our lives, who have raised us and loved us and knew us long, long before we ever knew each other can be there, can have their own moment to process it and so we can honor them with toasts and dances. we will have that wedding and that party eventually, but after we said those vows to each other both of us knew that this was the real wedding, this was two people promising to love each other no matter what, and for the rest of my life i will think back on that moment and on chris's face and i will know that this is when we became husband and wife.

and it only cost the state fees- $70 for the license, $25 for the ceremony, $26 for two copies of the certificate- and we went to an applebee's in norwalk afterwards and drank ridiculous fruity cocktails, and the most beautiful photograph of any two people that i have ever seen was taken by one of my best friends in the world, with my digital camera, and the dress i wore was from high school and i got to wear my converse. and now i am sitting on the floor of a motel in elko, nevada, about to drive to salt lake city, and chris is getting dressed and i look over at him and its this feeling like seeing the grand canyon for the first time, it defies words and it would be silly to reduce it to that, it touches each and every part of me in hundreds of thousands of different and glorious ways that will never have words attached to them. every day now, for the rest of my life, i can look at him and just feel. i don't think i knew that was even possible until now. and actually, i don't think it was.

los angeles county registrar's office, norwalk, july 24 2008

bad ass

i cried when i saw the grand canyon. though this probably won't come as a surprise to most of you, it did surprise me. we drove from santa fe (santa fe: my mom and howard go every summer to see the opera, which is performed in this spectacular open air dome, and they took me with them a few times during college, so i knew going into this trip that i knew santa fe, but i didn't know until yesterday that i actually love santa fe, with its turquoise skies and its peacefulness. it is the ultimate city in which to take an incredibly long, deep breath), drove past more unending views, views of what feel like all of america splayed out before you, and then entered arizona, which was at first pretty underwhelming. its gets flat again as soon as you cross the border, and then around flagstaff there are trees again, which is jarring after so many days of desert. but then we start down the 40 towards the south rim of the grand canyon, and we're chasing the sun across the sky, trying to at least catch a glimpse of it before its dark.

and we do. we park the car, we get out and i'm in the middle of a sentence when i see it, right in front of me, waiting like it has been for the past two billion years. its frustrating for someone who writes to feel stunted by words, because i generally love words and i know that there is always a way to express a feeling, even without dipping into clichedom, but i'm afraid that in this circumstance i am going to have to let myself and you down and just say that the sight of it was stomach dropping, gut wrenching, something from a movie about another planet or the most fantastic dream of your life.

and it felt like a gift. not necessarily from god or anyone like that, but from chris. that was the first thing i thought, and i hope i said it to him in the midst of that moment- thank you. thank you for bringing me here, thank you, you british boy, for showing me america, for letting me find it, for guiding me there and for loving my reaction to seeing it more than seeing it yourself.

i think that living in new york i've forgotten a lot of things, or maybe its possible that i never knew them to begin with- mainly that there are hundreds and hundreds of miles in this country that are uninhabited. hundreds of miles of trees, hundreds of miles of desert, hundreds of miles of strange small bushes, of dunes, of mountains, of bayous, of valleys, of rivers, of canyons. its shameful, what we've done to earth, and its true that there is so much sprawl in this country and so many big cars and so many stores selling so much shit. but this trip, thus far, has reminded me that its not dead yet, its not all gone, we aren't yet holding on to one small little bloom planted in a boot as our hope for the entire future. in most places in america you actually can't find the new york times, in most places no one gives a shit that you are wearing a bright pink glittery button with barack obama's face on it, in most places a road trip like this would be seen as the greatest luxury you could dream of.

i think what i understand about america now, more than i did before, is that my reaction to the grand canyon is just as right and as beautiful as this young guy's was, probably about 20, with a classic greased back hair-do and a hollister t-shit on, when he said to his friend: "that's so freakin bad ass."

truth or consequences

texas behind us, we're now in santa fe. the western part of the state was much less painful to drive through, and it was more what i imagined it would be, with the desert and the mountains and all of that. we passed through some wicked lightening storms, which we could see from a hundred miles away. that was the most amazing part- the open sky, the vastness, the girth. how can one sky look bigger than another?

