"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose…"
American folk tune
I wake to the first sunny day in what feels like years, knowing it is time to act. Spirits dampened by a never-ending winter, I am hopelessly trapped in the familiar box of daily life. Urgent measures are called for. It’s time, I decide, to go to Mendocino for a hamburger.
Threading my way through familiar streets, I head for the highway. Anticipation tingles; it's been too long since I had a road trip. My heart lifts as I merge onto 101. Twenty miles north, passing Healdsburg, I get the sense of being “out of town” and fifteen minutes later, as Cloverdale flashes by, I succumb to the spell of the road … with 300 magic miles ahead of me.
Driving into a bright May sky, I roll north on 101. Four lanes, sparse traffic - it is the perfect road to start: smooth, wide and fast. The wind blowing past my truck soothes overwrought nerves, becoming a mantra that sings, “freedom ... freedom ... freedom.” Vineyards slide by my windows, valley after fertile valley tilting into gently contoured hills. Poppies and wild peas appear along the road. I pass Hopland and the cultivated lands give way to a more natural landscape. The hills are clothed in softly waving grass: still green, thanks to the long rainy season; smudged with golden mustard and rosy islands of wild radish.
They say a road trip blows the dust out of your carburetor but it also serves to blow the cobwebs from your soul. Lost in the scenery, some 60 miles into my trip, I become aware that I have finally let go the details of my life and given myself to the road, the day, the moment. My steady forward motion has untangled the knots and combed my thoughts into long skeins that flow gently along the time warp in which I now travel. I am able to forget Past and Future because here, on the road, there is only Ahead and Behind - and all it takes is a u-turn to reverse it all and view Behind from a completely new perspective. In road-time, the Present is altered as well. I move through the 'here and now' outside my windows: observing, taking it in without obligation, expectation or judgment. The only thing bothering to keep track is the relentlessly turning odometer, silently measuring how many miles of Present I have passed through. Today it reads just over two hundred thousand - a hundred thousand of which I put on during the several years I lived on the road.
I have always been a wanderer. After a transient childhood, I continued to move, searching for that elusive place where I would feel at home. I attempted settling down to a “normal” life when I reached thirty, but when I hit forty a seething restlessness propelled me back onto the road - in yet another attempt to answer the questions, “Who am I?” and “Where do I fit in?” I drove away with a thousand dollars in my wallet and no destination in sight, intending to travel for several months until I found a place to land. A year and a half later I was still crisscrossing the Western States. Working odd jobs to pay for gas and food, I tented out of my truck except for the coldest months of winter and continued my search for new horizons.
I used a green marker to trace my route. The pattern that emerged on my taped-up old map shows long lines following two lane highways, with digressions onto smaller roads ending in star-like constellations of back roads as I discovered landscapes that pulled me in. Today I know the route I’ll be following: the smooth run up 101 to Willits, where I hang a left for the coast on Highway 20. My thoughts drift back to days when I started out each morning with no idea where I was headed and let instinct guide the truck as I approached intersections: left toward Montana? Or straight on through the badlands of Wyoming? A song on the radio brings back an all-night drive from New Mexico to Utah, gliding across the high desert under a crescent moon, kept company by the keening ballads of Loreena McKennitt. As she sang of lost love and the veil between the worlds of the quick and the dead, I felt like a ghost slipping through the night, through my life ... my headlamps tiny points of light in a vast darkness.
Life on the road washed me clean. The further I drove, the further behind I left any landmarks that defined who I was: living situation, job title, even town or state. "Where are you from?" and "What do you do?" became questions with no answer. Some mornings I woke disoriented, in tears, without a clue as to who I was or where I was going. But there were also days and weeks during which I gave myself up to the road and reveled in the freedom of, as the old song says, “nothing left to lose.”
In those days, the only constants were my truck and my dog, both still cruising with me today. The old Toyota looks pretty funky now, its dinged and scratched-up body documenting a history of solid and adventurous use, but the motor purrs on - especially on a road trip, it seems to me. We’re all glad to get back on the highway. Lucky grins at me from his specially cushioned and extended passenger seat. At fourteen, he has to be lifted in and out of the truck, but he’s always ready to go for a ride.
I pull into a gas station in Willits and fill up the truck while Lucky waters a half-heartedly planted border. As I pay, the robust young blonde at the register envies me my road trip on this first sunny day. She proudly tells me she’ll work here all summer so she can get out of town - to college - in the fall but today, she adds with a wistful glance through the streaky windows, she’d rather be down at the river. I tell her not to work so hard that life passes her by. Our eyes meet with a smile and I head back to my truck.
During my wandering years there were many along the way who envied me my freedom, sighing as they muttered, “I wish I could do that.” Or querying, "Aren't you afraid?" Retired couples in trailers and men in campgrounds generally assumed that I must want company or need assistance and were quick to offer both; they had a difficult time believing it was truly my choice to travel solo. Once in a long while I met other women traveling alone, most often older women in small RV's who discovered the joy of the road after widowhood or retirement. It was always a special treat to swap travel tales with another woman, becoming a community of two for a pleasant evening before moving off in our separate directions.
