sadness, in motion

If you'll both forgive and indulge me, I'd like to write about sadness for a little while.

Every emotion on the road is heightened. That's just the way it is. Exhaustion bores down to your bones after long days checking over your shoulder for oncoming traffic, veering out of the way of bison that suddenly decide to wander across access road. Joy explodes and cartwheels after you successfully deviate course and find yourself face to face with that huge, rippling-muscled beast, your jaw so low it's almost holding down the brake on its own. Fear multiplies in milliseconds when brush rustles next to your Upper Peninsula campsite in the dead of night, gratitude flowers and bursts when a beer is thrust into your hands by South Dakotan strangers (and you hate beer), disgust assumes instantaneous color (brown and virulent red) when you find bedbugs crawling over you in your Fargo Motel 6...you get the point. On the road, sentiment flows over you in uninterrupted waves and when it comes that fast, with that little warning, it can hardly be contained. Everything feels visceral - even the mundane - and between that and the shitty South Dakota beer, you feel a little bit drunk.

Sadness is different from all the other girls. On the road, sadness assumes subtler forms, cloaks itself in irony and humor, and sometimes it just doesn't bother to hide at all. Whereas other emotions build and build - you can see a sunset coming an hour away and prepare yourself accordingly for the exhilaration it will insist upon - sadness often imposes itself with violent immediacy, manifesting in an iteration entirely different from yesterday's appearance. It keeps you nimble, doesn't allow any space for complacency.

Rather than continuing to meander on about sadness in the abstract, I'd rather take a single day on this trip - the day before yesterday, Friday, September the 17th - and present to you sadness, in all its different disguises.

I wake up early on Friday, before daybreak. I had camped out that night - my first in South Dakota - and painfully underestimated the cold front rolling through the state. My sleeping bag, only three years old, has pathetically surrendered to the prevailing winds of planned obsolescence and cajoled its zipper to come detached, forcing me to swaddle myself every night like a newborn. That's no problem during a cool July evening; a 35 degree September night, however, with a thunderstorm and its whipping winds raging in the near-distance, poses more serious questions. At 6:15, the whispers of sunlight only just creeping across the sky, I have to crawl into my nearby car and crank the heat as high as it goes to be reminded that my extremities exist. This is a form of sadness in its own right - sadness at my desperate lack of preparation, sadness at my outdoors ineptitude, and a deeper, more pathetic sadness that I will almost certainly do nothing of substance to repair the situation, even as temperatures continue to plummet.

I get on the road around 7, just as soon as blood has returned to my fingers and toes. My first stop is Pierre - Kristi Noem country! - I need to get gas and stock up on supplies. On the way, as I traverse gloriously desolate Eastern South Dakota (which, weirdly, does not make me sad - the emptiness provides a beautiful kind of minimalism, simplifies things), I call my parents. With flickering connection - them in France, me on the prairie - I have to brake, hard, as soon as I get a connection and hope they stay in place too. The call drops, more than once, and eventually, one of us gives up, surrenders to the impetuous whims of fickle cell towers. This is a more profound form of sadness, a feeling of unbridgable distance. I don't feel lonely much on the road - there's too much to see, too many miles to drive, and too few hours to waste - but in moments like these, where you sense the sands of connection seeping through your fingers, it's hard to avoid the feeling. Up one hill, down another. I'm making good time to Pierre.

There is such a thing as comic sadness, absurd sadness. I feel it overwhelmingly whenever I am at Walmart, in the canned goods and preserved foods aisle. As a pescatarian, my options are limited in transit and especially in carnivorous states like South Dakota. So - and I'm not proud of this, although I do own it - the Julian of the road devours vast, ocean-depleting quantities of tuna (as opposed to the Julian of home, who ingests a heavy yet not quite shameful volume of the protein-dense fish). My preferred tuna-consumption vehicle is the Starkist pouch (speaking of sadness, Starkist...I will be an influencer for you...you can advertise on this website...please reach out) because it's lightweight, doesn't require a can opener, produces minimal waste, and allows me to revel in that extra 10% of depravity as I eat it straight out of the pouch on the side of the road, sheepishly avoiding eye contact with passing motorists. In the Pierre Walmart, I feel a pang of sadness - at least I think it's sadness, although it could be the earliest symptoms of mercury poisoning - as I load my cart with twenty packs of processed "premium" tuna. I feel an even sharper pang when I realize this is my second restock of a two-week trip, that I have scarfed pounds and pounds of tuna across the United States, and that my rate of devastating this overfished population can and will only increase.

Now, around 10:30, I'm well and truly on the road. South Dakota is opening itself to me, revealing its intricacies concealed within sweeping vistas and agrarian hubs of production. I remark upon this fifteen minutes outside of Pierre, having pulled over to eat my first tuna packet of the day (Herb & Garlic flavored, for those keeping track at home). Time and tuna wait for no man. As I clean the packet, I feel no sadness. Just a sense of grim identity, a forlorn acceptance of myself for myself.

