Svitek Family,
I have enclosed a brief story about the trip Kate and I took
out west.
Please understand how difficult it was to write, I still
don’t feel like it is finished. The words seem so far
away from describing how I really feel.
I am with you always.
Love,
Tim Messinger
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I was so excited to drive cross-country with Kate. Everything
seemed open when getting ready for a trip with her. We knew
where we were going to end up, and could get there anyway
we wanted.
That spring before our trip we were having contests on who
could wake up earliest, and do the most before everyone else
got up. More often than not Kate would beat me and have bagels
for the whole house and a story about what she had done by
seven o’clock in the morning. It was that excitement
of life, to want to do everything as soon as possible that
I adopted and admired, and it is what kept both of us going
on the same mentality throughout our voyage.
Kate and I always had somewhere to go, things to do, something
to talk about. We balanced each other out, when we were together
it seemed like we both focused more on what we really wanted,
nothing else got in the way. Our friendship was strong at
the beginning of the trip and was even stronger when we came
back to the East Coast.
The trip out to Boulder was great. As we left Pennsylvania
the landscape changed dramatically, and so did the people.
We felt exclusive; privileged in the fact that we were smart
and quick, the people we encountered were quite the opposite
at times. We were on a mission, glowing with enthusiasm. We
stopped for dinner in Lawrence, Kansas, on a warm summer night
during our trip. We had a great time checking out the town
that seemed to resemble both Burlington’s Church Street
and Boulder’s Pearl Street. In the dry, dusty air right
outside of Kansas City, we both felt like we were in a parallel
world, similar to what we were used to in Vermont and where
we were going in Boulder. The difference was in the people,
the friendly waitress, the talkative bartender, the collage
of Midwestern students. It was an exciting night, the connection
between us had never been stronger as we took in the new people
and setting, far from home and far from our destination.
A day later we celebrated our arrival hiking around the flat
irons of Boulder and checking out the town. I left with my
brother about a week later to drive out to California. Kate
stayed at my brother’s house for a couple days, getting
ready to go on her trip in the Kate way of scattering everything
she owned and going through it randomly picking articles to
take and ones to leave behind.
A couple of weeks later I picked up Kate when she was done
with her trip in Golden, Colorado right next to the Jolly
Rancher factory. We were so excited to see each other, I had
really missed her. For the next couple of days we laughed
about the stories of our respective trips, planning for the
next trip back to the east.
On the drive back we were different people, enriched from
our experiences. The drive back was filled understanding of
ourselves and how our country was on the interior, and the
desire to see the people we had missed, eased by the fact
that we had each other’s company.
…The mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to
talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time. The ones who never say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like
spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue
centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Kate will always be a part of my life.
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