Unrooted
It is between seven-thirty and eight in the morning when we all get in the car. Five cats, one dog, four people. This “late start,” my mom claims, will allow us to begin our journey especially well rested and alert. We have just over 1,000 miles and just under 36 hours of road tripping ahead of us.
Every summer my family makes this road trip twice — McLean, Virginia to Bovey, Minnesota and back again — all of us, people and pets, jostling for space in an over-packed, overcrowded Honda Odyssey. Waiting at the end of this drive is a small cabin tucked next to a quiet lake. My parents met in Egypt and when they decided to raise their family overseas my mom insisted that my brother and I, her future children, have some sense of home, some sense of belonging, back in America. Together they bought the house on the lake in Northern Minnesota and moved to Saudi Arabia. Although my brother Josh and I have grown up in a country not our own, every summer we make this same trip to the lake, chasing a home we never found anywhere else.
Before we get to Minnesota, before we reach those summer days of swimming and boating and tubing and campfires and berry picking and stargazing, we have to run the gauntlet across America. Zinger family road trips are not for the weak of heart. My mom, our driver, has the endurance of a long-haul trucker and she expects the same fortitude from her passengers. Every eleven-hour day on the road is divided by three stops. Each stop corresponds with a meal. Each stop includes a bathroom break and a new tank of gas. If anyone has to go to the bathroom between stops they are a disappointment. Their small bladder adds time to our journey. There is technically no timer running when my mom pulls off the highway for an extra stop, but there may as well be. Unscheduled bathroom breaks are bad enough. Unscheduled bathroom breaks that last longer than five minutes? Unthinkable.
The first few hours of the trip is a time to settle in, to get comfortable with the seats that will be our entire, claustrophobic world for the next two days. At my feet is a pile of books hand picked for summer, a stack of trashy romances and dizzying fantasies that teeters as we careen west across the country. To my left is a shoebox overflowing with my favorite road trip snacks, a stash of saturated fats and high fructose corn syrup that will comfort me even as it gives me a sharp, sugary stomachache.
While we humans get comfortable in our seats the animals do the same. Ido, our dog, curls up on the floor, her eyes closed in a deliberate attempt to pretend she is anywhere else. Tubby, my cat, ignores my attempts to corral her in my lap. Instead, she slithers underneath my seat through a hole that no one else can find. She wedges her tiny body beneath where I sit and waits for the ordeal to end. Icy and Bim-Bim, two laid back Siamese kittens, sit in the rear window contentedly, causing fellow travelers to nudge each other and point delightedly in our direction. Casper and Garfield pace nervously around the car. They cry and hiss and drool until I trick them into eating calming treats, fish shaped pellets that supposedly encourage rest and relaxation. Casper and Garfield halt their prowl, crawl into an open cat carrier, and fall asleep as I sprinkle catnip under their noses in an attempt to drug them into even greater quiescence.
Animals excluded, spirits are high in these first few hours. We have yet to push each other’s buttons by breathing too loudly or putting our feet on other people’s armrests. The car is still clean and everyone still smells good. I play hours of Candy Crush guilt free, starting a level in the suburbs of Maryland, finishing it in the rocky outcrops of West Virginia. I listen to National Public Radio with my mom. We drive backwards through time and listen to the same morning report twice as we cross a time zone.
Around one in the afternoon we make the first of our three allotted stops. We crawl impatiently through a Subway drive-thru and take turns using the restroom at a Kum & Go. Before we get back in the car we communicate with whomever is inside using a complex series of knocks to ensure that no cats are lurking in front of the doors, waiting for a chance at freedom.
The sun eventually sets and my mom drives until not even pounding classic rock can keep her awake any longer. We then pull into a rest stop in Illinois, or a trailer park in Indiana. On Zinger family road trips we do not sleep in motels. They smell too greatly of second-hand smoke and are not appreciative of the small menagerie travelling with us. No, on Zinger family road trips we sleep in the car. My dad passes around earplugs and my mom places a small canister of mace in her cup holder, for easy access, just in case. We stretch our legs out across backpacks and cat carriers, waiting for the sunrise that will wake us in five restless hours. When we do wake up, crusty and achy and inevitably more tired than before we went to sleep, we slug down a coffee or two and get back on the road.
The atmosphere shifts on the second day of the trip. When we fall out of the car for lunch, somewhere in Wisconsin, we feel out of place among the other well-groomed and fresh-faced diners. My arms and legs feel like they do not work as I clumsily bend my knees and roll my ankles on the side of the road. My pants are coated with the crumbs of my subway sandwiches from the day before — we had Subway for both lunch and dinner. There is a brownish stain on my shirt that could be coffee or some kind of mustard. I try to ignore my appearance and order another Subway sandwich.