this part of the trek also made me understand just how stir crazy i had gone driving from new orleans to austin. since i knew it wasn't even a category one drive (our classification- meaning more than 600 miles in a day), i tried to convince myself that it wasn't that boring. i tried on all the beautiful feathered masks i had gotten in new orleans, and took pictures in each. i tried on various lipsticks, and took pictures of myself in each. i made chris suffer through questions from two books that had been given to us- one from my mom, with questions to ask each other before getting married, and one from hoodie, with questions about each other and our relationship. the first has questions like: "what do you imagine our bedroom looking like? whimsical? romantic? will we have a TV in our bedroom?"; "how will we raise our children regarding food? will we encourage them to be vegetarians? will we prohibit processed foods? how often will we eat out?"; "how often will we socialize with friends? what will be our preferred method of socializing?" these definitely spur conversation but as you can see after 100 miles of it, it gets old. the second book, which was given to us because it made hoodie and her boyfriend fight, asks questions such as: "what was the first thing that attracted you to your partner?" ; "name three things you hope your partner never says to you again"; "what is your favorite facial expression that your partner makes?" again, great, thought provoking questions, but one can only do this for so long.

for the record, my favorite chris facial expression is when he first starts to concentrate on something. his eyebrows do this little furrow and he sort of pouts, and its real cute. his favorite was my fake frightened face.

austin to el paso was just a much better experience. we stopped at the monahans sandhills for a picnic, which was absolutely stunning, and we also stopped at odessa, sight of the ratliff stadium, at chris's request (something having to do with "friday night lights"). reaching el paso was a huge milestone, but unfortunately we had to go to a wal-mart to get camping equipment and other supplies. it could have been worse, but it still wasn't fun, and then trying to find a non-chain, non-terrifyingly sketchy hotel in el paso proved impossible, so we broke down and stayed in a red roof inn.

if you can, skip el paso and go about 50 miles into new mexico to a town called truth or consequences. what a better story that would have been.

this is a long drive for someone with a lot to talk about

chris and i are sitting on the balcony of the other best hotel in the world, the austin motel, dorkily both on our computers because we have a tiny, fleeting moment of internet access.

driving through texas, thus far, has been less interesting than i thought it would. everyone always goes on and on about how texas is so flat and so boring and lasts until you want to cry, but i imagined it being interesting at least: roadside taco stands, desert, horses. i was excited about driving through texas, if you must know the truth. unfortunately the drive from new orleans to austin was just flatter than from birmingham to new orleans. less trees, more field. one wonderful thing is that, given you aren't the one driving, you can look out the window and know that what you are about to see will look the exact same as what you just saw. there is something extremely reassuring about that, and surprisingly after about half an hour of that everything looks beautiful.

we got to austin about 11:00 pm last night and went straight to the continental club, an allegedly world famous bar thats right across the street from our ridiculously charming hotel. it was exactly what i thought austin would be, old hipsters with tattoos, jazz music, cheap booze. we loved it. today we woke up early and ate pound cake for breakfast in bed, made by peg, my mom's best friend's mother, who gave it to me on my birthday a few days ago at the epic brunch we had in atlanta. no time to tell you about that now.

what i will tell you about is how much downtown austin reminds me of birmingham and how much driving around austin reminds me of california. also about the barton cold springs in the zilker park, and the farmer's market on guadalupe street, and the tip of mount bonnell, which yields glorious views of austin and its huge sprawl. we are off to dinner now and then some drinking on sixth street, and then we wake up early tomorrow to drive all the way across the rest of texas.

i am a little scared.

bastille day

i need to go backwards.

i'm sitting in the dining room of our sweet hotel in new orleans (the frenchman, on frenchman street- i highly, highly recommend it), drinking coffee and trying to at least write a little before chris is done getting ready and we head out for beignets at cafe du monde. i don't care if its touristy and predictable of us, i won't leave this town until i have eaten beignets and drunk cafe au lait at cafe du monde. i hear barack obama's voice on TV talking about the surge. i turned on the TV for the first time since chris arrived in the states this morning and george bush's face was all over every station, talking about the economy and gas prices and laughing when he said every reporter's name. i wonder if the reporters will miss him a little bit, the banter and the lightheartedness in the face of all this disaster.

