The In-Between
Jaxon McCanlies
“The road goes on, I can’t stay long, I’ve got sights to see.”
-Cleto Cordero
Flatland Cavalry (Traveler’s Song)
Beginning Route
When I was a kid, I would bring my 3DS along on road trips. I would sit in the front seat next to my father, on his scratchy, mossy oak seat covers, the dashboard caked in dust and sunlight. We’d stop at an Allsup’s in Hermeleigh or Post to take a leak, grab a corndog and a Coke. Sometimes we’d talk. Sometimes there wasn’t anything to say. Sometimes we’d take a backroad, stopping at a convenience store in Roby or Rotan or Anson, hopping back in the unwashed truck, a gray Toyota Tundra with camo wheels, the DS in my hands, constantly questioning when was the right moment to open it. Oftentimes I would end up staring out the side window at the world passing by, oftentimes I’d think that once we got to a certain town I’d open the DS up and start playing, and often that town would pass and nothing would change. I arrived at many destinations with a fully charged 3DS, stylus in its slot, the blue and black Nerf case it lived in faded from windshield light and un-use.
In 500 feet, ignore the speed limit radar telling you to slow down
It was that part of sunset right before everything goes dark. That ten minutes or so when the sun is beyond the horizon, its last memories spilling out into the distant sky, crawling into my retinas. If the view from the back passenger window was cut into thirds, the top two were a rich, if not slightly understated blue, while the final third was populated by soft oranges and yellows. The silhouette of wind turbines and hay bales littered the plains that extended for miles, not a hill in sight. The window was dirty, and looking out it at this display caused the countryside to take the affects of an old photo, taken on a polaroid and thumbtacked to a bulletin board in the kitchen, in which someone could point at it and say “that’s the time when my friends and I-” and then continue to tell the story. Noah Kahan was singing on the radio, everyone else had mainly gone silent. Caden and Alyssa sat in front, Trenten beside me in the middle, and Sid alone in the way back. Looking out at the New Mexico sky, retiring for the evening, laying its head to rest as the song ended and people quietly started to joke in the background, excited as to where the trip would take us, excited to be in motion, excited to be away. If you could capture the feeling of leaving somewhere in a bottle, I’m willing to bet the highest bidder would keep it locked up for the gloomiest of days, that sense of unsteady anticipation, of excited unknowingness. Earlier in the drive we passed a field of cows, the sunlight hitting their black fur the same way a spot light hits the lead actor, as they slowly trotted along a fence line. “They’re flying home for the winter”, Trenten said with a smile. I laughed. It was March.
At the light, call your mom and tell her you love her
In the spring of 2023 I got a puppy. Her name is Charlotte, a small border collie, and at the time, among the stupider animals on the planet. Baby Charlotte had the tiniest little snout, big, big paws that I called her “stompers,” and a glossiness in her eyes only found in newborn sea turtles and ventriloquist dummies. My mom and I brought her along on a trip to my Grandma’s and, assumingly getting sick at the elevation change from getting off the caprock, she promptly threw up in the little space between the back passenger side door and the seat. I pulled over in a small dirt patch in between the road and railroad tracks. My mom and I cleaned the chunky, brown mess with several Clorox wipes as Charlotte looked out at the cars passing by on Highway 84.
At the stop sign, notice how the sun peeks ever so slightly through the clouds
Dylan drove up and down the rolling hills of central Texas towards Junction, the powerlines framing an ocean of blue shadows and golden reflections, the radio playing Zach Bryan or Colter Wall or Dylan Gossett, the thick Friday windchill slicing through the almost translucent air. Diego sat next to me in the backseat while Ryan and Dylan quietly discussed the Alamo Bowl and good Mexican food, the angry and obnoxious OU supporters we sat next to the night before, and the picturesque way in which the God rays hit pockets of canyons before us. God’s country was passing us by with seemingly little to no care of how much of it we actually saw, how much we cared to notice as the inconsequential details of hill country quickly became a thing solely relegated to memory. I wonder how much of those little things people actually care to notice, and what people deem worth noticing, which is a funny notion, because I’m sure depending on who you ask, everything is worth noticing. The song changed, and its neon blue lettering illuminated above the AC dials, sort of serving to yank me out of the funk I was settling into. My hearing faded away from the opening chords of a Caamp song and towards the conversation Ryan and Dylan were having in front of me, a conversation about God and belief, Dylan being a religious studies major, I was intrigued about what he had to say. He wove together passages and Scripture into new and appetizing ways that my ears had never heard, or if they had, it had been a very long time. Diego looked up from his manga for a moment in order to deliver his two cents on the matter, his words meaning much more to me than a couple copper pieces, and I looked out to the green interstate signs flying by, transcribing the names of places and the miles not yet traveled to get there. I hadn’t been to church in several years really, but The Good Book states that any two gathered in His name would not be in lack of company, so with this, Dylan merged his church, taking the form of a white GMC Sierra, right across the dashed white line without a turn signal. I got a good feeling out of that conversation- perhaps the best thing you could get out of words on the road, an assuredness that comes and goes like small towns and stanzas. To find beauty in the temporary, or rather, to be grateful for the temporarity of beautiful things, for permanence leads to mundanity. Dylan continued driving as the sky began to grow dark and the flicker of streetlamps harmonized above the blacktop, the fleeting sunset getting quietly shooed behind the velvety curtains of twilight, the Ballinger cross silhouetted against constellations I couldn’t name.
