The Road to Exile
a year in photos
The mile marker of another year on the road has just flown past. I can no more answer the questions I’m often asked - where am I going, and how do I decide where I’m going next - in an easy soundbite than I could when I set out; I can no more - as T.S. Eliot might have put it - ‘fix it in a formulated phrase’ than I could when I left. I knew the organizing principle then, and know it now; I knew the driving force, the shaping factors in the course, and those haven’t changed. This week, I’ve done what I can with this maddeningly spare language to articulate something about this journey’s where, and how, and why; where words fail me and language falls short, I hope this handful of photographs will serve to suggest the shape of a story, do a little to shade it in. This is a year in a life on the road, July 2024 to July 2025; make of it whatever you like, whatever you can. Above all else, please know how glad I am to have you with me, helping me make sense of the story as we go. xo - M
It happens now and then -
I find myself driving through somewhere I’ve been through before, stopping off at a place that seems faintly familiar. I park the truck, walk toward the door, scan the horizon, glance up at the sign, rotate slowly as I walk, looking for the thing that’ll jog my memory, have I been here?
or are the edges of places beginning to blur?
one town bleeding into the next, the smell of cherry blossoms blowing north to a place where cherries don’t grow, a face you saw in Aberdeen coming toward you like heat mirage in eastern Tennessee, a voice you’re pretty sure you last heard in Tulsa catching at your ear, turning your head at the roadside stand that appeared around an unmarked dogleg turn in the Blue Ridge somewhere. I listen for the faint shuffle of pages in the back of my mind -
the hand of logic sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of thought,
separating fact from idea, memory from dream, fishing out receipts with my own scrawl on the back, half-torn out spiral notebook sheets, an envelope addressed to me, unopened, used instead to jot down the date and place and time of a conversation I had with a guy who wouldn’t tell me his name so that later, when I went back through, I’d have at least a few facts, a starting point, a notch I made in the bark of the tree - not too deep, not enough to hurt the tree - with my knife, just to show myself the path I took to wherever I wound up, to lead myself back to what happened, and when, and where, and why, and if I can put that much together then maybe if I squint I can start to see the faintest outline of something tangible, solid, something material, real,
maybe then from the otherwise meaningless
scattering of things that happened I can discern a pattern, a story, a shape, and maybe then I can answer the only question that matters -
what did it mean -
so that every day, when I sit down to write,
when I set out again, slashing away at the overgrowth of experience, distraction, illusion, cutting away the clinging vines of impression, longing, belief, digging my way down till I hit something solid: the thunk of shovel hitting bone, the sharp clink of metal to gem, the muffled clink of what might be pottery, might be glass -
I drop the shovel,
get down on my knees, begin to dig with my hands, fingers feeling around for whatever is there, whatever is fragile and true, until they touch the broken edge of something - I brush away the dirt, hold it in my hand: a shard, slightly curved - it might suggest the shape of a pot (a vase? a water jug? a jar?), and from there I can begin.
I sit back on my heels,
mentally rifling through every fact I’ve ever found, every shape I’ve ever seen, searching for the pattern, the faintest resemblance to something I already know, something upon which I can build. It’s a treasure map, or part of one; the part with the arrow that says You are here. It is always missing the far edge, the X marks the spot, the journey’s end. It never shows the route, and it never says what I’m supposed to find.
But from that shard a shape veers into view -
the shape of what something was, what happened, what might have been. From that shape a path toward an answer begins to unfurl. On that path, more shards, more facts, more clues can be found, and what cannot be found can be deduced, fact-checked, cross-referenced, confirmed or denied, proofed by process of elimination, thrust into the fire to burn off the dross, bitten to test if it’s real like you would test a pearl.
From one instant, one conversation, one person, one story, one shard, one place, you can set out in search of some semblance of understanding, some approximation of what happened and what it meant.
But you need that one thing,
that shard, that fact, or you tumble through the world, vertiginous, amnesiac, without memory or history, seeking with no sense of what you seek.
You need that known factor, that absolute zero, that given, true north. You need - or I do - the a priori assumption, the question that begets the quest, the fact upon which which the whole must rest.
I cross the state line I’ve crossed - how many times? -
and it is the same state line and not the same state line, it is the same journey and a new journey every time, the storyteller can’t stop changing and and has not changed, the story is the road that rolls out ahead and it is the thing just around the bend, she is nineteen and driving off into the sunset, hurtling headlong toward the tomorrow that will never come, she is fifty-one and can already see the end of an era rise up ahead in the dark, closing the distance between point A and point B at a rate that increases as she goes, she nears the sign that says last exit for empire and before she registers the words on the sign she’s already passed it, it’s in the rearview, and this is the road to exile.
I get out of the truck, stop in my tracks - something catches at me, tugs my sleeve like a playful girl of a ghost - a scent, a flash of color, a sixth sense. Here, exactly here, at this exact degree of latitude and longitude, this exact axis of north and south, I’ve been here -
the rifle of pages, photos, I thrust my hands into the seething sea of memory, fingers feeling for hard edge of fact.
I do it because I can.
I do it because I think someone should. I do it in the everlasting hope that somewhere, well past my own reach, far beyond anything I can ever find, there exists something real, there exists meaning, there exists truth, and though I will not be the one to find it, though I will not be the one to write the last page of the story, though there are fewer and fewer of us who are called or compelled to embark on this ridiculous journey, to undertake this absurdist task, it is in fact our task and we will do it, and here we are,
here I am, bobbing on the open sea, clinging to my still-buoyant scrap of wrecked ship, wet haired, festooned with seaweed and shells, barnacled and starfish-adorned, I will stay here clinging to this fact I’ve found with both hands, and I will call it a compass, and with it I will chart a course to some horizon, whichever one I find, because the world is round, and I will sail this thing to shore.
I'm in awe of the writing, the thoughtfulness, the tenacity to dig through layers and this: "I do it in the everlasting hope that somewhere, well past my own reach, far beyond anything I can ever find, there exists something real, there exists meaning, there exists truth, and though I will not be the one to find it, though I will not be the one to write the last page of the story," -- the reaching beyond self -- this is hope and following the trail of meaning, is transcendence, is of the essence of humanity.
I've said it before, and will doubtless say it again:
Wow.