My back hurts from sitting for 10 to 11 hours a day. When I close my eyes, I see maps, routes stretching out in all directions, speed limit signs, distance markers and dotted highway lines endlessly passing under me. When I lick my lips, I taste dust. I smell of wandering. I am always in motion.
My car is a cake of mud sprinkled lightly with bug guts. Inside, it has its own compartments where my camera, maps, CDs, change and other important items live. I’ve created a traveling apartment with every room imaginable except for the bathroom (If I could only work that out. Just think, I wouldn’t have to stop as often). But it is no home.
Being on the road this long completely alone, without the normal chatter of life, dwelling for so many hours in so much silence changes you. It makes you pay attention to every last detail. It makes you listen to things differently. It makes you know things that would have otherwise been unknowable, and to do things that otherwise would not have made sense.
When you are really attuned to that stillness, when you can touch that place deep inside yourself where the known becomes seen and understood, it is a truly magical moment.
At least that’s what I told myself as I stood at a lonely intersection in the middle of the dust yesterday evening, looking one way west towards Idaho and the other south, the wrong way, into the sprawling desert. That’s what I told myself as my body ached and my eyes burned in the dryness as I tried to force myself to face the comically wide highway to the ocean and instead found myself facing the narrow, meandering road into the hot stone expanse.
I have been carrying a suitcase full of doubt with me for several days, feeling lost in the vastness of the trip, the miles from my starting point and my destination weighing heavily upon my soul. The choice should have been simple. In fact, there should be no choice at all. I should have just driven onward along the prescribed path into the Pacific Northwest, a straight shot from here to my destination, and gotten off the damned road.
But that’s sometimes when the silence speaks up loudest.
Because as I stood there, the unknowable thing I knew with every ounce of my being was that I had to reach Sedona, Arizona by Monday. I can’t even tell you why I knew that or when that message reached me. But it was clear and unwavering and had pulled me off the road. It nagged at me as I paced up and down for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. It picked at me as I sat on the hood of my car with my head in my hands, as I distracted myself with digging rocks out of the soles of my shoes, as I argued with myself over the extra cost I would incur. But it was of no use.
Despite the fact that it would put nearly the entire width of the United States between me and Seattle, and that I would have to end up driving that width not once but twice, I really had no choice. I had to listen to that voice.
Slowly I walked back to the car, which I’d left parked up under the shade of a scrub tree, and I sighed. And then I left the grandeur of Wyoming, glancing just once at the easy road to the West I was choosing against. I turned the car south, preparing to prolong the journey with yet another loop.
Route: Drive around and around until I found 15S and then just traveled like hell until I reached Beaver, Utah.