by Jamison Nicolazzo

I. The Diner

The diner, situated somewhere along Highway 50 in Nevada, was dark inside, at least that’s how I remember it. I was studying a coffee cup, the same design and possibly the same make I remember from my grandmother’s house, thirty years and nearly three thousand miles away.

The waitress asked again if I’d like anything else.
“No, thank you.”

She was tall and very pale, even for a redhead.
“Well, if you pass through again, stop in. Okay?”
“I will,” I told her. “Absolutely.”

It was an odd thing to say — especially in a diner off a 400-mile stretch of road so desolate, my road atlas had labeled it The Loneliest Highway in America.

We’d had a nice enough chat. Names exchanged. I was from Massachusetts, but now I live in New Mexico. She was from Idaho and had been here for a few years. When I asked what brought her, she looked away and winced.
“Oh… you know…..”

I had no idea what that meant. Only that there was a story she didn’t want to tell and that she was lonelier than this highway had ever been.

II. The Dream

In third grade, I used to stare at wall maps and trace routes across the country with my finger. I didn’t have any illusions about driving. Instead, I dreamed of building a raft and floating west to Montana, Huck Finn style, on rivers like the Snake and the Missouri. And a few I couldn’t pronounce. 

I attended school near the Charles River. The plan was to sneak into the woods and prepare materials for the raft at each recess. When it was ready, I would shove off. The mission was thwarted on day one when someone saw the rusty saw from the garage in my school bag and told my teacher, who confiscated the saw along with all my dreams. 

It was about thirty years later, while reflecting on this, that I learned that the Charles River petered out about twenty miles from my hometown. 

I miss that dumbass kid sometimes. 

III. Leaving Massachusetts (and the Pennsylvania Pit Stop)

I left later than planned. The truck had very little in it: some clothes and a mattress under the cap.. A road atlas had pages dog-eared, and my CDs were spread along the passenger seat. Massachusetts disappeared in the rearview, and for a moment, it felt like both an escape and the beginning of something.

But somewhere in Connecticut, the feeling changed. A low rising anxiousness. Not homesickness, exactly, something closer to dread.

I’d made it as far as western Pennsylvania before the car started smoking. Not the cinematic kind of smoke either — the desperate kind that makes you wonder if your life is unraveling in front of strangers.

I pulled off into a rest area and put my head on the steering wheel for a moment, feeling ashamed. It wasn’t because of the truck or that I hadn’t made it off the eastern seaboard, but because there was a possibility that there was something wrong with the vehicle, and that I might have to go back. And I felt relief.  

Suddenly, a group of people seemed to materialize in front of the truck. 

One of them tapped the glass and said, “Pop the hood.”

I did. The man was fiddling with something before I got out of the cab to join them. 

“Yup, that’s it,” another guy was saying. 

He walked to his own truck while I made some small talk with the group that had descended on my vehicle like a pit stop crew in an Indy 500. He returned promptly with a wire.  

“Your rubber hose for the coolant system got loose and is touching a metal hard line.” 

He used the wire to tie the rubber hose to something.

“You’re good to go.” 

I thanked him and everyone who had gathered there, but I felt a little ungrateful.

“Where you headed?” a woman asked. 

“I don’t really know,” I answered.  

IV The Detour 

I eased into the drive with some good music that friends had given me. Green turned into brown. The canopy comfort of the trees in New England was gone, and something was alluring about the open space. Most of it existed behind A&W restaurants. Turns out A&W wasn’t just a root beer. Chain eateries that were family places by day and havens for tweakers at night, and Billboards selling Jesus or Fireworks. 

Somewhere in New Mexico, I realized I had to get off the interstates. I would make my way to Colorado and then start heading west again. 

The road unspooled like a thread through the high desert, everything sun-bleached and low to the ground — dry brush, rusted fences, signs that rattled in the wind. Then, almost imperceptibly, the land began to rise. The flat, vast landscape folded in on itself, hills swelling into ridgelines. Red turned to ochre, ochre to pine. The sky grew larger and felt closer.

And the air changed — not just dry, but slow and aware, like it had time to settle on you and stay. It would be a while before I saw Colorado. 

The people were like that in a small town in New Mexico.  I met them by chance at first. A campfire, a parking lot, a spare room, a bar stool, or a coffee shop.  They were warm in a way I hadn’t prepared for. Open-hearted, not in performance but in presence. I had the strange, almost disorienting experience of being welcomed with no conditions. And I did my best to meet that warmth with my own. I laughed easily. I showed up as best as I could. 

But something in me held back from stillness. I could embrace the people, the moment, the geography, even, but not the gravity of it. Not then. Some animal part of me was still scanning the horizon.

People often asked what my astrological sign was. I had no idea. I’m a Scorpio, it turned out. 

I told new friends I was leaving tomorrow, then again the next day. I’d stick around for a gathering with a bonfire and go after that. Then the snow came, and it didn’t seem so urgent.

But I left that town five times—four of them for good. I never really knew why. Maybe it felt like the home I wasn’t ready for. Perhaps I still needed to prove I could outrun something, even if I couldn’t name what. There was always a belief that I may be meant for somewhere else. 

Or maybe I just didn’t yet believe I was allowed to stay.