As I pull back onto the road, it occurs to me how much I miss the freedom of meeting people along the way. Connecting with people in passing, whether a brief conversation in a gas station or a more intimate exchange, means no definitions, expectations, or histories to color the encounter. Both parties are free to be whoever they are in that moment. And at those times when the encounter carried sparks, the transience only served to fan the flames ... prompting, as it did, full immersion in the present.
The present is demanding my attention right now, drawing me away from spicy memories of passions left behind. Highway 20 snakes its way up and down from Willits to the coast, exposing sudden top-of-the-world views where ridge after ridge of northern California’s coastal range tumbles into the distance. I enjoy the challenge of narrow winding roads and focus on the task at hand, catching scenery out of the corner of my eye. Waterfall ... sharp corner ... mmm, lovely view. Brake just so, throttle up, shift and smoothly glide around the curves at the top cornering speed of my old pickup. In the moment. As I move into a straighter stretch, images wash through me of other back roads traversed; some so full of ruts and washboard that no thought is possible, only complete attention to the dance of human, vehicle, and road. Back then, a quick glance in the rear-view mirror showed me Lucky’s dusty face in the rear slider, grinning as he braced himself for the next pothole. Today he slides on his pillow as we round the sharp curves, paws out to brake, that same grin on his face.
The coast announces its presence as the forests thin to short, wind-swept Monterey pines, at whose feet tangles of rhodos and scotch broom jubilantly attempt to fill any empty space. I emerge onto Highway 1 and head south toward Mendocino. To my right, a peacock-blue Pacific fills the horizon, glimmering in the afternoon sun. The road is fast, requiring concentration; time only for a quick glance down as I cross tall bridges over craggy inlets and negotiate cliff-edge curves that drop into space. The ubiquitous poppies are here, kept company by daisies and clumps of purple lupine. I catch a glimpse of spray ricocheting off dark rock and consider stopping, but hunger pulls me down the road.
In Mendocino, we wend our way through the tourists to a friendly hole-in-the-wall that offers large homemade burgers heaped with fresh lettuce and tomatoes: healthy enough to satisfy my conscience yet sloppy and greasy enough to indulge that forbidden fast-food craving. My kind of place. With Lucky’s beef patty and my turkey-burger in hand we drive to the Headlands, where we eat our lunch on a grassy knoll overlooking the cove. White-tipped waves surge in and out through an archway of black rock, filling the air with salt mist. Lucky and I watch a seal who watches two divers. We lay back in the grass, soaking up the sun, and I doze off until Luck wakes me with a “whuff” and limps toward the truck. He’s right. We need to go if we’re going to get home before dark. Besides, the purpose of this trip isn’t so much the destination as the getting there and back.
As I head south on Highway 1, the thought of home brings a current dilemma to mind ... but it refuses to stay lodged, blown away with the wind. Instead I receive the memory of a hitchhiker I picked up along this stretch some years ago. He was homeless, a wanderer and self- published poet. We spoke of life on the road and I wondered how he faced the loneliness of not fitting in. “Some of us are born restless,” he told me. “The ‘Normals’ are the ones who declare we don’t fit. Once you quit caring what they think, young lady, the loneliness will go and you’ll be truly free.” I dropped him off here, at the bridge where Highway 128 meets the sea.
Turning east on 128 signals a commitment to return to my everyday life. It will carry me back through the hills to 101, completing the loop. I feel rebellious at the thought of ending this trip but I’m so immersed in the flow of the road that it floats away with the rest. This is a pretty highway, following the Navarro River through dappled redwood groves and rolling hills ribboned with spidery chains of oaks. Something about the light slanting down to the river reminds me of a drive through southern New Mexico, where another setting sun burnished the waters of a small river winding through a scenic valley. Farmhouse windows glowed cozily in the twilight, while on my stereo Linda Ronstadt crooned love songs from the forties. The music and that peaceful valley combined to present me with a vision of the American Dream I’d always hoped to find. A vision I didn’t encounter in too many places during my travels.
In my two years on the road, I moved through a broad range of diverse cultures. My path intersected those of Mormons, Hopis, retirees in Winnebagos, carnies, farmers, and street people, among others. I saw how people live in these United States, vastly different lifestyles at vastly different levels of the pecking order. I learned that there are many ways to look at life and at what is of value. It became apparent that the “Normals” my hitchhiker friend spoke of make up a small yet immensely powerful minority in this country.
The more I saw, the more difficult it was to come in off the road. Yet it eventually became indisputably clear to me that no matter where I went, the same old me ended up in the same old imperfect world. Re-entry wasn't easy but I’ve managed, with persistence and luck, to build a reasonably stable lifestyle on the edge, balancing as best I can with one foot in this society and one dragging along outside to keep me from getting boxed in completely. It crosses my mind that I might buy a small RV in another ten or fifteen years, like the elder women I met, and take to the road again. But for now I have chosen to stay in one place, wandering inner highways except for an occasional therapeutic day trip, like this one.
The tires rumble beneath me down the darkening road as I maneuver the truck along the hairpin curves of 128. Lucky snoozes beside me and I am at peace, my belly and my soul full with all the miles of highway I’ve ever driven.
circa 2000 while living in a travel trailer parked in an organic apple orchard outside Sebastopol, CA
Commentaires