One particularly blood-pressure-raising night, on the return trip, summer of 2016, one of the cats nearly found freedom somewhere in rural Indiana. My mom and I were making the trip alone — alone except for three cats and a dog. Nearly nine hours after leaving the lake we pulled into a parking spot at a secluded KOA campsite. On one side of the site was a cornfield, on the other was a herd of cows. A two-lane road stretched lazily across the farmland, reaching for the highway that you could not quite believe was around the corner.
The two of us settled into our road trip nightly routine. I negotiated my long legs around inconveniently placed arm-rests, catching a whiff of the souring Subway sandwich that must have fallen beneath my seat, and fell into a fitful sleep.
At two in the morning I was roused by the muted whoosh of a car window being rolled down. I clumsily pushed my eye mask onto my forehead and watched groggily as Garfield stepped off the button that had opened the window and threw himself into the cold Indiana night. My mom screamed from the front seat as she fumbled with the door handle. I screamed from the backseat as I flailed my arms in a wild effort to keep the other cats from following Garfield out the window. Garfield himself screamed from outside of the car, an orange blur moving swiftly across the dark.
This is it, I thought. Garfield is a stray cat now. He lives in the wilds of Indiana.
What happened next must have taken no more than thirty seconds, though as it was happening time stretched and pooled, ticking by at an impossibly slow speed. My mom opened the car door and followed the runaway cat into a drizzling, late summer rain. She launched herself at Garfield and flew through the air in her pajamas, tackling the bastard to the ground. The two wrangled in the grass as I watched from the car, sick with nervous energy. It was my mom who emerged triumphant from the tussle. Dangling from her iron grasp, Garfield’s back legs clawed ineffectually at the air. She held the cat aloft, her elbows locked, her eyes wild, and she tossed him into the back seat of the car.
We both cried when the ordeal was over. Too hopped up on adrenaline to fall back asleep, I sat awake and watched the night shift imperceptibly into day through the car windows, an obsessive death grip on Garfield, lest he try to make another escape.
I love this road trip, I love road trips in general, because I do not know where I am from and when you are on the road, moving through space, each minute in a different somewhere, this uncertainty does not matter. I was born in Cairo, Egypt. Although my passport is American I have two birth certificates, one of which is Egyptian. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, living in the Eastern Province city of Dhahran for ten years before moving to Northern Virginia, alone, fifteen years old and in search of an American education. My dad is from Iowa. My mom could be considered from Minnesota, but like me she grew up in the Middle East. Where are you from is my least favorite question. Every answer I give is a lie. On paper I am definitively American. In my heart I am not sure of this label or of its application to my life. When people do ask where I am from I like to tell them instead where I am currently living.
“Oh, my parents live in NoVA,” I say with a smile, hoping that whichever well meaning stranger asked me this question will not press for details.
When I am on the road the displacement that I feel is validated. Travelling is the single experience in which my understanding of myself, as unrooted, matches my state of being. This synchronicity brings me comfort. Every day I feel as if I am from nowhere. When I am on a road trip I feel as if I am nowhere.
The final hours of the trip bleed into each other, marked as different only by the gradually changing scenery. Midwest farmland melts into forests of chalky birch trees. The highway turns into a paved country road turns into a gravel driveway. We slow down, scarcely breathing in anticipation. When my mom turns off the car there is a moment where no one moves. We look out of the windows and realize with some surprise that the ordeal is over. The moment bursts and we scatter. The dog sprints circles round the house. Once inside, the cats race to the basement, hunting for the mice that made their nests among our spare sheets during the frigid, Minnesota winter. We unload bag after bag from the trunk, carrying inside swimsuits and kitchen knives and kitty litter, everything we will need for the next two months at the lake.
Once the car is empty, but for a few soiled napkins and half-empty water bottles, the four of us, my mom, my dad, my brother and I, file out onto the deck that overlooks our forested backyard. We grant ourselves a moment of stillness. We are proud of ourselves, impressed by our own hardiness. For me, however, the moment is tinged with sadness. A feeling of loss lurks at the borders of my tired relief. We have arrived, but the communion between our days on the road and my own feeling of unbelonging is gone. Tomorrow I will go to the grocery store, and hearing my unfamiliar accent the cashier will ask me where I am from.
I will cringe and lie, “Just outside of Washington, D.C.” I will select the most convenient fragment of my identity and slide it towards the woman behind the cash register. My answer will be untrue, but it will be the easiest answer I have to offer.
