reflections from eighty-one days in motion

After a very long time of not being home, I am finally home. Two weeks have passed since I returned from my grand indulgent adventure, two weeks since the wheels stopped spinning and I emptied my trunk of desiccated tuna packet carcasses before sleeping for many hours on the first bed in months that I knew with total, decadent confidence was bedbug-free. Two weeks is really no time at all in the grand scheme of the world but it is surely enough time to grant distance, for the morning fog to lift and for some clarity, the smallest bits of wisdom - or, in the inevitable absence of wisdom, its stunted cousin, perspective - to emerge.

Since shrugging off the burden of endless surface streets, I have been greeted by a steady stream of family, friends, and some of those friends' high school ex-hookups that we ran into at the hometown bar the night before Thanksgiving. All of them asked questions about this trip. They wanted to know what lessons it held, which parts of America are the most beautiful and which are the least, when I felt afraid, how bad the anti-mask stuff was, etc. But it is not lost on me that what most people - especially those my age, treading water amidst a tumultuous global moment where the traditional career path holds eroded significance and the plethora of existential crises looming vertiginously over our futures have left so many in their early/mid-20s inadvertently, viciously nihilistic - really want to know is whether eleven weeks of movement delivered a new reservoir of strength with which to confront the world, a new framework with which to contend with all that malaise. Tragically for me, for the hunk wearing all flannel at the bar, for any of you out there still reading...it did not.

I had never hoped for a newer, more sagacious version of myself to return from this trip and thus I do not feel any emptier for his absence. What I had hoped for was for romance to be restored to an existence that had come to feel conspicuously sterile of it, to take in a few nice sunsets, and if at all possible, to catch a couple of bison sightings along the way. If insights emerged, did their part to grout the crevices I had noticed widening within my life, all the better. But I was really just after the bison.

The insights that did make themselves known were largely centered around my feelings towards a singular person that, barbarously, I am unwilling to share here. It wouldn't be particularly interesting to any of you and it would be tremendously indelicate even if it were. But what I will volunteer, in the laziest format possible (bullet points, baby), are a few things that I did learn, a couple moments of depth that did seep through as the temperatures dropped and my muscles atrophied and this great country coalesced into itself all around me. And because said wisdom so rarely revealed itself, I'll also share a few observations that stick out in the memory from along the way.

-There is stillness in motion. I spent eighty-one days and eighty nights on the road - alone for the vast majority of them - and the only moment where I felt even the slightest tinge of loneliness was my first evening back home, once the car had been unloaded and the shower run. Moving without stop, rarely sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, constant immersion in the unfamiliar...nothing more effectively relieves the compressive pressure that the rigidity inherent to a more structured way of life imposes. Indefatigable motion provides its own form of lubrication; it offers just enough of a daily mission to distract from looming existential crisis and the constrictive heaviness of anxiety. There is no FOMO when you are 1,800 miles away, no self-doubt when there is no alternative image of yourself or a friend to mirror against. Being in endless movement, alone, mandates a certain self-containment. The self-reliance you develop that ensures your car never runs out of gas or that you always have water stockpiled in the trunk builds into a mobile stoicism, a capacity to accept circumstance and to find a silent solace within that acceptance. In isolation - and it is its own distinct brand of isolation, induced exclusively by the feeling of relentless forward momentum inherent to the road trip - there is release.

-Every single church from Arkansas up to Virginia, regardless of denomination, hosts a turkey shoot in November. The pastor will be there - the turkey shoot is to thank him (always a him), after all - and so will every half-decent, God-fearing member of the congregation. Turkeys, it seems, are godless birds.

-On the road, routine develops new importance. It wears a different face than it does at home, where the weight of the mundane allows routine to colonize vast swaths of the day, but that only serves to heighten its significance, to allow small, repeated acts to feel like a warm, comforting embrace rather than a stranglehold on spontaneity. My routines were small but they were the handholds I built my day around. The collapsing of the tent in the morning and its miraculous resurrection in the evening...the feeling of stakes entering soft soil or, as was more commonly the case in the latter half of the trip, being hammered into soil flirting with frost..the frantic search to find a rock with which to perform that hammering before the batteries in my headlamp died...the cleaning of my sunglasses as I drove off from my campsite at daybreak, condensation lifting off windshield and lens...a daily cigarette, savored and elevated, always at a spot secluded and scenic. These were rituals that grew heavier with meaning and intent as the trip progressed. By the end, they came to deliver something close to spirituality. Routine can liberate from constraint, facilitate spontaneity, but only if it is allowed to assume its righteous, diminished, secondary role.