V. Scattered

Colorado, Oregon, Vermont. New Mexico, North Carolina, and places both in between and far off. Many people I met in coffee shops were taking road trips. Some were just wandering, like I was, though it often felt like I was traveling straight lines in no logical order. There was a commonality that made for great conversations on barstools. I would be part of a group of people I had met that would camp together, eat together, and share stories, much like a family reunion of strangers. Then we would disperse, and it was usually me who was first to go.  

People scattered across the country. Friends, I meant to call again.
Lovers, I promised I’d write—some I did. Most I didn’t.

Each goodbye carried a slight ache, even the short ones. Cities blurred together, but specific names stayed lodged in my chest like something unfinished. That kind of loneliness is hard to explain — not the kind where you’re alone, but the kind that comes from having been close to something, and now you’re not.

One Sunday in Whothefuckknows, Indiana, I pulled into a closed gas station and ended up playing poker for quarters with a group of locals in the garage. They teased my long brown hair and beard, and joked that they didn’t feel guilty for skipping church that day because Jesus had shown up.  I countered by telling them I was going to take “all of you hillbillies’ quarters” and that they would have to make moonshine out of the Twinkies they were selling. I. I got whooped and still needed gas. But I stayed until dark and laughed the whole time.

On a dreamy evening in Flagstaff, Arizona, an Egyptian girl from France asked me to take a walk with her. We were talking about Versailles when we came to a field with long green grass.
“You don’t want to talk about Versailles anymore, do you?” She gently took my arms in her soft hands.
She was right. I didn’t.

Encounters that felt cosmic in meaning would end inevitably with me on a lonely road, sometimes belting out song lyrics and drumming on the steering wheel, but also smoking cigarettes to sad bastard music. 

Drifting into sleep on the mattress in the back of my truck, I would often think about the spot by the river near the mountain where I lay, and then look up, seeing the mountain range and the country’s topography, and finally the earth. I’d wonder about how it came to be that I was in this spot at this time. And then there were nights I would think about that Chris Farley “In a van down by the river” bit and ask myself what the hell I was doing. 

VI. The Bewitchin’ Pool

When I was a kid, I stayed up late one night and saw a rerun of The Twilight Zone — the final episode, The Bewitchin’ Pool. In it, two unhappy children dive into their backyard pool and surface on the other side, a pond in a magical place, a place where kids laugh, play, and feel safe.

Once they can hear their parents calling them in an echo near the pond. The jump in and return to the pool. Their maid knew of this phenomenon and told them it is not always possible to return there.

That episode haunted me. Still does.

I hadn’t thought of it in years. But somewhere out there, between Idaho and Utah, maybe,  it came back. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like a message from a younger version of myself. Like a question.

It’s now available on Amazon Prime.
I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it.

VII. Ghosts

Behind the glass in a diner in Kansas, I’m eating a burger. Watching, or maybe waiting for something to move. Storefronts had been covered with plywood, and weeds reached upward from cracks in the pavement. The roof on a house was caving. A water tower stood proud. It’s blue paint against a bleached sky. At first, to my eye, it looked like it loomed over the town like its domain. But maybe it just belonged to something bigger, like it remembered when this place had dreams. 

The waitress slapped the check on the table, and I dug for my wallet. A man appeared from the corner of the glass, crossing the street away from the diner. He stumbled in opposing diagonal lines, jabbing a fist from each hand downward as he stomped off. A pack of dogs appeared, stopping and watching him curiously. His knees bent a little too far every time a boot hit the pavement. I could see his mouth moving, though I couldn’t hear a sound from behind the window.

That evening, I was in an old mining town in southeast Colorado, where the plains give way to foothills. The wind kicked up and occasionally slingshot a cold rain drop at me when I went for a walk. The roads were empty. People were inside. Television light emanated from the windows of Victorian-style homes. I remember a time when I judged a scene like this, perhaps when I was nineteen, back in Massachusetts. People working jobs I assumed were boring, eating dinner, and sitting down to their prime-time shows. Rinse and repeat. I had no Idea what was going on in those houses. But I felt envy. I romanticized their steadiness and the lives they led. A sense of belonging, or just having a place to be. I didn’t know anything. But maybe I wanted to be a part of that world. Perhaps there was some kind of balance.

Or, I may need to go to the San Juans, a couple of hundred miles west. I remember feeling like I hadn’t spent enough time there. 

VIII. The Other Side of the Pool

The road did what roads often do. It brought me back.

And now I’m here.

My youngest daughter is four, asleep on my shoulder. My oldest daughter is eight. From the top bunk, she asks big questions.
“How did people get to Earth?” 

“Was there a first one?”

“Where did the first seed come from, and where did it grow?

She knows I won’t let her stay up to watch a movie. But I’ll always answer questions.  She always saves some for bedtime, and I try to answer them as best as I can  I hope she always asks questions. I hope she never wonders if she’s running from something. I hope that the world she grows up in becomes a little kinder. 

She is quiet for a minute or two, and I know she is asleep now. My youngest moves closer and holds her arm tighter across my neck. 

My mortgage is looming. There is more than a day’s work lined up for tomorrow, and the nightly question: Should I make their lunches now or in the morning? 

For the first time in a long time, I think about that Twilight Zone episode. Only this time it makes me smile. I kiss my daughter’s forehead.

I’m on the other side of the pool