In truth, they had all day, just as this text, as all text seems to escape my control.

Before succumbing, I ate across the highway at Ryan’s Wilderness Inn. I sat at the counter and watched a courtroom reality show through the static on a small T.V. What could have been my last meal was a French dip with over-salted, but tasty, au jus. It was served on a place mat depicting a map of the solar system (I think one of my best friends growing up had the same set). The mid-October day unraveled as I ate. Listening to crackle of the snowy TV screen and the waitress chit-chatting with the cook, I marveled at the vastness of the universe from this roadside eatery, just a speck in Idaho’s forests.

I’d left Oregon that morning before swinging across a remote corner of Washington. Along the way, I inched ever closer to my professional line in the sand. I wouldn’t arrive in Missoula, though, without facing the Heart of The Monster.

As I’ve previously recounted, my day began with deer at dawn in a campground on the shore of Wallowa Lake. After a breakfast in Joseph of polish sausage and eggs  drove North through Enterprise (disappointed not to have realized the night before that the Terminal Gravity brewery was there). I left Enterprise along Oregon Route 3, following the road up a slowly-rising plateau until I traveled above the western rim of Joseph Canyon. I entered Washington where the Lewiston Highway becomes state route 129, then decends into — and rises again out of – the Grande Ronde River Valley on a tangle of twists and turns protected only by guardrails resembling white picket fences.

“Discovering” the land

That realization started to emerge about ten miles south of the Washington border, when I “discovered” Joseph Canyon. Having never seen the Grand Canyon and having reluctantly skipped Hell’s Canyon, I was easily impressed by Joseph. Beyond the natural beauty and beyond the fascination I felt for its geology, though, another thought circulated: what was this vast and dramatic and beautiful place like when there wasn’t a road above it, when tourists weren’t stopping at overlooks to peer down into the valleys that used to be the winter home of an entire nation?

Such questions rattle through my head wherever I travel. Here in my own nation, on a landscape so many of us so readily dub “ours,” they take on different meaning. It’s easy for Americans to still perceive spaces like these that contrast so sharply with our cities and towns and farms as “wild” or “untamed” or “unspoiled” lands untouched by civilization. What came before is often unacknowledged, if not out of sight.

In college, I was a history major whose focus – if inadvertently so – was on the articulation and formation of national identities. Even so, I must admit to having little knowledge about the nations and communities that exist and existed within the land we describe as the United States of America. This is true even though I grew up in the heart of the Chumash world and no matter how many times in elementary school we were assigned to read The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Nevertheless, the Channel Islands I gazed at my whole life were the same ones so important to the Chumash. I’ve strolled countless times past the Albinger Archeological Museum and, of course, Mission San Buenaventura, both reminders of one sort or another of what came before, what we’ve wrought upon one another, and what’s been buried by the passing decades. In many ways, though, the Chumash — and even the Spanish who subdued them — were abstract concepts in late Twentieth Century Southern California. The only time they really began to seem less so was after college, when I paid attention to longer and broader historic narratives, or when I worked on stories like this one I did for the about the impact of contemporary development projects on ancient Chumash sites.

Vague Knowledge

Of course, I’ve always known the vague superficial history of American exploitation, subjugation, extermination and marginalization of native communities, but I’d learned few details about specific histories and incidents. More straightforwardly put: I know little about Native Americans and their history aside from the cursory overview given in traditional California public school educations, and whatever knowledge I’ve occasionally picked up through other pursuits since.

Then, a year ago, when I moved from L.A. to Portland, I found myself fascinated by the history of the Modoc depicted at Lava Beds National Monument, a history I hadn’t known, even though it occurred in my home state of California (albeit a corner of the state quite distant from where I was raised). It’s likely I wouldn’t have learned of it had I not been drawn to the monument purely by its geologic appeal.

It may seem naïve to carry a sense of wonder in my discovery of these topics when so much of this history is so problematic. So be it. I can’t do anything to change that history, but I can welcome my broadened perspective upon it. I’ve been fascinated by what I have been able to learn, and by how my knowledge of tribal history has slowly grown as I’ve settled in the Northwest. Such lessons allow me to much more vividly understand the extent to which urbanization and settlement has extensively shifted our world.

Checking Eden off the List

Just ponder that for a second. The source of all creation. Many, many people trace all of humanity to this spot just south of U.S. Highway 12, a nation’s sacred source tucked away in Eastern Idaho and now managed by the park service of another nation. The last remnant of a monster that, months later, would be dwarfed by enormous shipments of equipment meant to squeeze from the ground more of the substance that our nation now prizes so reverently.

I stopped. I looked. I listened to a recording of the tale of the coyote who tricked a monster in order to save all the other living things the monster had devoured. I learned how all the people and animals sprung forth from the defeated monster to populate the land.

Then the recording ended. I watched a mom take her daughter on a stroll, and I saw a car load of retirees stretch their legs in the nearby parking lot, and I took photos, and I enjoyed the sun on the skin of my aching body, and I returned to my own car.

I checked Eden off the list without saying a word.

