Miles....Miles.....

Siri, take a note.

Hey friends -

A dear friend and mentor commented on a photo of mine recently, “Miles…..Miles….”

In the past three weeks - not quite - I’ve spent time on both coasts and scribbled and scrawled a path all over the middle. The odometer has ticked up nearly 8k miles since early May. I’ve met some incredible people, done some work that feels worthwhile, helped out and been helped, fallen asleep and woken up in a whole lot of places but never once wondered where I was or why, and believe me when I tell you I am tired.

On one leg of this trek, as I retraced a route I took more than 30 years ago, I was reminded of a story, and that story reminded me of a piece I posted here pretty early in the Going Solo days. Some of you might remember this one; if you’re new here, welcome, welcome - kick back and enjoy the ride.

This month marks four years I’ve been on the road. Looks like there’s nothing for it but to head on into the fifth. I’ll see you back here next week with the annual photo essay for a glance back at where we’ve been this year. As always - I’m so glad to have you along for this journey, and so grateful you’re here. xo - M

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Dangerous Crosswinds

Originally posted June 7, 2024

Somebody asked me the other day if I write while I drive. The simple answer is yes—sometimes I dictate passages or whole drafts using a voice-to-text transcription thingamajig, then edit when I park; more often, I say, "Siri, take a note," and this bitch says in her faintly evil way, "I'm listening," which I really don't like but what am I gonna do, complain? somebody's got to take notes and lord knows Zeke won't, and anyway, once I had a husband, he was riding shotgun, we were on our way from somewhere way out east back to the northland, he didn't drive and couldn't read a goddamn map which frankly rendered him pretty useless as husbands and traveling companions generally go, so when I asked him "what's our exit?" he tried to use the maps app and suddenly he's frantic, asking me, "Exit for what? Which way are we headed? Why is it doing this?" as the maps app got confused and started turning itself around and around, and Siri started in with "Rerouting. Rerouting" in that weird-ass hostile warning tone she gets, and he started yelling, "WTF! Stop rerouting! Where are we even going?" which is an existential question any one of us could reasonably ask most any time, and I said, "Dude, I don't fucking know," and quoted a poem which struck me right then as relevant, and the husband said, "Oh, shut up" and shook the phone like an Etch-a-Sketch but it just kept on chanting Rerouting, rerouting till finally he shrieked, "Fuck you, Siri!" and Siri, palpably wounded, replied, "I'm only trying to help."

So usually I just say, "Siri, take a note," and Siri takes a note, and we lapse into an uncomfortable detente, each of us aware that the other one is listening, but unsure to what.

The notes often look something like this, from a few weeks back:

Indiana Toll Road

May 2024

·      The number of times I've said "fuck you" to my phone since 6 a.m.

·      The windowless cinderblock Holiday Inn

·      Nirvana slouching across the airwaves

·      Abandoned streets in Prophetstown

·      Speaking of havoc

·      Game on, bitch

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There was a time, early in this journey, when I thought the most obvious way to organize my notes would be according to place—where I was when I wrote something down, or the location I was writing was about. I've had the habit as long as I can remember of noting my location at the top of any blank page I've taken a notion to fill.

As an organizational strategy for something that covers this much distance and time, it never would have worked.

A week's notes from the road, inclusive of those I dictate and edit later and those I just write down, number in the dozens, sometimes hundreds of pages. Where have I been? All over. How did I get there? Took the long way and took my time. Do I file it under Hurricane, West Virginia Hotel? Nasty Squall in Outer Banks? Savannah Graveyard Date, Gator Sighting in So. Carolina, Gas Station/Georgia/Sketchy Dude, Alabama Heartbreak, Arkansas Tow? Do I try to organize from point to point, by distance spanned? No, that won't work—what if I want to find the notes that tell me the name of the mountaintop river that flows south to north, or the notes that tell me why? What if I want the notes about the town without any name that was full of houses where nobody lived? If I file these pages under "May 2024: Hurricane, WV > Palm Springs," it's misleading: it suggests a straight shot, mountains to desert, east to west, but that's not how it went. That's not the route I took.

