Tag Archives: road trips

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

Storing Up Montana

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Last week was reading week and I went to Montana.

At five on a Sunday morning four of us piled into my silver Kia and drove down towards the border. I sat curled in the back with a blanket a dear friend gave me years ago. The sun rose. We stopped at diners and Walmarts, made arguably too many puns about Spokane and country music, and discussed the eerie beauty of distant crowds of white windmills scattered across sharp brown hills. We crossed range after range of mountains and we crossed the Columbia, which is so blue and so wide and shadowed by walls of crumpled red rock. I breathed in America.

The whole week had both a sense of home and away to it. There was an easiness in the proximity of the friends I was with. My friend Becky is staying in a big house in Missoula, so we filled in her extra bedrooms, and spread out our school work on various couches and tables and desks, positioning ourselves so that wherever we sat, we could see the sunny blanket of snow and mountain gazing back at us through the paned windows. We went out cross-country skiing for a couple days in the middle of the week, and stayed in a picturesque little cabin that night, but beyond that there were no real plans. In the evenings, we cooked big dinners, drank wine gradually, and sprawled ourselves on the enormous sectional couch of the house’s basement. As is often true when I’m in a group, I was nearly always the quietest, but for the first time in a long time, this didn’t make me feel self-conscious or left-behind. I realized I was sitting in the midst of real—if hard-won—contentment.

Often, both in my life while I was teaching and in my life at Regent, I have found myself shuttling back and forth at record speed between two modes of being: relational and informational overload, in which I am busy doing and being all things for all people, or, when I leave that for any extended period, total solitude, in which I enter entirely into the lively twists and turns of the world within my own head. These spaces are not bad in their own right, but neither are exactly peaceful. Yet this past week was something else entirely, a space I think I’ve rarely inhabited, and which is probably more healthy than we know. It had finite limits of people and time and place, but we were aware that what we had provided for ourselves, what our God had provided for us, was abundant and, more than that, good. The trip gained its own patterns and jokes and worn footprints of house and food and snow and car and we shambled along in them.

Also worth noting: while we were in Montana, I skied. (Just cross-country, don’t get excited.) Anyone who knows me knows that I essentially never try new things, especially not physical skills. I knew this was out of my ordinary and was surprised at myself for even being willing to try, but I didn’t think much more about it than that. And then we got there and I did it, and it was massively uncomfortable. I still have bruises because I am very, very good at falling down—it feels more natural to me to fall than to stay upright—but that’s not, as you may have guessed, the sort of discomfort I mean. I am not graceful in learning, I am not graceful in being taught, I am not graceful in growth. Yet despite some pretty public frustration, I did learn, I was taught, and perhaps I began to grow. At the very least another new hole was knocked in my crusty, defensive shell, and fresh winter air came rushing in.

And now, a week later, with a bit of distance and a bit of thought, I think that was pretty good progress. Eventually, sometime the second morning of skiing, the bright cold sun, the weight of the snow on pine boughs, and the rhythmic click of my boots fastened into my skis all took over and I forgot to fall so much. So that’s something to file away, something to save, something to settle back in the attic of my mind.

I’m grateful, is all. I’m grateful for a week for the seeing of things and the breathing of things. On Wednesday morning it was very cold and very sunny. I was walking back from the washrooms to our cabin with dirty hair in loud snow pants, and a little bit of snow sifted down from the trees just ahead of me. The air caught it like glitter and it shone like anything. I couldn’t stop smiling.

Home from the Badlands

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Yesterday, nine days after leaving North Carolina, my dad and I arrived in Vancouver with America splattered all over the front of my car.

We saw a lot of things–in fact I looked out the window a lot more than I did anything else–but my favorite was this: on Tuesday we came to the Badlands in western North Dakota, where for miles in every direction the earth has simply dropped out under itself, leaving behind thousands of craggy green and brown plateaus, all looking pensive as if they are contemplating their options and might someday sink down as well, turning the whole place into one great lush valley. But for now, and for all of human memory, we’re still in the in between–some land up, some land down, and the sky getting larger every mile.

