My Holy Grail
A windmill in Mustang, OK
We drove through the Ozarks, made our way into Missouri, and searched for a parking lot to pull into to sleep for a few hours. It felt like we hadn’t seen a rest stop since New Mexico. We found a Walmart and I tried to nod off, but we left when I noticed an older woman taking down our license plate number. Frustrated, I drove on for a few more hours until found a truck stop. I pulled a blanket over my head and slept for an hour or two, then we got back on the road.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten more than half a sandwich in nearly 24 hours, but I felt like everyone was giving me dirty looks wherever I went. I thought it was maybe my one-too-many-days-of-dry-shampoo hair and generally bedraggled appearance, but it soon became clear that they were looking at everyone that way. Mistrust, fear. It was in every interaction from purchasing a drink or a candy bar, to awkwardly navigating the soda fountain. It felt… off.
I saw a sign for a Waffle House as we were driving through Kentucky. We’d been talking about Waffle House since Arizona so it wasn’t even something I had to think about. We’d stopped at a Denny’s after an all-night drive, just outside of the Los Angeles sprawl, and ate a California-priced breakfast ($40 for eggs and coffee). When the Waffle House waitress gave me my check that read $18.27, I felt the same way Indiana Jones felt when he finally found the Holy Grail, only my Holy Grail was a waffle served to me by a middle-aged woman with blue eyeliner.
We drove through backroads in Kentucky until we finally hit I-40 in Tennessee (why we weren’t on 40 to begin with is still a mystery. We followed the GPS, millennials that we are). Zack caught some shuteye in the passenger seat, and I took in the sight of a partially-destroyed Nashville. Aluminum roofing twisted up and hanging in trees, houses half torn open, insulation hanging like pieces of skin. The rain drummed into them indiscriminately. Sitting now in the safety of my own still-standing home, sheltering in place from a virus, makes me wonder how those people are doing, if they survived the first blow from the tornado and the second from the virus, or if life’s rain drummed on until the riverbanks burst over with raging flood waters.