End of the Road Trip

3116.3 miles and I’m finally “here”. As I was laying in bed last night, listening to Sugar pace the confines of my parents’ guest room, jumping from floor to nightstand to twin bed to window and back down to the floor, getting to know the boundaries of the small space that will be her home for the foreseeable future (my stepdad is allergic to cats, damn his eyes), I finally started questioning the wisdom of what I’d done. What the HELL are we doing here? I used to have an apartment, with pretty furniture and fresh flowers and now I . . . don’t.

Here are the highlights of how we got here: After that crummy hotel in Ohio, it was a short drive to Chicago and a reunion with great friends for New Year’s Eve. It’s my least favorite holiday, with its high expectations and open bars and bad champagne and mandatory jollity. But this was actually the best New Year’s I’ve had in quite a while. Not only did I get to spend it with people I really like, but we were out, dressed up, in a bar with no smoke . . . where we sat all night on slouchy overstuffed couches while people brought us food. YES! I KNOW! There was no forced mingling in pinching pretty shoes bought just for the occasion with drunken strangers who’d vowed to get their money back at that open bar. Oh no, we were able to hunker down and be the anti-social goobs we are in complete and total comfort, pretty shoes doing their job and being pretty without having to actually support us, while watching drunken strangers do silly things from an ideal distance. It was a revelation. Even though, goobs that we are, we were tucked away in bed not long after the countdown to midnight, I took the next day off to “recover”, i.e. to sit on my friend’s couch (let’s call her Poot) watching the second season of The Wire and calling around to takeout places to find enough open restaurants to keep us fed for the day without actually having to leave the house or turn on the stove. It was motherfucking heaven.

But Poot eventually had to go back to working the corner (that shit won’t move itself) and Sugar and I had to get back on the road heading west (to paraphrase Bob Dylan, which reminds me that my ipod never did bring up his “Train Going West” on the whole drive, which is a shame, though it did start playing “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys somewhere in Oregon which was nice.) A day and a half out of Chicago I finally hit Wyoming and changed my clock to Mountain Time Zone, both of which felt like home. I know that, technically, Montana is Big Sky country, but Wyoming’s sky is pretty damn huge. Somewhere between Cheyenne and Laramie the country subtly changed and I was back in the intermountain west with its dull brown tree-less hills dusted with snow rolling up into great craggy mountains touching a flat sky and something in me eased. The first time I saw a sign beneath an exit marker indicating that the next services wouldn’t be for over 20 miles I felt positively giddy. I’d really truly and finally left the East, with its tolled turnpikes and conveniently located 24 hour service plazas, behind.

I hit the only subpar driving conditions I faced on the whole trip on my third day out of Chicago, on I-80 between Rock Springs, WY and Ogden. I’d gotten a very early start, so I think I missed the worst of it. The road was never too slippery, and everyone on it seemed to know what they were doing . . . except for that weird foolish girl with DC plates who was taking pictures of the snow with one hand and steering with the other. But in a winter like we’ve had in DC, to finally see SNOW! Falling from the sky! And sticking to the ground! It was fantastic.

The penultimate stop on this stage of the adventure was a visit to my grandparents in Idaho. I’d planned to stay one day, but a conveniently timed bout of stomach flu kept me on their couch (or “daveno” in grandparent speak) for the weekend, watching football while my grandpa rolled on the floor like a kid with their new puppy and my grandma brought me Sprite and soda crackers. It’s been years since I’d had anyone around to take care of me while I was sick, and I’d forgotten how much easier it is to be miserable when there’s someone else to reach for the cozy afghan on the top shelf of the closet that’s oh so far from the couch and to make that trip to the store for supplies.

But finally, yesterday, I struck out for the Oregon coast. As I drove through the Columbia Gorge, the sere brown of high desert gradually gave way to the mossy green of the Pacific Northwest and again I felt like I was coming home. A very different home from Idaho, with its blue skies and old, grey lichen covered lava floes. I love the Pacific Northwest deeply, but it also creeps me out. There’s something fundamentally disturbing in a landscape where everything is either alive itself or is being slowly ground into mulch by something living. Instead of the feeling of open space, of boundless freedom that I get in Idaho or Wyoming, or even Eastern Oregon where even the dry dust smells clean, like pine needles, the Pacific Northwest in winter feels . . . claustrophobic. The grey skies hang low with rain and the air feels soupy and thick and I’m always aware of its weight and heft. Even the smell is denser, sweeter, blackberries and wet leaves. I feel like I’m always flinching here, angling to keep pant hems out of mud, shoes from crushing something small and slimy and alive, trees from dripping down my neck, hands from getting caught by blackberry thorns. But in that living, decaying, messiness is something that can look like magic, and maybe someday I’ll feel like writing about that.

But for now I’m home for a little respite before the big trip. A home without internet (holy hell, I’m posting this thanks to the wireless connection at the local public library, a place I have a feeling I’ll be spending a LOT of time) but with a mom who’s incredibly happy to have me here, and two very big very dirty very slobbery dogs who think I’m alright too. Not to mention a cat that's REALLY glad to be out of this box.