Road Trip Summer
by
Berry Michel
I was 19 years old and the summer before I joined the Army was one of the best summers of my life. I was young, free, and poor, but for the first time I felt alive and comfortable with myself. I was a bit of a late bloomer when it came to girls and dating. But I had finally found someone. She was my first real girlfriend and who I lost my virginity to. I guess I was rather innocent back then. Little did I know things would spiral out of control from there.
Although my experiences with my first girlfriend were short in the big scheme of things, it was a healthy relationship, and healthy relationships are not exactly what my adult life have been composed of. I often wonder what happened to that innocent 19-year-old kid. The world took hold of me, and I lost something along the way, or maybe that innocent 19-year-old kid was never me and once I had the means to be different, I was. I often grapple with the question as I assume a lot of us do. Do we make our environment or does our environment make us? I assume that the answer is somewhere in the middle and each of us would answer it differently.
However, for me after all I have been through, I would like to think that I was innocent at one point and that 19-year-old summer was the last time I felt it. I spent that summer with my friends, all people I had known my entire life. I had already made the decision to join the Army, so I was just waiting for my ship out date. Until then I worked odd jobs to earn money and just kicked it with my friends. I had this old Ford Grenada that my dad had found for like $800. It was a crappy car, but it was transportation. It had this terrible exhaust problem where the fumes from the engine would come back into the passenger compartment. Even though we would always smell like gas by the time we got anywhere, we did not let that hold us back. We would oftentimes have to pull over to the side of the road and get out of the vehicle to get some fresh air before passing out from carbon monoxide poison. The fumes we were breathing could not have been healthy, but we all managed to survive it.
We took that Ford Grenada on so many road trips that summer. Those road trips were what I was most fond of. On this one road trip, we just got in the car one Saturday afternoon and just started driving. I don’t think our group had really thought out where we were going, but it did not really matter. That’s what made it so great. We did not have attachments or dependencies at the time. We could just go. It would be the last summer I could feel that way. Life has a way of putting burdens on you that you are not aware of when you are young. The world seems endless, unrestricted, and full of possibilities at that age.
That one road trip on a Saturday in August when I was 19 was the first time, I had ever left the borders of my home state of Virginia. I never traveled as a child, I had barely been out of my area of Hampton Roads, Virginia, let alone the state. I fondly remember seeing a sign that read “Welcome to Maryland.” It stood out to me because growing up, I always felt that I was in a box, a very small box. However, on this day I had crossed state lines and I was finally outside that box. As fun as that trip was with my boys wondering Interstate 95, smoking Swisher Sweets, and drinking malt liquor, the most memorable moment was that feeling of breaking away from those chains that held me in that little box.
I never lived my life in a box again after that road trip. I would soon leave Virginia and see the world with my time in the Army. I know I’m not the only one that had to escape boxes that other people put them in. It is all too common for us to live the way other people want or expect than feeling comfortable enough to step outside the box that you did not create. If I did not learn anything else on that road trip summer, I did learn this one thing. Do not let anyone or anything put you in a box you do not want to be in. The first step is knowing that you are in the box to begin with and once you are awake, create your own box or don’t live in one at all.
The Reinvention of Cake 