The afternoon I left, Clayton said, “I don’t want you to go, Momma,” and a tearful Dee Dee jumped into my arms and wrapped her arms and legs around me. My own separation anxiety rose in my throat and suddenly the whole trip seemed like a bad idea. How could I miss four sweet bedtimes, four mornings of waking to Clayton climbing into bed to snuggle, the girls’ dreamy morning faces? Plus, Don was clearly stressed from a hard week at work, and it seemed cruel to leave him flying solo while I flitted off to Florida by myself. Not to mention the fact that we were only four chapters from the end of the last Harry Potter book, and nobody— including me— wanted to wait four long days to find out if and how Voldemort met his end at last. The car was packed, the GPS was set, but suddenly nine hours and twenty-eight minutes seemed far too long a drive for a weekend, far too many miles to put between me and my family. Could I still change my mind?
I didn’t, of course. The miles rolled away easily as I cruised down the mountain, Robert Siegel’s voice dissolving into static on the radio. When Marketplace was over, I opened the case in which, two summers ago, I had stored my modest collection of CDs, forcing myself to discard all the cracked plastic cases. This was some of the same music I had listened to over thousands of miles two decades ago, when gas was ninety-eight cents a gallon and my Triple-A map could have been a dot-to-dot. First, Florida to California and back again, when college graduation had cast me into the world with few marketable skills and even less sense of purpose. Four months later, I was back on the road to California, ashamed of the months I had spent at home, waiting tables and generally making a mess of my life while my worried parents looked on, dismayed. If I was going to be a fool, better to do it in the privacy of a vast and distant city, where only I and my unlucky boyfriend would know my folly and my loneliness. I was already twenty-three, after all, and had to start a life somewhere; going West felt like both a rite of passage and a tried-and-true part of our national heritage.
By the next winter, I’d shaved my head and planned my escape to Ecuador, where I’d relearn Spanish and work as a volunteer for a cloud forest conservation organization. But first the boyfriend and I drove to Texas for one last adventure in the winter desert, then north to Colorado, where we boarded our respective planes, both relieved that we had managed to part with some modicum of grace.
Six months later, the drive from Colorado back to California felt like nothing, a skip and a jump, and there were the sea lions lounging on the beach again, the dry hills of Berkeley like the answer to a prayer. Suddenly California smelled like home and even if I hadn’t quite found myself, at least I had a better idea of what I was looking for. I settled in for my real life, got down to the business of growing up at last. I found love and then lost it, was consoled by the few true friends I’d mined like jewels from the city’s throngs. I found my calling and had the sense to follow it, first to the South Bay and then to the South. There was one last trek to make out of California, all my belongings piled high in the back of the old pick-up I bought for three thousand dollars from an elderly Korean man who insisted on paying for the registration that was coming due.
“It’s like the Grapes of Wrath in reverse,” my parents laughed when I stopped again in Colorado, seeing my truck piled high. My father bought yards of bungee cords and helped me tie down the tarp that had come loose before I’d even made it out of Sacramento County. I had no air-conditioning, so I drove east in the early mornings, a hundred miles under my belt by eight o’clock, Hal Ketchum on the tape deck urging me along.
Now I have power-steering and air-conditioning; all my cassettes are gone except for a few sentimental mix tapes stowed away in a drawer somewhere. I listen to an old Hal Ketchum CD and sing along, overcome by nostalgia and a sense of loss I didn’t expect. By any measure, I am far happier now than then. Love has long since ceased to be a fragile, transient thing to be watched closely for signs of wear; home is no longer a restless quest but a haven shared with my best friend and my children.
And yet as I drive, the sense of loss persists. I listen to the Indigo Girls, but I’ve got no map to get out and lay my finger on. Now the GPS tells me how to go and where to stop if I grow weary. There is an ease in this, but it has its costs. For a moment I allow myself to miss the olden times, when the roads were mine to choose as I wished, not dictated to me by a disembodied voice. I’d stop at dusty rest areas and spread my map out on the burning hood, scanning it for its little squares of green, eager as a pirate for whatever out-of-the-way treasure I might find there. At night, I spread my sleeping bag on the couches of friends of friends, the piney ground of National Forests, the gravelly tent pads of lesser-known state parks. I never set up my tent if I could help it, but fell asleep with eyes heavy from star-gazing, the sky stretched out above me with its endless map of stars.
One cold February morning, I woke at the Grand Canyon, the ground around the tent dusted in snow. I’d left my boots sitting in the vestibule of the tent as if this were any summer trip, and sliding my cold toes into them, I felt like I’d been put on notice. Ready or not, the seasons turned; summer didn’t last forever. Eventually, even the highway would come to an end, and how long would I keep driving? In that moment, it seemed I’d been reminded that the time for recklessness and foolishness had passed, that this was the life I had and I’d better get on with it, that home was waiting if I could only find it.
