Driving Towards Eternity
26. Jun, 2008 
6 Comments
GUEST POST: While I am on the road this week and exploring Madrid, I’ve arranged for some of my favorite travel bloggers to share their travel stories and advice here. So enjoy, give our guest bloggers lots of love and be sure to check out the author’s site.
Allen Ginsberg wrote in “Howl”,
“who drove cross-country seventy-two hours to find out; if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had; a vision to find eternity.”
It’s not easy to point out the things that drive a man to wander in search of something he doesn’t understand. Maybe it’s a simple biological need to explore and feed into his own curiosity, or maybe it’s simply a reason to escape.
Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, NJ. I didn’t grow up far away from there. My hometown lies right outside New York City, west of the Hudson River in an extremely populated town called West New York. For my entire childhood when people would ask me, “Where are you from?” and I would reply, “West New York” it took a few minutes to explain to them that it was actually in New Jersey.
As a child, the copies of National Geographic along with the pictures of Southeast Asia left behind by my father, relics of his tours in Vietnam, opened up an exotic world to me. Anything without skyscrapers for me was exotic.
I can’t complain. Being a bus ride from Manhattan was a godsend in its own. New York City is a place like no other on this planet. For me, it is the staple of modern human civilization. The city is an organism that breathes culture, and pulses with life.
However, it was always there for me. Always casting its large shadow over the streets on which I grew up. I thirsted for escape, not because it suffocated me, but because I knew there was something else out there.
Growing up in the circumstances in which I did, traveling was a bit difficult. I wasn’t willing to take up my father’s advice to join the Army if I wanted to see the world; and having no money, left me with few options. I simply had to wait.
Problem was that I needed to travel and head out west. I wanted to live in California. Since I was 18, I had been saying to my friends that I would go out there; many times I used it as an excuse as to not commit to girlfriends. “I really would love to make more of this relationship, but I’m moving to California,” I would say to them as the years passed by.
Not having a proper degree, and no money in the bank, I put my hopes for many years in that I would write a masterpiece that would somehow fund my way out of where I had grown up and bitter. This of course was nonsense, I wrote a crappy novel and couldn’t get any of my short stories published.
Many years later and a few years ago, I was living in Rahway, NJ and working in a small computer manufacturing company under ridiculous circumstances. I still had not had the opportunity to travel as I wanted. The bitterness inside of me grew and bubbled. Once again I searched and looked around for some escape but I saw myself tied to my prison of bills and responsibilities.
Eventually, this bitterness grew so much that it got me fired from my job for as my ex-boss put it, “offending him.” It was no heartbreak, but once again I found myself hungry and scared. Luckily for me, this allowed me to truly think about, “what’s next?”
I HAD to travel. I knew that if I found a new job, I would stay put just where I was and live longer with more regret and always dreaming of eternity. So within a few months of my sudden forced departure from my last place of employment, I had packed up all my belongings in my very efficient Honda Civic and drove across the United States. Luckily for me, there was a good friend with an empty couch waiting for me in Southern California.
In the following seventy-two hours while driving cross-country, I was to see lands and places that I had only seen on postcards posted on the walls behind the counters of many diners in New Jersey.
I experienced torrential downpours and floods as I left New Jersey, blinding snowstorms driving through the Appalachian Mountains near Pittsburgh, great-plains that stretched in every direction for as far as the eye could see, winds gusting through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona that lifted red-sand all around having me imagining that this was what the Mars landscape must look-like. All before reaching my final destination where I could see the Great Pacific Ocean. I had finally found peace and my vision of eternity. I was destined to travel.
About the Author:
Joe A. Melendez eventually lived in Santa Barbara, California for ten months and worked as a Staff Writer for the Santa Barbara News-Press. He decided that news reporting was not his forte and now currently resides in Badajoz, Spain where he survives off scraps of ham and works on his fiction. You can read his blog at Johnny Redbone.
Photo (Top): Shek Graham
Photo (Mid): Chance Gardener
Love your bio! Headed over to your website now.
Julies last blog post..5 Reasons to Shop, Cook, & Eat Fresh
Why is finding your calling so hard? Do the people that find their calling in a basic accounting position find it because they give up, or because it really is their calling?
Chad @ Sentient Moneys last blog post..Be Fearful When Others are Greedy and Greedy When Others are Fearful
Great story Joe, about finally just $^#*ing doing it!!
I love your story! It’s a good reminder to listen to what your mind and body are telling you.
Going to check out your blog next.
Loris last blog post..Things I Like About… Weekend Getaways
“All before reaching my final destination where I could see the Great Pacific Ocean. I had finally found peace and my vision of eternity. I was destined to travel.”
This article couldn’t have ended in a better way.
And I must say I LOVE the pictures.
Erica Johanssons last blog post..New Almodóvar Movie To Boost Lanzarote Tourism
Make me want to hit the open road again. My son and I hit the road to Utah and hit a SCARY thunderstorm out in the middle of nowhere. My gps wasnt working because of the clouds. I felt like a little kid and I didnt want to show fear with my son in the truck with me!