On this trip, I traveled with the precise goal of connecting with others, joining potential colleagues, establishing professional connections and honing my reportorial skills. The closer I came to Missoula and the more I discovered along the way, though, the further I felt from anywhere. “Isolated” with my thoughts as the landscape unfolded beneath my feet, the more my mind wandered into these sorts of reflections and recollections.

Meanderings of thought

You’ll notice in reading these recollections that I am extensively self-referential and that my thoughts are increasingly digressive. This isn’t an accident, exactly. On this trip, especially at this point, passing through these locations, I barely encountered anyone else. There were few sources to develop. The encounters I did have were simply inappropriate to develop into deep connections, if at all. To do so may have been to force a story that wasn’t there. This might be a reality of a solo road trip. You’re so encased in your car and then, over time, in your head. As you’re recollecting it hours or days or months later, doesn’t it follow that your words will be uniquely shaped?

I’m confident in my abilities and experience as a writer, but I’m trying to do much more reporting, more actual reporting, and I’d like to have done so on this trip. It’s pretty easy to write and to meander without a guaranteed paycheck. What I need to figure out is how to report without one, because I need to keep my journalistic skills as fresh as my writing, even when I’m not sustaining myself. Then I must figure out how to turn that writing, that reporting, that observation and reflection and analysis and curation into something that does sustain me.

I’ve long since encountered that professional line in the sand. Each day that passes, I wonder a bit more whether I ever really crossed it. Have I even properly acknowledged it? Did I skirt it? Did I place it further down the road?

Now, as my resume lingers on potential employers’ desks or in their inboxes, as reporting piles high like scaffolding around as-yet-unfinished stories, as pitches bounce about the ether, and as I prepare for another, shorter journey (this time with a clear reporting objective in mind), do I need to address what I’ve learned about myself and my career on the other side of that line? Do I need to stop asking myself questions, and start asking them of others (my suspicion is a loud, resounding “yes”)?

Do I understand whether I’ve encountered the monster, whether at 30 years old, after college and grad school and years as a reporter and editor and everything else I’ve built up, I’ve found the monster’s heart, whether I’ve found a way inside, to confront it and to spring forth again from within?

See the initial story in this series

Before the second day of my trip from Portland to Missoula for the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference I’d hoped to visit Hell’s Canyon. That morning – if I could really call it that – I realized I didn’t want to make the solo trip down a gravel road from Imnaha after a freeze, not the way I felt. Lonesomeness had crept in a little, too, and I didn’t want to experience the gorge alone, knowing then that there was a traveling companion not there with whom I’d want to share the marvel. Anyhow, I didn’t know exactly yet how much time I had to linger.

Still, this was my time on the road, my time made uniquely possible by a few key people. I didn’t want to miss this world, knowing how remote this landscape was for me, and how rare my opportunities to visit might be. Though fatigued, it was important to me to let my spirit move me, even if it moved me slowly, even if it moved me differently than I’d expected or hoped.

First, the dawn. I can’t remember a morning I’ve welcomed as much as that one. I watched the world take shape, connected by fog between the trees on the hill behind my camp site.  Though exhausted, I needed to stretch my legs, to soak in as much of the emerging daylight as I could, and summoned the energy to enter the space taking shape around me. I needed to draw some value, some strength, anything from that space.

It was little more than a typical state campground, albeit a heavily wooded one at the edge of a mountain valley.  Two campsites to my left, a couple stirred from their tent, pulling sweaters and oatmeal and orange juice from their Subaru. College kids giggled inside a big tent at another site. A bald man pulled a bike from the back of his RV across the way. Though not crowded, the campground was far more occupied than it felt the previous night, when I barely slept. Instead, I pulled all the layers I’d surrounded myself with to the passenger seat of my Mazda, where I sat with the seat warmer on for half an hour. Wearied by fire and ice fighting their way through my body, I had stopped caring about energy-savings or frugality or any rational concern. In the dark of night I ate string cheese and freshly-baked chocolate chip and ginger cookies that had been given to me at the outset of my trip, and I drew solace from their nourishment, especially after skipping dinner the night before while I looked for a place to stay and collapsed into my campsite.

To calm my mind, to distract myself, to think of anything but there, I’d wandered through 100 pages or so of Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. (a bit “burdened by device” myself, but enjoyably so, happy for the escape from my nocturnal malaise). I took pleasure in noticing that the book began not far from where I was headed, and where I might end up after the SEJ conference. As I read of young T.S.’s fascination with the Berkeley Pit, near Butte, I lamented not having selected a conference tour of the Superfund site (though I remained excited for my own tour to Glacier National Park).

Before I headed out for a walk I picked up my journal, the one I’d written in the night before, still in the tent, still before giving up on the night, before succumbing to the cold. To this day, the pages beyond the entry are blank. Their potential having vanished as the breathing room around my brain filled and as my lungs clouded

Morning did return, though. With it came my breath, and at least a little enthusiasm. So I set out on my walk, planning first to stop at the bathroom. On my way I discovered a buck grazing on the frozen grass between me and the campground restroom. A few more deer grazed at other parts of the campground. I quickly realized whose land I was visiting.