In one mile, recall the smell of gasoline and coffee
Music is the lens through which you see the world passing by, the amount of thought you give to your problems, the heaviness of your foot on the gas pedal. Ryan was on aux, and like any reasonable person, I had the cruise control set to 80 in a 75. He told me about his family's old vacation house on Lake Brownwood, all the memories they had there, how it was only a few minutes walk to the shore, how it would be up for sale in the coming days. I thought about all the houses, and the owners of those houses, that these backroads have seen over the past century, all the families that would come and go. Backroads know nothing of that sort of temporarity, they tend to deal with matters of permanence; Ryan continued on. There’s something to a conversation on the road, maybe seeing the world passing by so quickly makes things feel stagnant somehow. Your treadmill of thoughts mimicking the surrounding blurriness, you don’t even realize that your body is speeding across the earth, you’re too busy sitting down. A Brownwood County squad car passed us on the left, his sirens off, the glimpse I caught of him seemingly indifferent, and all was quiet. Folks get real honest on the road. Many times have I heard the phrase “don’t tell anybody, but…” and many times have I been the one uttering it. Something about proclamation in an in-between state makes it acceptable, to not let the information slip out at any singular destination, to state the truth only in a constant state of transition, to fess up, to spill the beans. That is, until a good song comes on and everyone collectively stops talking. Another cop hides in the tree line. The current song ends and the opening notes of Tyler Childers begin to play, Ryan and I go quiet. “Catholic girl pray for me, you’re my only hope for Heaven.”
In 1,000 feet, admit you have no idea where you’re going
I had prepared a miscellany of songs for our time in Ruidoso, folk tunes and string instruments, sounds that compliment the view from the front windshield. Songs to slither in between pine trees, to climb slowly up into the canopy, songs that pair nicely with a hammock and a book of love poems. Instead of that however, Caden primarily played his music for the drive, blasting early 2000s alternative rock through the speakers of his mom’s 2022 Chrysler Pacifica. I had never associated a small tourist village in the pocket of mountains with the song “Scotty Doesn’t Know” by Lustra, but now the two are inexplicably tied. We began driving out of the village, our cabin cleaned well enough for our standards, as he played the song again. The mountains rolled on and on for what seemed like forever.
In 1.5 miles, turn right down a street you’re all too familiar with
There’s a small town in Lee County where not much happens, a remarkably unremarkable patch of land wherein small town people go about small town lives. Despite being in the big middle of nowhere, the town is sort of in the big middle of everything. Depending on which direction you pick the town can take you to Austin, Houston, or San Antonio in a matter of just about two hours. My cousin once told me a story of some men he graduated high school with in this small town. These were men my cousin knew well, who sat beside him in class everyday for fifteen years, not just faces in the background, not that you could even be a face in the background there. After high school, they would go on to get a job in Austin, waking up at the “ass crack of dawn” each morning to hit 290 for their morning commute. One morning, on the drive they’d done a hundred times before, an 18-wheeler unexpectedly took a turn in front of their vehicle, and they couldn’t stop in time. They impacted with the back half of the semi and were forced underneath the trailer. The truck driver proceeded to merge two lanes to the right in an effort to pull over, dragging the car underneath the trailer, shooting sparks onto morning asphalt. Three of the four men in the car died, the survivor only being so lucky that he happened to be laying down asleep in the backseat. Rumors spread quickly in the small town, being that at least one person knew something, and everybody quickly followed suit as the streets were polluted with whispers and gossip. There was word that one of the men was decapitated during the collision, and despite this rumor, the man was given an open casket funeral. From what my cousin heard, the man’s head was not sitting properly on his body, bruises around his neck, his head completely wrapped in medical tape.
