Homecoming

I did the last steps of my road trip’s last leg in a sprint, making it from Colorado to Seattle in two long driving days.  There seemed no point to linger: the route lay entirely on Interstates, ones I’d driven before, and anyway the calendar had rolled over to December, my rented apartment was open, and my head was already full of the many tasks awaiting me at home.  My trip was over.  I spent one last night at a motel in Boise, a city I barely saw, arriving at night and departing at dawn, and my blur of highway memories combine the tawny hills of Eastern Oregon with the sense of a sore butt, of switching on the cruise control to stretch my aching accelerator leg, of fizzy Christian rock stations competing with the buzz of the overworked motor. 

The Pacific Northwest greeted me with rain, appropriately enough: the first downpour I’d driven through in six months.  The Columbia River Gorge met Portland in a blue twilight smear of wet road, sky, taillights, and upward glimpses of smoke-swaddled pine mountains.  As a premature night fell I had good news, however: peeking in on the town of Chehalis on I-5 I did a driveby of the (very cheap and possibly shady) auto storage yard where I’d left my other car for six months: there it was behind the fence, perfectly undisturbed!  Breathing easier on that front I splashed the last few miles up the highway, navigated inexplicably ridiculous Saturday traffic through Tacoma (oh wait, it’s always like that), entered Seattle in a five-lane 75-mph nighttime derby of cars changing lanes for no reason (oh wait, they’re always like that), found my exit, found my street, and pulled into my condo parkinglot some six months and three days after I’d left. 

And patted my ticking Pepin on the doorjamb.  We didn’t get to Tierra del Fuego, but my little yellow MX-5 Miata Sport made it to Oaxaca and back, a little banged up in the rear and with a new clutch up front, having managed to miss two earthquakes and three hurricanes, still running as smoothly as the day it left.  Now that’s a good car!

I then had another piece of good news when I let myself into my apartment: my tenants (and their cats) had left the place spotless and without a single scratch to my furniture.  And it was the oddest feeling in the world to go to sleep in my own bed.

My road trip is over.  When all is said and done I have no idea what it amounted to.  It wasn’t the trip I imagined, but that’s undoubtedly for the best, and just as undoubtedly it served its greater purpose of providing a needed break, a needed adventure, in my life.  In its first half it opened my eyes to a part of the world I’d never seen, and I’ll always remember the extraordinary sights, the deep cultural presence, and the warm-hearted people in the great, varied, troubled land of Mexico.  In its second half I reconnected with family and friends from whom I’ve lived too far apart, and renewed connections that I hope will stay strong for the rest of my life.

Yes, it was lonely, and I’m not sure I would recommend a long solo road trip as a means of travelling.  But the virtue of travelling alone is that you’re free to make mistakes, and by the same token you’re free to turn down unexpected paths of your choice and make incredible discoveries, from the tacky black light sculptures of Moqui Cave to the mountaintop Aztec temple of Tepozteco to the Corned Bison Reuben at the Living Farm restaurant in Paonia, Colorado. 

I confess that I wanted to return from this trip carrying more of a change in my life.  I had visions of parlaying the road trip into some sort of a new career in travel writing, or photography, or something else undefined.  I never crossed that barrier to publicity and a “travel career” -- but along the way I began to suspect that I wouldn’t want it.  Instead I carried the bizarre inward accompaniment of a novel in progress, something that mixes with a road trip like oil with water; I found myself, however, bending the trip to accommodate it, and the part of the trip most geared to my future may turn out to be the week I devoted to it at the Algonkian workshop in September. 

Meanwhile, I return with a small bevy of travel photographs, and a small blog’s worth of vaguely travel-oriented writing, and now that I have a chance to seive through it all, who knows? 

I might make something of it all yet.