skirting along the coast

It's the middle of October now and I can see clear to the other side of the world. Jagged mountain spires have dissipated behind me, endless plains of wheatgrass and corn wave in the rearview, and I no longer plunge Westwards but rather South, away from impending snow and precipitous drops in temperature and instead towards the warmth seductively held by palm trees, inland deserts, and familiar reunions with friends and family. It is a welcome shift but it is a shift nonetheless, a transition in a trip always in transition. This change in direction and purpose has been accompanied by a change in scenery: everything is much more aquatic now. For the past week or so, ever since I arrived in Seattle and then headed up the Olympic Peninsula before meandering slowly, glacially down the Washington and Oregon coastlines until I reached Crescent City, California, from where I am presently writing, I have had trees larger than any I've ever seen to my left and to my right, blue, endless blue.

I began Jack Kerouac's On the Road in Michigan's far-removed Upper Peninsula - over a too-doughy Munising bagel smeared with whitefish - so it was fitting that I finished it (only took me five weeks; driving isn't the only thing I do at a glacial pace) in Astoria, Oregon over another plate of fish. Coast to coast, whitefish to sablefish, the world's largest lake to the world's largest ocean...there's poetry in these patterns. That said, the question must be asked: is there anything more hideously cliched than a 25-year-old white dude on a cross-American road trip, reading On the Road and professing to have discovered new meaning within? If there is, my email is juliangerson822@gmail and I'd be very glad if you'd send me a note letting me know.

As horribly on the nose as reading On the Road rang while on this kind of journey, it also felt horribly right. Kerouac's words, the pairing of his vast, forlong longing with his indefatigable restlessness...well, they provided a serum of sorts, a literary Monster energy drink that I could only consume in small doses, right before bed or right after waking, lest I mainline too much of his heaving, frequently-tedious prose or allow his voice to seep into mine. But more than anything, I had to limit my consumption because God forbid I read too much all at once and watch the line between artistry and reality fade into a haze. No one writes about the world as seen through moth guts-smeared windshield with more deftness than Kerouac, the incomprehensibility of his 100-mile-per-hour style perfectly aligning with the irrationality inherent to driving for so long.

Above all, Kerouac has a knack for capturing not only the terrain morphing and mutating before your eyes but, more than that, for attaching character and motive to that landscape constantly in blur. Take this passage about Laredo, Texas:

"Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cabdrivers and border rats wandered around, looking for opportunities. There weren't any; it was too late. It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed." (273)

That last sentence, man. Doesn't get too much better than that. And yet, beyond the beauty of it, it holds relevance too. Place can carry intent. Just as Laredo, at the foot of America, collects everything and everyone on a downwards plunge, voyaging along the coast ushers in a strange feeling of the peripheral, of peering into horizons I know I'll never fully make out and reveling in the liberation that holds. It's a feeling I recognize most acutely in this strange boundary between land and sea, suspended between worlds, but it's one that has been simmering for these past five weeks, throughout this entire trip. A sensation of melancholy and removal, of isolation and exhilaration.

Per the recommendation of my uncle, I traveled to Ozette Lake upon leaving Seattle, a gorgeous spot perched in the very northwest corner of contiguous America's most northwest state. It felt right to get as far away from where I had begun this trip as I could, to venture somewhere where you can see no one and be close to nothing and not even entertain the dream of cell service. I arrived too late in the day, set up my tent in a rush, and made a beeline for the three-mile boardwalk through the rainforest to the ocean. The sun was still dawdling somewhere up there between the spruce but I knew it was dropping, sinking quick. I flew down that trail, coat fluttering, breathing at a rhythm, not feeling my body and feeling it deeply, innately all at once. Forty minutes later, the trail tumbled me out onto a beach - my first real encounter with the Pacific proper on this trip - and it felt like a culmination of sorts, but one that leaves you a bit ashen, like a celebration of sobriety.

I had spoken with a college friend over the phone a couple hours after leaving Seattle and after some catching up, the conversation had turned to the Pacific. With all the zealotry of a convert (he's an East Coaster who moved to the Bay Area a few years ago) he spat out Pacific fact after Pacific fact - he taught me that the Pacific Ocean is so awesomely large that standing in San Francisco, you are nearer to Dublin than you are to Tokyo - and then we remarked on the peculiar power that this ocean holds, the way it doesn't meet land but rather, crashes into it, slapping rock with routine violence. Standing on this beach about as close to Canada as you can get without a passport, I felt that force, reckoned with its abruptness, knew myself to be small.