I watched the deer investigate trash cans outside a shuttered boathouse for while, then returned to my site, packed up and drove back into town, pleased I’d come here, that even as the rest of the campground woke in a rustle of orange juice cartons and sewage hookups and GPS devices, I experienced, seemingly all to myself, this brief sliver of nature waking up to itself.

SEJ 2010: My journey

For the next week or so, each day I’ll recount some element of my October trip to and from the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I’ll combine my recollection of what I saw, experienced or learned, tweets I made at the time, photographs and links to some of the cool things I learned. Check back each day for new reflections, tales and reports. At the end of my updates I’ll post a link to read the story as one narrative (and post a complete photo album as well). Be prepared. This series will include a mix of storytelling styles — don’t expect straight journalism, or complete creativity. In fact, don’t expect anything but a journey.

“The only way out is through,” I thought, pulling my scarf tightly around my neck as I burrowed into my sleeping bag. Admittedly, I didn’t realize when I mumbled this that I was (not quite precisely) quoting Robert Frost. For a week or so, for a variety of reasons, a dear friend and I had been throwing this phrase around. Never was it more true to me than this moment.

Likely resembling little more than a lump of a polypropylene undershirt, two sweaters, a down vest, a pair of long underwear, waterproof gloves, fleece socks and a knit hat, I burrowed deeper into my bag as temperatures outside my tent dropped below freezing. I’d already felt the tickles of a cold coming on before I arrived after dark to Wallowa Lake State Park. Did I really want to push getting sick before the SEJ conference after working so hard to get there?

I’d already paid $16 for the site, after all, a whopping $16. The closest motel was 5 miles back in Joseph and another $70. If I wanted to actually see the lake, I’d have to return once more the next morning.

No, I could do it. Adventurers did this and far, far more everyday, right ? Besides, I had a car with a heater, seat warmers and a reclining seat. I wasn’t exactly isolated (really, it’s pretty ridiculous I even thought the word “adventurer”).

It’s now a few days before Christmas and I’m packing for a holiday trip to my mother’s house. I grab a dop kit and find some cold medicine inside. The discovery reminds me how long I’ve been taking to tell this story. Holding the medicine in my hand, I remember my trip’s first day.

Sixty miles east of Portland, after a brief stop in Hood River for coffee and a bagel, I felt the first hint of a scratch in my throat. Ten miles later, my throat burned. As I progressed further eastward, my eyes watered. My face burned. Each mile closer to Missoula seemed to bring new aches. Pain coursed behind my eyes, but, no, I wasn’t going to succumb. I would battle through. I was far too excited about the conference, about the people I’d meet and the places I’d go and the ideas I’d generate. As the week progressed and after I arrived at the conference, each day I did what I could to set the cold aside as late into the night as possible. Back where I was staying for the event, at the Hutchins Hostel, I’d return to the bottom of a bunk bed in a room I shared with other conference-goers and try, desperately – and unsuccessfully — to muffle hacks and coughs, stringing sleepless night upon sleepless night throughout the length of an event that I’d been looking forward to for months.

Still holding the cold medicine as I walk to my suitcase to finish packing for my holiday trip, I see dark lines stretching across the United States. Rather, I notice lines across a map of the country tacked to a wall in my apartment.

Each line traces a route I’ve driven at some point in my life. The record tells a story as comprehensive and accurate as I can attempt.

The map only documents roads I’ve driven, or ridden along, and it’s at such a scale that the nuances of my trips get lost. I’ve had to guess at routes taken during a few trips because they took place on stretches not charted by this map, or so long ago that I can’t recall their exact path. Nevertheless, each time I return from a journey I look forward to tracing my trips on the map. Doing so is the only reason I keep pencils around my house.

More than two months after I’ve returned from one journey, though, I’ve yet to trace its path. I still haven’t traced my trip from Portland to Missoula and back, and I can’t quite express why not. Perhaps I don’t feel like the trip’s over, like I’ve truly returned. Perhaps I can’t record it until I’ve described it, until I’ve wrapped the journey in words and pictures and recollections that I realize are fading with each day.

Some of you might not be interested in such ponderings.

“Get to the point,” you’ll say. “Tell me about the conference. Tell me what you learned, what you saw along the way, what the latest news is. I only have so much time. Don’t you know attention spans are ever so slight? Haven’t you ever heard of an editor?”

Indeed I do, and I have. As I’ve noted elsewhere, as so many have noted before, though, to truly travel you can’t simply move from Point A to Point B. You can’t experience this world’s multiplicity of dimensions through a straight line.

The truth is, of course, I did wait to write this down. I let the story fester. I let it fall away and apart. Like anyone might, I’ve been making excuses for months now for not chronicling my trip. My terrible cold on the road. Assignments due just upon my return. Job applications. Novel Writing. Story development. Other conferences to attend as a reporter. Holidays. I could think of any number of reasons why you’re reading this now, today, this very second, and only now, but this is the moment, this is when these words take shape.

I’ve also, I’m coming to realize and admit, been utterly incapacitated for months by writer’s block – really the worst I’ve known – despite having felt so inspired, so driven by the conference (and, despite having completed the rough draft of my first serious stab at fiction during NaNoWriMo, which, it should be said, was the only thing to really begin to loosen this writer’s block).

