I fumbled with my phone at a red light, awkwardly trying to slide the brick around so I could enter the URL with one hand while my other was still on the steering wheel. I managed to pull up Dust to Dust: the NTS guide to Ambient Americana just in time for the light to turn green. It was a sleepy Sunday morning, and I had managed to peel myself out of bed at a slightly inadvisable hour after a late night out. I couldn’t quite see my breath in the air still, but the memory of it was enough to feel the call of the comforter. It’s not natural for Southern California to provide the kind of chill that gets under your jacket and lingers long after you’ve found refuge. I imagined everyone bundled up at home, the city peacefully waiting to come alive again.

I reached down and took a sip of 7-11 coffee with too much cream in it, the perfect beverage to pair with plastic-wrapped facsimiles of pastries. I was in high school when I truly discovered the joy of early-morning junk food at highway speeds. In those days, I was desperate to get up and get out to the paintball field as early as possible. I didn’t want to miss a minute: running games until we couldn’t go anymore, and then hanging around afterwards, delirious and careless.

Over the years, I’ve become an afficianado of the highway breakfast: a greasy breakfast burrito and a limon pepino gatorade as PCH glides by, a coffee with enough grounds that you have to chew just a bit from the back of a crowded rental car as the rain clouds cleared to reveal morning near Woodstock, a can of Monster Energy and Camel Turkish Silvers with the shadowy, hulking masses of Jumbo Rocks providing cover. The road is a place of exception, a place of transition – what you do there doesn’t matter: you’ve left who you were behind, and who you will be is still miles ahead.

The mountains were starting to emerge at the edge of the highway, and the languid guitars were sounding more and more poignant. 

I had been reminded of the radio show the night before while watching Train Dreams. I wasn’t sure what I thought of the movie, but I knew that I wanted to be somewhere that beautiful. As I drove, I thought of the central character. He seemed so unmoored, but not like the protagonists I often returned to. He didn’t really seem to struggle against the search for his place in the world. Everything kept changing around him, showing him how small he was in comparison to nature, to history, and he just… kept going forward. I couldn’t tell if that made him enlightened or just flat. I envisioned the film cut to just those beautiful landscapes matched to these wandering guitars.

I was climbing the Angeles Crest Highway now. Traffic had accumulated on the narrow curves that traced the mountain. Had the music stopped, or was it just the ambient? No… my phone signal cut out. I followed the twists and turns up and up and up. Water from the recent rains was flowing across the asphalt in sections. I thought about how the water’s path was dictated by the mountain. It was an arrangement that preceded our paving, and yet it was the water that looked out of place on the road.

I pulled into a turn-off and shut the car down to consider my next move. The traffic was sparse enough that it formed an intriguing rhythm against the silence of the forest. I pulled out a camera and shot some of the interesting-looking cars as they drove by, trying to frame them against the landscape. I never figured out what my next move was going to be, but eventually I had to move, so I just started driving back.

On my way home, I stopped at Roma Market and got The Sandwich. I stopped my car outside of a nearby park in the shade and unwrapped the minimalist lunch. Families were gathering for youth sports and birthday parties. I thought of a walk I took with my parents in some small college town on the East Coast when I was touring schools. It was approaching dusk, and a baseball game was underway. We walked the perimeter of the park slowly, enjoying the crisp spring air that was blowing through the trees.