There's nothing like being young and leaving some place.
That was a feeling that, oh, I loved.
Maybe that's why I became a musician.
Um, sleep late, stay up late, and you do an awful lot of leavin'.
The night I left Freehold for the last time, I laid back on the couch that was perched high atop a load of the band's junk furniture in the back of an open flatbed truck on a beautiful summer night.
I was 19 years old. That felt pretty good.
Soft ocean breeze of the shore was reaching all the way inland
And as we drew through town, for the very last time,
We were stopped by the police,
Who informed us, that there was a law against moving after dark.
What the fuck?
Who the fuck will know that?
Don't move your shit after dark?
What are we running off one of Freehold's great antiquities?
The sun goes down
They'll bust your ass in Freehold son.
Anyway, they uh, they sent us on our way,
Glad to be rid of the town hippies I guess,
And so I laid back on my couch,
And I was watchin' the tree branches brush above me and the stars glowing in the night sky,
And I remember it felt absolutely wonderful.
I had nothing
No parents, they'd moved away with my, little sister Pam, to California in 1969.
My sister Virginia, great soul that she is,
She got pregnant and had a baby at 18,
She left high school, married a competitive bull rider,
And they moved into the wilds of southern New Jersey
Because, that's where the cowboys live
The real joke is that fifty years later
They're still together and they still go to the rodeo.
But I had no money and no family and no realistic future
But yet I remember laying on that couch with the summer wind rushing over me
And ya know that salt water smell in the air of the shore coming on,
And thinking, I was just happy, I was happy.
I got it all, ya know, maybe I did, ya know.
Maybe there was nothing like that moment in your life with being and leaving some place, all that youthful freedom,
You feel, finally being untethered from everything you've ever known, the life you've lived, the past, your parents, the world you've gotten used to and that you've loved and hated.
Your life laying before you like a blank page.
It's the one thing I miss about getting older
I miss the beauty of that blank page,
So much life in front of ya.
It's promise, it's possibilities, it's mysteries, it's adventures.
That blank page, just laying there
Daring you to write on it
So now it's just Tinker, me, Tinker's dog, thousands of miles to go,
And we got several problems, one is I have no license.
Second problem is I don't have a clue as to how to drive.
And by that I mean the man who would very very shortly write "Racing in the Street"
That's how good I am.
Because at 21, I had never driven a fucking block.
Around 1 or 2 AM, Tinker's eyes glass over and he says
I'm fried. I need to get some sleep. It's your turn to drive".
I go, "Tink, I can't drive".
He says: Springsteen, there's nothing to it.
Idiots all over the world are doing it. Oh yeah?
He pulls me into a parking lot, he puts me behind the wheel,
I start grinding gears, pumping the clutch
Jerkin' the truck all over the lot,
It's a 1940's manual transmission and I can't get past first gear!
After a moment Tinker says, "This isn't gonna work".
But I got another idea. He gets in the driver's seat.
He slips in the clutch. He smoothly shifts it into first.
He eases out on the clutch.
He gets that truck going on a sweet little roll,
Looks at me and says: now let's switch seats
And that's what we did.
I was fine in second, third, and fourth, and I could keep it in between the lines as long as I didn't have to stop or go near first gear.
If I gotta do either of those things I have to wake up Mr. West, alright.
Now, it doesn't matter because he's awake anyway,
Because the guy who can't drive is driving
You're not gonna sleep through that!
So, uh, you'd be surprised how far you can go across this big country Without having to stop, ya know,
It's, it's a long ways between things out there, and man I drove my share.
2000 miles in second, third, and fourth gear.
Without killing anybody.
Uh, and we made it on time, ya know,
But that trip was, was where I saw the United States at its fullest,
And as a young man I was overwhelmed by its size and its beauty
And, this is a short piece from the book about riding across the country for the very first time.
The country was beautiful,
And I felt a great elation at the wheel as we crossed the western desert at dawn.
The deep blue, purple shadow canyons,
Pale yellow morning sky,
All of its color drawn out,
Leaving just the black silhouetted mountains in your rear view mirror
And then with the eastern sun rising at our backs,
The deep reds and the browns of the plains
And the hills came to life slowly in front of us
Our palms turned salty white on the wheel from the aridity.
Morning woke the earth into this muted color,
And then came the flat light of the midday sun,
And everything stood revealed as pure horizon
Just sky, sky, sky, and more sky.
Lowering on the two lanes of black top,
And disappearing into nothing.
My favorite thing.
Then the evening, with the sun burning red into your eyes
And dropping gold into the western hills in front of ya.
All felt like home to me.
And I fell into a lasting love affair with the desert