But somewhere in the middle of the first sleepless night of my journey, in that jury rigged tent, as the cold descended — both in the form of my illness and the weather — I wrote clumsily, with gloved hands, in an irregularly kept journal, beginning with the following fragment:

Sometimes I ponder the choices I make, or my difficulty making them. I end up here, in what promises to be a beautiful setting, but aching. I ache with the impact of pride, of love, of adventure.

The first day never quite goes right. Surprises for both the better and worse arise and you’re left not quite certain how to process them.

I’m fighting a cold I refuse to catch, but hearing creeks splash from what seems like all sides. My tent is jury-rigged together – I’m missing a stake so I put a rock in the corner to hold one side down – but outside the stars pepper the sky in such a way that clichés actually serve them well.

Nobody knows where I am (how near or how far). Were I not ill, I’m not sure whether I’d really want them to.

The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then so is the MAX, but you don’t mind. You’ve been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Boarding the wide slick new cars of the Green Line, you laugh occasionally at a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast and take another stab at the crossword you started two days prior. Disembarking in Lents, you pass a crop of green, swirling, solar panel-topped sculptures, walk beyond cold, new planters toward Foster Road and gaze on Lincoln’s giant face on the side of the New Copper Penny.

This landscape is neither foreign nor familiar, a domestic banlieue swept to the edge of the green movement’s model city.

The mission is murky at best. You walk west under another freeway, looking for a well-reviewed video game merchant you found online. It’s not clear why you went this far. You don’t play games often enough to make them a destination, though you suspect the entire point was to ask just such questions. Wedged next to a 7-11, the store is smaller than you imagined, as cluttered and cramped inside as the clamoring chaos of the intersection between which it’s squeezed. A man lingers at the counter, trying to squeeze pennies from the business as he sells old games. There are two many people in the store. Despite nostalgia stirred by the pile of old NES games all you want to do is leave. Asking a quick question of the clerk, he assumes you’re there to make a trade and for some reason won’t look in your eyes when he talks with you. Nothing in the store interests you enough to make a purchase.

Not quite ready for lunch, you head the other way beneath the freeway to see if you can find some sort of treasure to justify the journey. Past a barber shop and tiny antique shop and a handful of businesses closed for the weekend, all you can see in the distance is a long road.

You turn back toward the MAX line, but can’t ignore a taqueria down a side street. Inside, fake pepper and onion and garlic plants line the ceiling. Elephant statues raise their trunks from every surface behind the counter. They’re outnumbered only by ducks. Rubber ducks. Ceramic mallards. Wooden drakes and plastic hens. Ducks. Everywhere.

Everything else is as traditional as taquerias seem anywhere. Staticy TV stations play spanish-language music videos. Hand-written specials fill a dry-erase board. A dozen bottles of hot sauces and salsas sit on the edge of every table. The red, white and green of the Mexican flag on the wall mirrors the facade’s paint job.

You make your order quickly, and simply. Tacos. One pollo, one pastor, and one cabeza.

You sit down at a middle booth, ponder discoveries and road trips and that burning itch to travel. When you pull from your bag the latest issue of Harper’s, it opens to an excerpt from a writer who spent five weeks in residency at London’s Heathrow Airport. He describes arrivals. Expectancy. The cultural filters thousands of us pass through each and every day. Crunching tortilla chips and hot salsa you sink into the words, wishing you wrote that way, or that you could be there, documenting the everyday, spinning it into lush, rich language.

A family comes through the door, led by a girl of no more than seven hobbling on a cane. She’s dwarfed by the boisterous entry of her oversized relatives. They settle into the larger table in the middle of the room. You find yourself inching away as one sits near you, the slightly unpleasant odor of her exhaustion hitting your nostrils just as your meal arrives.

Embarrassed by your quick judgment, you let the discomfort pass and eavesdrop on their cheerful Saturday afternoon conversation. They plan errands. The mother recalls a long-passed uncle’s favorite foods. The boys and girls chirp. A man, a boyfriend or brother or son, sits at the head of the table and doesn’t utter a word. Not one. The women talk about an 18-year-old niece’s thwarted hopes to hire a male stripper. The $150 cost of the house-call is too high and she’s too young to go to the 21-and-over club in town with male exotic dancers. Mother and daughter and aunt discuss the situation as the younger kids laugh and joke, oblivious. It doesn’t seem anything is resolved, except the family’s decision to include tacos with breaded fried beef in their order.

You sprinkle a little too much habenero sauce on top of your second taco, the chicken. A middle-class couple walks in. The woman is cute, blonde, maybe mid-30′s and wearing a long, knit sweater-jacket. Her partner is about the same age, with a meticulously cropped red beard around his chin and a tight, pastel green t-shirt from another Northwestern metropolis. They ponder the menu and make their orders. They’re loud, somehow more so than the sum cacophony of the family, which somehow seems to have gained even more members in the fifteen minutes or so they’ve been in the restaurant.

You turn your attention away and sip your lime Jarritos. A waiter offers more tortilla chips. Though you decline, on each of your remaining five or six you carefully dab a few drops of a different sauce to find just the right one for your last taco. The name of the favorite escapes you now, but you sprinkle it carefully on the taco, only a touch so as not to overpower the pork.

