I recently took a road trip along I-95 up to North Carolina and along the way I saw something that struck a chord with me and I find it worth mentioning. Somewhere in between nowheres-ville Georgia and the South Carolina border the coffee and water coursing its way through my body decided that it was time for the first pit-stop. Now once I get burning down the road I really hate to stop, for any reason. It just seems to take the wind out of my sails and makes getting back into the driving groove all the more difficult. However after several failed attempts to urinate into an empty water bottle resulted in a few near collisions, I decided it be best if I pull over to the nearest rest stop which as luck would have was only a few miles down the road.

Now this particular rest stop wasn’t significant in any way. Not being near the border it wasn’t one of those colossal tourist center jobs with all of the maps, coupons and other accouterments. Nor was it one of the seedier, backwater rest stops where the fear of getting shanked or stumbling upon a gay prostitution ring lurks around every corner. Nope, just a normal, average rest stop; two bathrooms, dog walk area and cheap vending machines full of partially hydrogenated goodies and bad road coffee. Of course none of this mattered because the needle on my bladder was pegged at ‘F’ and I needed to empty the tank pronto.

I rolled up, barely coming to a complete stop before I did a Luke and Bo maneuver out of the car door and gingerly sprinted toward the rest room. To onlookers I’m sure it looked like I had a mean crap on deck, but I didn’t care. My only concern was in not letting a drop slip. Guys you know how it is, let one drip loose when you’ve got to go badly and it’s Niagara Falls Frankie angel. I ran into the men’s room, careful not to slip on the slime covered floor, and managed to get to the urinal and get my suddenly difficult shorts unbuttoned just in time. Ah, sanctuary.

While basking in euphoric release of the pressure on my bladder I became curious to see what clever advertisements were splayed on the little mesh in the urinal or what color cake I was peeing on. My gaze fell down and to my surprise I was greeted by neither of those things. Instead all I saw was the hole at the bottom of the urinal filled not just with water and an increasing amount of urine, but with what looked to be a good handful of change. Pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters; I counted them all in there. This was no mere accident either where someone trying to get a French tickler out of the overhead machine accidentally dropped a stack of quarters in the urinal; these were wishes, hopes and dreams. I peered over the little dividing wall to the next urinal over and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a whole nest of change in the bottom of that one too. I finished my business, gave the follow-up shake, zipped up and washed. I walked out with this odd scenario clouding my thoughts, almost getting toppled over by another frantic traveler hurrying to empty his own bladder.

Now I’m aware of the odd human, genetic deficiency that causes people of all kinds (present company included) to throw change into any standing or even flowing body of water in the distant hope that this charitable act to nobody will grant you wishes or at least good luck. It is truly a strange phenomenon and until scientists finish mapping the human genome and discovering the gene that causes this I doubt anyone can offer a proper explanation. However, have things in our world become so bad, so desolate and so hopeless that people are willing to part with their hard-earned change in a dirty urinal located in a rest stop of no significance along a US Highway? Have people become so desperate for hope that they look for wishes and good tidings wherever they can find them, even in the bottom of a disease filled toilet?

With these questions dancing on my mind I got back on the road and tried to shake them from my thoughts. I couldn’t get rid of the sad sight though and it bothered me my entire vacation. Thinking about those minted visages of Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR and Washington, originally intended to bring someone wishes and hope, being micturated upon, target practice for road-weary motorists it makes me a little disappointed and sad. Then again it’s not like the hopeful travelers threw them into a mall fountain or well, it’s a freaking road toilet. I didn’t understand at what point it enters a person’s mind, while in the middle of a piss, to empty their pocket of change to make a wish. Did they finish and then do it, or were the coins tossed in mid-stream? And still I couldn’t figure out what wishes could be made while in the middle of nowhere at a toilet.

Then it hit me.

A trucker or road-weary dad, standing at the toilet alone with his thoughts for a few moments of peace away from the din of the kids in the backseat or the stress of the road, looks down at his little, shriveled penis. Saddened by this thought and feeling the loose change jingle in his pocket, he takes a defeated sigh and says, “Well, here’s to hoping!”