A Bad Day. A Good Drive.

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I had a bad day yesterday.

No desire to get into the particulars, but I just knew at some point I needed to get out of the house. Out of the recursive loop of bullshit and anger and frustration and negativity in my head. So I did. Got a haircut and a shave. Laughed at stupid banter in the barber shop, as I got my mop of unkempt hair cleaned up by a heavily-tattooed, bearded guy who laughed a lot and reminded me of Teddy Swims.

After that, I still wasn’t ready to go home, so I took a drive. I’ve only been in Raleigh a month as of tomorrow, and I have a very incomplete head map. After spending years in a city like Phoenix, a monstrous smear of suburban sprawl spread over a measured, evenly-spaced gridwork endoskeleton, it’s strange to be back in a place where roads wind and curve and meander aimlessly before dead ending into each other, all of it hidden in trees.

In Phoenix, I knew what “the Southeast corner of Shea and Tatum” meant without even needing to look at a map. I could tell you which stores were there. I never doubted which compass direction I was moving in. It was perfect and beautiful in a way infrastructure rarely is.

So the long and short of it is, I didn’t know where to go. When you’re in a pissy mood and go out for a drive, you don’t want to think about where you’re headed. You want to think about the thing that’s on your mind as the driving unwinds your nerves. So I decided to turn on Uber Eats and pick up some deliveries, which I haven’t done in months. If I was going to drive around aimlessly, I might as well get paid for it. The rhythm came back quickly. Order. Accept. Pickup. Deliver. Order. Accept. Pickup. Deliver. A Target run. An Indian place. A Chinese place. A cupcake bakery. A BBQ joint. The navigation system told me where to go. All I had to do is work the process.

It felt good. The tension began to ease. My thoughts cleared. Productive activity feels purposeful, even if it’s menial. For me, anyway, it also reduces angst.

It was a bit warm and muggy, but as the evening wore on, and the sun began to set, I put the top down on the Jeep and opened the windows. I chose not to listen to anything. Sometimes silence is the best medicine.

The experience of doing deliveries here is different. Things are more spread out. There are fewer apartments and more houses. People seem to be more generous tippers. And the landscape couldn’t be more different than the desert.

Each are beautiful in their own unique way. But I was born and raised in rural Upstate New York and Northern Connecticut. My memory of childhood trips to summer barbecues with family involved evening drives home beside the warm glow of fires under the long, low, grey-weathered wood of tobacco barns. And trees. Lots of trees.

I took the cake delivery for less money than the trip was worth because it took me to the oddly-named Fuquay-Varina, a community on the southern side of the Raleigh metro that is up-and-coming, but still quite rural. A charming old downtown strip with early 20th century brick buildings stuffed with antique shops and breweries and coffee places and bistros. A restaurant patio with live music. Families lining up with their little ones in pristine white gis on the front lawn of a martial arts studio.

I pick up the BBQ order on the way to drop off the cake. The place is called “Daddy D’s BBQ,” and it’s nestled into the end of a large shopping center. I walk inside and am immediately hit by the delicious aroma of smoke and meat and sauce. Now, I’m a bit of a Southwest BBQ supremacist, and the king of all barbecue meats is Texas-style smoked beef brisket, preferably over mesquite. But the Carolina school has its charms, especially when it comes to pork, slow cooked over oak and hickory. And if I’m being honest, this place smelled better than any other barbecue place I’ve gone into anywhere in America.

I only did a handful of deliveries, but roughly half involved people who actually answered the door, instead of giving instructions to just leave the food outside. (99% of Phoenix orders were no-contact.) And they were all nice. One lady, who did want me to leave the food on her porch, proactively contacted me to apologize for her order coming from a restaurant so far away (she thought it was placed at a closer location) and volunteered to increase my tip. I accidentally texted the lady with the cupcakes to tell her how great the BBQ smelled (it was two deliveries on the same trip, and I mixed up the recipients) and she had a great sense of humor about it.

People here are different.

Driving through the countryside in the twilight reminded me so much of home. Everywhere I went, growing up, meant driving through woods, and near old farms, and past homes nestled on acreage. With the Jeep wide open, I could smell the grass, and it carried a sweet fragrance that was different from the more herbaceous aroma I was used to as a kid. Here and there, the smell was punctuated by the tang of onion grass, or the floral scent of some late-blooming flower I never saw, but reminded me of lilacs. The sand-brown stucco of cookie-cutter Southwestern homes was replaced with whitewashed farmhouse chic, the soft ambiance of incandescent outdoor lights creating warm pools of orange and yellow beneath the dark canopy of leaves.