Taking a bite, you sit back in the booth and notice another herd of elephant figurines in the corner.

Follow the Map | See the full photo collection

Why don’t I just write the story? Why didn’t I just report each day’s journey? Why can’t the words come out straightforward?

I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Presumably it took shape some time in the past month, as I’ve done something akin to settling into a new home, while I’ve dragged out my move from Los Angeles to Portland, moving no longer across hundreds of miles and instead creeping slowly, randomly across my new home town.

For weeks I’ve been plotting maps, tweaking Google Earth settings, uploading and arranging photo slideshows, transcribing audio, adjusting WordPress themes, reinstalling broken databases, sorting notes, scrawling in journals, browsing help forums, maintaining computer files, arranging furniture, pitching stories, visiting labs, reporting, attending meetings, filing emails, postponing responses, mailing postcards, paying bills, signing leases, opening boxes and otherwise transitioning through life, both digesting and avoiding my recollection of my journey from Los Angeles to Portland.

It has been a mixed blessing. Sometimes I kick myself for not writing enough, not writing when the trip was fresh, not writing soon enough, early enough. Other times I realize something that K.C. Cole told my class of science writers at USC on more than one occasion, something I found incredibly encouraging. “Even when you’re not writing,” she’d say, “You’re writing.”

I wonder what I’ve written as I’ve not been writing, and as I’ve fretted each day about losing the memories that so recently burned themselves into me, that brought me, simply, from there to here. I don’t want to wonder about it too much, though, lest I get caught up in the pointless tedium of writing and reading about writing.

What I can recall distinctly is a sentiment I felt somewhere between Lassen and Modoc counties, when I emerged from a forest to see sunlight like I’d never seen before swirling across the tree tops. Then, I uttered the following into the digital voice recorder I babbled at throughout my journey:

I don’t know how quite to describe what I’m seeing and what I’m passing through and how to record it for permanence. I don’t know quite how to capture the sense of the sun on the line of trees up high with the trees still in shadow beneath, the changing landscape from thick fog and patches of snow to only small patches of snow and these, what I think are lava beds, pouring over the side now in a landscape becoming more rough bit by bit. I don’t know how to keep describing everything that I’m seeing, the complete emptiness of it all, the complete soloness of my drive at this moment.

I guess what I’ve written is what you see here. What I’ve produced is what you’ve found. What I’ve created is in front of you and, quite possibly, it is changing just as quickly, just as astoundingly as the light shifting and scattering and spreading across those treetops in a faraway corner of California.

The Mother Lode

I didn’t pan for gold.
I didn’t climb aboard a vintage railcar.
I didn’t sip local wine.
I didn’t read Mark Twain in Calaveras County.
I didn’t track every place I ate.
I didn’t always talk to strangers.
I didn’t program my route in a GPS.
I didn’t tag my coordinates.
I didn’t blog.
I didn’t care how many bars I had.
I didn’t log my miles.
I didn’t measure my footprint.
I didn’t keep this in order.

I wandered.

I listened.
I ate.
I visited old friends.
I overheard bartenders gossip with regulars about workplace drama.
I ate seafood in the mountains.
I stumbled upon the Mother Lode.
I gathered pretty rocks at turnouts.
I read about vanishing hotel investors in newspapers stacked on front desks of their erstwhile property.
I crossed the San Joaquin Valley.
I explored lava tubes.
I heard shotgun blasts and ducks quacking.
I listened to cows moo and sheep bleat in mist-enshrouded riverside farms.
I played blackjack with drunk Iraq war vets at tribal casinos
I ate freshly baked maple bars.
I got waylaid in fog.
I gripped my steering wheel on mountain passes with no one around.
I lost touch as I rose and fell into the gray, freezing blanket.
I got bad directions from teens but had fun trying to make sense of them.
I took an entire day to travel 100 miles and still felt like I was rushing.
I fell asleep to tales of California’s geology.
I kept the road ahead of me open.

I wandered.

“Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.”

Roger Waters’ voice floats through my car, settling among my backpack, torn bags full of clothes and piles of randomness stuffed on the backseat — as they have been for days and will be for weeks longer. The Pink Floyd bassist and singer’s first breath emerges from the stereo just as I turn from Highway 49 in Jackson, California, to Highway 88, headed toward Volcano, headed toward black chasms, headed toward forests and storm clouds, toward gravel roads, turkey flocks, store shelves groaning with ancient merchandise and through the valleys and hills of Gold Country.

By the time the ethereal opening of “Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI-IX”ends I realize how the first time I heard the song was 13 years earlier, in the dark kitchen of a lone cabin on a small island at one end of a lake in a landscape much like this. That earlier time, a mid-summer night, I relaxed with fellow trainee camp counselors, eating fresh-baked brownies covered in melting vanilla ice cream, savoring how well the music mixed with each sweet morsel (unaided, despite what the scene I’m painting might suggest, by chemical enhancement), feeling a sense of calm community and simple summer joy as our young charges slept on the island’s nearby beach.