-Did you know that roads possess personality? It's true, they do - the winding ones that tease their way through Michigan's upper peninsula are impish and playful, the straightaways in Western states like Texas and Arizona are insecure about their lack of flair and panache, and the coastal roads, the ones abutting Oregon and Washington and California cliffs, are as arrogant as any 26-year-old crypto trader. Those winding highways know they've got it going on, they're well aware of your desperation for the glamorous views and little beachside walkabouts they have to offer, and you can tell that they extract a sick glee from making you contort yourself every which way and back. It takes you ninety minutes to travel eighteen miles and you can feel the asphalt beneath your tires smirking under the glare of setting sun.

-America's greatest food is not Kansas City BBQ or Wisconsin cheese curds or Wyoming beef. It's the sandwich that your friend makes at the end of an unending day in his cabin perched among towering redwoods, roasted vegetables and hummus topped with melted provolone and baked in an oven that predates the abandonment of the gold standard, served with crunchy chips under burning starlight and accompanied with abundant heapings of red wine and Humboldt County's greatest export. America's greatest meal is always set before you with a generous helping of context.

-If you are doing a cross-country road trip, enable the setting on your maps app that routes you away from highways. Driving on interstate is no way to know a place. Take the much less efficient path along county lanes, gravel forest service roads, and backwoods drives that you are certain are private property...they teach you more in a single mile than you could ever learn over a hundred miles of thruway.

-The majesty of America's richness, its diversity and its contradictions, is revealed in its gas stations. This isn't some Bill Brysonesque effort at finding sanctity within the cracks of life rendered stark by travel; I am solely, simply, trying to say that if you cannot get yourself fired up for a good gas station, cannot take anything of note away from the venison jerky stand in the South Dakotan Kum & Go or the sublime hawthorn strands coated in chili that are abundant among the orchards and fruit pasture-perched Central Californian Valeros, you're looking for love in all the wrong places. For so many small hamlets across the country, the gas station is the only business in town. It is the artery from which the veins of daily existence extend, and it is not unfeasible to discover a feeling of warm community within a rural Sunoco, often nestled somewhere between the energy drinks and the sunflower seeds. These are some of the few places within our nation relatively uninfected by class disparity - everyone must get gas and use the bathroom, regardless of what make of car they're driving - and what results are spaces that often feel lighter for their egalitarianism. I will remember my journey as much by the Love's (my favorite) and the Exxons' as I will by the soaring mountain ranges and scooped out ocher canyons.

-Voyeurism: it's both a dirty word and a word that I barely know how to spell. I have dabbled with it throughout various stages of my life - most pointedly while knocking doors on a political campaign, as I peered into people's homes and constructed wholly unsubstantiated accounts of their inner lives from flitting glimpses of their foyers - but felt the impulse flourish on this trip. Staying with friends for no more than fifteen hours (in after sunset, out after breakfast) and meeting strangers either on their home soil or with them in moments of similar transience allowed for an unparalleled entrance into the lives of others, permitted passage over boundaries otherwise guarded. Much of that has to do with how you're perceived when you're on the road, especially when you're young and alone. Most people keep their distance, of course, but those who don't often approach because they either see something of themselves within you (typically a figment of themselves from the past or a vision of themselves, idealized) or because they're interested in existing vicariously through you. What emerged were interactions laden with intimacy and generosity, interactions capable of reaching visceral emotional heights that one rarely ascends to in regular, regimented life.

Older men, in their 50s and 60s especially, gravitated towards me (particularly those on motorcycles, for whatever reason), asked me questions about my gear and my route, and within minutes, were sharing immensely poignant facets of themselves with someone they'd never seen before and never would see again. Americans in every state spoke to me of incarceration and plans for weekend recreation, of sex and fried foods and dreams delayed or abandoned, they told me of the pride they had in their children and in the same breath, of the regrets that populated their life. So many were strangers but just as many were the people I love whose couches I was sleeping on, themselves emancipated by my ongoing flight from the confines of society to utter things long tethered to the esophagus. They rendered themselves emotionally vulnerable to compensate for my physical vulnerability. I chased it, of course, sought out friends like the poet in Mendocino or the middle school teacher in Baltimore who I knew had things to say, are in the midst of lives of expanse, but as grateful as I am to them for allowing themselves to pour forth, I know that they deserve only partial credit. Most, of course, must go to the road trip, which innately produces the conditions amenable to self-revelation.

