Setting Out

A little backstory, and a hint at what's ahead.

American Dreams™

            Those of you who've jumped in on this project and will be with me as it moves ahead—and I am so deeply grateful for your readership and support—will see two stories emerge, woven together to form a helix. Broadly speaking, these strands represent my understanding of the social experience: the story of the individual self is irrevocably bound up in the story of society; likewise, the story of society is shaped by, and recorded by, subjective, limited, flawed individual selves. This project intentionally reflects that subjectivity; it will necessarily reflect those limitations and flaws. The mutual influence of who we are as individuals and how our individual actions shape and are shaped by our social world is what I am here to explore. We are affected by circumstance, by era, by the shaping force of historical time; we are also implicated in those things and bear the responsibility of taking wise and ethical action wherever we can.

            One strand of this story is just the tale of a traveler: a stranger comes to town. A woman sets out to see what she can see. That story began, for me, with the fall of Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, which was the inciting incident that set this whole journey in motion. The other strand is the story of a nation that is deeply fragmented and fundamentally flawed. In weaving these stories together, it is my hope that a dialogue will emerge in between the personal and the political; that dialogue, in turn, may reveal something about the ways in which the historical tangle of sex, gender, body autonomy, marriage, property, territory, and law continue to inform and in some ways corrupt not just American lives but American life. Zeke and I aren’t just wandering hither and yon as the wind blows; we're following social and cultural narratives back to this country's beginnings, and trying to get at the heart of the phantasmal American Dream™.

            From America's colonialist origins and ongoing impulse toward empire, whitewashed and glossed up as Go west, young man, to the idealization of individualism and the misinterpretation of individual rights, from laws that made it possible to claim ownership of other human beings to laws designed to enforce the maintenance of a fertile herd of breeding stock and an ever-expanding, impoverished, and functionally captive labor class, the historical story that is being written as we speak reveals the centrality of gender roles, heterosexual marriage, and bodily control to American social structures, the American economy, and to this nation's concept of itself.

            I am moving through a landscape where rights, autonomy, and freedom remain fraught and fragile, both as concept and as fact. What I’m learning reveals more and more about how present-day America was build, and for whose profit, and at what cost. The individual stories I hear and tell, both mine and those of the people who are willing to share theirs with me, shed light on the story of a body politic, which in turn sheds light on our individual and collective lives; ultimately, this dialogue can help illuminate the path—whatever it is—that lies ahead.

The Tramp Scamp

            In the summer of 2022, when Roe v. Wade was struck down by a Supreme Court which was fully one-third comprised of men credibly and publicly accused of sexual assault, my mother and I convened on her back porch to discuss. As my phone blew up with frantic texts from women—all angry, all frightened, all stunned, all of them trying to make any sense of anything at all—and as my preternaturally restless mother held far too still, I tried to steer the conversation somewhere else.

            "So," I asked cheerfully, "what are you going to do when Steve dies?" Steve is my mother's husband of 20ish years. This was not perhaps an ideal starter for a lighthearted chat, but there you are.

            She replied, "I don't know. It depends on where you go."

            "Not to Oregon?"

            "Not if you're not in Oregon."

            "I can be in Oregon," I said, grinning. "I should get a Scamp! I can drive to Oregon. I'll park in the driveway. Then, wherever I go next, you can come with me. There are two beds. You can have the big one."

            "That's silly," she sniffed. "It's your house, you should have the bigger bed."

            I didn't yet have the Scamp.

            And then she told me something that I'd never known: when she was in her 20s, throughout the 1960s, my mother and her first husband bought a camper and traveled in it all over the world.

            "I remember driving away the day I left him, sobbing," she said, then added, "because I knew I would miss the camper, and the sea."

            We sat there in silence. "You should have kept the camper," I said.

            She scowled. "I know."

            What if she had?

