Today is 25th April, 2022. This past night I slept in a fully empty parking lot at the corner of North Anthony and hmmm…. can’t remember. I had been looking for a house that I had lived in a decade ago. I found it. 1426 C….s avenue. So, I went online and determined that the house is still apparently owned by the same person. That man had purchased the house within a short time before I met him. I met him online also, but before your imagination gets the better of you, no, it wasn’t a dating site.

The man to whom I now refer had listed on a site called “couchsurfing.com”. I don’t know that it still exists. That time was a bit crazy for me. (Well, here I have to exclaim, which time in my life wasn’t? That’s the actual question here.) Nevertheless, I satisfied myself yesterday, after a quick look online, that the house at least has not changed hands since 2008, so, I am reasonably sure that this man at least still owns the property. Whether or not he lives there, well, it would take a somewhat bolder move on my part in order for this to be ascertained. I don’t quite feel ready for that. Suffice it to say, I am happy for the moment. There is a potential friend somewhere nearby, let’s just put it that way.

So, I was asleep, and I slept really quite well. I have to say, there is something so profound about this place called “home”. The words from the Wizard of Oz come to mind easily, “I guess we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.” That would be paraphrased, of course. Well, I moved away from this place so many, many years ago. I had what they call in German, “Fernweh”, which, if we would translate it directly, would sound very strange: “Distance-Pain”. I find it a little ironic indeed, the English translation of this word is also German! Collins calls it “wanderlust”, or the “travel bug”. But the original German word, Fernweh is somehow more descriptive for me. It’s the first thing that came to mind. It’s the ache associated with the yearning to be far from where you are, to experience something so completely different from anything you have experienced before. That would have described my state of mind when I was in my twenties. It was the need to escape from my life as it was, as it had been and as it promised to become, should I have chosen to stay put instead.

And I must admit, coming back here was not exactly a conscious choice. I didn’t set out to do it. It just kind of happened. At the end of the day, there was nowhere to go, but “home”. Sure, I could have gone anywhere, but I chose to come back to my home state, because there are still people here, people who knew me at the beginning. I wanted to see them. Or, you could say that “the horse knows the way back to its stable”. My “dad” would have put it that way perhaps.

After Florida, I started driving and I set my compass to North by Northwest and worked my way along through the southern states, traversing them from the Southeast to the Northwest more or less in each case. A few states later I reached the southern border of the northern state where I had come to see the light of day for the first time, so many decades ago. I had figured out pretty early in my current travels that I didn’t like the interstate roads at all. Aside from being stultifyingly boring to the point of being dangerous (falling asleep while driving has been known to happen to me more or less often), the gas prices on the lesser traveled roads were generally from 50 cents to $1.50 per gallon cheaper. Not only that, the smaller towns and villages, unicorporated areas etc. offered so much more to see, not to mention so much more to eat. There was always a good chance of finding some one-off Mom & Pop Shop in a little hamlet on some country road somewhere. Much more to my liking since I eschew fast food entirely, and astronomically larger chances of striking up conversation as compared to @McD’s and Co. Beyond that, the country roads were without exception much less traveled, as in un-busy, always. I abandoned then the bigger, well traveled roads in favor of the more comfortable travel speeds of the country and county lanes and byways.

There is a tale, a legend known about the travels of Louis and Clarke while they were exploring the North American Territories. They had hired Native American scouts for their journey; and they were all traveling by canoe or small boat down rivers and smaller tributaries. This type of travel had not been customary for the scouts who were used to going on foot or at the most by pony, when ponies were available, which I am guessing they mostly weren’t. The Lewis and Clarke party was pleased with this type of travel, because it was at once easy and pretty rapid, compared to travel overland during this period of history, when there were practically no trails or roads available what to speak of railways. One day early on during the trip, the party had stopped for the night and the next morning the scouts had not packed the canoes while the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. When asked they replied that they were unable to continue the journey and needed to wait. This same conversation repeated itself on both the 2nd and the 3rd subsequent mornings. At this point, the Europeans asked the Native scouts the equivalent of, “Hey, what gives? We need to get going.” I guess they were on a schedule. I am sure of it, in fact. They must have had a budget and weren’t happy to think that their supplies were being eaten up during “non-productive” days of sitting around waiting. To the repeated and more demanding query the scouts replied finally that they were waiting for their “souls to catch up”, and they remained adamant and steadfast, insisting on the need to wait until such a time as they had been rejoined by or re-attached to their lagging spirit bodies.

Perhaps there is a correlation here; for some reason anyway, I had to take a similar tack.

The range in quality and style of the alternate country roads went from generously widely laned divided highways, which were not the limited access kind, (these tended to be just slightly less irritatingly monotonous than the interstates), to twisty curvy, up and down bobbing one and a half laned county (county without the “r”) roads carving the countryside at right angles into patchwork quilt like blocks of pasture land, corn- or bean fields etc., punctuated by farmhouses, barns, grain silos and livestock, and so on. The generally arrow straight county roads proved normally quite acceptable both in driveability with regards to the surface quality, signage and general safety as well as in the quota of visually interesting diversions for the travel weary eye. These and their slightly wider counterparts were to become my favorite travel arteries on this trip. I did find that, especially while driving on the faster roads, I became intensely tired much more often and it did turn out to be generally advantageous and comforting if I were to stop and just sit in my car for 2 to 3 or more days at a time periodically during the trip. In fact, more often than not did it turn out to be so. I think there might be something to that old legend. For me, at least, it felt like it was “a thing”.

