We’re making a run for the coast after yet another diner breakfast. I’m fast running out of indigestion tablets. The American diet can only be described as a slow form of suicide. I know there’s a lot of food based entries in this blog but ask any touring musician: it’s an obsession even for those who don’t particularly watch what they eat when they’re at home. Mealtimes are like markers laid down along an itinerary that is otherwise somewhat foggy. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. These are words that imply roots and a sense of belonging…however fleeting.

We cross the bridge, leave Portland behind and before long the landscape changes from suburban to farmland with horses in paddocks and people who look like they ride tractors to work. 

The Philomath gun shop is a tiny white wooden shack on the side of the highway and has a sign that boasts of 1500 firearms in stock. I thought I was good at fitting stuff on shelves but this is prize winning stuff. I’m almost tempted to feign an interest in guns just to check out their storage system but I’m afraid of being tricked into buying a Colt 45 and finding when I come out of the shop that I now own a small piece of land on the edge of town, 2 horses and a jeep. That’s how they get you… Drive Tim DRIVE!

Further down the road, Newport gets me where Philomath failed: by the time I leave town I’m carrying a small black case. Not a firearm but a 1954 peacetime instrument. A Supro Lapsteel guitar.

The Pacific is so bright in the late afternoon light I can’t look directly at it. We’ve stopped at a Halloween themed ice cream parlour on the pacific strip; one long road with communities dotted along its length. I can’t figure out what people do out here, on the edge. We’re too far away from any large towns for them to commute from elsewhere. They must actually live here, squashed in between the sea and the forest. I ask the girl serving ice cream and she looks surprised at the question.

“Everyone I know lives here.” She says.

Drive Tim drive!

Barton

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October US tour day 10 – Drive Tim Drive « Tous ceux que je connais vivent ici »