It never is.

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Couple of days ago I went into my files to look for something I wrote down a while back, I couldn't remember exactly where or when. I remembered, like I always do, the physical details, the present tense of the thing: I was on a break from a long stretch of road. I was sitting on the driver's side running board with my laptop balanced on my knees, watching Zeke snortle around in the grass. The grass wasn't dry but it wasn't wet; it was hot, but not blazing hot, not Atlantic Coast hot, not hot like the Deep South, so it was north and west of everything southeast. It wasn't Kansas, because Zeke won’t pee in Kansas; it wasn't Oklahoma, either, because I always seem to go through Oklahoma at night, and this was afternoon, right about 3, given where the sun was in the sky, and the light was thinner than it was yellow, so it was spring.

Finally I remembered—I was on the Indiana Toll Road.

That would have been helpful, maybe, if I hadn't labeled another note "Indiana Toll Road" exactly four years before. I found them both when I typed in the search.

Indiana Toll Road

May 2020

·      The photo she sent labelled "this is not me"

·      Hoarse from singing Supertramp

·      World's Largest Truckstop, I-80

·      All the things I didn't think to question at the time

·      This DJ is clearly recovering from a broken heart

I remember that trip. I wish I didn't, but I do.

I remember the route I took, the rate at which I traveled, the fact that I got from point to point in record time. I remember that year: the shutdown, the nearly empty interstates, the abandoned hotels.

That trip feels longer ago than it was, almost back in the Before Times. I clearly remember the first time I heard someone use that phrase—the Before Times—to describe the world as it was before the pandemic hit. It was Lora—we were on the phone, she at home in San Francisco, me in a third-floor walk-up I never bothered to furnish and barely unpacked, standing by the window where I could keep an eye on both the street and the door. Even then, the phrase felt accurate, if prescient; though the pandemic was just getting started, just beginning to double and redouble, mutate and refine, spread and grow yet more adept at spreading, burrowing into our lives, even then we had a sense that the world as we’d known it only a few months before was gone.

In May of 2020, driving a cheap-o model Jeep I'd bought in a hurry, somewhere on the Indiana Toll Road, I said, "Siri, take a note," and Siri took a note.

Last month, in May of 2024, somewhere on the Indiana Toll Road, I said, "Siri, take a note," and Siri took a note.

Nothing else is the same. Not the reason for leaving or the place I left. Not the place I was headed or the person awaiting me there. Not the driver, not the truck. Not even the road, nor the heart of the country through which it cuts.

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I-40 West

June 1995

Two girls, young and terribly brave, get it in their heads to hop in an orange hand-me-down Toyota Tercel and just go.

I dropped her off in Albuquerque and kept going.  

She never forgave me. I never stopped.

I-40 West

December 2022

James and I hit the New Mexico state line same way everybody else does: the otherworldly landscape reels up out of nowhere, the welcome sign for the "Land of Enchantment" flies by on the right, the tires start bouncing off the buckles and breaks in the blacktop, the truck starts to shimmy and rattle right down to the chassis, and pretty soon we're pulling off at the first rest stop, made of adobe, cool and low-roofed inside.

I was heading into my first winter on the road. James—dear friend and fellow traveler—was along for the ride. He'd travel with me as far as a remote campsite in the borderlands of southern Arizona, where I planned to spend the next few months. We'd left Minneapolis a few days before, taken I-35 South through Iowa down to Kansas City before cutting southwest on I-40 all the way to Santa Fe. From there, we'd head due south and make our way to Truth or Consequences. Who wouldn't? I drove and we fought about something long since forgotten and Zeke refused to pee in Kansas and James wanted to get noodles in downtown St. Louis on a Friday night so we went lumbering through the neon and music with a truck and a camper like the couple of rookies we were, and there was that whole scene with the tailgating driver at the Kum n' Go, and then up and over a crest and there it was: New Mexico veered into view. It did feel enchanted, it always does, and everything is very still: blue-black mountains, red mesas, dun-colored flatlands, all of it glowing gold.

