Arkansas Recap: Of time travel and cross-country drives

For some reason, Luke asked me to write the recap for the Arkansas game because he said he “probably wouldn’t be able to watch it.” I’m not sure what this means given that he’s a time traveler who today could easily spin up his light drive and pop into Egan’s yesterday (can you move through space-time, Luke, or just time?), at least to catch the fourth quarter, which, as far as denouement goes, served its purpose but was almost entirely predictable. There were no alternate timelines in play here.

I have a feeling that being a time traveler would make you pretty lazy. (Time Traveling Teenager whining to his dad when told to mow the lawn now: “I’ll do it today tomorrow.”) So I don’t blame Luke. But given how predictable this game was, I think you could have written the recap from the past. “Huh … Alabama showed early dominance on both sides of the ball, but poor red zone offense kept it close, and Kiffin decided to keep it closer with cuteness, before Arkansas also got cute and Alabama decided just to put the game away? I never would have guessed.”

Since the game was as immutable as the past (Luke notwithstanding), I will try to liven things up by injecting stories about my travels to Arkansas. My closest friend in college was (still is) from Fayetteville. His name also is Luke, strangely. I’m pretty certain this isn’t time travel chicanery, but I can’t be sure. Here goes … (italics are my game notes as the predetermined opera was unfolding) …

First drive for each team … word that comes to mind is methodical. Flurry of punches by Alabama ends with a field goal.

Every time I’ve arrived in Fayetteville to see my friend Luke it’s been by car, even though each time I’ve been traveling from another part of the country. The first was when I was still living in Chicago after college, managing a coffee shop for Sodexo on Northwestern’s campus and feeling like kind of a loser (not even a cool, indie film with Tom Waits playing in the background as I wander ironically through a post-globalization urban hulk of rust in no-name landlocked America loser; just a loser). During the year since we finished college, he had been living in Rome. Now he was back home, and I hadn’t seen him since the day after we graduated. So since I didn’t have much going on, I drove across the lower Midwest in my gray Civic (which some years later would be totaled by Rob’s neighbor on New Years Day while parked on the street during the Auburn-Northwestern bowl game). It was sunny, and I saw St. Louis for the first time.

Derrick Henry. Derrick Henry. Derrick Henry. Go on. Derrick Henry. Yep.

I remember one thing vividly about Missouri and that’s that speed limits seemed not only optional, but a suggestion that drivers found irksome enough that they went out of their way to do the opposite. The Interstate west from St. Louis was crowded but we were all going about 90. Then we crested a hill and for some reason there was a backup in traffic. About 30 cars barreled in all directions off the pavement into the grass on either side. Somehow, nobody hit anyone else. A minivan spun in a circle but didn’t flip. We opened our car doors and stood up out of our cars and looked at one another befuddled. Then we got back on the road and drove 90 again.

Arkansas looks like they understand the game being played is football. Comprehension. They are zero standard deviations of football.

This was before Luke’s parents build the big new house out in the country that was the setting for later trips to Fayetteville. I can kind of picture their old house and neighborhood, but there isn’t much to say about it. We went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner and were asked to pay cash, and Luke explained the informal economy of Southern states to me, because at that point I’d never been to one as an adult.

We are fiddling around. Three points out of two drives inside the 10.

We went and walked around the campus and the stadium. There were bricks with graduates’ names all along the walkways. I felt like if you had your name on one of those bricks, you probably didn’t get to choose where it went, and then you would be stuck with a coincidental attachment to some part of campus that you probably didn’t care about at all. We met one of Luke’s high school friends at a bar downtown on the square. I could tell Luke had a tense relationship with this guy. Anyway, he was conflicted, because he was going back to Rome again for another year, and Italy and Fayetteville are not the same, so he was probably feeling a fair amount of dislocation. I think he was trying to start dating this girl named Carrie he had known in high school.

Stifling defense but our offense is keeping them in it. Ark D is gasping, then Coker throws a pick over the middle off the back foot.

The next day we went spelunking in a system of caves under the Ozarks about 20 minutes south of town. I didn’t have much experience with mountains to date, either, and the old Ozarks, threadbare and rolling, impressed me. We went with his brother Gareth, who was about 15 at the time, and we didn’t have any kind of formal route or intention. They had been in these caves lots of times, they said. I hadn’t been in a cave before. It wasn’t much fun, because “cave” to me implied a large, hollow space you could walk around in and look at cool rock formations, and what we were actually doing was wedging our body down narrow cracks of space with gaps of darkness above and below us to indefinite distances, often without enough room to stand or stretch out. There were others in there we could hear once in a while. Inevitably, our flashlight stopped working.

Did I write these notes before the game started?

Gareth insisted he knew the way out, and Luke more or less believed him. It’s the kind of thing a 15-year-old knows. We went up for a while and then down. Eventually we saw a slip of daylight and came to a spot where the floor dropped away and there was a long stretch of deep mud just below a ceiling of rock, with maybe a foot of air between. We went down into the mud on hands and knees and crawled to the opening. Coming out into a clearing there was not an inch of us below our chins clean of thick gray muck. So we hiked past stunned new arrivals down to the river and floated in that for a while until we were unmucked enough to get in the car.

After 20 minutes of football, Arkansas has gotten 2 yards of offense per minute.

