The Journey Part 1

copyright 2009 by Randal Schaffer

One day, he just left.

To this day if you ask him why he left, he probably couldn't tell you.

He just did.

It seemed like the right thing to do.

He withdrew all of the money that he had from the bank, something like $5000 and some change. What some would call his "life savings". Pretty miserable life, really, if that's the savings.

Maybe he did it to save his life.

Suicide was something that was never far from his mind, usually. And not in that "cry for attention:" way that so many people like his ex-wife used it. To her, "I'm going to kill myself" was a statement used to get her way. He hated that. To him, being a basically logical person, it seemed more like a shortcut to an inevitable destination. We're all going there, we all get there, what difference does it really make how or when you do it?

But that day... instead of killing himself... he tossed his clothes into a suitcase, tossed the suitcase into the car and just... left.

He headed out of Seattle on I-90 East. Not that there was anything drawing him East, really. It just seemed like a trip West would end very quickly at the Pacific Ocean, and he didn't want that.

He had a moment to wonder if anyone at the plant would miss him, and if they did, when it would happen. Tomorrow? The next day?

He listened to the radio for a while, old rock and roll from when he was a kid, but turned it off pretty quickly. It was difficult to keep a radio station tuned in moving cross-country as he was.

He didn't realize that he had dropped his cell phone in his pocket until it started to ring around Ellensburg. He pulled his car to the side of the road and looked at the display. It was his ex-wife. Probably, he thought, calling to threaten to kill herself over one thing or another. He couldn't cope with it. He pulled as far as he safely could off the road, put on his emergency flashers and turned the ignition off. He walked about a hundred yards into the scrub grass, and then threw his cell phone as hard as he could. He watched it arc through the air, creating a moment of beauty in the cloudy Washington sunlight before disappearing over a low hill. Probably, he thought, the two most useful things that one of those damned things has ever done.

When he got back into his car and pulled back into the sparse traffic, he felt like two large lead fishing weights had been removed from his balls. In his happiness at feeling liberated, he turned the radio back on, fiddled with the tuning until he found some oldies station belting out "Back In Black" by AC/DC, sang along for a while, and then turned the radio off again.

The end of his first day found him in Kellogg, Idaho. He had never been to Kellogg, had BARELY ever been in Idaho, so it seemed as good a place as any to start.

He got a burger and fries and a Coke at the drive through at some dive fast-food place, and ate in the car while he looked for a cheap place to crash.