All along that stretch of desert highway, there are warning signs about the wind. Nowadays, they mostly say, "Gusty Winds May Exist." Let me tell you, when you're struggling to keep five tons of truck and camper on the road as gusty winds make every effort to wrench you and all your worldly goods right off the mountain and dash you down on the desert floor, the existential implication of the indefinite clause seems more than a little absurd, and as we drove, I told James that back in my day, when I went a-wandering, on foot, in shorts and sandals, along an abandoned highway in New Mexico one auld lang distant afternoon last century, carrying a notebook and a pen in my trusty rucksack, set on reaching a nearby town where I intended to acquire a cheap handle of unspecified booze, and as I went, and the small, neighborly sounds of a small, neighborly town with a general store faded in the distance, and the clicking, sibilant sounds of the desert grew louder, closer, the thick, habitated silence of the desert seemed to crawl right up to the edge of the abandoned road, crowding in, and I squinted to let my eyes adjust to the changed degree of equatorial light, and my plan of walking 15 miles began to seem a bit ambitious, and it was summer, July, and very hot, I didn't know how hot, and I remembered the first time I went to the desert, when I was six or seven, and my mother came in from a long walk and stood at the kitchen sink and filled a glass of water and drank it without breathing, then filled the glass again and drank it without breathing again, then set the glass down on the counter and looked at me the way she does—those piercing, nearly-black eyes—and said, You have to be careful in the desert. The heat can be deadly, like the cold can, up north—and I saw a road sign up ahead that was bent strangely. As I got closer, I saw that it was not bent but twisted; and as I came upon it, I saw that the signpost was twisted in spirals, corkscrewed, and the face of the sign was bent away.

I strayed off the road to see what it said. I took a few steps into the brush, heard a rattle, and stopped.

The snake was sleepy, sun drunk, it barely bothered to lift its head. It lay looped in a heap of itself, back sliding over its belly, belly sliding over its back.

I said oops, sorry, and slowly backed onto the road. I watched my feet the whole way back to town.

James looked out the window as I spoke. "What did it say?" he asked.

"What?"

"The sign," he said, exasperated. "What did it say?"

"Oh!" I said. "It said, 'Dangerous Crosswinds Beware."

Same place, different world.

Even on that first trip, in 1995, I had the sense that the America I'd thought to go and see was not what I'd been taught, not what I'd been told, not what anyone said, not what I'd thought or hoped or believed. Even then, the cracks and fissures in this country were deep and were spreading; even then, the wildness beneath the surface was stirring, rising, beginning to take it back.

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Last week I gritted my teeth and ran on the white sand of the lower Atlantic shore, bare feet burning with every step.

I woke up in North Carolina.

I woke up in Alabama.

I woke up at a truck stop in Texas.

It was 34 degrees when I woke up at 4 a.m. at a gas station off of I-40 in northern New Mexico where I'd stopped to grab a piece of pie and a pre-dawn nap. I walked Zeke in the dark, got two cups of coffee to go, and let the rising sun chase me down the mountains, across Arizona, and into the desert that borders Baja. When I stopped for gas late afternoon it was a windless 96 degrees; the heat reared up and hit me full in the face as soon as I got out of the truck. That night, high beams tunneling through a dark so deep I might as well have been out to sea, I climbed Highway 1, switchback by curve, dizzy with the smell of eucalyptus, pampas grass, woodsmoke, salt. Zeke lay burrowed under a blanket with only her nose out, twitching in the ocean wind as we skirted the cliffs above Bodega Bay.

This morning, Zeke ran ahead of me on a wild, remote Pacific beach. Bundled in layers and barefoot, I picked my way through flotsam and jetsam, kelp and seashell, spume and foam.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion. By the time these notes are finished, and I put the laptop in my backpack, and whistle for Zeke, and she gallops toward me, ears streaming in the wind, and we get in the truck and buckle up and get back on the road, wherever we were is gone. By the time we return, if we return, everything will have changed.

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