I left Mississippi with my grin intact. By the time I crossed into Alabama, my edges were fraying. I’d logged 1,500 miles since my last real rest in Santa Fe, continuously battling the wind.
I managed to dodge the rain until the last five minutes when I turned left into the Hampton Inn on the edge of town, where I fell easily into sleep after dinner. By morning, I thought I’d found my balance again. I hadn’t. Fatigue lingers in disguise.
Down in the guest lounge, the buffet attendant was overfunctioning in his attempts to connect with the bleary-eyed guests. He couldn’t read the room, and I found myself both annoyed and sorry for him. It wasn’t just his lack of confidence—it was something else. Like the volume of his friendliness was turned up too high to hear what anyone else was saying, or in my case, thinking.
My family—salespeople—prized extroversion, same as American culture. Quick with a story, wired for rapport. Sure, I inherited the family charm, and I can turn it on in the right company—as I did with the nuclear engineer in Santa Fe—but it’s not my fuel. What refuels me is quieter: a good sentence, a long ride, a day where I don’t have to answer to anyone.
I’ve gotten pretty savvy navigating this strain of social terrain: I started my hot tea at the table I’d chosen but didn’t sit down—that’s a trap.
So is eye contact—interpreted as willingness to listen to the attendant’s story about his daughter finishing nursing school (which is exactly what happened to the feckless guest who gave off open vibes). As soon as he locked in on his mark, I made my break for the reconstituted eggs and bacon.
Look, I know that feeling—the reach, the trying too hard—but I didn’t have the kindness or the time to spare that morning. Back in my room, the silence felt heavy after all that forced cheer. That’s when JJ called.
My brother doesn’t sleep much, so I wasn’t surprised to get a call at seven o’clock his time. His tone was soft, but I could feel something loading behind it. This wasn’t just a check-in.
“Well, I have to tell you what happened last night,” he said.
JJ was waiting for Mom and Dad to come over for a family dinner, but they didn’t arrive. He kept trying to hail Dad on his phone, then Mom, to no avail. He can usually find them using Apple’s tracker, so he figured out they were at Lowe’s. An errand. (She loves squeezing in an errand). But this one took much too long. What was going on? Finally, Mom called from home to say they weren’t coming. She said she‘d just needed something for the patio garden—just a quick in-and-out at Lowe’s while Dad waited in the car. But she took his phone by mistake, disappeared into the store, lost track of time, and never found what she’d come shopping for.
“She left him sitting there with no way to reach her,” he hissed. “Dad didn’t know what to do—just waited, hoping she hadn’t gotten lost or fallen or…”. JJ trailed off. “She finally came back.”
That’s when his voice cracked. “Tam, she was scared. She said, ‘I don’t recognize myself sometimes.’”
I don’t recognize myself sometimes.
The words landed with the weight of both truth and prophecy—what she feared now, what I’d feared for years. I didn’t know what to say to that, and for a moment the whine of emotional static scrambled my thoughts. It was a dagger in my heart, clean and quiet.
In my predictable avoidance pattern, I mounted up, trusting the road to work its old magic—or at least to nudge something brighter to the surface.
But the thoughts clung, hovering around me like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts. By the time I rolled into Scottsboro, Alabama, early that afternoon, they were still swirling. I was running on fumes and looking for lunch, a second wind, and maybe a little mercy under the overcast sky with its (blessedly) light breezes.
I’d long wanted to visit Unclaimed Baggage—the country’s only thrift store that sells the contents of lost airline luggage—but I didn’t have it in me. Not that day.
I passed the corridor of chain restaurants along State Highway 79 looking for local fare--there had to be some near downtown, since Scottsboro is Jackson County’s seat, and every county courthouse I’ve ever seen has a local diner within walking distance. Where else are lawyers supposed to argue over pie before they argue in court?
Three blocks later, I nearly blew through a stop sign. A big red one. Clear as day. And somehow, I didn’t see it until the last second. That’s how it starts—the slow fade between alert and autopilot. You run the same systems for too long, start cutting corners without realizing it. You tell yourself you’re fine, you’ve done this before, you’ve got muscle memory.
But fatigue’s a shape-shifter. It slips in sideways and settles behind your eyes. Maybe that’s how Mom experiences it too.