I was well aware that I was chasing daylight so I rushed along the sand, dodging decomposing sea cucumbers swarmed by black walls of flies, leaping from rock to rock, ruining my shoes. I found a cliff at the end of the beach, climbed it, took dumb grinning selfies, felt a rush of totality. Then I turned around, readied myself for the voyage back through dense ferns and groaning old-growth, and suddenly, striding down the beach, I saw a creature emerging from the forest, its hulking dark shape unmistakable: a bear. It poked out of the woods right at the trailhead, right in the middle of the beach, right where I needed to go. I looked down at my hands for my bear spray, remembering as an eerie, creeping feeling welled that I had made the hubristic decision an hour prior to leave it in the car. That isolation I mentioned earlier? I felt it then...a different version of the isolation so common on a solo trip like this, distinct from when I find myself alone at a campsite on a Saturday night or the only Jew in church, but isolation all the same. The bear stood there, five hundred feet away, silently weighing which way to travel, and I stood there too, paralyzed, waiting to learn my fate.

I was left. The bear chose right. My plan of rapidly rescaling the cliff and then kicking down at the bear - a brilliant plan, truly, one of my best - never had to be tested. Instead, I lingered on the boundary of the beach and the woods and as it slowly ambled away, growing simultaneously frustrated as the sun plummeted and in awe of this moment that I was savoring alone, alongside only my new ursine companion. From hundreds of feet away, watching it shift its winter weight from paw to paw, I felt a remarkable closeness with this beast that knew nothing of my existence, luxuriated in an intimacy that was either deeply real or the result of a wholesale absence of human touch for the last fifty days. Then, with the sun nearly kissing the whitecaps, the bear stopped, turned, and sat on its enormous ass. It faced the setting sun and watched it set. Bears do this, apparently: they take it all in. I did so too and for a few seconds, even if the bear had no idea that I was there, we shared that moment. Like every occurrence on a road trip, it was fleeting, evaporating and before I knew it, the bear was in motion again and so was I. My feet didn't touch the trail more than twice on the way back.

Two nights later, in the outskirts of Astoria, I stood on another beach, this time surrounded by people. The sun was long down, the sand and the sky a thousand shades of gray. Everyone around me was wearing headlamps, using strange contraptions to dig for something beneath the surface. I approached a woman, a friendly wind-washed smile wrapped across her face, and introduced myself as an idiot. "Hi," I smiled, too wide, "I'm from New York and all this is totally foreign to me. Would you mind explaining what you're up to?" Lila - I've changed her name here - very patiently took the time to point out the razorneck clams everyone was searching for, the telltale signs of their burrowing, how to seek them out (a truly absurd dance that includes ample stomping; I later learned that I'm a natural) and so on. But the clams were just the opening repartee. Lila, volunteering her pronouns, proceeded to share much more about herself than what I had asked - she was a trans woman, had come out when the Obama Administration had allowed trans Americans to join the military, that decision producing a barrier-breaking relief that carried with it perceived safety, and then abruptly had been fired from both of her jobs (including a government job she'd held for 30 years), called disgusting pejoratives, lost her healthcare, and countless more miseries. The light was setting all around me.

Lila continued, telling me that she'd sued the county, won a landmark decision (I'm fairly confident that the only reason she offered so much about herself was because I, like her team of attorneys, hailed from New York and she wanted to know if we were socially acquainted), and was now trying to make sense of how to move forward in life. Too young to retire, too old to start again - so why not catch clams until things fell into order?

Just like with the bear forty-eight hours prior, I felt a sudden intimacy. Lila had shared depths of herself with me and I was rendered more thoughtful, more compassionate for it - and I knew all at once that this kind of interaction, so rare, is only made possible by the precarious circumstances of the road trip and the vulnerable version of myself it precipitates. There is a transience to this existence I am inhabiting, no motel bed or campsite slept in more than once, and with that transience comes both a sense of distance and a willingness to widely outstretch my arms and fill them to the brim with everything they entrap. If Laredo was on the bottom of all things, catching whatever trickled down, these two coastal experiences - on the edge of it all - rather aptly captured the balancing act that this voyage fundamentally represents. I am always alone and never alone, in a constant state of baffling calm while also hurtling around flitting roads in a thin can of steel. Every turn carries risk and it's that risk and the possibility it belies that gives a trip like this its meaning, pushes away any hint of staleness, mitigates those whiffs of homesickness. On the Road is a story of motion and platonic love and vitality but it is also one of regret and suffering: its richness inhabits within those multitudes, those sweet juxtapositions. In the salty air, heavy with its own contrasts, I'm searching for the same.