We left Pittsburg late enough that we only had a few hours on the road, Jim driving, I think, before we needed to get off the freeway to look for someplace to camp. From the off-ramp, we followed the empty two-lane down quite a long way, around a slow bend to the left, past some farms or houses or whatever. The horizon began looking more and more empty, so we turned around, back past some whatever, houses or farms, to the right, around a slow bend, and quite a long way up the empty two-lane, past the freeway, to a mom- and-pop trailer campground.

All the windows in the main house were opaque gray, unlit roll-down window shades. Jim eased the car over bumps in the grass yard, steering around picnic benches and electrical hookups and steel barbecue boxes, rolling to a stop at the far end of the property, where a wire fence and a chaos of vines mated indifferently in the dark.

The car sat clicking and whirring softly to itself.

'I was thinking maybe we could trip, and wander around here.'

"That could be fun."

'On the other hand if we trip all night it's going to be no good hanging out here tomorrow during the day.'

We grinned uneasily, sickeningly sharp kid shouts and dog barks floating in from some other ethereal tomorrow. Outside the car, time ran faster, and the things our eyes landed on warned how ugly they could become in daylight.

'Do you want to find another place to camp? This place is pretty lame but I get the feeling everything else around here is going to be like this too. Why don't they have different signs on the freeway for places like this and for real camping?'

"Well, they don't."

'So do you want to do a tab?'

"I could be up for it."

We each licked a hit off the tip of a finger and a tingling smile ran down our arms. From nowhere in particular a distracted idea slipped out.

'You know, we could give up on sleeping here and just get a cheap room at a motel. I mean, we're going to be up, anyway. And they'll have a real shower.'

"We won't have to hang out in the car all night, sure."

The minor demons of Pennsylvania were as bored as we were, and snaked the car, shaking and wiry, straight to the cheapest-looking motel in town.

'Why don't I go in by myself and say I only need a single room?'

"Whatever, as long as you go deal with it."

The motel was fifty a night, too much I thought, but fuck it, I just wanted to check in and be done with it. I was already filling out the traveller's check when I noticed the only way to get to the rooms was past the front desk. So I took the check off the counter like a wet kleenex, got in the driver's seat, and pointed the car towards the motel across the street. As the asphalt pitched and rolled I operated the turn signal switch and modulated the gas pedal across five lanes of road.

Inside, the guy behind the counter wore a black tie and a white shirt underneath a navy boy haircut. The room would be a little cheaper, maybe he didn't charge us extra for another person, I can't remember, but he knew Jim was there with me and it was fine. Maybe Jim or I said something a little surreal or maybe our pupils were a little expanded because while we were standing at the deserted counter the night man said, "You know, I used to trip, all the time. I used to go see nine inch nails, a bunch of times. And just be on four hits, or whatever."

Clearly the presence of this person was synchronicity, a fun-house mirror for our twisted smile. Here he was, on the far side of the rabbit-hole, his black tie strangling him twelve hours a night. I loaned him the crow soundtrack so he could finally hear 'dead souls.'

In the room we smoked a bowl and the colors of television leered right out of the box. The quay brothersesque alien semaphore sent me exhilarating smoke signals from inside the 'closer' video. Three times, holding top hat fish and suspenders wriggling, worms from a ball gag, a crucifixed monkey through the missing image hole.

Watching the end of a hollywood product-marketing vehicle, fortified by artificial dialogue pauses the size of a stadium after each insipid joke, Jim and I tortured ourselves by leaving it on. Give us this day our self boring contest, the naked state of pop star slogans dissolving from defiance into premeditated fast food endorsements.

After, though, while surfing the channel waves, 'closer' popped up again, twice, twitching like an animal, so having the television wasn't a complete loss.

Since we'd have at most a few hours before they kicked us out, the cost of the room reviewed itself, and after that, and so on, until I was sick to death of it. Miller and Dostoyevsky and on. through. Joyce, therefore I must burrow into debt, and live ruinously.

I took a shower to shake off the feeling. Hot clean water poured on me from deep inside the motel, but soon they would take it away.

Strangely, through a purple haze, we got a few hours of sleep, although, of course, not quite enough. In a hallway of empty rooms, why do they make you leave before noon? but anyway the crow tape was waiting for us at the desk and I drifted on a wave of swallowed caffeine green carbonation into the driver's seat.

Later that day, in our nation's fine capital, we visited Carl, who had once shared a house with Jim in Ann Arbor. Our luck still seemed strangely dislocated. The local ATM refused to believe I even existed, and the view from the Washington monument was blocked by locked doors. As the sky darkened, Carl's girlfriend dragged us through the arched buildings of a mall and down into the depths of the hard wood planet cafe, where we could find uninspiring food at uninspiring prices. I felt annoyed I hadn't resisted her plan, such as it was, and the scenery eerily echoed the cultural image vacuum we'd been warned about the night before.

We went back to Carl's apartment after eating. I was glad to see his boa constrictor again, which had never tried to squeeze me impolitely, but his girlfriend had a habit of starting questions without finishing them, which got weird fast. We ended up leaving their place before eight o' clock.

Carl made up for everything, though, by telling us about a good place to camp. Within an hour we had the tent set up three or four wet pines away from an old white VW bus, which smiled a dark silent hello. Suddenly surrounded by the smell of green things absorbing the soft sounds of raindrops, our luck came slinking back out of the shadows. The sticks and leaves were wet black soaked but the tarp kept the water from our sleeping bags, and the radio in the center of the tent murmured us to sleep.

In the morning, we got everything pulled down quick, and the ranger drove past us quietly as our serene smiles pulled our car out the gate. It might have been petty, sure, but finally something was free.

In Virginia we saw no cops. Like mallory's paradise-- shangri-la. Just tall trees flitting past at ten miles over.

Towards the middle of the day, I detoured us towards the blue ridge highway. The highway connector was a two-lane local route crammed with trucks and cars apparently lacking a gas pedal, I mean they took those "please reduce your speed" signs so dang literal, they dropped down below thirty, jamming miles of traffic.

Jim had his doubts, even once we glided onto the blue ridge. I liked curving above those deep green ravines, but even I knew that we wouldn't get anywhere fast. I wanted to stare without having to keep an eye on the road so I stopped on an overlook and snapped a picture I knew even then couldn't capture it. But how else would the ghost deep inside the robot know the colors were real?

Jim had a lot of fixed ideas, among them one that the blue ridge route was too slow. So after a few exits we headed back over, but at least I had seen the valley for myself. We pulled off at the intersection of the blue ridge and the next local route, which was a truck stop filled with rows of stuffed animals and quarts of motor oil. If you wanted, you could play a pinball machine which simulated a chase by the highway patrol, standing with your feet on the spots worn through the linoleum, flicking levers, winning high-speed pursuit escape bonuses, sliding a stream of quarters through the slot.

On the way back down the mountain, we got stoned and 'paul's boutique' did the driving for me. I flexed my reflexes, enjoying it, although an eighteen- wheel truck hung on our bumper with no passing zone or pull-off in sight.

Jim said, not for the first time, "Slow down, man, slow down."

I responded, not for the first time, 'This guy is riding my ass-- besides if he can do these corners in a truck, we're totally fine,' as I pulled the steering wheel down through sharp curves taut.

The leaves were sunlit yellow edged in red, the covered bridge in white, and the billboard to announce the white covered bridge, so tourists would see it. We shot out of the white covered wood slats through an empty crossroads, back into the half-glowing trees and I don't remember.