Making (a) good time

"How long will you be on the road?"

When I mention Lover's Lanes to people I get this question a lot. And I mean it's a fair question. A month-long trip is subjectively different from a three-months-long trip, or something even longer. It's just that I have no idea how to answer it.

I mean, I estimate I'll need to cover twelve thousand miles if I want to hit all the cities on my dream route. I expect to stay on interstates most of the time, and be speeding for some of that time, so if I'm lucky I'll average 70 mph. In an average day of driving I'll probably drive two hours, take a break, collect a story, then drive another two hours. At that rate it'd take about 43 days of driving to complete my route. If I spend about as many days off the road as on, spending the time collecting stories instead of driving, that's 86 days total, about three months. So that's what I've been telling people. About three months.

But that's conditioned on about a thousand assumptions. What if it turns out that four hours of driving is too much for one person (other than a professional trucker) to do in one day, every other day, for three months? Or what if because of the way towns fall, four hours of driving is an unrealistic average? The run from San Antonio to El Paso, for example, is a very dry zone in every sense of the word; it might be wise to try to drive six hours a day there. While in southern New England you can plop down in a random spot, collect stories, drive half an hour, and be in a completely different town with completely different stories. Or maybe I'll get to Seattle and discover that gosh darn it I like it in Seattle and I want to stay here for a week. So Lover's Lanes is something that can only be "scheduled" in a similar sense to how American business is "regulated;" there will be oversight, but there will be oversights, and the latter will tend to overwhelm the former. In the end, if this is worth doing, it's worth doing with a spontaneous spirit. I just hope I don't lose my chance to stay with friends because I can't give them exact dates of arrival and departure!

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime

When John Donne wrote that line he was trying to convince the sun to quit shining through his window so he could stay in bed with his lover a little longer. That guy was a class act. His love poetry is among the best in the English language, and I hope he's watching this project with amusement from his tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral.

Love may know no season. People do, though, and I need to figure out when to set off on my odyssey. Summer is best for me; I tutor high school students for a living, so July and August contribute butt to my bottom line. But is that the best time to collect love stories? I'm guessing that one of the two kinds of people most likely to sit down with me and talk love are college students, who'll be harder to find in the summer. On the other hand, most colleges have summer programs, don't they? Maybe I'm making this a bigger deal than it is. But then back on the first hand, with half the country on vacation are the roads going to be crowded, making driving a chore?...

You can see I'm in a worried frame of mind. Been thinking a lot about that wild card I mentioned yesterday, the one about finding willing interview subjects. If I build it, will they come? I've been consulting with my friends about it. No one is sure. Fortunately, a good friend -- whose name I'll withhold because she's likely to also be a subject -- has offered to spend a couple days with me before I set out in earnest teaching me how to approach people.

What this drives home is that this journey is not just about compiling love stories or writing a book; it's also about self-discovery. Even if I come back without understanding a lick more about love than I do now, I'll have met a lot of people and learned how to talk to strangers. I'll still be an introvert, but you can't spend ten thousand miles asking people for their love stories and not come out of it feeling closer to the center of the human heart. To return to Donne, I'll be less of an island entire unto myself. And that alone would be enough.