Headway: Westward Bound

Six days and two-thousand miles away from Asheville, hello from Bozeman, Montana.

It has been a week.

I’ve wandered from slow Missouri — whose truck drivers somehow unanimously think it’s okay to sit in the left lane and who, when they finally deign to let you pass, wave creepily out the driver’s-side window — to the baffling, nigh-nauseating wide-open spaces of South Dakota and Montana. These are states with enough empty ground to cover that the speed limit shoots to 80, states where every serviced exit has a large sign reading FOOD PHONE and another warning travelers how long it might be until their next chance at those comforts. After emerging from the winding, unmarked end of the Spearfish Canyon scenic loop that spat me into big sky country, I pulled over and put on my emergencies to check my phone for directions. The elderly couple in the pickup truck a football field behind me slowed when they saw me, pulled up with rolled-down windows. I thanked them and explained that I was fine — but out here, when you see someone who could be in trouble, you stop. You’re morally obligated to do so.

I crouched 250 feet under the earth at Mammoth Cave and loomed 630 over it at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, both to the tune of claustrophobia and fear: during the two hour cave tour, they thought it would be “fun” to show us what it was like for cave explorers, and so turned off the lights in exchange for the glow of one skimpy candle — which, of course, they then blew out; the tram to the arch’s summit is a pod-like, 1960s imagining of future travel, a 6-by-8-foot egg into which they cram five passengers, many of whom lived up to the Midwest’s girthy stereotypes. The tiny car click-clacked up the arch’s south leg precipitously, at times slowly resetting itself to make up for the curvature. One tiny window revealed the endless staircase I happily would have climbed instead if it had been an option. It was like the worst carousel ride on earth.

Nevertheless, I survived, and the view at the top was the perfect catapult to set me sailing west, a surprisingly moving goodbye to the Mississippi River and all that lies east of it. I ended up more or less following the Louis and Clark trail by accident, meandering through Missouri into big, square Iowa and across the bleak plains of South Dakota. Much of this country is great swaths of land covered over in run-down pickup trucks and dilapidated barns, their rooves pulled off in what I can only imagine are twister-sized portions. In nicer areas, it felt like driving through that eyesight test with the red-roofed barn in the distance. American flags punctuate all of it, old and tattered or new and billowing, this week often at half-mast.

The Midwest still has video rental stores, some of which double as pizza joints; I passed an empty, but operant, drive-in theater in a town called Reo, Indiana. Further west, ranch houses sit prim and perfect right out on the rolling hills by the highway, accessed by unserviced exits that exist just for this purpose. It feels, somehow, like it would invoke a fuller sense of ownership, or even identity, to possess one such conspicuous and exclusively-accessed property.

There are also, of course, the road ironies and not-so-funnies: a Michael Pollan book for sale in a truck stop serving exclusively corn dogs and fried chicken; a government-sponsored, light-up road sign advertising a new hashtag: #BUPD – Buckle Up Phone Down. How Sinclair gas stations use a dinosaur as their branding, which seems… on the nose, but also grim. The billboards dotting the landscape quoting Reagan: “EVERYONE WHO IS FOR ABORTION HAS ALREADY BEEN BORN,” or admonishing our nation to “EAT STEAK, WEAR FUR, KEEP YOUR GUNS – THE AMERICAN WAY.” The lofty-voiced reverends preaching endtime terror right in the middle radio bands, the low- and mid-nineties. I try to at least taste the local radio everywhere I go, but each time I turned it up I was faced by — seriously — a PSA to boycott Target (for their “insistence” on a “dangerous and misguided bathroom policy”) or an advertisement for guns: 9mms only $88.88, some such something with X-many magazines for some other price. All of this in the same breath as the reportage of yet another school shooting. So I turned it down and listened to nerdy podcasts about outer space the whole way.

But at the same time, it’s all so beautiful it’s sometimes hard to stomach: the wind running its fingers through the endless hair of the prairie grass, the monolith wind turbines towering in the distance. Cows gathered hock-deep in a watering hole under an overpass; sunshowers and a rainbow as I wound my way through a sunset in the Black Hills. The deer and sheep and antelope who have ambled across my road more than once, rolling me to a stop. The sweet, open, not-smiling face a mother made as her daughter lifted her phone to take her portrait inside the tram at the Gateway Arch. All of these ordinary things that sound distant and mundane when described, but are so frankly beautiful to see in person that sometimes it makes my heart stop.

I let myself rest for three nights in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I stayed in teeny-tiny Silver City — teeny-tiny enough for deer to walk past my window down the gravel “main” street while I sipped my coffee each morning; teeny-tiny enough that when a car alarm goes off, everyone hears it. Teeny-tiny enough to lack cell service, the sweeping relief of which told me everything I needed to know about my relationship with mobile technology.