Those early camp years helped first stoke the allure of the road when a treasured few of those summers included drives back from camp to Southern California. I remember descending from the Sierras into a landscape of rolling, golden hillsides dotted with oak trees. I fantasized about growing up to buy a home in a fold of one of the remote foothill valleys beneath us, about lazing in the summer sun in the high grasses spread out forever below, about the bluer than blue skies of those mountain summers. After the road flattened we’d skirt the monotonous cities of the Central Valley — still yet to explode with sprawling growth — and stop for lunch or a snack in quiet, tree-lined Downtowns I didn’t yet know were reminiscent of the Midwest towns I didn’t yet know I’d pass through on cross-country treks between California and Ohio while I was in College.

Though our route varied each time we took the journey, at least once we kept to the backroads and returned home by way of Highway 33. On that journey, we crossed the San Andreas fault and soon afterward found ourselves at a remote shack somewhere between Maricopa and Ventucopa, in the southwestern reaches of Kern County. We walked inside for a Coke or a burger or just a chance to use the restroom. My mom noticed the small rack of postcards and thought about buying a few for her step-father, who she knew collected postcards and, more importantly, was an avid student of Kern County history. Rather than just sell the cards and see us off on our way, the person working the counter (I don’t remember if it was a man or woman) invited us to see their “real” postcard collection.

We were led out of the small cafe to a barn behind the building. It may have been dark and dusty. It may have been bright, with sun piercing cracks between the beams of the building’s aging frame. Whatever the case, it held what seemed like generations of family keepsakes. Really, it felt just as you’d imagine a barn turned storage shed in the so-called middle-of-nowhere might feel.

We were allowed and encouraged to paw through boxes and boxes of old postcards the family had received over the years, no matter that they featured the sentiment of their relatives and friends. We were fascinated, and I was enthralled by the hospitality of strangers, really something I never experienced in the alternative universe that was my exurban childhood.

That moment of spontaneous welcome embedded itself deeply. All at once it was a moment of connection, a moment of wonder, and a moment of adventure. It sparked in me a realization that beneath the surface of society, beneath our expectations, beneath all the rules and mores and standard ways of being there is another current, another way to live, another world.

More immediately, the experience taught me that there was so much going on that I had no clue about so close to my home. There, less than 100 miles away, was this quiet out of the way gas station. There was a back country no one ever talked about in this state so focused on coastlines and the urban landscapes spilling out of its core and across the edges of our nation. I’d later learn that all of Ventura County’s 10 incorporated cities together fill only roughly half of its geographical area, all of them gathered south of the Los Padres National Forest, a theme of dichotomy echoed in other regions I’d later live, and a contrast characterized by this country, by much of this world as a whole.

These journeys from camp to home and back each summer weren’t my only experience traversing the unseen landscapes surrounding my erstwhile home.

When I was even younger, my parents often dangled a tantalizing possibility for my brothers and I on our journeys to our grandparents’ house in Northridge: The back way. Though I suppose the route wasn’t so much our choice as my parents’ interest in avoiding freeway traffic, the “back way” has taken shape in my memory as an adventure along country hills with butterfly-inducing dips and tree-shaded stretches of asphalt. Though I know Highway 118 and the communities along it exploded with the cancerous growth of 80s, 90s and early millenial exurban expansion, I imagine my recollection of the journey is a bit more fanciful than it might have been had I grown up two or three decades earlier. Nevertheless, I remember the “back way” with fondness, now more so after this other alternate route has carried me from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon.

Waking Darkness

It takes the darkness to wake me up, the uncertainty, the presentness of the road after a meal.

I eat my first road dinner in Dos Palos, California at a small diner where beefy men in overalls talk about gang executions and tell Portuguese jokes and a young, expectant mother joyfully exclaims, upon reading the menu “They have a chili-cheeseburger!”

After dinner I feel reinvigorated by getting on these roads where I don’t quite know where I’m going. Where the San Joaquin Valley was getting exhausting, its endlessness has been replaced by a darkness through which all I can see are two white lines, some yellow dashes over and over again and a ditch off to the side. The glow of my headlights makes this valley seem so much more interesting. I have no idea what’s around me, although I suspect it’s a lot of nothing.

I like to imagine it’s a lot of something.

I’ve come to understand that there is so much so-muchness of this state, and of this country by extension. These roads must crisscross forever in this country, in similar ways, in different amounts of repair, I’m sure. So many resources. So many things that we just don’t conceptualize in our everyday life.

Sometimes, the repetition really does feel like something. As I roll through the town of Newman, California I think it’s just another main street, just like all the others I’ve passed through today and just like all the others that fill this country. Two story buildings, a grid, and struggling businesses half-filling storefronts for blocks around. But here, the lights are on. People are strolling the streets. An old theater marquee downtown announces the next showing in somewhat cryptic language: “Sneeky Pete is the word on the street.”

Sometimes, the words just come out, as they do when, suddenly, the Yosemite Highway turns a corner and reveals Lake McClure below me. On a day when I woke on the opposite side of the San Joaquin valley, still uncertain what direction I’d head, I delight in the serendipity that led me to catch this sight. I utter the following into my voice recorder:

It’s the discovery of a lake clearing like this that makes the decisions to take random roads and wander all the more worthwhile, it’s the not knowing what you’ll show up to, it’s the uncertainty of endless miles of empty farmland and repeating grids and the hypnosis of the road to suddenly let it explode in geology and weather and climate and forest and all of it, to see it, to see it fall apart, to see it recreate, to see it evolve and rise from nothingness into somethingness, that’s why uncertainty works.

