"You want to hear a long story?" I asked.
"Sure."
"When I was fresh out of college--this was the Bicentennial, the summer of 1976--a friend and I decided to drive around the country until our money ran out. A typical On the Road fantasy. This trip turned into a marathon conversation. We drove, and we played our cassette tapes, and we talked. Being that we were guys in our early twenties, we talked mostly about women. A theme developed for me before we even got off the East Coast. There were a couple of women in my life, and I realized that I was associating each of the women with a different vision of my future. One was save, expected, almost a retreat. The other was dangerous, risky, a leap of faith. And as the trip progressed, and we played our tapes over and over, each of those women, and each of those attitudes toward life, came to have a theme song in mind. The safe retreat was Dylan, 'Shelter from the Storm.' The wild, dangerous one was one of those desperate Springsteen songs from Born to Run, 'She's the One."
To great songs," Joel said.
"Damn straight. And they both had a real hold on me. Both the women and both the songs. And my friend and I talked this stuff inside out and upside down. Talked about it the way it can only be talked about when you're twenty-two, unemployed, and driving down an empty highway an hour before dawn toward a place you've never been before.
"Anyway, as you can imagine, this discussion went on ad nauseum as we headed out west and spaces got wider and emptier. We visited some people we knew n Phoenix, and then we headed toward LA, which had always been our intended destination. On the way, we were going to stop and hike into the Grand Canyon. But it was already afternoon, and we decided to stop instead in a campground an hour to the south, spend the night, then get to the Canyon early the next morning.
"The campground was just a flat plain nestled at the foot of some hills. There were a few trees around but it was fairly wide open. A dirt path headed in from the road for maybe half a mile, with three loops of primitive campsites coming of it--no water or electricity, just a bare dirt spot for a tent, a picnic table, and a fire ring. There was nobody there. We were completely alone.
"We drove past the first two camping areas and took the furthest spot on the last circle, set up camp, made a fire, and decided to hike up one of the hills. It was late afternoon by this time, and as we climbed higher, it got darker. We started talking about The Dilemma again, and it was really starting to drive me crazy. 'Which Woman?' quickly became 'which life?' and the more we talked, the more crucial it seemed to figure out which was the 'right' decision. Everything seemed to reflect the basic choice. Was taking the bold course, doing the unexpected, courageous, or just foolish? Would it lead to glory of doom? Was doing the safe thing solid and reasonable, or cowardly, the first step into a life of tedium and regret?
"And it began to reflect in more immediate decisions. Should we go on to LA as we'd planned? Or turn around and plunge into Mexico, which to us was terra incognita? Should we head back to Florida and look for jobs, as we'd always assumed we would? Or just stay out West, settle down in Phoenix, and start completely fresh--no money, no contacts, nothing but untapped potential?
"You get the idea. This was it the clear turning point. The indecision, the complete inability to see what was the truth and what was the delusion, was agony to me.
"We walked and talked for hours, and by the time we got back to the campsite it was full night. I was exhausted. My brain literally ached. We were standing there, poking the fire with sticks, and my friend said. 'Maybe we should just get back in the car right now and head for Mexico.'
"The idea really appealed to me. It was bold, impulsive, adventurous. But then I started thinking how tired I was, how we'd probably end up pulling off the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and sleeping in the car, feeling stupid that we’d left this nice empty campground and given up seeing the Grand Canyon.
"My head was going to explode. I screamed, 'Wait a minute! That's the same decision as all the rest.' Suddenly I could see how I'd been chasing my tail for hours, if not weeks. 'I'm not doing this anymore,' I said. 'I'm just going to wait for a sign.'
"Instantly the ache in my head vanished. I felt a bottomless silence wash over me, and we stood there in the dark, listening to the hiss of the fire.
"Absolutely no more than sixty seconds later, we heard the faraway sound of a car engine moving through the night. It faded, then got louder. Then we saw the sweep of headlights through the trees. The headlights would disappear and then appear again as the road rose and dipped. Finally, we could see that it was a van, coming down the dirt path Remember, the campground was utterly deserted. But the van passed by the first circle, then second, then it turned in to ours and came around all the way to the end, stopping at the very next site."
"Joel jumped in his seat and slapped the dashboard. 'Oh, shit,' he said. 'This better not be the Springsteen song.'
"The side door of the van slid open," I went on, "and the sound slapped us, the wailing voice, the grinding guitars, the pounding key board. Springsteen. 'She's the One.'
"Oh, shit!" Joel said again.
"It played through the first three-quarters of the song, then it got to the point where he sings, 'And you try just one more time to break on through. . .' then it just stopped, with that little electronic rep, like someone punched the off button. The lights went out, the door slammed shut, and it was just us again. Perfect silence. We never heard another sound. Not voices. Not rustling. Nothing."
Joel laughed.
"My friend and I just looked at each other. Then I said, 'It's funny--you ask for a sign and you get one. A big, garish, blinking neon sign. And you still don't know what it means.'
"My friend said, 'Isn't it obvious?'
"And I know what he meant. It was obvious what he meant: The 'sign' was telling me to take the bold path, go for the dangerous woman, throw caution to the wind. And if someone had just described the scene to me, I would have thought the same thing. But standing there, in the middle of it, I never even considered that. It was instantly there, in the middle of it, I never even considered that. It was instantly clear to me that this inexpressibly absurd coincidence was in no way a practical guide to which set of specific decisions I should make. It was too weird for that, at once too immense and too trivial. I had the intense certainty that the universe was laughing at me, at my self-involvement, and the oddest thing happened: The anxiety I felt simply vanished.
"Even though I immediately sensed that the 'sign' wasn't what it seemed, it was years before I came to see it the way I still do. For some reason, I was given this gift, this weird, irrefutable demonstration that there is a more to the world than its surface. That whatever we're all about, whatever the universe is, it is far more than just some empty, mechanical, material machine. There is some. . . force out there, something beyond knowing, that we can nonetheless--on some level--feel, and see and interact with. My petty life, and all my personal concerns, in some way connected up with something so big, so far beyond myself, that it could choreograph a little performance like that tailored perfectly to what was going on in the mind of one confused kid.
“I mean, really. An empty campground in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And these two kids standing there, discussing everything in terms of two songs over a period of weeks, and within sixty seconds of saying, 'I'm going to wait for a sign,' a van shows up, plays that one song, nothing more, then shuts up? I would have thought it was some kind of hallucination, except my friend was right there--I have a witness! And the next morning at dawn, we were finally just getting to sleep when we hear the van door open, the tape player crank up, the last bar of the song blare out, then the door slams shut, and the van roars down the road."
