Rambling stories

When I was fifteen I went on a school trip from Michigan to Florida. I ended up on a different bus than my friends – essentially, I was travelling alone. I remember angling my book toward the fading daylight. The interior lights switched on and the world became bus-shaped, isolated, moving fast through the darkness. I watched my face floating ghostly in the window; the white edge of the road, an impossibly long line, running away behind us. The lights went off. I slept. When I woke I felt a jolt go through me - we were someplace else. Spanish moss hung beautiful and sinister from the tree line. I’d never seen it before.

In that moment, I fell in love with road trips, and with what can happen between the beginning and the end of a journey. In a car I become a pilgrim. I have a map on the seat beside me, but that’s for physical things. My Self is on a road with no markers. When I return I will be different, bigger; for weeks I will be filled with the sounds of road and wind and engine, like the ocean in a shell. At some point I will leave the map behind…. OK, so I get lost a lot, but that’s where the memories happen. To have discovery, you first need a little unknown.

I've patched the distance by weird routes: back roads in Ohio, with tall grass rising maze-like at the edges; twisting hill roads in New York State, in a high wind full of spinning yellow leaves. I've driven along mountain ridges into sunsets, into thunderstorms, into places where people live inches from the edge. When I’m tired I stop, and if I’m lucky there are other pilgrims waiting to swap stories. When I was 17 I stayed up all night in a motel parking lot with five strangers, until the rain chased us indoors. Before I left the next day one of them drew new lines on my map, refusing to let me take the next leg by highway. I will carry the road I took instead with me forever.

“How did I end up here” can be asked of many things. I’m here – with my stories, adventurous and hopeful, knowing I've lived – because I've walked the labyrinth outside my door. Driven rather, while line after impossibly long line, tying one story into another, runs along behind.