3.

We didn’t get on the open roads though, at least not right away. We had to double back into town and stop at a Meijer’s to pick up film and deodorant. Jon also needed a more detailed atlas. Meijer’s didn’t have one, but we finally found a Rand McNally at a Target. It would prove to be our most important purchase of the trip.

We also passed a comic book store called the Danger Room, and I was foolish enough to stop. It was one of the things we wanted to do on this trip, be able to stop at random places along the way, but I should have been smart enough to stay out of comic book shops. I always want to just go and look, see all the inked robots and costumes and explosions on the covers, but sometimes the temptation to touch is just too great. Then I feel stupid for buying comic books at the age of twenty-two. Today wasn’t any different, and I walked out with three issues of the latest Transformers series.

“They’ll probably be the last comic books you ever buy,” Jon consoled. This was the Jon who spent about a hundred dollars in a camera shop before we even got on the road. “You should savor them.”

So I tried. I neatly folded the plastic bag around them and put them in the side door panel, to be safe and unbending until the long ride home. They’re probably not the last I’ll ever buy though. If I had my way, my bachelor party would be spent buying and reading and organizing comic books, like some last desperate fetish.

But finally we were done with all of that and we finally moved out of the towns onto the roads that hold the towns together. The car was making funny noises, but Jon was almost sure it was simply an exhaust knock and nothing to worry about. We finally found what we’re looking for, out there between Indiana and Ohio. There were all the small towns I’ll never see again, hills, brick houses, churches, graveyards. We were following a tiny red ribbon, Jon driving while I plotted our course on the map, watching the labels and intersections pass.

We stopped to get gas at a Marathon in one of the towns that was exactly what we hoped to find. There were only two pumps, one of which was full service. There was a service garage attached, and the inside of the gas station had a single counter, a single metal shelf of candy, a newspaper rack, a refrigerated display of pop that seemed to be the newest thing in there, and an old-fashioned cigarette machine with those handles you had to pull out. The men in there were old, and they talked to each other and other old men that came in and generally ignored us. In the bathroom there was a “shallow water; no diving” sticker on the inside of the toilet seat. I note it here because it was my favorite gas station of the trip.

Another point of the road trip was to document what we found. We had decided, between this gas station and Nate’s house, that it would be impossible to stop and take pictures of everything we wanted to. There had already been about a dozen assorted windmills, collapsing barns, and old brick houses that we had wanted to stop at, and at that rate we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. Instead we decided that whenever we did have to stop, we’d try to find things there to take pictures of. So after we pumped and paid for gas we drove the car back across the street and got out at an old junkyard we had seen.

The junkyard was probably owned by the old men at the gas station, and it wasn’t so much a junkyard as a used-car lot that someone had forgotten about and allowed to sink into a swamp. The cars were still parked in neat rows, and through their broken windows you could see that some still had their upholstery. They all seemed to be from the fifties and sixties, all cars you should have seen polished and sitting proudly in someone’s garage. Here they were all rotting and dyed the color of rust by time.

We took pictures of them because they were arranged in such nice, swampy rows and it was such a richly overcast day. Jon was impressed because some of them still had their engine blocks, and I was impressed because it looked so cool to see trees growing out of engine blocks. We took our pictures, feeling important and artistic with our shoulder straps and lenses, and then we got back on the road.