The sun continues to rise as I chug along, devouring podcasts like they're pole caught. I stop for my daily cigarette (sorry to my former employers, grandparents, rabbis, etc...this is who I am) and listen to a sad song. Sometimes I crave the sadness, seek it out. Anyone who has spent too much time with me has begged me to turn off the Sufjan Stevens, to allow a day of sunshine to remain a day of sunshine. Alone, I pump up the volume on the Elliott Smith and embrace the morose. It delivers a certain balance, a fragile feeling of control.

Something clicks now, in Philip, South Dakota - maybe it's the tumbleweed that's caught in the barbed wire fence, maybe it's the endless horizon but I feel, for the first real time in my life, like I'm in the Wild West. This makes me both ecstatic and, somehow, very sad. I am a huge Wild West nerd, have lingered over countless books about the frontier, re-read assigned Frederick Jackson Turner tomes for pleasure, adore the romance of the period (a romantic outlook that conveniently overlooks the dysentery and everpresent threat of violent death). And standing on this beige road that goes forever in both ways, I feel a real, palpable sadness that I'll only ever be able to truly conjure the Wild West in my brain. My imagination is hyperactive, sure, but nothing can replicate the real thing. I stand there, inhaling, straining, but I know I'll never be able to move beyond the peripheral.

Now, around 1 PM, the real, profound sadness comes. This might sound frivolous - because, in a sense, it is - but I support a terrible soccer team called Derby County that plays in the second division of the English football pyramid. For years they have been on the periphery of greatness and every year, without fail, they come up just a step too short. I love them unreservedly, feel no shame towards this embarrassingly under-accomplishing team I follow obsessively, but as I sit in my parked car, September 17th turns into the darkest day in the club's 137-year past - and this is a team that holds the record for the worst ever season in Premier League history. This Friday, Derby, unable to pay tens of millions in outstanding debts, goes into administration. It is an existential crisis for a club that now faces the threat of liquidation. Countless people associated with the club stand to lose their jobs. I sit there, tuna overheating in the trunk, and wish I knew how to cry.

On the road, the one thing you can count on is that you're in control. You decide where you sleep, you choose when you want to get up from the church pew, it's your call whether or not you want to risk the Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme with no bathroom nearby. As this wrenching news comes in from an ocean away, potentially evaporating one of the things I love most earnestly in the world, I feel a very peculiar feeling of powerlessness. All of a sudden I feel very small, very far away from anything and anyone I know. Maybe I am lonely after all. But then, I remember: I have half a tank of gas. I can accelerate. So, I do.

I pull up to the town of Wall - famous for the Wall Drug tourist trap, advertised for two hundred miles in either direction - and, still in a shocked stupor, enter a maelstrom of unmasked madness. Men with shirts tucked into pants riding above the nipple swirl around me. Their always-smiling wives drape buffalo hides over their shoulders. Someone throws an onion ring in my general direction. I walk through this altar to kitsch in a daze and for a moment, consider furthering my recent Lutheran education and seeking solace in the food court chapel. I decide against it - maybe what happened to Derby was God smiting me for my audacity to cross religious boundaries - and buy a quarter pound of dark chocolate caramel fudge instead. I eat it, alone, in the car and allow myself this final moment of wallowing.

Ten minutes away from Wall is the entrance to Badlands National Park. On the way there, I phone a friend and we talk about how he has recently taken up surfing. I am too afraid of sharks and open water to ever surf, I tell him. Maybe that'll change one day, he suggests, like how you beat your fear of heights. It won't, I know, and that makes me sad too.

The Badlands make me feel like I'm back in church and I know all the words. I find the highest point of the park and look down at the moonscape before me. I've never seen anything like this before - cragged peaks, tumbling canyon, waving grassland. Why is everyone in the world not here, right now? I forget about Derby, forget about all the other things I think about during the day when I sometimes want to be sad - love squandered, mistakes not yet unmade, former coworkers who wronged me - and immerse myself in this moment. It feels like nothing less than a gift.

As I drive the twelve miles down to my campsite for the night, I feel a very peculiar form of sadness. It is the kind of sadness rooted in nostalgia - the most powerful form of sadness in the world, bar only grief - but it is not nostalgia for some bygone moment in my life. It is nostalgia for the now. I know that this moment is one of the greatest of my life. I am young, my body still hums and answers me with verve, I have nowhere to be and no one I have to be. It will not always be this way, it will not be this way for much longer. I should not be so aware of how fleeting this period of my life is but the rare combination of my Jewish anxiety and everyone I talk to about my trip telling me to "savor this," like Tom Hanks to Matt Damon at the end of Saving Private Ryan, gives me little choice. I am sad because I am too happy and I know one day, I will look back and wish I was here.

On the way to the campsite, I see my first bison of the trip. I feel nothing but pure, unbridled awe.

I get to the campsite, set off on a brisk, hour-long hike up rolling hills on paths cut through waving grain, get back to camp and set up my tent, make a delicious dinner (that incorporates tuna, of course...Starkist, don't make me debase myself for you...pick up the phone), and reflect on the day. I have been sad in ways I never thought possible, never hoped possible and yet it has been one of the best days of the road trip, one of the best days of my life. I go to bed to a sky impossibly full of stars, the night quiet pierced by the howls of a roving gang of coyotes. All I can hope as I tumble into slumber, disintegrating sleeping bag tangled around my fudge and tuna-infused body, is that tomorrow brings more sadness.