Later, I have other, similar revelations and as I listen to my tape recorder I find as the journey progresses the utterances become longer, more contemplative, far less about the every detail of what I saw and more about the what I experienced, what I felt. I catch a scent of pine needles as the sun sets while I walk to Lower Yosemite Falls on my very first visit to the national park. Thoughts take shape and I record them minutes later back at my car:

It’s days where the story is everything you see. It’s days where sight takes a back seat to sound and smell, and the way what you hear, and what you smell, and even still what you see changes so rapidly by having and not having people around.

I also contemplate the transformative effects of the road, as I do somewhere between Grass Valley and the once-secessionist settlement of Rough and Ready:

This is like a grand reboot of my brain. Like someone hit the Nintendo that is my body to make it get its picture again (though I know the preferred method of my childhood for fixing an NES was to blow on its connectors). That’s somewhat what I feel. Um. Anyway. Here I am and I probably missed a few turns on my little record, but whatever, that’s part of my journey too, not saying, not remembering to record everything.

Theroux and Friends

“All I had to do was remove myself. I loved not having to ask permission …”

-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (As cited in Lapham’s Quarterly, Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 2009).

In the depth of winter, while the year is still an infant, I descend into a cave beneath Lava Beds National Monument. My footsteps echo across chilly cavern walls. In half a day at the park I’ve seen all of six or seven people and none for hours.

As I surround myself with quiet and rock, the thought cascading through my head without a name begins to leave its impression. I feel some inkling of what I imagine a walkabout to feel like. I know I am traveling in a car, but when I get out and about, as I have at the Lava Beds, or even when I wander the streets of some small, until-then-unknown-to-me, town, there is some sort of reconnection happening, a thought of the vastness of the world. My place in it is such a tiny part, but it’s just one mechanism, one moving mechanism, not in a hopeless “I feel tiny” way, but in a “this is all so grand” way.

First, I realize how grand and huge California is, and then I ponder the country, and how thoroughly so much there is in this place. Of course, then the how much there is in the world is my next thought, and then I consider the universe, and I find that constant constantness, the immensity of so much to be refreshing in a way. It’s not depressing. I don’t have a sense of ineffectiveness.

I wonder if that is an indication that I am losing some sort of need to have control, to have an impact on the world. Instead, I find myself accepting my impact as it is, at is now. I find myself accepting my place as it is now, that this is me and I will make the connection with the world that I will make with the world.

Though I’m rewriting this now, I was saying this to my tape recorder. One of the things I assure myself of — though it’s less a denial as it might seem if you are reading this — is that I’m not trying to convince myself of anything and I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. Of course, I know I’m not accurately capturing the definition of a walkabout. It is just a moment’s thought, but one stoking my curiosity.

Anyhow, I wonder whether the challenge for me, or the thought to consider when I finally arrive in Portland, is how to interpret the place, if it will feel like a big rushing city to me (it does). How can I both carry on the sense of peace that I have but also an acceptance of the city as it is and of my place in that city as what it will be, and not feel the need to somehow run to it, to run to this peace, to this sense of calm, to all of this.

I’m not trying to seek an answer to that, I’m just curious.

Meanwhile, I told my tape recorder, I’m very curious about my ability now to get this out here on this recorder without stopping, you know, and wondering what it would be like if I were trying to write these very same thoughts I’m trying to write at this moment, um, or trying to speak at this moment. If I was typing on a typewriter or if I was on a computer or by hand, would it be this stream of consciousness? I doubt it. It would most likely involve backslashes or deletions or scratchouts, depending on the medium I use. But, you know, I am speaking here openly. Then again, I’m speaking here, like on, you know, uncooked, or something, um, and, and, as much as I think I value honesty and openness and just stream of consciousness I do wonder though if, you know, just making a sea of words and thoughts that you haven’t contemplated also doesn’t work, but clearly I’ve been contemplating all of this for days now. Anyhow, that’s that.

I wonder what it is that changed my mood from recording the route to talking and thinking out loud and having ponderous thoughts later in the trip. What was it? Was it that they needed cultivation? Was it that it was more isolated? Was it that they had been cooking? Was it the landscape? Was it fatigue? Was I transitioning slowly in personality?

Sometimes you just roll through downtown. Sometimes you miss the downtowns, diverted by frontage roads and business bypasses while you’re not paying attention. Sometimes you miss entire towns. Sometimes you just don’t get to do everything you want.

Sometimes you speed through stories. Sometimes you forget to tell others. Sometimes you leave out the details. Sometimes you choose to keep them to yourself, simply because they are yours.

When a friend of mine recently wrote about her attempts to chronicle her own recent journey to Africa, she discovered she was:

“disappointed I couldn’t capture in real time all I was seeing and doing, so friends and family could travel vicariously alongside me … But a deeper, larger part of that disappointment came from the worry that without writing about them in a way that was publicly and immediately consumable, those experiences — my experiences — would somehow become more fleeting and less significant, something that could be put away, set aside, forgotten.

