My Non-Honda Odyssey

The odds on a good night’s sleep weren’t great, as the alarm was set for five, it was already 10, and I don’t sleep well under pressure. I don’t do anything well under pressure, which I think is one of the many reasons I love watching sports, as sometimes you see athletes not only not crumple under soul-crushing pressure, but reach previously unexplored heights of greatness. I will never not find that dazzling. Okay, enough double negatives.

But I slept remarkably well, a good thing given the day splayed out before me: a 693-mile, four-stop (two airports) drive from Tybee Island, Georgia back home to Silver Spring, Maryland. I’d driven down nine days earlier so I could bring our folding kayaks while my wife, who still works and has grown-up responsibilities, flew there and back. (This is interesting, right?) Apparently, this caused moderate consternation in our friend group, with me garnering utterly undeserved praise for shouldering the immense burden of piloting our belongings down I-95 for a few states while my demonstrably better half jetted to Savannah, in their minds perhaps reclined in a Gulfstream G700 sipping Syrah and laughing at the charming co-pilot’s jokes for an hour.

I’m generally not the biggest fan of great stretches of time by myself, especially while hurtling across not-nearly-wide-enough ribbons of pavement in a computerized landship at speeds that most certainly should not be legal much less endorsed by the state. On the flip side I had music, podcasts, the promise of increasingly weird billboards the farther I burrowed into the coastal-adjacent abdomen of the American South, and my most critical asset, the fact that I am easily entertained. (For the full case on that score, see Let Me Entertain Me, https://jonathankronstadt.substack.com/p/let-me-entertain-me)

The moral of this story—which I know is supposed to go at the end but that’s a dumb rule and ignoring dumb rules, especially those lacking any enforcement mechanism, is kind of a hobby—is you just never know. In this case, the principal focus of the trip—the kayaks—never got unfolded, much less wet, because the weather quite literally blew. And yet we had a great time.

Tybee is a swampy triangle bounded by two rivers and the Atlantic Ocean, with internal tidal creeks, a great walking beach, and goo gobs of egrets, herons, and other terrific birds as well as occasional otters and nearly daily dolphins. We’d been once before and taken a guided kayak tour but no one would rent us any in February so this time we brought our own. But it never got close to warm or calm enough to turn either of us pro-paddle. So instead we walked a bunch, me stalking wacky waterfowl like this roseate spoonbill

ate expertly fried and other foods, had some friends blow through for a couple nights on their way somewhere, which was sweet because Tybee isn’t on the way to anywhere, reconnected with someone from an almost past life at the Savannah farmer’s market, where I met and hung with these jokers for a while.

Their kids went to pre-school together in Cleveland, and now they’re snowbirds and spend Saturday mornings dispensing “wisdom” to passersby. Both freely admitted to making shit up on occasion when the talk turns to one of the many topics they known little or nothing about, and neither seemed interested in taking themselves the least bit seriously. Also, I learned in the 20 minutes I spent in the guest chair that I too have opinions I am not shy about sharing with strangers.

I also have a seemingly endless fascination with the bigger birds that live on and near water around here. The snowy egrets cluster like Xmas tree ornaments in the late afternoon in live oak trees hung with Spanish moss, or stand knee(?)-deep on one leg along with their great and little blue heron buddies, all united in their maniacal obsession with eating the little fish that live, often not for long, in the pond. Across the small road is Horseshoe Creek, which rises over six feet from low to high tide, and in which I have seen dolphins, otters, and little green herons. Across the creek is an osprey nest with two adults and likely some eggs given how attentive they were to the space, and pelicans and cormorants are kind of everywhere.

I treat these sightings as treasured daily scorecards, reporting back what I saw, where I saw it, and if it was doing anything at all unusual. I like to think the animals do the same, sitting around in the trees at night talking about all the different humans they saw in their travels, like round-bellied rednecks, bald beet-faced beachwalkers, New England snowbirds and the always elusive tight-fisted Canadian beer guzzler.

So even had I not had excellent visits with favorite folks on each leg of the journey it would’ve been a great trip even for one as fortunate as I, but I think we both know by this point in the sentence that I in fact did. On the way down I stopped for about 42 hours to inhabit the world of a beloved cousin and her three-generation mash-up of wonderful family weirdness. I had my first-ever one-on-one meal with her husband of more than 40 years—fried chicken eggs benedict, piled on proof that if I lived in the south I would most assuredly be dead—and then we went to price generators, another first that wasn’t on my bucket list but maybe should have been. The highlight there came when the absolutely-no-older-than-30 salesperson started a sentence with “For guys our age…” but could subsequently not be heard over the laughter of two 69-year-olds. I got to watch my own worry gene at work in someone else as my cousin fretted over whether the sauce for the slow cooker chicken was too thin, and since I hardly ever do science projects anymore that was kind of fun. And I got to talk, sing, and sneeze like a duck for her grandkids, and the list of things that are more fun than that has always been short and is shrinking.

On the way back, I had a three-hour visit with a friend with whom I’ve had an almost exclusively one-way correspondence the past three years while he’s been crazy busy in school, so he knew all about my life and I knew almost nothing about his, which is a problematic conversational construct over a meal, because I was done with my bounteous trio grilled chicken salad before he’d even touched his three-item Mediterranean sampler. Eventually we achieved conversational balance, but only after we’d left the restaurant and walked in the rain for a while.

Back into the Prius Prime went I—couldn’t cope with the range anxiety such a long drive in our EV would involve, and yes, I realize how high up the ladder of first-world problems that is—and off to Dulles Airport to scoop up yet another friend/student flopping for a night with us and a return airport run the next morning, which I also performed because I apparently have an until-now-totally-below-the-surface completion fetish.

It goes sadly without saying that lots of shitty things are having moments of late, but some good ones are too, like whimsy, community organizing, pickles, and for my purposes at this moment, gratitude. I was grateful at every turn and for almost everything on this trip, from a reliably comfortable and comfortably reliable 10-year-old car to some pretty decent highway rest stops. I did stop at a Buc-ee’s somewhere just to see what all the fuss was about, but be forewarned, Buc-ee’s is not a place for one seeking only to empty a bladder and refill it with coffee. Buc-ee’s is more for when you need a multi-hour break from your fellow travelers that involves such sensory overload that you’ll welcome their annoying antics for however long the rest of the trip is.

As always, I was most grateful for the dizzying array of two- and four-legged critters that populated both the journey and the destination. Mother Nature rarely disappoints, but as one of my more imaginative friends put it, her cousin Mr. Wind can be weird and a little aggressive and if everyone is being honest no one really wants him around. So next time we bring the kayaks and check the wind forecast.