Travels With Sailor: Heading Home

Sailor's turn to drive.

If I can do one good thing in my life — make one truly valuable contribution to humanity — it will be to have a child and teach little Austine or Austin Jr. to never, ever sit in the left lane. The left lane is for passing.

Superstition is the crutch of the atheist, especially the uncertain one, and I find myself knocking on wood every time I talk or even think too loudly about my truck. I turned over 150,000 as I pulled into Casper, Wyoming, last week to visit my wonderful aunt Karen, Uncle Herb and their beautiful kids. When your a man of my disposition, every milestone is a cause for worry. But since then, it still runs like a prince.

A rear-wheel-drive, four-cylinder truck — light as it is in the back end — is quite possibly the worst thing I could have taken through snow storms I encountered in the Montana Rockies and north Yellowstone. Near white-out conditions in both made the driving slow, and quick accumulation made the rear wheels of my truck spin nearly every time I accelerated.

In Yellowstone, I followed a caravan to a viewpoint that wasn’t a viewpoint, only to get stuck in the snow. The friendly people around me helped me get my truck out. Like an idiot, but one who was thoroughly enchanted with the world, if only for a moment, I continued my journey deeper into yellowstone, pushed my truck to its limits as it struggled up a snow-slick hill.

No dice. Not enough momentum, and my truck couldn’t make it up the hill. Behind me, a UPS truck skidded off the road. A park ranger shook his head when I told him I didn’t have four-wheel drive.

“You better turn around and go back the way you came,” he said. “This storm’s only going to to get worse the further you go east. It isn’t going to get better.”

He said he wasn’t sure I’d make up the hills I needed to surmount on my way back either. But I didn’t have much choice. I drove as fast as I could on the snow to keep the momentum going, but as slowly as I had to to keep from sliding off the road.

Sailor was deeply concerned. So was I. We still had enough time to stop and marvel at some bison, some elk.

Seattle and Portland are great towns. Thank you to my friends Anne Catherine and Allison who put me up and put up with me.

A few days back, I turned my wheels toward home, and the trip has assumed a different tone since. Until you run out of room, the West seems infinite. Something about reaching the Pacific and turning around gives one pause. I had a moment, in Wyoming I believe, when I was driving and everything felt familiar. Like I was on any other drive home from across town. This big, wide-open hulk of a country felt small for the first time. It was a feeling that passed as quickly as it came, as vague and unconscious as a spell of deja vu.

Of course I am sad. And the various mountaintop confrontations with mortality that I envisioned in the wake of my uncle’s suicide, I seem to have mostly deferred to another time. Like my fight with cigarettes, like not having run for two months, I told myself I would turn over a new leaf and face reality on the road. Now I tell myself I will turn over a new leaf and face reality when I get home. The hydra-like specter haunts me now, much more than when I first embarked, while there was still so much West to be won. The old, familiar East beckons me back, reminds me that a man can only escape so much before he’s lost himself completely.

That’s not me. I’m gonna keep choosing life over death, hope over fear. My identity, mutable as it feels these days, lies somewhere beneath the ashes and the soot I left behind — the ashes and the soot to which I return. I don’t mean Indiana. Indiana is just a place. There is an idea of place, of where one has been, that is much bigger. That is what has burned. The last two years of my life, at least. Gone.

Trite images of the phoenix come to mind. I’ll have to do some research and find something else that rises from the ashes. I’d like to employ it here. It’s where the hope comes in.

Next stop Kansas.