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.

At first it was a bit of a whim. I’ve been working on a complex but often dry assignment. During breaks I’ve read these fascinating – if horrifying – stories about the spill. There are just so many pieces of this story that need to be covered. How could I contribute to that coverage, particularly when the story will have such far reaching impacts on our world?

Then I thought: why not just ask? Who needs help reporting on the spill? Why not offer my services as an experienced reporter who’d be willing to contribute his work, his time, and his energy?

So, who needs help?

Two years ago, when I applied to grad school, I described our shifting environment and its impact on society, politics, economics and culture — let alone life — as perhaps the only great global story. As I did, I had my grandmother’s cousin, Melville Jacoby, on my mind.

As I’ve described before, Melville served as a correspondent in China and Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early 40s. His work appeared in places like Time, Life and the United Press Syndicate at the onset of World War II. Younger than I am now, he was so deeply immersed he reported from the midst of a narrow escape from the Philippines after the Japanese invasion and, during his travels through China, became close to Chiang Kai-Shek. Killed at 25 in an accident in Australia in 1942, he left behind rich accounts of his life in the form of letters, dispatches and photos now in my grandmother’s possession.

As I learned from my grandmother about Melville, I realized he played a central role telling stories about one small part of another great, global crisis. Perhaps the war was more romantic than seemingly glacial environmental changes (though really, they aren’t so glacial) but both crises are the defining milieus of a particular generation. “Like Melville,” I wrote, “I want to chronicle my generation’s response to its crisis.”
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I have some travel credits, some time, and a little cash saved up.

I even have Melville’s typewriter.

If that could get me to the Gulf Coast, could there be a floor to sleep on for the minutes I’m not in the field? Who’s in need of a collaborator? A researcher? An errand boy? A transcriptionist?

Let’s talk. Even if it’s not in the field, how can I help?

Today I leave Los Angeles for Portland, Oregon.

As I do, I look forward to taking an as-yet undetermined path to my new home hundreds of miles north.

I don’t know how exactly I’ll get to Portland, though I’ve set a few ground rules. I won’t set a firm date to get there. Though the trip could easily take as little as a day and a half, I don’t want to constrain myself to any schedule, lest I miss the world I pass through (you can help me get there, too). I may backtrack. I may make detours. I may decide to linger in one spot staring at the sky for hours. I may rush. I may wander.

Which brings me to rule #2, perhaps the most exciting and most questionable part of my plans. To best experience the journey I plan to completely avoid freeways and even divided highways. Getting to Oregon from Southern California in January makes this a rather daunting task, particularly because I also plan to steer clear of the coast. As stunning as the coast is, I’ve seen much of it and hunger for a new path, at least this time around.

Instead, after a brief visit to Ventura, I might start crossing the mountains of the Los Padres Forest along Highway 33 or perhaps head east to U.S. 395, the Eastern Sierras, and a detour through Nevada. It’s likely I’ll have to ditch certain highways for local roads as some stretches, like the 33 in Ventura, become highways. Perhaps I’ll find myself crisscrossing farmland on country roads in the San Joaquin Valley. Most certainly I’ll travel along dozens of unknown roads upon which I’ve yet to decide. I may very likely encounter snowy passes, and, though I have chains, I don’t intend to be stupid and may have to make a number of adjustments to the paths I set (I won’t, however, bring a GPS because I treasure my sense of direction and my ability to read a map).

On the other hand, I’m most likely to pass through a California and an Oregon oft-ignored. I’m free to turn elsewhere if an obstacle proves more than I’d like to surmount, if I simply tire of where I am, or if I’m curious if what’s down that side road, and I’m free to experience the landscape I see along the way as a result of those decisions. I’m also leaving myself free to change the parameters of this journey, though I don’t expect to too drastically.

I have no set plans for what I intend to write or how frequently I’ll do so (and I may be constrained by wi-fi options or simply too caught up in adventuring at certain points along the way), but I imagine some account of what I see, where I am, where I am not, and who I meet will pass upon this screen.

Transitory nature

After reading about my plans for a road trip, some of you might question my commitment to shifting society away from its focus on single-passenger automobiles toward more sustainable, rationally planned transportation strategies. Yes, I do own a car and yes, I do enjoy driving it, though I never have qualms leaving it behind to take transit, ride a bike, or just walk. I can say that I plan to determine how to offset the carbon footprint of my journey once I have a good sense of its reach (including the distance traveled, the food I consume, and an estimate of the resources I use to write and post about my trip). What you make of my intentions beyond that is your business.

