Interstate Highway Pilgrimage
Notes on a solo road trip through the West
During one of California's unbearable heat waves in August or September, I deliriously planned a road trip through the American west in about an hour. Weighed down by the heat and the smoke of our fire season, I was almost feverish with a desire to breathe crisp mountain air, to see the turning leaves of autumn. I couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than a clear blue sky. Looking at a map, I haphazardly booked Airbnbs in places I'd never been to without doing any research and then returned to suffering through the heat wave, somewhat comforted by the fact that in October, I would be elsewhere.
When that late October day finally came, I left town early in the morning. About two hours into this three week road trip, somewhere in the dry vagueness between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, listening to "Movies" by Weyes Blood, I suddenly and abruptly started sobbing. Full body wails at 90 miles per hour, eyes fighting to stay on the road. I muttered to myself that I didn't even know why I was crying, I just knew I needed to. When the song ended I immediately replayed it.
This happened a lot on my road trip. Sometimes I knew why I was crying: the way the golden autumn light fell over the trees around Mt. Hood, the sound of my solitary footsteps in a snowy forest in Wyoming. Moments of sublime tenderness. And sometimes I cried because... because.
I think I cried every single day. I'm grateful no one was traveling with me, because I wouldn't have wanted to explain myself every time I started weeping for seemingly no reason. I was also grateful to be able to walk barefoot in the snow or plant a tender kiss on a tree, and have no one look askance at me. It's somewhat ironic that I craved such solitude, given that I've been living alone this entire pandemic, but there's the solitude of being trapped in your apartment and there's the solitude of roaming free over thousands of miles.
When people ask me how my road trip was, I usually say "oh my god, so good!" because that feels easier than saying the truth, which is that it felt like a pilgrimage. It feels corny to say that! But there it is. It was sacred, and it was what I needed. At the risk of stating the obvious, this year has been crushing for all of us. On top of everything that's part of the news cycle, for me this year was the year that my heart got broken over and over again. Sometimes by people, who my friends would be quick to point out never deserved my heart to begin with, and they are of course correct, but unfortunately that's not how the heart works, she has her own unknowable agenda. And sometimes by the world itself. Seeing California choked and incinerated by yet another horrific fire season truly broke something in me, something more than just my heart. This is my home and I'm watching it die year after year. I really can't say more without feeling overwhelmed with sadness, but you understand.
So when I planned this road trip, it wasn't just because I was tired of the heat. I was tired of everything, worn down to almost nothing and the only way I knew how to feel better was to hurl myself into the vastness of "the West", with little more than a full tank of gas and a few choice country playlists, because maybe somewhere in that emptiness I would finally have space to breathe, to think, to just exist.
Though I cried an inordinate amount on this road trip, I never quite felt sad. I felt more like I was healing. I was listening to myself and doing whatever I wanted, every single second. I joked about becoming feral but as with all my jokes, I wasn't entirely joking. Sometimes I felt fear on this trip, like when I was driving through fog on a very dark night, but I didn't feel that nebulous existential fear that had loomed over me the rest of the year. My worries were immediate and easily managed. As long as I had a warm place to sleep and some food, and I always did, I was fine. Every day the only item on my to-do list was "Stay alive 🤠". I didn't have any Zoom meetings, there was no email to check, no chores or errands that would pile up, and above all I had no sense of needing to be "productive". If I wanted to stay in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the entirety of Emmylou Harris's "Blue Kentucky Girl", then that was a perfectly fine way to spend a morning. If I didn't make any art or exercise or do a stupid little Duolingo lesson that day, that was also fine. I was keeping myself alive and that's all I needed to do.
It's easier to think this way in the rural West because, well, there's really not much to do anyway, and more importantly you're much closer to nature and its rhythms. In Yellowstone I got to see a pack of twenty wolves (!) slowly wake up with the sun. The younger wolves played with each other, wagging their tails, as ravens stood silently nearby. Some bison were eating close to the river. Coyotes yipped nearby. A solitary grizzly bear marched slowly through the snow. There was no sense of urgency to anything. It is unlikely a single one of these animals woke up and thought about their Jira tickets. Sometimes we need that reminder, I think.
In addition to all the crying, I also wrote a lot on this trip. I wrote in pen, in cursive, trying to be deliberate. On my drives and my walks I would let my mind shake out the neurotic mess of thoughts I'd been holding onto for months, and in the evenings I would write with greater and greater clarity. Early on I wrote: "i feel like the smoke after a candle has been abruptly snuffed out. listless, aimless, dark, sad." I described desert mountains as "pale blue waves of death and calm." Later: "how lucky am i? this is eden." Later still: "does the wren question her place in the world? the coyote? human consciousness was a curse." I wrote gushingly about how beautiful the landscape was. I sorted through some complicated feelings about uncomplicated people. I wrote about what I truly want out of life, and what I don't. I wrote secrets I barely wanted to share with even myself.
Near the end of the trip, or this pilgrimage, I had a six hour stretch of driving, and when I got to my destination, a small cabin near Mt. Shasta with old country records and new astrology books, I was startled to realize that for the past few hours I hadn't really thought about anything at all. My mind had been blank for the first time in, well let's be honest, probably my whole life. I had started this trip a frantic mess of anxiety and tears, and I was ending it with complete serenity. That hadn't been my goal, all I wanted was to breathe some fresh air, but in hindsight it made sense. Crying and journaling are already good for you and everyone should do both, with gusto, but even if I had done neither, roaming through the lonesome crowded West would have been enough, too. Hiking between red rock canyons, standing in a snowy meadow with pronghorns staring at me from the hills, walking along a rainy beach, I felt more like myself than I had in a very long time. It's a strange place, at once both cruel and magnificent, mythical and banal. It's beautiful beyond what words can really capture. It's a perfect place to listen to a sad country song and cry and cry and cry and not feel like you have to hide it from anyone, because there's no one around. And especially after such a crushing year, sometimes that's all you need.