I stopped, barely. Pulled into a parking space just beyond the sign, hit the kill switch, and just sat there, staring at the faded white perimeters of my safe spot. By some unknown grace, the driver crossing my path had seen me coming and didn’t try to gun it. I once lost a friend to that very scenario.
That’s when it hit me: the road high was gone. Not a giddy high—just that steady hum of purpose and forward motion that had carried me west, then north, then south again. What remained was the long slide down the other side: the final push east, and the re-entry zone waiting for me.
In time, I forgave myself. Shook out my hands and shoulders. Coasted the few blocks into downtown, where I found what I’d been looking for: a proper local joint with an old-school Coca-Cola mural blazing across the side of a brick building.
Payne’s Sandwich Shop and Soda Fountain didn’t dabble in branding—it mainlined it. The interior was a Coke-themed shrine: every square inch decked out in red-and-white kitsch from the farthest reaches of the company’s marketing imagination.
I have a soft spot for anyone willing to triple-down on what matters in life—even if what matters is carbonated nostalgia and a bottle opener screwed into the counter. Places like Payne’s don’t just sell lunch and a heroic array of ice cream flavors. They sell a feeling—one bite of Americana at a time. Have a Coke and a smile. Tell yourself the myth still holds.
And just for grins—why is it that Pepsi can’t hold a candle to Coke when it comes to cornering the American spirit? It apparently wins all the blind taste tests, but people still prefer Coke.
My fling with chile rellenos was behind me now, and I ordered a proper Reuben—corned beef, not the pastrami pretender or, God forbid, turkey. Why restaurants think they can get away with calling something with turkey a Reuben is beyond me. That’s false advertising. Do I make myself clear?
The guys to my right were business associates whose conversation had dipped into the personal. The younger one was shaky about his relationship, and the elder had thoughts. My writerly instincts usually compel me to tune in—I’m a sucker for an unexpected turn of phrase or a glimpse of vulnerability at the edge of a meal—but there was nothing here worth tuning into. The hum of my own thoughts was louder anyway.
I’d had enough secondhand doubt for one day—plenty of my own to sort. I paid the bill, stepped back into the heat, and swung a leg over the bike. Time to ride.
The land began to rise—an ascent that echoed the shift happening inside me. The lowland stretch of my journey, both literal and emotional, was giving way to something else: elevation. I’m not sure if the rising road lifted my spirits or just gave them permission to rise—but it felt like alignment, either way.
Any rider knows that shift in elevation—not just in the road, but in the body. You get the chance to lean. A quick series of twisties here becomes switchbacks at higher elevation, then a mountain valley where Black Angus raise their heads to follow the sound of your engine. Somewhere between the ridgelines and the filtered light, the mountains were mine again.
The climb is always my favorite part. Second or third gear, right in the power band, where even a slight roll of the throttle changes everything. No shifting needed—just that sweet, responsive zone where engine and intention move as one.
When I hit the angles just right, the ride becomes a sentence—each curve a clause feeding the next. The exit of one flows clean into the entry of another. No corrections. No overthinking. Just lean, throttle, trust. The engine growls low and steady. The scent of the mountains drifts in and out. Nothing exists beyond the next turn—and that’s the point.
When the curves finally straightened, the world returned in slow motion: traffic lights, shopfronts, the smell of barbecue smoke. Just ahead of the golden hour—which comes a little earlier in the shadow-casting mountains—I pulled into the temporary parking space at the Hampton Inn in Blue Ridge, Georgia, and there it was: just five feet in front of me, a gleaming passenger railcar bearing the warbonnet of the old Santa Fe Super Chief. The emblem belonged out west, not here in the Southern Appalachians. And yet, it fit.
It wasn’t entirely out of place. My hotel sat beside a historic rail corridor known as the Hook & Eye Line—famous for sharp curves and switchbacks that once moved timber, tourists, and textiles through the Appalachians. These days, it’s a scenic rail route using vintage cars like this transplanted Super Chief. The hotel leaned into the theme with historic maps in the lobby and a rooftop bar named after the line.
I took a photo without thinking—instinctively. Not because it was rare (though it was), but because it reminded me of Dad. Stagecoach had been different since I set out a month earlier. Brighter. Lighter. Maybe it was just the novelty of riding shotgun with Buckskin from afar. But I think it was more than that.