-One's location in America is most efficiently deduced not by GPS or the stars in the sky but instead, by the dead animals that dot the side of the road. An armadillo means you're somewhere in the Southwest, bleeding into the South. A lifeless pronghorn: anywhere in the Mountain West. The one exception is raccoons who, like Walmart, serve as the great American unifier.

-Distrust percolates among this nation's grandeur. A year removed from a fraught election, ten months post-insurrection, and with a two-year pandemic still running rampant, the wounds lacerating the country have not yet scarred. I felt that distrust keenly. There were the glares exchanged when I wore my mask in Ohio diner and Wisconsin church, the Trump Store in rural Minnesota where a young man trailing an oxygen tank behind him (a coal mining accident, he explained to the proprietor) bragged about never having donned a face covering, the campsite host in Montana who suggested the violent murder of everyone working in the White House, etc. It went both ways: the sneering condescension of so many on the coasts towards the heartland states I had just passed through was breathtaking, arrogance blithely and indiscriminately directed towards places where I had known only kind empathy. I have spent enough time in politics and have no intention of dirtying the relatively pure waters of this site with some political screed decrying exported economic opportunity or inciteful rhetoric as the source of these collectively narrowed eyes, nor do I have the ego to believe I understand the roots of our shared unease towards the other within our own nation when no one else does. To propose some kind of solution would be hubristic on a scale so vast that it brings me shame even mulling it hypothetically. But I do know that this dynamic of villainization and suspicion is unsustainable and vicious, that we are on the precipice of growing irrevocably estranged from ourselves, and that, like cement under a high sun, such mistrust will only further harden.

-Should you ever have the chance to structure your life according to the circadian rhythm of the sun, I urge you to do so and to embrace it as fully as you can. Make a point of rising as it rises and drawing down your activity, your acts of consumption, your inner dialogue to a dim as it sets. It is a structured, limited mode of life - the days shorten, the afternoon holds a strange urgency - but it is heightening all the same. The colors of the sky become a drug of sorts, that boiling ball of light a metronome. You find yourself alone often, awake when no one else is, standing outside in places remote and frigid and unexpected. To live your life as the sun lives its own is to guarantee austerity, yes, but it is also to guarantee a steady drip of joyful solitude.

-Allow me to close, if you will, with a brief meditation on romance. It is what I set out in search of, after all. I found it, or rather it revealed itself to me, everywhere and in everything. Romance manifested in all the obvious places of course: the countless couples holding hands and caressing each other with quiet tenderness (I intruded on one too many of those moments for anyone's liking), in the hues of descending light and encroaching night, in the mournful tones of plaintive love songs, and in the rustling grasses of late morning prairie. It was there in all the obscure locales as well, the places you can't imagine romance residing. Romance trickles through the porous walls of Michigan motel, via the cries of a man in anguish, pounding on doors in violent search of his mythical Jessica. And romance, ambiguously, exists with even more ferocity once the pounding ceases. It inhabits the soft tones of the stranger pulling over on Oklahoma country road to inquire whether your car has broken down (no, just smoking a cigarette). It lives in the regrets that you circulate in your mind, over and over, because they make the miles evaporate faster. There is romance in $4.75/gallon gas prices and in nights spent shivering inside a sleeping bag that won't zip closed and most certainly in the port-o-potties and roadside piss stops that bestow so much of the texture of a trip like this. That romance is not the same thing as love, not at all, and yet it is what allows someone like me, who has run from love for too long, to give love the abundance of time and thought it deserves. It delivers patience, a settling within oneself, a capacity to listen, to tolerate dissent and more loudly voice your own. Romance is only elevated within certain spheres of our lives; we allow it (and romance can mean anything to anyone...for me, it is spontaneity, ready self-effacement, the sublime, an embracing of doubt, a pregnant pause with another present) to grow diminished in the others in part for time management, in part because the idea is daunting, and in much larger part because we don't know where to look to locate it. But that is no way to live, no way at all.

We all have our own ways of seeking out romance. I had to severely depreciate the value of my car to chase it from its hiding place (deep within a pit of cynicism) and yet nothing has ever meant more. I encourage you, whoever you are, to do all you can to find it. Drive safe.