Prometheus drowned.

30 September 2002—By the time we had gotten to Nashville, two and a half months into a four-month, mostly-camping road trip across the country, I ran out of money. OK, not out of money so much as out of traveler's cheques, which, because it was 1990 and people didn't use their ATM check cards to pay for absolutely everything, was kind of a big deal.

So I went to an ATM in Nashville and took out $300 in cash, fifteen crisp twenty-dollar bills. At twenty years old, I wasn't accustomed to holding that much cash, let alone fresh bills. At thirty-two, I'm still not. So I hid the cash in the safest place I could think of, an empty cough-medicine box. I had been sick from DC through the Virginias and down into Kentucky, where we had KFC (it tasted the same), and now I had an empty cough-medicine box that no one would think to look in for a junior-gangster roll of $300.

We had a great time in Nashville and then made our way to the North Carolina coast. We drove through the Great Smoky Mountains, which I know are gorgeous because I have a poster at home, but that day it rained. Biblical proportions.

There's a thing you have to know about the car we were driving, my nine-year old Rabbit named Prometheus (again, I was twenty, though it now occurs to me the irony of what follows): It had a peculiar thing that would happen in the rain. Somehow water would splash up from the ground and soak the carpet on the floor of the back seat. As we drove through the Smokies listening to a syndicated retrospective on the radio about REO Speedwagon, everything in the back got drenched, many things past the point of usefulness.

Sometimes private campgrounds will give you an empty trash bag when you pull in and register. It's a nice touch, I guess — the campground just wants to make sure you know what to do with your garbage. So they gave us a nice little shiny white trash bag, and my friend cleaned out the junk from the car while I set up the tent.

The next morning, we headed off to Charleston, South Carolina, about a four-hour drive. On the way out of the campground, we handed off our shiny white trash bag, which the guy who ran the campground threw into the back of his little golf cart which he used for getting around.

We started seeing signs for someplace called South of the Border, most of them featuring a racist caricature named Pedro who spoke in broken eeenglish, spelled out on the sign in the worst phonetics-for-dummies sort of way. The billboards popped up every mile for a hundred miles or so, much like they did in South Dakota for Wall Drug, which we finally fell for because I needed some shampoo, none of which was to be found at Wall Drug. We weren't falling for South of the Border. We passed that neon disaster with its sombrero behemoth, and kept right on to Charleston, where we had a great time walking around and looking at the architecture until the end of the day when my friend suddenly said:

Um, you didn't have your money in that cough medicine box, did you?

We called the campground back in North Carolina, and to our relief, they hadn't taken all the trash bags to the dump yet. Still, on the drive all the way back to the campground, passing the hundreds of signs for South of the Border along the northbound highway, I envisioned myself going through dozens of identical shiny white trash bags looking for our garbage of riches. It made me think of the warehouse where they stick the crate holding the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. No matter what, we still weren't stopping at South of the Border.

When we got back to the campground, it turned out that the guy had never taken my bag out of the golf cart, beautiful lazy old man. The cough medicine box was near the top of the first bag I opened, and there inside it was the cash, safe and sound in its still-damp little roll of twenties.

We stayed in a motel that night and had a long drive the next day, passing South of the Border for the third and final time, on our way to Florida, where we hit a tropical storm, the tent blew away, the ignition switch broke on the Rabbit, and we were mistaken for drug smugglers, but that's another story.