Dad isn’t a train guy. Not in the memorabilia sense. The Super Chief emblem reminded me of him because the railroad was part of the story he came from. After high school, his dad and uncles got him in at the Barstow yard doing undercarriage work. Not his calling, exactly, but it came with union possibilities and the kind of physical work he’d been raised to respect. Dad didn’t have much in the way of guidance growing up. His own father—my grandfather—wasn’t much of a model, but a man named Charlie Fontaine filled part of that space. Mid-fifties, lean and muscled, Charlie was what people called a health nut. He believed in clean living, vitamin C, and the medicinal properties of fruits and vegetables.
Dad has a way of telling a story that makes it unfold like a scene from a film. He becomes the other guy—jutting his chin like Grandpa—with just enough exaggeration to be funny, never cruel. He never mocks. But he has a comic’s eye for detail, the physicality of someone who’s watched the world closely and remembered how men moved—how they grumbled or swaggered or dragged cigarette smoke down to their toenails.
That’s his gift—the kind that doesn’t seek a stage but finds one anyway. He doesn’t perform so much as channel, as if the stories passed through him on their way to somewhere else. Suddenly I wasn’t just hearing about a guy named Charlie—I was in the break room with him, watching grease-stained hands slice an orange like it held the meaning of life.The light doesn’t shine on Dad because he asked for it. It beams because he knows how to hold it without breaking the spell.
Dad still tells the story of how Charlie took him to one of those proto health food stores, where everything cost three times as much as it should. Dad spent a week’s wages on two bags of groceries because Charlie said pure food was “pure fuel.”
One of the items was beans. Charlie gave careful instructions: soak them overnight, pour off the water, rinse, then cook with salt, pepper, and onions for a couple of hours until tender.
But Mom, ever resourceful—and unwilling to waste a single drop of anything she’d paid so dearly for—used the soaking water to cook the beans. She figured there had to be nutrients in it. But the beans came out tasting like regret. Even a toothbrush couldn’t remove the grit.
That was them in a nutshell: Dad, the starry-eyed believer. Mom, the one left to salvage the plan. Every time he brings up the railroad—“Back when I was working under railcars”—Mom chimes in, deadpan: “That’s where all the body parts fell out.” She means it literally. When someone was hit by a train, the remains got caught up in the undercarriage and axles, then dropped into the inspection pit where the mechanics worked. The gore was real, but Dad never talks about that part. What he remembers is Charlie Fontaine.
Dad didn’t stay in the yard. Said he wanted to be in business, so he got a job in collections for Pacific Finance—apparently repossessing muscle cars felt more promising than working his way up to union shop boss. But when he talks about finding his way in the world, it’s Charlie who comes up—the blue-collar philosopher, the strongman with a jar of vitamin C in his lunch box. Not because he preached anything, but because he was his own man. In a shop full of hangovers and hard luck, Charlie had clarity—a quality Dad still admires and sometimes borrows when he tells those stories.
Later that evening, I texted him the photo of the warbonnet and it didn’t take five minutes for the phone to ring. “Hey, where’d you find that beauty?” A beauty it was, a western echo in Appalachian pines.
He was proud of me for taking this trip—this solo trip. Said he and Mom had been praying for my safety every day. Our nightly check-ins gave him something to look forward to. He was excited about their own trip back east and had already scheduled the minivan for service. Said he wanted me to help plan their route and overnights once I got home.
But I could tell there was a restlessness under the surface. Retirement suits him—and it doesn’t. He’s not bored, exactly, but he’s never been a man with a five-year plan beyond what work and family required. Mom has always set their pace. He grumbles about her endless to-do lists, but he doesn’t have a competing one of his own. Her drive pulled him along for decades. And now, it’s love that keeps him moving, even when he’d rather coast.
My trip was something different. A jolt of forward motion, minus the weight of responsibility. I was giving him a vicarious thrill—an undemanding spark he could tap into from a distance. He could still feel the thrill of motion in my joy. That’s the kind of man he is—soft-footed, generous with his attention, and quick with a laugh. The light finds him, even when he’s not asking for it.
Mom used to say—half joke, half truth—that we all loved him best. “I did all the work,” she’d mutter, “and he got all the love.” It was said with a wink, but sometimes it had teeth. She carried the weight of all she’d done—unseen, unpraised—and Dad, with his natural buoyancy, always seemed to float above it.
She wasn’t wrong about the workload. But Dad has always had a way of making things lighter. He still does.
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