So really, it was about me, and my own fears.

And with that realization, the pressure evaporated. I traded my traveling companion‘s sleek MacBook for the solid, hard-bound journal a good friend gave me the day before I left. I was my only audience, the keeper of stories for the sake of memory, with no obligation to enlighten or entertain.”

Likewise, I was my only audience for my journey. I was the only one taking it, and this was the only time in my life I’d ever quite have this experience (though I did need a close friend’s reminder that this was the case, and that I needed to go easy on myself about what I’d write about it and that this was my story, mine to record how I saw fit).

A Sort of Homecoming

I traverse a mile or so of the rainy border between North and Northeast Portland, passing more buildings and more cars, and, presumably, more people than I had in a week on the road. I swing a gray coupe packed to the brim with bedding, boxes and unfolded maps into the last parking space of a former funeral chapel.

Now a pub, the building’s front room is quiet, somewhat eerily so for a Saturday evening here near one of Portland’s hipster hotbeds. I pass the empty bar on my way to a back room, where I find my brother and his wife in a crowd jointly celebrating her and a friend’s birthday. I greet my sister-in-law amidst a crush of mutual friends and beer and food and presents. Hungry and overwhelmed by the activity, I duck out to the main bar with her own brother. We try our luck ordering from a clearly overstretched wait staff, catch up over chocolate stouts, chicken wings and rice bowls until another friend of ours shows up and greets us. She steps close and hugs me warmly.

“Welcome home,” she says, echoing a sentiment others had already expressed to me.

“I told you you’d be back,” this friend continues.

Initially confused, I begin to recall how more than seven years ago, when I first left a temporary stay in Portland, she’d insisted how hard it would be to return to the city. As my memory of the conversation slowly returns I remember how I’d thought then that I wasn’t even certain I would come back. In the years since that first stay I’ve skirted the city, but barely been here, though I’ve really barely been anywhere.

Now, here I am. Home.

But the road, my other home — so often my home — still lingers. It’s not just the car packed to the gills. It’s the sensation that I’m still observing my surroundings. I’m still taking them in. I’m still thinking of how different I feel since I started my trip, how much slower my breathing is, how little I care about where I need to be when and how I’ll get there.

Later, when I leave the pub and pull into a rainy streetscape, the colors of an intersection’s traffic lights splash across my windshield. My radio is tuned to some random station I’d settled on as I drove to the pub earlier in the evening. A pop song about another city scatters through the night and into the corners of my car.

These streets will make you feel brand new, big lights will inspire you.”

As irritating as the repetition of Gotham’s sense of its own centrality may be, I detach myself from the geographical reference and think about how the song itself has bookended my trip. I first heard it in the staticy haze of a distant radio station, the sort of station you only listen to on the road, the kind so lost in static that, no matter what it plays, you strain to hear it struggle through the static, hope for even the most vapid pop to overcome the static and arrive intelligibly into the car, perhaps only because it’s seemingly unattainable.

That first time I heard it, on a dry straightaway stretch of Highway 33 in the Cuyama Valley, at the remotest of corners of Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, I heard the song at the first moment of radio alienation. It’s a term I used for that moment I realized I was finally escaping Southern California’s gravitational pull (though not before I’d also hear, for the first mind-baffling time, the utter jaw dropper that is Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex”). I passed a shack referring to itself simply as “The Place” and advertising homemade pies and other homemade food and knew I was far from big lights and any streets but the one I sped across, though I was already starting to feel brand new.

Hello/Goodbye

When I made it to Portland I felt like I was stumbling into town. I knew the journey was over. I rushed around Mt. Hood, unfazed by the snowbanks after days in the Sierras on far smaller, far more remote roads. By then I was exhausted and didn’t really know how I’d enjoy it by myself for half an afternoon, and figured I’d be back soon enough to enjoy the mountain fully. I made one last meandering stop at Smith Rock, but I could see Mt. Hood and knew Portland and the rest of my life was on the other side. For the first time, I felt a bit frazzled, though there had been few calamities during the trip. I never locked myself out. I didn’t get pulled over. I had felt safe and unhurried throughout the trip.

That morning, though, I woke up in Bend at McMennamin’s Old St. Francis School with a strong sense the trip was over, even though I only arrived in Oregon the day before. It didn’t help that I’d lost my wallet (Though a housekeeper found it in my room, despite my numerous searches and additional help from an attentive front desk clerk). Though a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme, it felt so clearly like an indicator of the journey coming to a halt. Feeling a bit strung out from the road, I didn’t very much want to deal with the variety of hassles involved in replacing my wallet’s contents when my home address and other details were as up in the air as I was.

Really though, it was just time to get to Portland even after I had more and more slowly made my way out of California.

Where I set out thinking this trip would allow me to discover the remote parts of a state that I would soon be calling home, I arrived in Portland realizing that the drive was not my discovery of an Oregon new to me. It was a sendoff to California, even if that sendoff included discovering parts of the state that hadn’t been part of my life until this journey. As the world comes back into focus, I realize I have much more time to discover the rest of Oregon. This was my chance to say goodbye to California.