DAY 15: Life is an exercise in dismantling your dreams

RICHMOND, VA | MARCH 24,  2010 - On a remote European mountain, a long time ago, Friedrich Nietzsche was hungry and alone, tired and bitter. Sitting in a yoga pose, channeling a prophet named Zarathustra, he said, "We must run into the sun at every moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness."


Another time, my artist cousin the house painter dreamed of Spain. He dreamed of Spain for seven years, so long that in the end he knew he couldn't go. The dream had become so beautiful. To go was to risk losing the country he had borne so closely for so long.


By nature we are serious. Americans especially. So industrious. So serious. And dreamy. Every day we are spectacularly dreaming and then working to make it real, pull it from the sky to earth. 


Today was like that. Adrienne and I had been driving all day. All day we were heroically driving the tangible back roads, outside of dreamy abstractions like time and schedule. We were drinking in the old barns, stubbled fields still grey from winter. Only once or twice we had to speak. We mentioned aloud - interrupted the ongoing unspoken conversation - how oh, there was a successful farmstead. It was all white fresh lines and fields a deep low luminous green. "Monsanto," I said. "They all work these days for Monsanto," Adrienne replied. Then we went back to silent mode. We both knew the rest of the narrative, before and after, Monsanto owns the farmers' seeds.

We were on our way to Reedville. It fit the triangulation plan: we could go back roads; we would no doubt get lost at some point and end up talking with local strangers. Or we would find them at a store or on a sidewalk of some small place. A place; part of the plan, finding place. And we would be getting our first taste of 100 percent biodiesel. At Kilduff Oil, a public filling station at 691 Main St, small unknown town on a spit into Chesapeake Bay.


Well, it took a lot longer than we figured it would to get there. And when we came down Main Street, closing in on four pm, it was beautiful and quaint and deserted and all. The road ebbed away into a sandy delta that ran up against wharves, a fish pound and trucks and boats. But nothing like a fuel station. 


We turned around, drove a bit back up the road, slow-like, looking at all the still put-together Victorian houses. Then we turned around again at a corner gas station, lurched back into the road and came back down the terminus of deserted Main Street, not a person to be seen, slower this time, looking, peering. 

Adrienne spotted it. There. No. 691 was a house, like another other, no sign out front. Well, maybe the guy made the biodiesel out back, we decided. We parked and got out, scrambled down to an outbuilding past two fishing boats in dry dock. We found guys inside milling boards from wood.


"Nope," they said. "Haven't had biodiesel for about 10 years."


Mold, they said. One had a nephew worked for Cummins diesel. Called it bioslime. When it sat in the marine diesels it grew a mold, they said. Didn't last. Never really caught on. Nope. But do what you can. Straight diesel. They're getting the sulfur content down.


We talked awhile while two ospreys lifted and fussed at the end of the dock. Apropo of nothing, I pointed out the birds' giant mess of a nest on the pilings in the harbor not far off. The day was slow and at its end. We went on talking, listening. We learned from the two fishermen how the restaurants wouldn't probably open until Thursday or Friday this time of year, that we'd have to take Route 360 back to Burgess, take the 33 down to Kilmarnock for something to eat. 


"You have a good map of Virginia," the one suggested, asking obliquely.


"Pretty good," I said doubtfully, to let him know that our map wasn't so good and that I knew it.


So we went back to Yellow Truck, more than a little upset once we were on our own again. Totally foiled. And then every station we checked from the website printout seemed suddenly to be hundreds of miles out of our way. And then, as we drove off for Kilmarnock, not sure what our plan was, I wondered aloud if the whole thing, the whole voyage, maybe was pretty much ill-conceived. I wondered if the desert of No Biodiesel might stretch all the way to California. And we snapped at one another about who was more of a genius, etc. for getting us into this mess.


In Kilmarnock we had more heart ache. They hid our nachos under cold cheese whiz and microwaved jar salsa, then sprinkled real cheese along the plate border like art. As we sucked down the chips, we realized we would have to give up our plan to continue along the coast, at least for the rest of the afternoon. We'd have to head inland, Richmond was the closest place with biodiesel, the least out of the way. But when the woman answered the phone for the Richmond station, she laughed at me. "Baby," she said. "I'm sorry. I've never heard of biodiesel in my life." When I persevered and asked what kind it might be, if they had it, wondering if the B20 advertised on the website could be right, she had to ask someone else in the store. He didn't know either. I could hear him shooing her off in the background. She came back on the line. "I know it, baby. I work in a gas station. But I'm gas ignorant." She laughed some more.

Later, after dark, when we came into Richmond, I called back the same gas station, looking for directions, call me stupid, and someone else answered. It was a woman, she said no, there were no cross streets, the road the place was on, New Market, was all alone. No, none others near, she said, nothing near, all alone. It seemed impossible. No cross street.

The only way we were going to find Varina Pit Stop, we realized, was with wifi. So we got onto a highway, drove back to the outer rings outside the city and found a cheap motel. After food and a beer, we would find the place on the map, we knew, in a matter of minutes.

But American Idol was on. First things first. We were in no hurry now. We had Yellow Truck safely parked in the motel lot, under grey metal lights and the American flag, out there flying above the parking lot, through the something-something night. We had our bags inside. All was good. 

We could resurrect the dream in the morning. We would find all the biodiesel we needed. Once again, we had that unserious knowingness, that dreamy self-assuredness I don't know where from. Sometimes a bed and a room can do that. A full belly. We would improvise a new path in the morning.  We would run back into the sun just as soon as it came up.

We had to dismantle several dreams before we got here, flopping on our weird anonymous beds. But our road would be infinite all over again we already knew and were peaceful again. Already, in one day, we had traveled a thousand infinite miles, luxurious doppelgangers, from somewhere to nowhere.