             My mother's journey was altered, irrevocably and not in ways she wanted, not just by getting pregnant and having a child, but by believing the story that she'd been told—by believing she had to stay. From the gauzy fairy tale of ever-after romance to the Hallmark version of motherhood she hated from the start, from the maxim that dictated that she ought to mate for life to the hard economic truths of earning a living and raising a child, there was a storyline she was supposed to follow as a woman, a good woman, the kind of woman she was supposed to be.

            But the story is a setup. The story is a trap.

             I can almost see the animal desperation on my wild, beautiful mother's face when she realized some part of her body was caught. What choice did she have?

            There are choices, of course. She could have chewed off her leg.

            My mother didn't have the life she chose. I have the life my mother chose.

            My phone kept blowing up. Finally, I said, "Fuck it. I should just hit the road."

            Something—that dark-winged bird—cast its shadow, briefly, over her face.

            "I would help you with that," she said.

The Before Times

            Before it all started, before I bailed out of the bed of another bad idea, grabbed the pink flamingo suitcase, and was out the door and on my way to Lincoln at 3 a.m., before I hit 90 on the narrow country roads that wound through thick dark fields of corn, belting goodbye country songs to an audience of none, before I met up with James and the band and fled east, Chicago to Indy and then Cincinnati, before we took a detour from I-80 specifically to visit the XXX Diner in bumblefuck nowhere, which was closed, and debated, shouting over the wind, the relative merits of "slammy" sex, which James said his latest lover liked and he did not, the kind of batshit unhinged conversation you can only have on the road, before the fall of Roe v. Wade in July of 2022, the afternoon I pulled in to Minneapolis and sat, car-filthy and road-blind, on my mom's back porch, watching her face as she absorbed the news, and, to distract her, told her I thought maybe I should buy a camper and hit the road, before something crossed over her eyes like a dark-winged bird, something dangerous and beautiful and harsh, way back, before Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, before the doctor told my mother she was pregnant that same year and it was too late to abort, because she's an idiot and not entirely attached to her body nor perhaps entirely of this world and she thought her boobs were getting big because she'd been playing too much tennis,before my father sat chain-smoking under the cherry tree in the yard, writing a book in his head called The Unwanted Child (I found the manuscript while nosing through his file drawers when I was 10; even then I thought it was pretty good) while my mother locked herself in the bedroom for three weeks, before I kicked and punched her in the ribs, tucked under her sternum, for months, and then was born so fast you'd have thought we'd made a deal that if I would just get the fuck out of there, nobody would get hurt, and decades before the picture—I'm sitting on a curb in the late-day sun, wearing short shorts, a tie-back bra top from Target, polka-dot sunglasses, legs splayed, grinning, looking alive—that I posted on the socials with the caption, "I am nowhere happier than when I am on the road, nowhere freer than when I am in motion, nowhere richer than when I have nothing to lose," before any of that,  there was this.

            This—whatever casts the shadow that crossed over my mother's face, whatever we call the animal impulse to flee, take flight, to run; whatever we call the creatures who lack the instinct to nurture or to nest—this existed long before I had the idea, before the idea became a notion, before the notion became a split-second plan that I realized I'd had all along.

            The plan came later. The plan emerged like the rest of the road does as you roll. The plan came after Tom the car salesman in Fargo lifted my 83-year-old father into the passenger seat of the giant silver truck so he could confirm it was, in fact, a good truck, after Tom the car salesman handed my father his cane and me the keys, after I drove to Alexandria to pick up the Scamp from Dan the Man, after Dan the Man showed me how to level the camper in the blazing hot chaos of his farm's back 40, disappearing twice into the barn filled to bursting with god knows what all antique oily mechanical crap to dig around for a beer and a 1/2-inch pin for the two-inch hitch, after I hitched the Scamp to the truck and waved as I drove away, after I pressed the pedal down, gingerly at first, then gathered speed, to test the tow's tensile strength and the physics of forward motion at cross purposes with prairie wind, the plan came into view as I flew down the highway with my new home, now dubbed the Tramp Scamp, waggling her round little rump at truckers as she flew by.