Setting Out

Clearfield Creek, a tributary of the Susquehanna River, in central Pennsylvania, May 2021

There’s a certain kind of road traveler who, setting out, fills with confidence that, on this trip, life as she’s know it will transform. Sunlight will dapple her arms in a wholly novel way. The very act of intentional movement, will re-create her, a transformation inextricable from the motion of the journey.

And in the eye of that movement, she imagines, she will take on the sparkling hum of otherworldliness. She will become the poet of her imagination. The land will lay out gold and true before her —even in its broken-downness, even as its fast-food-grease-blowing freeway exit gauntlets disguise the true downtown, the heart of the heart, that she has come to be transformed by.

And yet there she is, that first day on the road, her fingers smelling of gas, jeans still pressing against her gut, her very grimy humanness all disappointingly intact. Perhaps she’s even a little more bored, as she plunks in the key code of the Airbnb padlock, and is greeted by walls the most neutral of grays, featuring the most mundane of off-price-home-store word art (Keep Calm and Coffee On. Gratitude is Giving Back.), by the locked-in smell of Febreze on particle-board furniture. And she sees that she is in fact not changed at all, that difference has not fomented discovery — that it has, if anything, revealed diminishment.

And she finds this life less, after all, than what she’s left.

That’s just the first day. Not yet inured to long drives, she is too exhausted to despair -- or too fearful of her pretensions of grandeur exploding around her in public. So she sits and reads tourist brochures and looks out at the neighbor’s lights, eye-level in her “garden studio,” and imagines how the sun will flicker across her legs when she wakes up in the dawn. (Which she will never do voluntarily.) And tomorrow those sunstreams will be – yes, they will -- a particular fleck of gold she’s never seen or been.

And that’s why she goes.

That was the dream. And I’m not saying it was altogether fatuous. But here’s how it really happened.

I set out in May 2021, soon after two Covid vaccinations, armored against all but the mildest of infections, should the virus touch me at all. I’d spent 15 months in my house in central North Carolina, teaching college classes from my couch (okay, sometimes my bed), in a house full of my grown children, their partners, and accompanying menagerie.

In June, my daughter Maia, her new husband John, their two dogs and a cat, had lived with me, then moved out, then moved back in, and then in February, moved to Stuttgart, Germany. In October, my son Isaac and his girlfriend Alex had sublet their Los Angeles apartment and moved in too. The LA air was choked with wildfire smoke, and the whole town was essentially shut down; their two industries, service and entertainment, were the hardest hit. This short visit turned into almost a year’s residency. We’d huddled at home, I holding classes on Zoom and grading papers in the living room while Isaac wrote proof-of-concept scripts for TV series and played Rocket League with his friends from LA, some also now dispersed to their parents’ houses.

And it was blissful. What a treat to be able to host the grown versions of your children, who’ve become the people you’d most like to hang out with, blood notwithstanding.

That joy was a particular blessing given that, in February 2020, my dad died. Almost exactly a year later, mom followed him. About this I have nothing novel, clever, or profound to say. Their deaths left holes in my heart. It helped a little to know that they had both, more or less, been ready to move on. Dad in particular had spent the last few years virtually deaf, unable to do see well enough to read, or to control his body and its functions well enough to live the independent life he loved. My mother, healthier in body but sinking into dementia, was sideswiped by Dad’s death; they’d known each other for 67 years, married for 63, and, despite endless bickering, theirs was the kind of true love story I’d hoped to have.

After a 14-year marriage and several long-term, post-divorce relationships, I was single again. That January, I broke up with my boyfriend of two years, a kind, smart, funny man who, it turned out, didn’t fit into my life as I’d thought he would. We’d made plans, too – the kind of plans you make in mid-life when “until the end” promises have begun to take on the note of finality: When and where will we retire? What will we do with ourselves when our “real work” is done and the world lies open before our somewhat-diminished selves? The plan was to return to England, his home country, plant ourselves in the picturesque early-manufacturing town of Ironbridge, England, near Birmingham. We’d buy a small cottage there and, in summer when tourists barged through, we’d launch our narrowboat, cruising down the ancient canals that crisscross the country.

Still sounds lovely. But not to be.

There I was then, in February 2021, suddenly with no one to take care of, hover over, delight in, cook with, plan with, agonize over. No one, for better and worse, to occupy my mind and heart. In short, I was down to me.

Over the course of that dark winter, I plotted my escape. Spread out on my dining table was a huge, laminated map of America, decorated with routes traced in blue, green, red and black: the pioneer trail from New York to Oregon, Utah, and California; the Cabeza de Vaca trail, from Florida to Mexico; the de Soto trail, meandering through the South; the Trail of Tears, sad threads from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, bottlenecking in the NC/Tennessee mountains for the trudge toward Oklahoma and “Indian Country;” and the Underground Railroad trails, from the deep South to New York, Boston, Ontario.

My plan was to traipse across the country by myself, following a vague plan but be accountable to no one. My route would be some amalgam of paths already worn – paths inspired by hope, avarice, idealism, desperation, despair. I’d go alone, staying in Airbnbs and cheap motels. I’d stop to take photographs and/or pee whenever I chose. I’d meet up with friends to camp and hike in Utah’s Canyonlands – but I’d be within my rights to hop in my car and take off at any time.

I’d take the time it took. Maybe a month, maybe two. I’d see what was happening out there, in small towns and cities. I’d photograph everything, take notes on eavesdropped conversations, talk to anyone who expressed interest.

The planning — drawing, wiping out and re-drawing my path, researching interesting spots along the northern and southern routes, focusing on byways and backroads parallel to Highway 80 West and Highway 10 East — was at least 1/3 of the joy of the trip.

On a photo safari near Omaha, Nebraska, with my Airbnb host, Alicia (above), May 2021

My friends had a few concerns. I am by nature an introvert; friendly but reserved, sociable but exhausted by extended interaction. Not the kind, in short, to make instant friends wherever I go. Many people, to my surprise, proclaimed my plan to travel for so long without companionship brave, strange, or a combination. Why, I didn’t even have a dog, a la John Steinbeck. To me, this trip seemed a capital idea, and (mostly) not a scary proposition at all. I was without responsibilities for the first time in my adult life. Goddammit, I was going to be irresponsible! And by God, given my inclinations, I might end up bored and lonely among crowds of locals wherever I went. But: would that be so awful, after all? I had this entire fascinating, horrifying, down-trodden, stupid-wealthy, stew of landscapes, climates, regional eccentricities, flora and fauna, a feast before me. If I ended up bored and lonely: my fault, and easy to remedy: Just move along!

In truth, my biggest fear is that something – or somebody – would prevent my going. For more on this, see “Getting Away with It.”