In 7 miles, ignore that funny feeling lingering in your head
I won’t romanticize the kind of darkness outside of the car on this night. No stars twinkling in the distance, no soft winter breeze, just blackness interrupted by speeding headlights. The soft red glow of the dashboard clock was burned into my tired retinas, my contacts making themselves feel ever-present on my eyeballs as I grew more and more exhausted. Jack continued driving through Ballinger, past Sweetwater, and finally onto I-20 heading back towards Lubbock, his red Ford Focus darting across the countryside in the ever-darkening night. Caden was fast asleep in the backseat, in a position that I thought looked uncomfortable, but given our collective tiredness, any position could turn into a fine resting place if left alone for long enough. In a mix of darkness, sleep depravity, and construction, we ended up missing our exit to get back on 84, and not wanting to head towards El Paso, Jack took the next exit to maneuver our way through the sleepy town of Roscoe. We had been driving all day, woke up in San Antonio, detoured through Austin for a fancy, if not underwhelming Italian lunch, and continued through central Texas and up into the panhandle. No more aesthetic hill country, just flats. It was probably around 10 pm as we turned right at a stop sign onto the “main road” of Roscoe. My voice was tired, Jack and I had been singing songs for hundreds of miles, but unlike him, I was no former choir president, even I could hear the tone deafness in my voice. We eventually merged onto 84 as The Lumineers serenaded our pilgrimage, Jack and I argued which song was better, Gun Song or Gale Song, I was partial to Gun Song, and despite my tiredness, the bloodshot in my eyes, the soreness in my throat, I did not fall asleep, nor did I ever get particularly close. The miles dragged along slowly, ensuring that we witnessed every passing telephone pole, every mesquite tree, every bar ditch and deer carcass on the side of the road. There were no more secrets to tell, no more opinions to make known, no more suspicions to entertain. We were only two conscious people in a moving box screaming down the highway on a night as technically unimportant as any other, with useless details and trivial stories, but chock-full of humanity, what really matters. To remain in spite of everything, to let your song be heard and to speak your voice into the darkness. A moving lighthouse in a sea of dead prairie grasses and empty cotton fields, stuck in a box with those around you, or the lack thereof. Like staring at a painting that updates before your eyes as you tell a story, true or false, biased or unbiased, and the intermittent silences that take place when the radio deems you have been talking for too long. I remember that night Caden awoke briefly at some point between Inadale and Snyder, I looked back and said something to him, I don’t remember what, he responded groggily, looked out the window for a moment, and quietly fell back asleep.
For the next 86 miles, touch your passenger’s hand to ensure they are still there
I was driving somewhere in Wichita Falls, where exactly I’m not sure, but what I am sure of was that the details of the countryside worked a little harder to be noticed on this night, as if they were trying to emphasize a memory in the making, silently shouting to pay attention, you’ll be revisiting this place frequently. The sunset settled into the Texoma sky in a soft way, a way in which you could tell that the air beyond the window was cold and still, the yellow shine of our central star masked beyond a layer of light blue winter, and on this December evening, I caught myself driving significantly below the speed limit, maybe in an effort to make the current moment last longer, because for whatever reason, moving slowly is slower than not moving at all. A car behind me honks and I speed back up from my crawling 15 miles per hour and show a friendly wave as a meaningless apology. My other hand is sitting clasped in another, resting in the lap of someone sitting criss-cross in the passenger seat, her bright red socks nearly glowing against the indifferent gray cloth they rested upon. The purple shadows of abandoned buildings and pumpjacks elongated across an overgrown grassland of primarily yellow shrubbery, the sky began to close her quiet eyes as stars began to burn ever so slightly in her iris, I turned the heater up just a little bit. The sky, now as black as blue could be, accompanied the air ducts that had a slight fuzz to their sound, looking to my right, I could barely make out the figure of my companion, her hand still laced with mine, having remained there for so long that a slight repertoire of sweat began to form and transfer from fingertip to fingertip. She explained that the song we listened to now, in between the soft cracks of the transmitter radio, had a lyric that she misheard for the majority of her listening to it. The song, "Holes” by Wyatt Flores, included the line “I watched concrete turn into grass,” but she had heard it as “I watched concrete turn into glass.” I smiled and pondered the meaning of the simple change and, after a moment, decided that I liked her version of the song better, some kind of white, hot magic that had the power to turn stone into something transparent, something you could see yourself in, something fragile, something new. The song ended and she sat there with an effortless kind of demeanor that you could just stop and stare at, and I did, and she looked back at me, the red light illuminating the strands of hair in front of her eyes, seemingly always seeing just what I wanted them to see, quickly turned a shade of green, and she smiled, and I paused for a second, lost to time in the seeming genuineness of her expression, before slowly proceeding past the light. Don’t tell anybody, but I still hear her version when I listen to that song.
