Neither Here Nor There
When highway law enforcement gets existential
West of Salt Lake City, Utah, seventeen hundred miles into my drive from Michigan to San Francisco, I was pulled over by a cop. I’d first encountered him a few minutes earlier; his earth-toned SUV was parked in the highway median like a crocodile waiting for a heron to snack on. According to my GPS, I wasn’t speeding. But there the SUV was, in my rearview mirror, and here I was, on the side of the road.
“May I ask why I’m being pulled over?” I said as I rolled down the window. “You sure can,” said the cop, grinning genially. “GPS. It’s against the law in the state of Utah to have anything obstructing your windshield.”
You have to be fucking kidding me, I thought. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“Where you headed?”
“San Francisco.”
“Is this your car?”
“It’s a rental.”
“Got the papers?”
I did, and gave them to him. He studied them for a second. “I need you to come back to my car and answer some questions,” he said. “You might want to put up your windows so your dog doesn’t jump out.” I glanced at my dog, who sat in the backseat, looking as perplexed as I felt.
The last — and only — time I’d been pulled over before had been in Vermont, where I’d been sailing down a pretty country lane at fifty-five miles per hour, blissfully unaware of its thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit until I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror. That cop had been a kindly older man, firm but almost apologetic. He’d given me a ticket and sent me on my way.
This cop was younger, probably in his thirties. He had crinkly eyes and ruddy skin and looked like he’d come straight from a casting call for a CHiPS remake. I thought I’d somehow wandered into a television show too, as that seemed to be the only reasonable explanation for why I was following a strange man to his vehicle on the side of a highway. When I climbed into the passenger seat, I kept the door open and one foot on the running board.
As the cop typed away on a Dell laptop mounted on his dashboard, I watched his fingernails, which were cut to the quick. What was my address? He asked. When was I returning the car? Where would I live in San Francisco? Why wasn’t I living with my friends? What wasAirbnb? Why did I choose a vacation rental? Wasn’t that expensive? Where was all of my furniture? Wasn’t storing it all in New York expensive? How would I get around in San Francisco? Why was I driving cross-country instead of flying there? What would I do for work? What were the names of my friends in San Francisco? How much did I weigh?
I answered all of his questions as though I were at a job interview, though my just-placate-the-officer streak was increasingly at odds with my suspicion that this was becoming unequivocally weird.
“Why are you moving to San Francisco?”
Plenty of people had asked me that question, and my answer was always the same: “Because I want to,” I’d say, truthfully. And that’s what I told the cop now.
But sitting in his car, gazing out at the vast, desolate salt flats that lay before me, I suddenly felt lonely and unsettled. I didn’t understand why I was being asked these questions, but I realized now that I also didn’t understand fully what I was doing with my life. I had packed up all of my belongings; moved out of my apartment; said good-bye to numerous good friends, to my ex-fiancé, and to the man I was dating; and set off in search of what, precisely? Adventure? A change of scenery? Or, heaven help us all, to find myself?
Since leaving New York City three weeks earlier, I’d felt unmoored, adrift between what I’d already done with my life and whatever it was I was going to do with it, or to it, in the future. I’d had too much time to think, and to doubt, and to ask myself questions I had no answers to.Why are you moving? It now seemed less like a rote inquiry than it did like a test I’d forgotten to study for. During my detention in the police cruiser, I stopped feeling as though I were trapped in forgotten CHiPS footage; instead, I was stuck in Defending Your Life, that movie in which Albert Brooks dies and gets sent to Judgment City, a purgatory where he has to stand trial and justify all of the fears he had back on Earth. If he can, he gets to climb up the spiritual ladder. If he can’t, he has to go back and live his life all over again. Ultimately (spoiler alert), he’s saved by a last-minute display of courage involving a character played by Meryl Streep, and they proceed together to the next phase of their existence. The lesson, of course, is that you can’t let fear dictate the course of your life and that you must take risks if you want to move forward.
In the movie, though, moving forward comes with the implicit promise of a reward, a guarantee that there is something better to come than what would be left behind. I had no such guarantee, no scripted prize for getting behind the wheel of a car and pointing it toward California. I had a dog, a handful of friends, and now a highway patrol officer with a peculiar interest in my personal life. But I also had possibilities, and their mere presence, I realized, was its own reward, even if what waited on the other side of the salt flats currently offered no answers to the questions I was asking of myself with growing concern.
The cop handed me my license and hit a button on the keyboard. Behind me, a tiny printer mounted on the side spit out a piece of paper. “I’m letting you off with a warning,” the cop said as he handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said. He nodded. And just like that, I was released back into the wild, free to proceed to the next phase of my existence.
