Hubris
Is it presumptuous to label this chapter one, the implication of such a title being that there are more chapters to come? The first leg of this journey, only partially covered by this entry, has seen us clocking an average of 75 MPH for about five hours per day in our old Subaru Forester. In 2022, an average of 117 people died per day as a result of traffic incidences. But that won’t happen to us!
Saying goodbye
Farewells are hard, even if you’re coming back in a month. And again the following month. Farewells are more difficult when you’re saying goodbye to those you’ll never see again. To those whom you haven’t seen in years already. Whom you’ve kept alive in your heart through mementos. Shedding such memorials, which you hadn’t realized resided in every room of your now former home, rips open the wound again, revives the grief you thought you’d buried. Comparing loss to a zombie seems an irreverent metaphor, but it does keep coming back. Hopefully weaker each time you’ve fought it off.
Perhaps the stranger thing is saying goodbye to the parts of yourself that were long ago put to rest, often unknowingly, but had similarly left their remnants all over your home. Those hobbies you were certain you’d someday return to, that defined who you were at a time, that you maybe even thought you still identified with, relics through which you inadvertently mythologized yourself. Sometimes acknowledging the difference between your self image and your reflection can really hurt, but a fallacious idea of the self is always an encumbrance.
Certain bandages are easier to pull of than others. Shedding everything you own that can’t fit into the back of a compact crossover SUV isn’t logistically difficult. Crossing the emotional minefield of learning how much of your heart and spirit are held together by trinkets, unfinished books, spare parts and broken objects is what makes it so hard. I left Wisconsin with my flesh covered in the grimy outlines of hundreds of bandages. I agonized over many of these decisions and discoveries. But I think, by the time the stars return to this position above us, I’ll have forgotten the tinier things that seemed to matter so much.
Nebraska
You probably don’t think much about Nebraska unless you live there. Maybe there was that one time you raced home through the state, cranky, bleeding, and over-medicated, and you remember very little outside the misery and the gas station Indian restaurant you stopped at before taking a sweltering nap in a car seat that couldn’t fully recline. Not fond memories. But Nebraska is a pretty cool place, I’ve come to find. It’s easy to have a singular image of what a state is in your mind, forgetting all its neighbors whose own images — accurate or not — bleed across the arbitrary boundaries our forefathers drew.
Heatwaves
The only real downside of my time in Nebraska, aside from leaving behind the caffeine and nicotine addictions and facing their respective withdrawal symptoms, has been the terrible heatwave. Actually in some ways the high temperatures have been wonderful: camping two nights we didn’t need extra clothing or even our sleeping bags. The state’s famed wind felt glorious at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We had to hide in caves, under trees, at lake sides and within restaurants whenever we left the car, but this only encouraged us to eat great local food and explore Nebraska’s beautiful natural parks. Of which it has many, and they are very well equipped and staffed. The park amenities are excellent in Nebraska.
Hours in a car
When living in a building it’s easy to ignore the sky. When living in a car, the sky dominates so much of your ocular experience. Even on mostly clear days, jet trails crisscross the blue expanse and drift away in waves belying the celestial stillness. Air currents high in the atmosphere reveal themselves when you pay attention. When a storm rolls in off the Laramie Mountains, colliding with the more innocuous cumulus casually drifting eastward, fantastically dramatic layers form, looking unrealistic, looking more painting than reality, and the world feels more dynamic, a more wonderful show than you often think to take the time to watch. The miles of passing grass and rock, tree and edifice start to tell stories of their own, rolling over eons of geologic time, hinting at migration patterns animal and anthropological alike, singing songs commemorating ancient floods, rebuking the idea that the world around you is just scenery, demanding recognition of the billions of stories, some tragically concluded and many triumphantly ongoing, that the land records.
Many years ago, checked into a hostel in Montana, leafing through the guest book, I found a traveler’s note that traversing the world on foot, or by bike, revealed so much more than one could ever see from a car. But there is still so much to see from a car, if you only look. The passage concluded metaphorically that “cars are coffins,” and for some 42,000 people a year in the US, the statement can be assumed literal. Those $30,000 commuter vehicles which separate soul from body also ensnare the bereaved with modestly noteworthy items newly transformed into deeply intimate remainders. Maybe we could live better, longer, without cars. Maybe heat waves would become less common, less intense. And while I can agree that one sees more in a mile on foot than a mile on wheels, that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater: cars peel open the map before you. It’s a destructive power, but not one without the benefit of exposing a living, breathing world to those who take it as far as it’ll go.