Proceed to the route
My cop brother once told me a story of a drunk driver who crashed the car with his kid in the back seat. He responded to the call and when he arrived at the scene the man was on the road outside of the car, largely uninjured. My brother said he held the child together until the ambulance arrived, implying the boy would fall apart if someone wasn’t there to keep him in one piece. He told me that story largely in passing, he had a certain look in his eyes, he didn’t bring it up again.
Proceed to the route
The time my father ran over a prairie dog on Tahoka Highway and it crunched under the back tires. How its blood splattered callously onto the median, the windows telescopes for the passing landscape. How I once wrote a letter that read: “Dear, Texas Highway System, Thou art a heartless bitch,” and how my friends no longer let me drive on road trips. The time I fell asleep in between Post and Snyder and woke up with all four wheels off road. I was going 75 miles per hour. I was listening to “Body Like a Back Road” by Sam Hunt. When asked why the front of my car was covered in grass and sticks, I lied and said I hit a tumbleweed. The time Jack was driving us around Austin with a deep rooted hunch turned fear that we were irreparably, hopelessly lost. How Rhett and Matt and Justin and I joked and hollered and gave wrong instructions in a concrete sea of skyscrapers and gridlock traffic. How Jack screamed and freaked out and turned the radio off, how my sides were splitting from laughter, and my legs felt like TV static from sitting for so long. The time a Hozier song paired perhaps too nicely with a speed twenty miles per hour faster than anything you’d see on a dirty white sign. How I gave a generous $360 donation to Clyde, Texas after a polite, mustached sheriff pulled me over into the dirt and pebbled parking lot of an abandoned rest stop. How Charlotte looked at him inquisitively as he handed me a pamphlet with instructions on how to not get arrested for bailing on a speeding ticket, and how intimate the relationship between the gas pedal and the tarmac felt for the rest of the drive. How the ever-spinning tires kiss the hot, burning asphalt, how cracked knuckles seem to rest so perfectly on the morning’s cold steering wheel, how distant clouds cast rippling shadows on the dash, and how every single view from the window is its own location, lost in an instant to time and the rearview mirror, but existing regardless. How life exists, how life is maybe even preferred to be experienced, in between permanences.
Proceed to the route
My buddy Trenten totaled his sleek, silver Dodge Charger back in 2023. He went over a hill on Loop 289 to find someone going precisely zero miles per hour, to which Trenten gritted his teeth, put all of his weight into his right foot, and still couldn’t convince the car to stop in time. After what I’m sure was a fun storm of insurance and liability, to which he never told me about, or if he did I didn't listen, he got his replacement vehicle: a white 1997 Dodge Dakota. The truck was not only in great shape for its age, but also had all of those old-timey truck features, including hand-crank windows and a virtually unusable backseat, not to mention the truck was a standard, which Trenten had no experience with. These factors combined with our larger friend group ended in Trenten driving six of us back from Insomnia Cookies across town to his apartment, four of us in the cold and windy truck bed. Trenten didn’t exactly have the silky touch of a seasoned standard transmission driver, so we jolted forwards, backwards, and sideways as we accelerated up the fly-over on Marsha Sharp Freeway. Late at night, the city lights alive and breathing, the cold wind dancing through the dead ends of my dirty blonde-red hair, the blackened sky filled with dust particles and light pollution. I held on tight to the frame of the truck bed, my faith in Trenten only slightly outweighing my fear of an unsteady car ride a couple hundred up feet in the air, but as I looked out west towards Wolforth, the jolts of the car painted the light. A quantum entanglement of missed shifts and astigmatism. I gripped the frame of the truck bed tighter.
Rerouting…