6.

We woke up when Eric left for work, and Jon and I went outside in our pajamas so Eric’s mom could take a picture of us three in front of my car. It was rainy and cold, and though I was ready to leave right then Jon convinced me to come back downstairs so we could get another hour of sleep. We finally did get up though, got ready, and helped ourselves to breakfast.

We said our good-byes and walked out into the rain. Eric’s mom told me that she had read somewhere that the Columbus area gets more rain than anywhere else in the United States beside Oregon. It didn’t bother us that day, because we were getting back on the road and we will be seeing things that we haven’t seen before. Driving out of Columbus the rain can’t touch us. It doesn’t start to look like rainy mornings sometimes do until we are turning around fifteen minutes later, realizing that Jon left his cell phone in Eric’s basement.

That’s an interesting thing to stop and think about really. For a time there on the freeway that we were taking to circle around Columbus and hop on a middle road, we considered driving straight through and writing the phone off as a loss. Eric could drop it in the mail or just bring it back to school when he came. It’s some kind of commentary on our road trip that we both felt it necessary to have our own cell phones. When I asked Jon if he could go on without it, he explained that Annie would be calling it and worried if he didn’t have it.

We drove back to Eric’s house and waited in the driveway. His mother and sister had left to go shopping, and there was no way that we could get back into the house. There was a combination on the garage door, so we sat in my car in the rain and used our remaining cell phone to get in touch with anyone we could think of who might know that combination. Again, it’s something when you stop and think that no matter where we went we had the ability to instantly communicate with anyone in our lives. We weren’t truly cut off, nor would we ever be. We would always be connected with these invisible lines stretching from phone to satellite to phone. It was like the roads, and thinking about it now I wonder if these are the new high roads, traveling without moving, not even seeing the pavement between me and the people I’m far from. Eric finally called us back, gave us the combination, and allowed us to get back on the road.

* * *

There’s not a lot to tell about the roads through southern Ohio. I’m sure if we lived there, if we knew all their turns and every town hunched along their collective back, then there would be things to tell. Now there was only rain. There didn’t seem to be as much brick here as there was coming into Ohio, nor did there seem to be as many hills. Maybe they were there behind the rain. It seemed like we wandered south for a long time, stopping at gas stations and pumping gas in the rain, digging apples and yogurt out of the cooler in the rain. We kept looking for Kentucky, and it didn’t stop raining until we were at the Ohio River.

There was a town along the river on the Ohio side, and it was the first one that we had seen that day that looked like it had much character. It stretched along the river for a while, and we followed them both. Then there was a field and our road twisted up an on-ramp to join another road and make the leap over the river by a rather neat and trim suspension bridge, freshly washed blue by the rain. We stopped beside the field to take a picture of it, but bridges are always hard to capture. I saw the Mackinac Bridge every summer growing up, and no picture ever really came close to explaining it.

This bridge certainly was not the Mackinac, but we were proud of it for some reason, proud of the fact that it was on our road and that it would get us into Kentucky. For whatever reason, that seemed to mark the boundary, at least for me, into unknown territory. Indiana and Ohio bordered Michigan, so they certainly weren’t anything out of the ordinary. Kentucky was a definite step south, an unknown region of hills and blue-colored grass. Our blue suspension bridge was the gateway into all this, and our spirits lifted with the clouds as the rain finally stopped.

We decided that we needed a song as we drove into each new state that would be particularly applicable for that state. We didn’t have one for Indiana. I picked “Carry Me, Ohio” by Mark Kozelek (which Jon didn’t appreciate nearly as much as he should have) for coming into Ohio, and so Jon had to pick Kentucky’s song. He couldn’t think of one terribly specific to Kentucky, so he chose “Road Less Traveled” by George Strait. I liked it enough, as corny as it was, that it could be considered the theme song for our trip.

And it all might come together,
And it all come unraveled
On the road less traveled.

There’s a road, a winding road that never ends.