We drove into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, through and around more and more formations of layered, crumbling earth, and saw fields and fields of anxious, soft little prairie dogs popping in and out of their burrows and finally came upon a herd of bison grazing. They stood calm and focused, some half-grown, but others large and ancient. Their winter coats, which were in the midst of shedding, hung off their flanks in great brown furls and dragged behind them like unintentionally august robes. We pulled over and rolled down the windows and a few came so close we could hear their jaws ripping at the grass beneath the still blue sky.

And as we rounded Highway 1 up into greater Vancouver yesterday the city flashed at me through the trees, a split-second, glittering wink, not to be repeated. Something quite deep within me jolted and I knew I loved it. Instead of dropping out beneath me, the road was rising up to meet my feet.

Chaff and Wind in the Summer

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Last week I took a trip up through Ohio and into Pennsylvania. It was a quiet trip. I drove alone, listening to melancholy audiobooks, and then stayed a few nights each with good friends. The most exciting outings included Hobby Lobby and blueberry picking with a three-year-old. As I told someone just recently, I’m not much of a do-er. I’m a talker and a be-er, for better or for worse. So this was a really lovely trip.

I trod familiar college ground all week long, both literally and figuratively. Every friend I saw was someone who met and became important to me during college. People tend to talk in hackneyed terms about living life in chapters, and it felt appropriate to re-live such a neatly defined previous chapter as I’m about to step out into a brand-new one.

So on Thursday and Friday, I wandered around campus and its environs, stopping to gaze at very particular doors and windows behind which I remembered doing most of my living. I wanted to have some rush of feelings but felt a little disconnected from those four years, though I knew they grew me up. As for the friends I was in the midst of visiting and our long conversations, they were wonderful-wonderful, but those friendships have outgrown college in many ways, which, I told myself, can only be a good thing. I like these new conversations about marriage and motherhood and a home that’s distinctly yours, even if I’m not there yet myself.

But I continued to walk around campus, because I knew I owed it to the place. I took myself into the main classroom building to see if anyone was there, though Grove City doesn’t have summer classes. As I climbed the central staircase, for a brief moment I breathed in some old anxiety hanging in the air, as if I were wearing a backpack again, aware I hadn’t read well enough for the quiz I was about to take, running lists of names and terms in my head, surrounded by a crush of other students moving past me in the ten minutes between morning classes, choruses of wet snow boots squeaking on the slick floors. Funnily, it’s an anxiety I don’t remember feeling, but yet there was its ghost, moving eerily around my midriff, so it must have existed.

The overwhelming majority of things I remember from college are good (thus why I wanted to come back and visit): long meals with friends, sometimes cooked with our own hands, rambling walks down Pinchalong, methodically pacing the stacks whenever I had a paper to write, sitting in the dark nave of the chapel during Thursday night Warriors, teaching myself on icy-cold walks to class to look up even though everyone else looked down. I do remember some hard things: tears, humiliations, hurts that stung. I remember them because I learned from them, though, because they turned out to be important.

But that hazy, anxious feeling I wandered into on the stairs last week was not important, so I walked through it and up out of it onto the second floor toward the English department, where I ran into a favorite professor and we sat down and talked, not about the old days, but about the way things are now.

We cannot carry our whole pasts in our hands, so the wind blows the chaff away, and the memories left to us are manageable. I have been nervous about this move out west because of the looming, but as-yet unseen, challenges and pains I know it will present, but the great North Wind will continue to blow and blow and blow, and I will manage the gifts given to me, one by one by one.

Coming Up Clean

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I’ve just put lotion on my ankles to soothe my bug bites and I am tired. I’m in a slow and simple mood this evening, so I’ll just tell the story from the beginning, though it is not spectacular. Perhaps because it is not spectacular.