To the above end it wasn’t really very easy to configure the GPS on my phone, at least not with the app I was using. I didn’t find any setting that would have avoided any and all interstates. Maybe I just don’t do “phone” all that well. Perhaps there are different apps out there that I would have to download. It was hard enough, as it was, to stop the app from sending me on toll roads. So, I had to kind of “work with it” by carefully observing the course of the major interstate corridors leading from my current location to my desired end goal. Then I would improvise by plugging in the names of little towns no more than 30 to 60 minutes distance from my current location along that route. The result was usually quite gratifying. It took some doing, but the extra effort paid off. I didn’t actually ever run into any roads which proved less than desirable given my preferred travel orientation (slow and steady wins the race). Since I was not in any hurry, it even seemed that sometimes having chosen roads that had speed limits of less than 55, (some were 45, and in other places 35 or even 30), turned out to be quite pleasant indeed.

As I traveled along these routes, the landscape changed and these changes were also much more satisfying and noticeable than they would have been/mostly are along the homogeneously fashioned rapid transit roads. It’s kind of funny that we should feel that we have so little choice when considering traveling cross country by car. It’s either I40, I80, I70 or I10, right? I wondered more than a few times what it would have been like to have traveled during the 30s, 40s or early 50s even, or earlier still… At those times, an average speed of 30 or 40 mph would have been quite acceptable. When I happened upon a boring stretch of road in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, I often tuned into social media for a diversion. Ironically, some of my favorite videos during those stretches were ones about coast to coast cannonball tours.

I’ve described at length my mode of travel without mentioning my car. Let’s just say her name is Maddy, short for Madison. I don’t take very good care of her, I must say. It’s a bit chaotic in there most days. But that’s because I live in her belly and still I feel self-conscious about it. I find it difficult to pull up and park somewhere in public and start tearing apart my car, folding blankets and such, or organizing laundry, gathering trash to throw out etc. what to speak of actually brushing out the dust and sand from the rugs. Yes, Maddy is my home on wheels. I never set out to become a “van-lifer”. In this case I would have to consider myself a “crossover-lifer”; and it’s still a bit hard for me to part with things I don’t actually really need. So, there’s a bit more in there than I need or want, but I feel that perhaps soon I’ll relax a bit and be able to let go of some of the ballast, some of the extra blankets I don’t really need and so on.

The anxiety about living in my car notwithstanding, I’ve been able to enjoy my travel increasingly over the last weeks. This is in large part due to a connection I am beginning to feel with my past and with my country. The first time I felt this, on this trip, was in the middle of Texas, oddly enough. As a child, having traveled through 38 of the 50 continental United States with my parents and or my first husband, Texas was one of my least favorite travel destinations. The only reason we had, as a family, to travel to or through the Lone Star state, was my sister, #3. At the time she was living with her kids and her second husband in Lubbock. My sister had been widowed at 23 years of age, as the mother of 3 babies. And they were literally babies, 3 yrs, 2 yrs and 6 mos of age, two boys and a girl respectively, at the time of their father’s untimely and bizarre demise. Too soon after that great tragedy, my sister had married again; and in time she gave birth to two more children, a girl and then a boy. They all lived in a house in the most dreary place I could have imagined. Lubbock at the time, at least the way I experienced it, was a dirty, dusty, dry and dismal place. It was a desert of dead tufts of grass interspersed amongst stretches of bald, rocky, flat ground. The dust in the house was not something that could be removed for more than a few hours at a time. It was windy in that place and there was no way to keep anything really clean, as I recall. Perhaps there were other reasons for the impression Lubbock left on my young mind and feelings. I don’t know for sure, but my relationship with sis #3 never really became very warm, much to the contrary I am afraid. This, even though I had no reason to harbor any ill will towards her or her children. I just remember that, as I grew older, my sister waxed more and more unpleasant towards me. It always puzzled me, to a greater or lesser degree than it troubled me.

So, this time, driving through Texas just as dawn was slowly breaking, having crossed the border from New Mexico in the wee hours quite some time before, I was pleasantly surprised by a random accidental liking I took to the landscape in the “hat” of Texas (that’s what I call it anyway). It was quite inadvertent, this feeling, considering how it actually transpired. I had just discovered suddenly, after having driving past Albuquerque on highway I40, that I could diverge from the beaten path. It just occurred to me suddenly that “Hey, I’m not enjoying this trip; and I think it’s because of this old I40. It’s boring and the surface is actually quite annoying as well. It’s in poor repair, and the street is crowded with semi tractor-trailer rigs.” Just as I was having this thought, I spotted a sign for a gas station and the price was more to my liking than many I had seen on the previous stretches. I got off the Interstate then and pulled up to the pump and went in to have a bathroom break as well. Then I looked online and found that there was a nice little Mom & Pop restaurant across the way. I went there to have a meal. Normally I didn’t eat in restaurants at all. But this night, I thought, “I think I’ll treat myself to a sit down meal.” I chose the only vegetarian item on the menu. It was edible, for which I was grateful, a veggie burger. The price was a little high for what it was, I thought, but I was very happy about the homemade mashed potatoes, which were excellent, if not served quite steaming hot. The food was served in a timely fashion and the ambiance was quite pleasant. It was a family restaurant, very clean and obviously quite popular with the locals, as it was full. I had to wait a few minutes to be seated. The friendly treatment more than made up for the lackluster sandwich.

