The plan was simple enough: pack up the car and start our seven hour drive from good ol’ Seattle, Wash. to Bend, Ore. to see boygenius perform later that weekend. The crew — affectionately called “the nonbinaryidiots” in our group chat — comprised of myself, three of my best friends, and a borrowed 2003 Subaru Outback.
However, despite how simple the plan was, things are rarely so easy.
Our first obstacle was the inevitable hour and a half of rush hour traffic taking us all the way from the U-District to Tacoma. Even though we were stuck in the gridlock, we didn’t mind all that much. Conversation was flowing, our travel playlist was only on its first loop, and we had a full tank of gas — things certainly could have been worse.
We followed the I-5 all the way down to Kalama where I got to introduce the rest of the car — two former residents of the Bible Belt and someone from La Conner with really no excuse -– to the joy that is McMenamins. As we sat down along the Columbia River and watched the sun set over our food, we were lulled into a sense of false security that would quickly be shattered as the realization dawned that not only had more time passed than anticipated as we ate, but also our waitress (who was almost certainly stoned) was nowhere to be seen with one of our debit cards in her possession.
After we found our waitress (meandering between tables on the far side of the patio), we bundled ourselves into the car, navigated to our first gas station of the night for a refill and some much-needed caffeine, and got back on the road, bolstered by our full stomachs. We hit our stride, navigating through a slowly diminishing amount of fellow drivers and cussing out those who felt the need to tailgate with their LEDs turned up. We sang along to the Ghost Quartet live recording to keep our spirits high as it was now properly dark and we weren’t even close to the halfway point yet.
Our third great obstacle took the form of construction merging three lanes into one and thus commencing the world’s most terribly executed zipper. Dear reader, I’m not exaggerating when I say that I lost faith in humanity watching car after car refuse to let anyone else in as we crawled along in the dark. The only thing keeping me from complete nihilism was my companions as we laughed the whole way through.
Finally, finally, we made it through the zipper from hell and carried on once again into the night. That is, until the bridge.
My hometown(s) (Portland, Ore. and Vancouver, Wash.) really came through to represent as we found ourselves stopped once again by the Interstate Bridge between the two states being up to let a boat pass for what felt like forever. We came to a full standstill and genuinely contemplated giving up and crashing at my parent’s house for the night. However, we were determined to complete what we were now calling our “Odyssey.”
We followed I-5 through Portland towards Salem, having to take a less direct route due to wildfires. At this point in the night, things started getting weird. Conversation turned somber and the intense weight of the sheer amount of our journey that was still left hung heavy over the car. Midnight had come and gone, and as we crept further into the night we left city lights behind for all-consuming darkness and endless sky.
At one point, cosmic horror kicked in as we stopped along the road deep in the Deschutes National Forest to switch drivers. I felt with absolute certainty that if I took another step away from the car along the empty road and the so-full sky, I would never return. I think we can blame the clock ticking past 3 a.m. for that.
From there the horror show continued with one of us making eye contact with something that was very much Not A Deer and the collective car experiencing the sheer vastness of the universe as we were confronted with a militia of traffic cones outside of Tumalo (it is scarier than it sounds and no, I cannot explain it better than that).
We finally stumbled into our destination at four in the morning, 11 hours after we had left Seattle, as changed people. The rest of the trip was thankfully less eventful.
As we stood with our arms wrapped around each other during boygenius’ encore, swaying back and forth, I knew with the same certainty that I had felt during the drive, that these were the friends I would keep choosing again and again to make these journeys with. In the end, I know that they’re always going to make every trip, even the most arduous of them all, not only bearable, but a treasured memory.
I truly am the luckiest person in the world to have shared this odyssey with them.
Reach writer and photographer Chloe Peterson at pacificwave@dailyuw.com. Twitter: @cpphoto_
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