A Brief History of My Life on the Road
This is not my first cross-country road trip. My first, in 1996, when I was four years old and small enough that my brother and I didn’t feel crammed into the back seat of our parents’ Toyota Corolla with our 70 pound dog, Starbuck, at our feet, was just the beginning of a 20 year love affair I’ve had with the open road, an affair I’ve abandoned from time to time, only to return to it with nervous anticipation building up in me until I reach I-40 and breathe the road in like oxygen. There’s a freedom to the drive, to the gas stations and the rest stops, to the new hotel room every night.
The second time we drove across the country I was six, and we added two cats and a few snakes (and their eggs) to the equation. A few days in, the eggs began to hatch; for a half an hour, we were pulled over somewhere in the desert, hatching tiny corn snakes as semis rattled by.
I have a picture from that second trip, which wrenches me back to 1998 faster than an episode of The Powerpuff Girls. My parents, making oatmeal on a camping stove, crouched behind a cement roadblock in a gas station parking lot. My older brother taking the photo. My beautiful Starbuck, hanging out at the bottom of the frame. I can smell the dust, the propane stove.
The last time I drove cross-country was in 2012, when I was running away from my life and from a version of myself that I hated. I was sinking into a pit of depression. I left school, and I followed my parents to Winslow, Arizona. My problems followed me, as problems do. Four months later, I got back in the car and drove home to New York, my family in tow and my dog in the passenger seat. Every moment in that car was a moment of freedom. I never wanted to get off the road. I wanted the giant skies to swallow me whole. When I got home to New York, I almost killed myself, twice.
The point of this isn’t to over-share; I’m not the type, and I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself this publicly. It’s important, though, because without an understanding of my history — without an understanding of what I’ve carried with me on these roads in the past — it’s impossible to understand what I bring with me this time.
Katie and I reached the flatlands of Oklahoma today, and as the horizon began to lower and the sky began to spread out until it seemed to be following us as as much as it was waiting for us, I felt it again — the freedom. We took our time today; we still have three days until we need to be in New Mexico, and moseying around the back roads of Oklahoma, it felt like we were worlds away from our other lives. Our responsibilities seemed to drop away. I wanted to open up my lungs and breathe the skies in.
So far we’ve had a 760 mile day and we’ve muddled our way through a blizzard in Tennessee (slipping and sliding and raging at the South’s spectacular lack of plows and salt), but we’ve laughed more than I can remember us laughing in years. We’ve listened to music we haven’t heard since we were teenagers. Today, we finally found a good diner in the back lot of a casino just over the border of Arkansas, and with great joy I discovered that Oklahoma finally put trashcans in its rest stops.
I have a history with this country. I can barely count the number of times I’ve crossed it. I learned to read in these hotel rooms, practiced my multiplication tables on these roads. I’ve eaten more soggy pizza hut in tiny Motel 6 rooms than I’d like to admit.
But something feels different this time. I feel blessed — completely, wholly, un-ironically blessed — to be taking this trip with my best friend. But even more than that I don’t feel like I’m running away from myself anymore, and I don’t even feel like I’m looking to find myself. I’m happy with myself, and I like myself. That’s a first.
Tomorrow, we’re dipping south and driving to Austin because, well, why the hell not?