After I left there, I moved out onto the road and discovered that this was the perfect jumping off point into my new idea of choosing “the path less traveled”. It could not have been more perfect. I started off then down that new road and have avoided the interstates ever since. So, then, that next morning, as I made my way through Northern Texas, quite suddenly I received an unexpected text message. It was from my niece, the youngest daughter of my oldest sister. Now, this girl and I have a great deal in common, even though she has not the slightest idea whatsoever about it. It would break the boundaries of this tale to veer off into that direction at this point in the telling. I’m afraid this recounting of my journey has grown quite long as it is, but let’s just say that Sis #1’s youngest daughter fancies me to be her nemesis. I had contacted her by text message several weeks prior to setting off on my trip by car from the West Coast region of Southern California to the West Coast region of Florida. She had not answered and that being not at all unusual for my family, it had not really concerned me that much. The night before, in the middle of my first trip down county roads of Eastern New Mexico and Western Texas, my phone went off and I just casually glanced over to catch a phrase that seemed out of place somehow. At least with regard to my state of mind in that moment, it seemed not to make any sense with spurious statements. It said emphatically, “You will not come into this house to steal…” and then “you will be STOPPED!”

At this point, I said, Oh, Lord, I guess I should stop then. And I did. I pulled over right in that very moment, into a gas station in the middle of a little town. I parked the car and then read the whole message. I sat there perplexed for quite a while. I wasn’t really terribly disturbed by the message, as this sort of thing is not really that unusual in my family. But, I was a bit surprised, taken aback one could say. After some time, I just took a deep breath and said to myself, “Ok then, we shall stop here.” And I proceeded to spend a few days in this tiny Texas settlement. The Population sign declared less than 500 inhabitants. I don’t remember how many, maybe 411 or so. It was just the one convenience store on the main drag and then a really mammoth high school, a miniature public library consisting of one small room of a single story strip mall, nearby a municipal building in the same strip, a feed store, a post office, a small scrap yard and a messy looking mechanic’s locus. Off the main drag there were little bungalows, 40s and 50s builds, a few churches, one of which was quite sizable and sturdy, imposing even, made of brick and stone; I think it was Baptist. There was an antique shop and there was quite a lovely looking coffee shop, really impressively decorated, but unfortunately closed when I finally discovered it on my last day in the town. Then there was also a building that had obviously been at one time the local radio station. You could tell from the way it was built: quite low, one story, a small rectangle with absolutely no style whatsoever and the slender steel transmission tower next to it. Now it was a local craft shop, where crafts were apparently being made that is. But it was closed. I didn’t see it open the whole time I was there. There was a cafe a block or so from the gas station, also on the main street, named after the local high school mascot, run by a Mexican family, where I dined a couple of times. That was pretty much it, not too bad considering. The town declared itself to be an agricultural center, a center of exchange for farmers and ranchers. It was absolutely flat and windswept. Strangely, I began to notice, I felt quite at home there. There was something very familiar about it, and I mean that in the very “root” meaning of the word “familiar” as in “family”.

During the time previous to this stop, after I had left California, I had been quite stirred up, tense, not at all comfortable. It had been quite shocking for me to leave my home of the last 9 or 10 years or so, with not much of a perspective on when if ever I might return. Then suddenly after receiving this admittedly less than friendly missive on the part of my niece, suddenly I found myself feeling surprisingly relaxed and welcomed in this small rural Texan community. There didn’t seem to be any reason for that impression. No one was going out of their way to make me feel as if I belonged there or anything. It was just an odd feeling of “sympatico”. I think I can say now, I felt somehow less threatened, oddly, right after having received something one would have to consider to be a threat. Perhaps it was the contrast that did it. Reading this starkly negative message in a little town where any and every person I talked to showed me their face, looked at me straight in my eyes, and smiled in a genuinely friendly and open way, or so it seemed to me. Perhaps that was it, the gleaming white pearls of friendly good will against the black velvet dress of vicious calumny.

Well, this was all three days ago. It’s hard to be consistent with the writing living in my car. I don’t know why I get so distracted. Well, one this is this damn phone. The 24 hour access to ticktacktoe and the metootubi. Yes, that’s the problem. I guess it’s the dopamine. I wonder if I’ll ever get over it. I wonder. I wanted to come here and talk to my brother. I wanted to. I started to go through all this junk. It took up hours. hour and hours go by on that app. I want to throw the phone in the lake. Literally. I don’t want that thing. But they won’t let you have the phone without having that app installed on it.

THAT… was yesterday? Or day before. I guess I should say to be continued…