So I gave up on keeping up with Facebook and email and instead spent my time actually reading — without stopping every sixth paragraph for a phone break — and taking hikes. In western South Dakota, the trails gleam in the sun, glinting with flecks of mica that dust you all over like nightclub glitter. You clap your boots together at the end and a tiny shower of silver rains down. On Deer Creek Trail, tiny periwinkle butterflies flew up around my every footstep, making me think the word enchantment; the ground glows with watermelon-sized chunks of quartz, pink and white and unbelievable in the dirt. Black Elk Peak took easy care of me, with flies who seldom landed despite their noisy motors and cooling gray cloud cover that spit rain only when I was back within eyeshot of my car.

But I also explored the Badlands, which rise up out of the eastern plains like a gut-wrenching spinal column. Full of myself, I clambered up some fallen rocks on Saddle Pass in a (failed) attempt to reach one of the spiky summits. Instead, I ran up against the end like the lockout wall of a video game: impossible. In coming down, I could see the deep pits into which I’d fall with one false step, dripping with the recent rain’s water. I squatted and crab-walked down, gripping the muddy ground below and behind me, rocks sliding under my boots. I’d been hesitant, for fear of snakes, to stick my hands in the cracks between boulders on the way up, but the specter of falling into a ditch and breaking a leg made me cleave to anything solid. I was in shouting distance of a group of college boys who’d busied themselves taking Instagram-destined pictures at the base, so if I got unlucky, at least I likely wouldn’t die. Legs shaking like Jello from fear and not exertion, I tried — ridiculously — to channel my inner Alex Honnold while I made a slow, adrenaline-fueled descent, not noticing until later how badly I scratched up the backs of my calves as I slid down rocks on my ass.

Having been on the road for over a month now, I’ve had ample time to reflect on what, exactly, I’m doing. This kind of constant shifting isn’t always easy, and while I love traveling solo, it does have its own additional set of challenges. I’m an introvert, but I’m not immune to loneliness. And although I’ve met old friends and made new ones along the way, there are times when I wonder if I’m sabotaging my chance to grow roots, forgoing the stability and connectedness I should be seeking.

The reactions from others are particularly telling. “Good for you!” said Mike, a PA from New York City I met while hiking. A man at the Gateway Arch offered to take a photo of me and the guy who’d been making shy eyes at me, mistaking us for a couple. “Oh, actually, I’m here alone,” I smilingly responded, which made him falter before saying, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

And then there was the nail tech in Rapid City, who laughed out loud when I answered his and you’re doing this alone? with an emphatic “yes.”

“What?” I asked. I’d never even considered his diagnosis:

“Boring,” he concluded, shaking his head.

While I was down in Mammoth Cave, the woman behind me in line related to her husband a story she’d been told by a park official. A girl got lost and ended up spending two days in the darkness; the guide had warned people to stay put if they found themselves in that situation, but she just kept wandering deeper.

“Two days. Can you imagine? I don’t think she had light,” the woman said. “Not for long.”

While I wouldn’t call any part of my travels boring, I do sometimes fear I’m spending too long running, pulling myself further and further from the locked-in lifestyle that seems mandated and ubiquitous: an apartment, a group of friends who all live in the same place, a coffee shop where the barista knows your order. Commitment. I sometimes half-joke that I’m city shopping, looking for the spot that’ll conclusively tell me: here. But I also know that wandering is in my nature, and no place is perfect.

It’s a great privilege to have the opportunity to even make such a fundamental decision, if that’s really what I’m doing; for the vast majority of humanity, location is a given. But I also wonder sometimes at the paralyzing aspect of that freedom. It’s a little bit Sylvia Plath’s fig tree problem: all these options, and I’m sitting here starving. Or am I? Is tasting a little bit of everything as valid as committing yourself wholly to one venture? Do I still have ample time to change my mind? Am I struggling with these concepts for myself — my own, innate sense of purpose and place — or because I’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated by prevailing societal structures? Although I occasionally feel lost, most days I’m happy — joyful, even — and so I take that as my guideline. Life is so weird and hard to decipher.

I’ll spend the next week or so in Montana, finally getting some work done and hopefully exploring Glacier National Park. The drive in, I must tell you, was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced: heading west on I-90, I turned down the radio and leaned forward over the steering wheel, staring agape at the snowy peaks of the Crazy Mountains that rise up seemingly out of nowhere. They’re too big for an easterner’s imagination, and in this case haloed in sun while all around me dark clouds spat fat, aggressive rain drops that later turned to hail, the sky so big and open you can see each storm system in its entirety like an angry, heavenly boil. It’s stunning enough out here that it could almost make me believe in God again.

But then, I also stopped for gas near the battlefield of Little Bighorn at the tourist-trap “Custer Museum,” and there was quite literally a group of men negotiating over a suitcase filled with knives in the back room.

So.