field report: road trip

Two days after I turned 25, I loaded up my car and quite literally headed west. 

There’s an obvious metaphor about growth and change and newness, open roads and the promise of the future. This is not that. Go read Kerouac, if you feel so inclined. 

My drive is not nearly so romantic. I am mostly half-checked out – we all do it, don’t come for me, sorry, Mom – driving on the interstate for hundreds of miles at a time, ball cap and 72oz iced coffee in tow. I have done this drive before. It is me and everything I own and my cruise control against the world. And a lot of time to think.

The line between thinking and writing is blurry for me often, so I found myself recording voice memos of musings, phrases I like that might prove useful, reflections of bits of media I was consuming on the drive. And then I’d scribble in my trusty notes app at rest stops and in hotel rooms. It’s very Blue Highways, in its way. You’d think having been to thirty-something countries across four continents before I turned eighteen would make seven states I’ve already been to less interesting. To that I say, give me any amount of time and my mind will likely turn to the profound. So I wrote about it.

I had a birthday. I have nothing especially exciting to report on the subject. I don’t really even like my birthday. With a handful of exceptions, it’s always a little bit disappointing. What if you find out people don’t love you as much as you think they do? Or worse – not as much as you love them?

This year was good. People do love me. I like my life a lot. How neat to have another year of this. I don’t want to pontificate on being 25 – it’s a mostly arbitrary milestone. My prefrontal cortex is developed, which is nice. I still feel too old and too young all at the same time. I’ve wasted and am wasting my youth. This brand of existentialism feels right for the moment, but far too banal and embarrassing to indulge myself in.

So instead of all that, I’ll tell you what I listened to on this trip: interviews with Judith Butler, Richard Rohr, John Mark Comer, and JoJo Siwa. The new Maggie Rogers album, the new Lizzy McAlpine album, the new girl in red album, the new Joel Ansett album. Carole King’s Tapestry.

I listened to just one book, Brideshead Revisited. It’s a 12-hour listen and read by Jeremy Irons, who has proved an excellent companion across those endless stretches of interstate. It’s a classic I’d never heard of; basically the movie Saltburn (which is pretty, but I mostly hated) without the psychosexual voyeurism (which is what I hated about it). The result is a story in which nothing much happens that sits at the intersection of so many things I spend time thinking about. I’m not sure if I liked it, but it was worthwhile.

Really though, I’ve been trying to listen to the radio on this drive. Something about how specifically curated I can make my experience bothers me. Is it the instant gratification of it all? I’ve found myself craving the analogue lately. Perhaps I’m even more of an ascetic than I think I am. 

The songs on the hits channels changed with the landscape – “Water” by Tyla and “Not My Fault,” the song from the Mean Girls movie, gave way to “Greedy” by Tate McRae and Beyoncé’s “II MOST WANTED.” The preachers lost their thick Southern drawls but the sermons didn’t change much. The lack of nuance in political commentary is apparently nationwide. I found a classical station in Ohio that played Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (my favorite) in its entirety. I’m thrilled to report that Christian radio is still playing all the hits exclusively from 2006-2014. I developed a particular affection for the old-timey ministry stations, who play gems like this. It is so wonderfully nostalgic and hilarious.

There is something remarkably charming about scanning to find a station near whatever town I’m driving through, hearing local ads for car dealerships and furniture stores and ticket giveaways for whatever band is coming through soon. I listen until there is more static than song, and start the process over again. 

I’m reminded of the first time a new almost-friend joined me for Diner Breakfast Monday. DBM, as it’s known in my corner of the internet (because I made it up), is exactly what it sounds like. Nearly every Monday morning – my day off – I can be found somewhere in a booth or at a counter, drinking slightly burnt coffee and butter-soaked toast served by a woman with graying hair who calls me sweetheart. I invite people freely. Sometimes they say yes, and I get to hold the hope of a budding friendship over slightly-too-hard eggs benedict.

The first time this now-friend joined me for breakfast, I was describing why I love the tradition so much. First of all, pancakes, ripped vinyl seats and mismatched vaguely patriotic decor. But also, I love absorbing the conversations of locals: patrons asking after kids and husbands and dogs in the same breath as they order orange juice, Bible studies, happening to run into someone you know. The chatter of coworkers before heading into work, the older couples eating breakfast as they have a thousand times over. The regularity of it all is a gift.

“You know,” this new sort-of friend says as they listen to me say this, both totally casually and sagely, “you seem like you become a regular everywhere you go.”

I try. I really do.

That’s part of why I like the radio: I’m sure there are people listening who are in their car driving to the post office or store of school drop off or pick up. A kid is asking to please play a song on their phone instead. Someone is, like me, scream-singing along to Sheryl Crow. They are living their lives here. I am passing through.

In some ways I feel like I always am. I lament this with an old friend and she redirects me: it’s not that I don’t have that kind of security and community, I just am building it in multiple places. I am setting myself up for a life in which I am Not Just Passing Through in several towns. I am part of a lot of communities. It’s not consistent, sure, but that doesn’t make it less true or real. 