The next time I drove to Fayetteville was from Tuscaloosa. Luke was marrying Carrie, who was actually from Springdale not Fayetteville (this seemed like actually a thing, somehow). It was my first year in Tuscaloosa and I was still struggling with dislocation of my own. I had a class late in the day on a Thursday and so drove to Fayetteville overnight that night, through Mississippi and Memphis, across the clouded river under flickering halogen bridge light into Arkansas from a new direction, arriving in town just after light with a belly full of truck stop food. I wanted to check into the hotel and sleep, but the wedding party was ready to go out for the day and we had to try on tuxes.

Now comes the stretch where we inexplicably stop pounding it with Henry even though that was clearly making an impact. This could be a 17–0 game at this point.

Luke’s parents had built their dream house in the country. His dad was an architect and it was an impressive place. The rehearsal dinner was there, with tables laid out around and through and into and out of the great room. I remember the rooms of this house much more clearly than anything that took place in it. The treacly light of the candles in the centerpieces and the conversation of guests evenly distributed from room to room.

25 minutes in, Ark has not crossed midfield on offense.

The wedding happened. The ceremony was at a small church in town, the kind of modest congregation that keeps an American flag and an Arkansas one on the dais near the pulpit. The reception in the church’s multipurpose room emphasized the modest unworldliness in comparison with Luke’s parents’ new home. Even with a chocolate fondue fountain, dinner there was to the rehearsal dinner the night before as Fayetteville is to Rome.

Coker has decided to make this interesting. Terrible pass over the middle that sails and gets tipped up by Mullaney. Two INTS. Clearly going to be one of those games where we shoot ourselves in the foot so many times that it becomes a toss-up against an inferior team. 3–7 Ark.

I did not see Luke again for a few years. He and Carrie moved to Dallas. He went to seminary, and they had a son.

Kiffin outcoaches himself again on a key third quarter series. Ark gets it at midfield.

The next time I went to Fayetteville was by accident. I was in my fellowship year at Alabama and had more or less run out of ideas to improve the novel I’d been writing for two years. My friend Bryan was giving a reading in Colorado where he was earning an MFA, and then his little sister was getting married back in Minneapolis. So I conceived a plan to take two weeks to drive cross-country in a triangle in order to figure out what to write next.

Ark QB’s backup is his little brother? Is this a Friday Night Lights spinoff? Brandon and Austin Allen.

Dallas was more or less on the way to Colorado from Alabama, so I took I-20 west through Mississippi and Louisiana and got to Dallas, another city I’d never been to, around mid-afternoon. I saw Luke’s apartment and we drove around his part of town, talked about the money in Dallas, and had just finished dinner with Carrie and their toddler when Luke’s mom called and said somebody was in the hospital (an uncle maybe?).

Here be Raglands.

We agreed that I would drive Luke to Fayetteville that same night so he could see whoever was sick, and then continue on to Colorado. We left Dallas at dusk and drove north and talked about the novel I’d been writing. Parts of it were papered-over autobiography about my skepticism toward the faith I’d been raised with, and as he was in seminary this was pretty good conversational fodder for a drive, although awkward because we had first become friends as Christian recluses who didn’t fit in with Northwestern’s hipster humanities majors (“Have you heard the new Wilco album? Disappointing.”) or with its networking strivers (“Are you interning in New York or DC this summer?”) or with the regular religious types. He had spent most of his years at Northwestern as a piano performance major rehearsing in the music building, a strange four stories of stone at the southwest corner of campus that was covered in bird shit and felt a discord of melodies ushering out of the open windows even in January. And I was a journalism student who didn’t want to go into journalism and didn’t have anything in common with any of the other journalism students, not one thing. We took literature classes to avoid trouble. Now, in the car driving through Oklahoma in the dark, we realized our shared outsider status had branched off in different directions.

Kiffin makes his intellectual point. Ridley = Amari Cooper Jr. … 10–7.

The flat tire came at about 10 or 11 p.m., somewhere in the vague space between Oklahoma and Arkansas. I had no idea what my options were with the Civic. We opened the trunk and pulled my suitcase out and were glad to find a spare and a small jack.

Achieving separation. Coker = Robert Downey Jr.? … 17–7.

After 45 minutes of trying to get the spare on, kneeling on the gravel shoulder of the state highway while semis sucked air and noise past us, we limped onward to the first gas station with a garage, which, despite it being a Sunday night, was somehow open and replacing blown out tires for the semis that had come in ahead of us.

EDDIE!!!!!!

We got to Fayetteville at 4 or 5 in the morning, arriving from a new direction yet again, and Luke went off to the hospital while I slept at the country dream house. I woke up close to midday in a room with a surplus of sunlight and pink and lime green blankets and quilts. I was very hungry.

Jeremy Sprinkle is the least football name there is. Which means it is the most football name there is … ?

Luke had come back from the hospital. I don’t remember the eventual outcome for the sick relative, just that at that time it was up in the air. We went to a Waffle House at the edge of town, a chain I had acquired a taste for during my years in Alabama. A booth in a Waffle House is the only appropriate place to be following a late-night tale worth telling. It is the place to begin practicing the telling of it. I had much more driving in front of me, including two hours in Kansas where the interstate pointed me right at the setting sun that nearly blinded me as it emblazoned the nothing-but-wheat all around me with more red sun and left me dazzled as I crossed into Colorado. Eventually I wrote more papered-over autobiography about that in a second failed novel. In the Waffle House, Luke ate a breakfast sandwich of egg and American cheese on Texas Toast. I had eggs and hash browns and coffee. Nothing seemed more wide open than pulling onto the highway again after dropping him off at the house.

Why does it feel like the fourth quarter was actually the entire game in a “the inside of this police call box is bigger than the outside” sort of way?

Bama wins 27–14.