Two Days from Home.
My daughter sleeps in the passenger seat, her head resting peacefully against the window. Just beyond the window a three-quarter moon hangs in low in the sky, looking like a slice of some exotic pale-yellow fruit. The little car is solid on the Interstate. So far everything has worked as hoped. We’ll be in Fargo by 11, sleep a few hours, and hit the road again before dawn.
The big moon does little to light the road. The dark sky swallows everything out here, as Minnesota farmland gives way to an epic sweep of prairie. Packed in the car is the entirety of my daughter’s worldly possessions. She’s come up with a plan to spend her fourth year of medical school rotating through the field’s specialties at teaching hospitals hopscotched across the country. For the next year a scratched-up 2012 silver hatchback will be the closest thing she has to a permanent address. She’s sold or given away everything that doesn’t fit in with the back seat folded flat.
Oddly enough, the one exception to her brutally efficient downsizing was a temperamental old Soda Stream a friend had given her before she left the East Coast. It sprayed water all over the kitchen when she tried to fill a couple of bottles for the trip. But still, here it is wrapped in a grocery bag, making the move with us. Who can explain the things we refuse to part with?
That’s why rather than what lies ahead, my mind has turned to what we just left behind as the dark miles fall away. My daughter spent the month of September working at the county hospital in our hometown of Minneapolis, and so was able to crash with us in her old bedroom.
Thomas Wolfe wrote “You can’t go home again” and maybe he’s right if you expect home to forever remain the original artifact, waiting for you exactly as you left it. A museum diorama of the early-period you. We discovered a more useful definition of home these past weeks.
Maybe you can’t go home again, but humanity has a way of finding its own small piece of it no matter how rootless we all become. It’s the little things we carry with us. The people we stay connected to. Sometimes it’s as simple as the old family recipe for a Manhattan cocktail (on ice, not straight up!). This proved to be the perfect lubricant for an evening spent talking around the kitchen table. For a bright young person about to set herself adrift in the wide world that can be as nurturing as the womb.
Our two-day dash from Minneapolis to Portland further expanded the concept of home. I’d volunteered to make the drive out of practical necessity. My daughter needed to be at her next rotation early Monday morning, and there wasn’t enough time to make the drive safely without a co-pilot. By the time we pulled into Portland Sunday afternoon we felt as at home in her little hatchback as a king in his castle.
We rolled out of Fargo at 5 a.m. The night shift guy was still working the hotel desk. “Didn’t I just check you in?” he asked.
We made one stop, to stretch our legs in Theodore Roosevelt Park. I’d been through the park earlier in the year on a much more leisurely road trip with my son, and noticed a trail that looked worth trying. It began in a prairie dog town. The pudgy little critters stood at the entrances to their burrows and chirped and cheered us all the way up into the rugged hills.
Missoula became the second consecutive town we stopped at for the night and never really saw. We arrived long after sundown. We left long before sunup. It was Sunday so we had car church while the pre-dawn light began to outline the rounded shapes of the mountains on either side of the road.
This was our own invention, and might have been more appropriate had we been of a Protestant denomination where they take literally the promise, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” We Catholics are less comfortable with something not anchored by stone walls and a chain of command, but still we made it work. I took readings from Romans and John off the iPhone while my daughter had her turn at the wheel, then plugged in a podcast on First Century Gnosticism. It wasn’t exactly a homily, but it inspired a conversation about things spiritual that lasted all the way through the 4th of July Pass and down the mountainside to the beautiful lakeshore of Coeur d’Alene.
You hear talk about how isolated we’ve all become, barricaded in our homes and behind the digital glow of our screens. Even travel has become antiseptic, launching ourselves above it all like cattle strapped in an aluminum tube. That’s why I like my new expanded definition of home, earned one mile at a time on a long drive that was hard on my lower back but good for my soul.
It taught me to worry less about what the cranky types like to call blood & soil. The American Dream is so often defined as a tidy lawn and a picket fence. It can also be a small silver automobile and a year of adventure. That’s reason enough to take a more proprietary interest in the wider world we send the people we love out into.
