Love and First Sight(59)

And there are white and blue and gray clouds of all different sizes. Unlike the stars, I find the clouds fascinating. I watch them for a full hour, during which time I see one cloud that looks like the bicycle my dad gave me the other day. Of course I know that there cannot be actual bicycles floating in the sky, and actually I have a pretty fuzzy memory about what the bike looked like, but my eyes and brain insist that yes, that’s what I’m seeing. A sky bike made of clouds. It makes me laugh. My friends ask what I’m laughing about, but when I tell them, they don’t find it as funny as I do.

After crossing the state line, we stop at the Colorado welcome center for a bathroom break. Nick, Whitford, and I sit on a bench inside the lobby while Ion calls her parents, who are apparently flipping out.

“Hey, Whitford,” says Nick, “see that desk that says TOURIST INFORMATION?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll give you a dollar if you walk over to the old lady sitting there and ask, ‘Can you tell me about some of the tourists who visited here last year?’”

Whitford cracks up, and so do I.

“All the people visiting here today are, uhhhh…” I struggle to find the most appropriate word.

“Fat?” says Nick.

“Sad?” says Whitford.

“I was going to say white. Like, Caucasian. Am I seeing that correctly? I haven’t noticed a single African American here.”

“No, you’re right,” says Nick. “Not many of Whitford’s kind in this part of the country.”

“Kansas is five percent black,” says Whitford. “We came to Toano because PU was looking for nonwhite professors like my parents to increase its diversity. Otherwise, you can bet we’d get our black asses out of here.”

“Technically, we’re not in Kansas anymore,” says Nick. “But Colorado has similar demographics.”

“Interesting,” I say.

“But, hey, that’s rest stops for you. Some of the only places in America you can see a cross section of society,” says Nick.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“All the other places you go—where you live, what stores you shop at and restaurants you eat at, whether you go to public or private school—these decisions are basically determined by your family’s income and socioeconomic status. But interstate rest stops are the great equalizer. From time to time we all have to drive places, and, while doing so, from time to time we all have an urgent need to take a dump.”

“Going number two: the number one common denominator of America,” says Whitford.

“Jeez, I step away for one second,” says Ion, walking over to us, “and the conversation has already devolved into pooping?”

“Had you heard the context of our conversation,” says Nick, “you would know that we were in fact analyzing important socioeconomic and racial demographic issues.”

Ion snorts, unimpressed.

“How’d it go with your parents?” asks Whitford.

“Eh, okay,” she says. “I think I held them off for now. They still think I’m at Kelly’s house. They’ll probably kill me when they find out. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we drive!”

“You may take our lives,” Nick intones loudly in a Scottish accent, “but you’ll never take our freedom!”

We stand from the bench and cheer wildly.

“Is everyone looking at us now?” I ask out of the side of my mouth.

“Yeeeeeep,” whispers Whitford. “Let’s get out of here.”

We return to I-70. I point out that I can feel us making turns as we drive, something I had not noticed in Kansas.

“Interstates in Kansas are straight and flat as far as the eye can see,” says Whitford. “Colorado is more curvy.”

“Kind of like your mom! Oooooooh!” says Nick. His gag, however, results in no audible fist pounds or laughs. “Nothing? Jeez. Tough crowd. Anyway, it’s true. Driving across the state of Kansas is like running on a giant treadmill for eight hours.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever seen what a treadmill looks like,” I say.

“Sorry, bad metaphor. The point is it’s really monotonous.”

I also notice a line at exactly eye level where the green of the ground and the blue of the sky intersect. This, I assume, is the horizon. But the farther we move into Colorado, the less straight this line of the horizon is.

“What’s wrong with the sky?” I ask Nick.

“What do you mean?”

“There,” I say, pointing my finger. “That’s the horizon, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It used to be a straight line. Now the sky is all bumpy.”

“Those are mountains. Welcome to the Rockies.”

“As in, the Rocky Mountains? But they’re tiny! I thought the Rockies were supposed to be, like, huge.”

“Don’t worry. They’ll get bigger.”

It reminds me of what Cecily taught me about perspective. I guess the mountains will grow as we get closer.

Eventually I see another interruption to the horizon. But unlike the uneven bumps of the distant mountains, this is a series of parallel lines, long rectangles cut out from the blue sky. Nick tells me it is the skyscrapers of downtown Denver. My first city skyline.