speaking of bush, this is the first time i've been in new orleans since katrina happened. i came here a few times as a child with my parents but i don't remember it being this beautiful, this eccentric, this delicate, this outrageous, this sweet, this interesting and this complicated. and though i think the storm has a large part in creating such a sense of awe in me, such a sense of respect and curiosity about every street we walk down and every person we pass, i think that its actually despite the storm that it remains as such. shingles remain left off roofs, window panes haven't been put back in some houses and office buildings, and as you drive off the 10 and enter new orleans you can see katrina on every street. but from what i can tell in my narrow perspective here on frenchman street, new orleans is for the most part as new orleans has always been. you can't walk anywhere without hearing live music nearby, there are drag queens welcoming you into bars on bourbon street, moms walk leisurely down the street, plastic cup with skinny straw in hand, as their kids run ahead. i see katrina in the bumper stickers that say "nero fiddled as rome fell/ bush played guitar as new orleans flooded" and in the t-shirts being sold in chochsky shops that refer to new orleans being "still swinging" or "still the best city in the south" and in the ineffable feeling of this being a city whose fever is breaking. i remember the discussion after katrina about whether we should invest in new orleans again or not, knowing that a storm like this would probably come along again, and since the infastructure of the city is flawed it was bound to happen. this is an aside, something that most of you probably know, but katrina affected me infinitely more than any other disaster in my lifetime ever has- more than 9/11. i had been living in new york for a few months and found it extremely difficult to do anything but watch the news alone in my apartment. i went out to bars and found myself lecturing or crying to perfect strangers about what had happened and what should have happened and i found myself infuriated that people were able to get dressed and go to work, that they still wanted to get dressed up and go out drinking. it lasted for about two weeks and it was one of the darkest times in my life.

chris is ready to go. i need beignets. i also want to write about birmingham and how it was sort of this homecoming for me, it was this first and this final reckoning with it, like birmingham finally wiggled its way into its final place in my heart. maybe that couldn't happen until i had shared it with chris or until he at least had a sense of what it looked like and what it meant. this all needs to come later but i can't really say when. we leave for austin in a few hours and spend two nights there, so hopefully at some point i can steal away with this computer and type out some more day old memories.

new orleans has more soul than any city i have ever been to in any country in the world, and the notion that "we" would somehow not rebuild it is, thankfully, laughable now. it wasn't ever up to us. it was up to this old man with purple hair named ronnie who played the saxophone in a bar near our hotel last night and who told me i should be a newscaster and wear outfits that were attractive but not too sexy, and that i should shake my ass as i point to the thunderstorm coming from the west. maybe something from ann taylor would be appropriate, he said.

oh, and no one here gives a shit about bastille day.

before we begin

we eat my mom's potato salad and baked beans and hamburgers and hot dogs and we drink red wine and the middleton's irish whiskey chris brought my parents as a gift, because that's what they all drunk when the two families met each other for the first time in london about a year ago. i wasn't there but from what i've heard middleton's was an important element of that night. we play in the pool all afternoon, just me and chris, and we lay on a lawn chair on top of each other and he plays my body like a bongo drum- the thighs sound different than the calves than the stomach- and it doesn't hurt, it just makes me laugh.

we leave for the road trip tomorrow, which means we should be packing the car right now, but instead chris and howard are watching baseball and talking about brick lane, and my mother is cleaning the kitchen and refuses to let me help. i am scared about writing this blog, scared the way i'm scared in the hours and minutes before i sit down to write a story- i want it to be epic, i want it to mean something, and my greatest fear is that it just won't. that it will lay there, in gross unpretty cyperspace, flaccid and lifeless, and all the (miniscule) progress i've made in my life, regarding writing and art and meaningfulness, will somehow be negated. it's funny and it's merciful that with each word i type that fear gets a little less sturdy and i become increasingly more excited about what little beauties and truths i'll be allowed to express through the wide open medium of this blog. it's the starting it that's hard; during dinner i had a flash of writing and i dreaded it, and then i started talking about something, king george or arizona or obama or something, and i forgot about it, and then i spent ten or so minutes trying to remember what was attached to that sense of dread. this happens to me a lot- i'll experience an overwhelming feeling: dread, pure excitement, embarrassment, pride- and then i'll immediately forget it and spend awhile searching for what ignited it in the first place. its an incredibly satisfying feeling to find it again.

oh, i digress. (this will be the reoccurring theme).

we are leaving for a three week long road trip tomorrow, which is my 25th birthday, and our first stop is my hometown, birmingham, alabama. the thought of getting to show chris the house i grew up in, my school, vulcan, sloss furnaces, the neighborhoods and the streets that nurtured me into adulthood, that created in me a sense of belonging that i have never and will never feel again, is rocket propelled happiness.

somehow i'll find the words to tell you about that.