Road Boys

I use to think that everywhere and everybody were generally the same; I realize now that I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. It was early summer in Illinois, the sticky heat had not yet arrived and I still had the fresh feeling of awe at the fact that I was no longer in high school. I knew I had to make the most of this summer so I convinced three of my good friends to join me on a trek across the Midwest. Eight days of driving in a beat up Buick century with a broken gas gauge, no showering, sleeping outside, and an ungodly amount of cigarettes. The last thing I expected was to have my view on the world change.

As we hit South Dakota I knew something inside me was evolving. I stared out of my window and into the distance recounting my experiences from the previous few days. We had made our first stop in Davenport, Iowa. We camped overnight before heading towards Kansas where we camped two nights on jacks grandparents farm. I didn’t know farms like that still existed. It was 87 acres and you had to travel a couple miles on dirt road to get to it. The closest neighbor was at least half a mile away. But the experience that really struck me was what happened as we were leaving Kansas.

It was six in the morning as I woke up when I felt some ones shoe bounce off my head. “Wake up man, I think we are fucked”. That was not the best thing to hear, I sat up in the back seat of the car and looked around, I realized we were sitting on a small road near train tracks and corn as far as I could see. This troubled me because at this point and time we should be on a highway heading north. I was informed that Roberts prized Buick’s gas gauge had gone from half a tank to absolute zero in about four seconds. Jack was driving and he had pulled off the highway In hopes of finding a gas station but instead wandered into the middle of nowhere, we couldn’t even tell where the highway was anymore. We had no idea how much gas we had so we decided to try and find a house to ask if we could borrow gas or get a ride to a station. The first house we rolled up to looked empty, further inspection revealed that it was, Except for headless mannequins sitting in the living room. That kind of scared us so we decided to look for another house. We drove down an unpaved road through cornfields for 5 minutes and we saw another house. This house also looked empty and like it hadn’t been touched in years, but there was a shed next to it with a gigantic monster of a tractor. We pulled in to the driveway and ran in to the shed to look for gas cans. We found none. At this point we were getting very nervous, we had no idea how much gas we had left and every house we went to was eerily empty. I was sure that this type of abandoned area only meant one thing, we were in some twisted horror movie and we were about to be hunted down by a mentally unstable chainsaw wielding freak. We got back in the car and drove down the road once again looking for another house.

The engine cut out and we rolled in to the last houses driveway. I was horrified to see that this house also looked empty. This was it; I was going to die out in the middle of nowhere. I was slightly comforted by the fact that we had some food to last us a couple of hours and plenty of beer and cigarettes, so at least I could die in peace. But then Andrew heard something. It sounded like a TV, a cartoon maybe. I walked around the house to see if it was coming from inside but as I entered into the backyard I saw a trailer that was obviously occupied. Yes! We were not going to die here after all! Jack and I ran up to the trailer door and started pounding on it out of excitement. We heard some shuffling and after a few minutes a slightly overweight woman in a sleeping gown answered the door, she looked angry. She asked who we were and why we were disturbing her so early in the morning. We told her how we ran out of gas and that we were just some kids trying to make it up to Mount Rushmore for the 4^th of July. She shut the door and came out with three kids and her husband a few minutes later. This time she seemed a lot friendlier, her and her husband said they could take one of us to the gas station and bring back a gallon or two to get us back to the same station so we could fill the rest of our tank. There was innocence about these people, sweetness. It comforted me. They took jack in there truck to get gas while Robert, Andrew, and I sat on the driveway opposite of the couple’s small children. We stared at them, they stared back. Not a word was said, and all I could think about was why those people would trust dirty and smelly teenagers they had never met before with their kids and their unlocked trailer. Everybody in Naperville is way too paranoid with fear to do something like that. The couple and jack came back with gas and talked with us as we put it in the tank. They told us what they did for a living, the sports their children were in, they offered us food and a gas can to keep with us in case we ran in to trouble again. I was so surprised about how nice these people were to us. And then we were off.

As I stared out the window looking at the rolling hills of the Dakota badlands passing by the incident played over and over again in my mind. On this trip we had encountered so many good people, hardworking people. People who had lived there entire life in unbelievably small towns with limited exposure to new age living such as spending the day at the mall or movie theater. This is the real Midwest, not a bunch of snotty adults and bratty teenagers living in the suburbs. I have always had a very negative outlook on people but my experiences on this trip had made me realize that there is a ton of absolutely incredible individuals out there. I wish I could go into more detail about that specific situation, or the plenty of other situations that shaped my realization that people don’t suck after all on that trip, but they are stories for another time.