Disability theologian and writer John Swinton speaks beautifully of the difference between inclusion and belonging in his book Becoming Friends of Time (wildly paraphrased here): Inclusion is purely technical. That’s checking a box, yep, they’re here. Belonging on the other hand, says Swinton, is cultivated by love. We love you. It matters that you are here. To belong is to be missed when you’re not there. There is loss when you leave.

I think about that a lot. I rarely sit with and interrogate my own complicated relationship with missing, often finding it wrapped in grief and too close to about a dozen pain points. Swinton changed that for me with this perspective. Missing means I belonged. To a time, to a place, to a people. I have been given the gift of abundant belonging. I say my goodbyes knowing my absence will be felt only to be joyously welcomed home somewhere else across the country. I do the same for others; I miss them, and I’m so excited to be together again. This is good.

I think about that as I drive down the interstate with a hundred other cars, listening to the radio from towns I will never live in, full of people I will never know. I don’t belong here, but I do belong somewhere. I hope they do, too.

And usually when I’ve reached this part of the thought process, a song comes on the radio that I have already heard too many times today and I switch the station.

This trip, like last year’s, has accidentally become a bookstore tour. Once, because I desperately needed to use the bathroom while driving through a town and saw a sign for BOOKS & COFFEE and figured they must have a customer restroom. And then it was a used bookstore anyway so it was only $5 and besides I was the only person in there. Somehow I got to talking with the bookseller – I’m traveling for work, what I do – and her eyes lit up. She stage manages for the local community theatre, and we had a lovely chat about the work and the art form. She gave me a sticker. 

I looked up bookstores along my route and stopped at a couple. I didn’t always buy a book, but it was cool to compare the stock and the displays and ask after a couple new releases I was interested in. People were kind, unsurprising for folks who spend their days surrounded by books. And, a friend I saw along the way thrust a couple books into my arms and said, “these will be good for you to read!” I started one. It’s hurting my feelings.

So now I have my small library in my half-unpacked company housing. A few TBRs I just haven’t gotten to yet, my stack of textbooks and literal reference books I keep on hand because who knows when you will need to do some light reading on Kirkegaard or Calvin. Poems I revisit often. A couple of books I brought with the sole intent to lend to friends.

There is something grounding to me about books. Perhaps they remind me of my childhood, when being a reader was as important to my identity as being alive. Perhaps it is the tangibility of holding a thing in your hands and turning a page (again, I’m going analogue!). Maybe it is just an easy way to signal to my brain that a place or a space is mine – a book on a coffee table or nightstand or pulled out of a bag is evidence that I am here. That I can be here. It is also an investment in stories. What is a bookstore but a collection of stories and an implicit demand that they matter? My personal bookshelf – poetry, mysteries, and a lot of theology – a window into what shapes me and what I care about? Here, borrow this book. It meant a lot to me. I think you’ll like it.

This is how I justify walking into this apartment with six books more than I left home with.

I tried to read a new poem collection in the hotel, fashioning myself some kind of manic pixie dream girl as played by Lauren Bacall. It’s funny, because I do read poetry, but rarely in places as lavish as this Comfort Inn and Suites, where the elevator squeaks and ice maker rumbles and a baby is crying down the hall and I can’t let myself pay too much attention to the cleanliness of the carpet. I want to be a person who reads poetry in a local park on a road trip, but the truth is I’m exhausted after six hours of driving. Will the poetry invigorate me? Probably, but also there are blackout curtains. I went to bed at 7:30pm that night after watching about five minutes of an episode of Shark Tank I’d already seen. I am, it turns out, the kind of person who crashes hard. I do not cinematically read at golden hour in a robe. 

This is an example of my consciousness of my performance of self, the gap between who I imagine myself to be and who I am. There’s nothing malicious or dangerous or even particularly grandiose about it – I sometimes would just like to imagine I’m a little bit cooler. It is mostly harmless in the case of MTV vs TCM. It matters more on an existential level, the tension between who you are and who you could be, to quote saint Jon Foreman. That is a bigger project than I’m going to solve on this trip, I think. I am allowed to hold the multitudes. I thought about what those are in the very long last few hours of my drive.

The drive, by the way, I had the privilege of turning my GPS off for the last stretch. I knew where I was.

I made it home. “Home” here refers to company housing at my summer job. But get this: it’s the same apartment I had last year. It is my space. I did not have to learn a new place. The hum of the air, clatter of the ice maker, and this distant traffic sounds are the same as they’ve been. The throw blanket I got at Goodwill a year ago is still draped over the couch that I have taken many a nap on. My same old roommate and I have already filled out our puzzle and game shelves. It is home. I got teary writing that paragraph, sitting at the kitchen table with my coffee as I have a hundred times before. I will see friends soon. I am basking in the glory of familiarity, of belonging, of missing redeemed. 

So here we are. I drove 20-something hours from home, to home. For the second time, I watched the country change and the temperature drop some 40 degrees over the 1500 or so miles. The front seat of my car is littered with straw wrappers and gas receipts and napkins that escaped the bag. I participated in so many conversations and interactions that felt deeply American and grown-up in a way I should no longer be surprised by but still am. I am truly living the dream. It is the too-huge world vaulting me to the next crazy venture (yes okay sorry I’m invoking On the Road). So much behind me, everything ahead of me.