What I will say is that there are different ways to experience the automobile, and to experience the landscape through which it can take a person.

Despite my passion for transit — and a history of misadventures on solo road trips — I’m thrilled about this journey. Indeed, I have come to realize it’s quite difficult to really discern a “misadventure” from simply an adventure. Like life, it’s all interpretation. Too much of this world focuses on perceived destinations, and not the road we travel to reach those destinations.

That statement has been made so many times in so many ways. What I might add is that we are constantly in motion, even when we are “home.” As hard as we struggle for stillness, as passionately as we seek peace, we are in motion. Fulfillment might be more than freedom from desire, it might require accepting our transitory nature. Perhaps more than anything, I believe in the fluidity of life, and find transition to be the most constant force we face.

What you may read

This weekend, after encountering yet another bevy of predictions about exciting new technologies, prognostications about the evolution of journalism and fretting over worrisome new trends in the news business, I realized just how pointless it is to dissect the minute details of the future of media. Afterward, I made a statement I’ve already shared publicly and think is relevant to my motivation for this journey:

“Let’s go out there and tell the stories we see, tell them well, and stop worrying about who’s reading them and what they’re worth.”

I’m taking this journey in part because I want to tell a story of the road. You may read it. You may not. Though I welcome donations, I don’t expect it, and definitely will not put a price on my writing. More importantly, I know my writing and my ability to record what I see would suffer if I did.

What you read here, and this adventure itself, are products of imagination, not crowd-sourcing. Is there an audience for it? Who cares? Or rather, the audience is this one now, the one reading these words, whether the reading occurs today, two months from now or decades hence. This is simply an effort to describe one sliver of the world as filtered through my eyes, not by metrics and news budgets or obsessing over what I think my readers want to see. Though I definitely do not know, I think my readers, whoever and whenever they might be, want to see what they don’t know they’ll see, what they won’t expect, just as on the road I hope to see what I don’t know I’ll see and what I don’t expect.

I am not a backpack journalist. I am not part of a media industry in upheaval, nor a media innovator. I am not a technophile, nor a Luddite. I will not constrain myself by trying to pinpoint ways to present my narrative or funding channels to tap. I am simply an observer willing to use whatever tools are handy to tell a story and to uncover those parts of the story that might matter, but might not easily be seen at the surface.

Join the journey

If you feel you’d like to see what I come up with, perhaps you’d like to throw some change my way, or perhaps you’d like to avoid doing so, or, perhaps, you’d like to give me some cash and don’t want to see what I come up with. If you do want to offer money, you can safely drop it in my PayPal account by clicking here or on the button in this site’s right-hand column.

I’m not going to ask for a specific amount of money, and I don’t only welcome money, as you’ll see below. I’m not going to define what you’ll see in return for your support. I’m not going to outline how much I expect to write or how often. I’m not using a formal service to raise money, just asking whether you might want to buy me a gallon of gas, some coffee, a bite to eat or, heck, a night’s lodging. I’m not following any rules or any standard practices for fund-raising, just as I’m not following any set route to my destination.

Should you so choose, please fuel my journey. Fuel my writing. Fill my tank. Fill my belly. Fill my cup. Just as my route and my writing won’t be restricted by artificial constraints and deadlines, your choice to support my efforts or not won’t have constraints. You can offer $100, $1, 50 cents or nothing at all.

If you want to support me in another manner, perhaps consider offsetting some of my carbon impact (though, like I said, I won’t know its extent until after this trip) or maybe share this with a friend or someone else who might want to read it or see the photos or video I take, if I happen to take photos or video.

Or do something creative of your own. Take an adventure in the manner best suited you and maybe share a tale of it with me. Or avoid adventure. Or don’t share your plans with me and revel in your privacy. Write your own piece about a totally different topic or don’t write anything. Make dinner for your best friend. Play.

I won’t mind if you offer nothing. If I raise nothing more than the cost of a cup of gas station coffee I’ll still be pleased, as I’ll still have had that opportunity for the journey. So please, please don’t feel bad if you can’t afford to support me, or if you simply don’t want to (particularly those family and friends who have been so extremely generous and helpful to me lately).

Perhaps asking strapped friends, family and strangers to drop some change in my jar or take their own adventures instead is a bit insane without any concrete commitments and with such murky goals. But there’s no certainty to the road and, more importantly, writing thrives in the wild. Perhaps we can try to set it free here.