'And walked off to look for America'

Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America

This story—the part of it that's mine, anyway—begins the day I slammed the tailgate shut on the silver truck, hitched up the Scamp, and drove away.

But not really; that's not where it starts. Where did the Scamp come from? When did I get the truck? Is it my first truck? Where was I going? What did I leave behind, and whom?

A: My mother bought the Scamp. My father bought the truck. They worry; I'm impossible, and they're old.

It was not my first truck.

I was going nowhere. I was going nowhere in particular. I was just going. I needed to get gone.

I left behind very little. There was very little left to leave.

Now there's even less.

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

This morning when I stepped outside onto the wet grass, I was tangled in mist, there was mist rising off of the river, everything glowed.

I'm writing this outside of Pittsburgh. By the time you read it, Pittsburgh will have come and gone.

But of course, that's not the case; Pittsburgh will be right where it was. All that will have come and gone is me.

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

In December of 2017 I drove out to a remote cottage in Minnesota to get a writing project done. It was snowing, had been snowing, kept snowing for days. The cottage had a squat black wood stove and a wide window with a view of a snow-covered horse run and a narrow single bed. I could walk in the snow without my hat and nuzzle the noses of miniature horses with snow in their manes. I could eat squash for breakfast and oatmeal for dinner if I wanted to. The fire in the woodstove transfixed me: I sat at its feet, feeding it logs as if bottle-feeding a dragon I had accidentally found. Fat flakes of snow summersaulted past the window, snow whooshed off the roof in sheaves.

I sat at a small table by the window and wondered why I kept returning to a particular subject, one that had been cropping up for years—at first only here and there, in the odd poem or letter, then in an essay, then another essay, then in a whole series of articles. It's not unusual for people who make things to go on a jag, working and reworking a phrase or a color or an image or a subject till they get it out of their system and move on to the next thing that gets stuck in their craw; but I wondered why solitude in particular kept creeping in—a refrain, a riff, yet another variation on a theme.

I myself wasn't particularly solitary, or didn't see myself as such. I had and have wonderful friends, colleagues I liked and admired, a smattering of family with whom I stayed in touch. And I was married. My husband had been sick for many years; solitude was rare. Caregiving requires an acute proximity that some partnerships do not; the care and attention required is constant, no matter how willing one is to provide that care. I was willing; I was also aware that it had an impact on my life and my work. I begged, borrowed, and stole a day or a week away to write here and there. The dull, constant longing for more time alone, more time to write, was present, but it was a want I couldn't afford, so when it welled up in my chest, as it did from time to time, I turned away from the window and went to stand in the kitchen, as if to stand there was purpose enough in itself, to turn off a hall light or turn on a lamp, to murmur something about reading in the dark and the dimness hurting his eyes.

I couldn't want time alone because to want such a thing would be to court an outcome that would shatter me and was likely enough as it was. So a week, a long weekend, a moment to watch the snow fall and tend my own fire was enough.

In those years, solitude became a character of sorts. I wrote about her each time I caught a day or two alone. She was a visitor, a familiar—I saw her from the porch, flashing a smirk before she darted back into the woods. I caught a glimpse of her turning a corner as I came down the stairs. I wrote about her early in the morning before the light was up; I wrote about her late at night as I sat in the chair at the side of the hospital bed—I thought of it as the Vigil Chair—glancing up at the numbers on the screen: oxygen, brain activity, blood pressure, pulse.

Solitude walked past now and then, usually at night, in the florescence of the hospital hall. The sound caught my attention—shoes squeaking, a distant voice—and I'd turn to look. Then I’d turn back to the shadowy shoulder under the hospital blanket, lit blue by the ambient light and blinking screens, and keep track of its rise and fall.

I wrote about solitude buried under a heap of quilts in a four-poster bed in a rented room in a drafty farmhouse one New Year’s Eve in Vermont.

I wrote about solitude in an Oklahoma Rodeway Motel.

I wrote about solitude at a hip coffee shop in Pasadena and on a train from Saint Paul to Milwaukee and I wrote about her in airport food courts and hotel bars and a McDonald's in Arlington, VA.

I wrote about her on the stone portico of a strange little hobbit house we stayed in one Christmas outside of Big Sur before Highway One really fell into the sea.

I wrote about her on a deck overlooking a fern-dense creek in Ferndale, Tennessee a few miles up the road from the Loveless Motel.

Five years ago this month, I went into my kitchen, leaned a hip against the sink while coffee brewed, and watched a storm rumble in across Lake Superior from the east. The sunrise blazed, a violent streak of pink below a heavy bank of blue-black clouds. The wind picked up, whistling at the edges of my windowpanes; I needed to seal them up before winter came.

As I looked out over the water, a crack of thunder shook the floor; a sudden a surge of spray flew into the air past the cliff at the property's edge. The sirens that warn incoming ships began to sound as Superior began to churn. Silver waves swelled and rolled toward shore, flung themselves against the craggy rocks, burst into towers of spray.

It was chilly. I poured coffee and went into the other room to start a fire for myself and solitude, who'd made herself at home in the other reading chair, and appeared to be fixing to stay.

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

Late last night I waded all the way across the river on the banks of which I'm probably illegally camped and then I turned around and waded halfway back and stopped to sit down on a rock and let the river run over my shoulders and looked at the moon, which was very bright.

No one tells a you how to navigate solitude.

No one tells you how to cross a fast creek swollen with snowmelt. No one tells you what to do about a bear.

No one is coming to help you get the wasp nest out of the eaves. No one will carry the ladder for you or steady it as you climb.

No one says to a girl, See here. This is how you map a terrain of your own. This is the shape and nature of silence. This is how you move when you have sufficient space.

Latitude and longitude of an empty room.

Degree and angle of a lengthening day.

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America

All journeys are driven by a question, and that question is driven by desire. When this story started, I knew I wanted freedom; the question was whether, and how, it could be found.

There were other questions, of course. Can I handle life on the road? How do you level a camper? Where's the fucking converter? What's a fuse? Can I make it on my own?

That one was easy. Of course I can.

This story started when I slammed the tailgate shut on the silver truck and walked out on my life. And I’ll tell you—walking out isn't a solution to shit; sometimes it's the choice you make by default, sometimes it’s the only choice you've got.

But had I had a better choice, I don't think I would have had the guts to go.

If I'd seen even the slightest glimmer of hope that I could hang on to what I had. If I thought I could have pulled some stunt to keep a roof over my head, get my bills paid, keep myself warm and fed. If I'd thought love was the answer; if I'd even been willing to bother with love. If I really believed my well-meaning friends when they said Things will get better—just wait, I'd have sat the fuck down.

Would I have left? If I had known how difficult this would be? If I went back and told myself the truth?

The rest of your life will be hard. Comfort will be so rare that when it comes, it will seem suspect, strange. You will sometimes be hungry. Your hands and feet will ache all the time. Your body will morph into a powerful sinewy animal, quick to bolt. You think your startle reflex is bad now? Spend two years sleeping at truck stops. Your face will shapeshift not just with age but with something else; you’ll always be on guard. Everything will feel scarce, will be scarce. There will never be enough, so you will change your understanding of enough, and then it will be almost enough.

I'd have asked myself, What's in it for me?

I’d probably shrug. Freedom. Peace. Absolute sovereignty over your life.

I'd adjust my bandana and get up to go. Take it or leave it, I'd say. But don't sit there and bitch.

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Songwriters: Paul Simon

America lyrics © Sony/atv Songs Llc