Spokane Washington to San Diego in a blue Datsun B210 21 hours (or I remember we surmised - but.... it hardly seems possible). The part I am certain of is that we were on Acid the entire time, half a tab of fairly weak stuff each, when we started and a whole tab of some rather more potent stuff at the 6 hour mark. I was certain the entire time that we would die but our mentality would live on. Last I heard, my driving partner was still boasting about it - 30 years later, and THAT was ten years ago. It was late winter, What I recall most vividly was the grape vines in central CA. I was driving while my partner was explaining that those rows and rows of vines were NOT the tops of the plants but the roots. As I looked around I saw no green, just shades of brown and it came to pass that I was indeed driving upside down under the earth and looking at all the roots of all the plants where somewhere above us on the other side of the soil, plants were green, birds were flying, farmers were tending and we were speeding inevitably, powerfuly on the underside of the soil and earth. there were times when I was just eyes, that there was no car, no body, no windshield, just eyes traveling above a black surface - and I didn't know what kept those eyes between the dashing white lines on the surface to my right and the solid line on my left, when I had a comprehension of left and right at all. Just two pairs of eyes.
It got to the point where I was getting more and more certain that should we stop, our vehicle would simply drop off into the abyss that only vaguely looked like sky. I had bad dreams for days of losing control of the car, of dodging weird mechanisms in the road and speed blur was everywhere on everything all the time even when we were stopped. n one side of Shasta I had a pesistant vision of one of those speed blurs on my outside rear view mirror, it was SO persistant that I finally had to stop - even though we both vowed we would only stop for gas -, and see how it could possibly be that convincing. The blur was real. It was a collection of horizontal icicles that had grown off of the mirror in the freezing wind and rain.
Anyone who remembers the datsun B210 knows that it is not the fastest of cars so we had to make up time because we could never maintain a decent speed up hill. Because we were convinced that we were underground, no cops would even detect us let alone pull us over even at 90. The ecstacy came in waves when we were going very very fast and neither of us could resist the alure of such an enormous pace. Other times, we were indeed sitting still and the world was rushing by us. We were in our living room, we were watching TV (this was long before racing car video games but to this day I reflect upon that trip and how it looked so much like a modern video game that I would not see until decades hence each time I see such a game being played).
In our rush to get started, knowing that we HAD to have tunes, we rounded up a mono cassette tape player that was just a hint slow and three tapes. 12 dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (spirit), The White bird album by "It's a beautiful day", and -- Low spark of high heel boys" - Traffic. The understanding that the music was just a tad slow contributed greatly to our notion of rushing speed and warped our senses even further. For months afterward, when we listened from a normal perspective the music seemed foreign and odd.
At times, the interior of the car was all there was in the universe that was real and that alone may have saved us from the actual horror of the trip, careening across the landscape at times we were loath to look at each other as faces melt and bubble, and our hands pulsed and morphed. there were times when each of us in turn, in the passenger side grasped the totality of this machine we were in, the parts all moving in unison, all cooperating but under tremendous strain and we were sure that this could not possibly continue and the machine, of which we were a part would fly to pieces. Other times we knew that none of the parts were connected to any other and they were all simply going in the same direction at the same rate.
We would become one with individual components - in tune with the scream of the 4 piston engine, cringing at the pain the tires must be feeling, the bearings in the wheels crying for respite or refuge but still we forced ourselves and those tires on.
Oh I am certain one true emergency, a flat tire, black ice, a stalled car in the road that we would never be able to recognize as such before we "mereged with them" and the underlying terror of what we had decided to do would have led to our deaths and perhaps the deaths of others but during those hours - there were no others.