Last Friday I got up at four forty-five and my dad drove me to the airport in Raleigh. I met Mary in Nashville at about eight-thirty and we set off driving up through Kentucky and Illinois. We stopped at a rest stop around lunch time and made sandwiches on top of her trunk out of rye bread and cookie butter. We laughed so much that some nice people at a nearby picnic table asked us to join them. We are so magnetic. However, we said ‘no, thanks’ and instead walked around and contemplated ousting small children from the see-saw so we could have a go. But, of course, we had already had our turn on that same see-saw when we were their age. We’ve driven this road so many times.

In St. Louis, I unwittingly pulled off at a gas station in a rather shady neighborhood. We got out of the car and did one quiet circuit of the little convenience store, then just climbed back in and kept going. By the time we got up to Macon and turned onto 36 a few hours later, my chest felt light like it always does when I pass through that place at that time of day. The fields stretched wide arms, speckled with hay bales, and the road rose to meet us, leading up into the low, late-day sun.

We got to Grandma’s in time for dinner, and then took a walk with my cousin Hannah up to the cemetery across the highway, where we typed in the secret code at the entrance for old time’s sake. My grandparents have arranged for plots there. Hannah read aloud from To Kill a Mockingbird while Mary and I did dishes.

The next morning Mary and I began the two-day task of taking our grandparents and aunt up to camp. My grandpa is frail. He cannot lift his feet well. He uses a cane and he struggles to lift his head up high enough to look straight ahead of him. His sweaters never seem to go on right and are always hitched up over his collar. He shuffles. Our trip was full of halting steps and slow. We stopped at a Walmart north of the Twin Cities to pick up about ten things Grandma had forgotten. I had to relearn much of that sort of patience which has fallen out of use at college.

And yet, that last thirty minutes of the drive held the same glow. Grandpa started telling us miles beforehand how much the topography looked like camp, then we passed The ICO and a moment later the great big Story Book Lodge signs came round the corner and we were home. It is sixth or seventh on my list of homes, but I knew it was higher for everyone else in the car, so I borrowed from their awe and comfort.

I can’t tell camp in order. You never can, especially a family camp. Mary and I stayed in the Ark, which was very cozy with two beds and its own alarm clock. I spent lots of time with cousins. We attempted a couple games of Monopoly, which will never be enjoyable, but also went kayaking, met Hannah’s friend-boy (not boyfriend,) played Old Maid with Grandma and Sally, and drove over to Virginia after evening meeting one night to see Wolverine. It turned out that it was in 3D, which no one except the boys was pleased with, but giggling and snarky comments have improved many a cousin film.

On Thursday we threw Molly a little family party for her eighteenth birthday. We made Mary Brammer’s Black Forest Torte (a family classic), Faith passed out glow sticks, and when Joe would not come down in time to sing, our Aunt Sally scaled the stairs to retrieve him. (That was our favorite part.) We took lots of pictures. I was impressed with how we have grown up. I don’t mean that we have gotten taller and more employable, though we have, but that I saw in my cousins something better. I saw that they are kinder, more willing, harder-working, more thoughtful, and unabashed (though perhaps, with each other, we have always been that.)

But noticing more than I used to includes the less savory. I saw problems with good people in a good place. I saw imbalances, injustices, frustrations which I knew would go unaddressed, things which made me itch to change and fix them. But that job was not for me.

Instead, after every meal, Mary and Molly and I stood behind the counter to receive the rush of dishes. We scraped and stacked the platters at record pace, consolidated bowls of ranch dressing and emptied pitchers of water and milk. Afterwards we helped with pots and pans—I was always on dry-and-put-away duty. Mary had set up her slackline, which magically attracts people of all ages and sorts in clusters, so she took great joy in knowing the names of all the little kids and their intricate relations. I just liked knowing that the wide rubber scrapers went in a certain drawer in the bakery and that the cutting boards went under the microwave. It made me feel important.

On Wednesday evening my cousin Charity was baptized down in the lake along with three other teenagers. (I can call them that now that I no longer am one.) The sun was setting way over behind the island and I watched as each of them came up clean, at sharp angles with the water, their hair dripping smoothly back from their faces, their arms crossed over their chests, leaning into the arms of their fathers. Then they would slosh back to shore and stand shivering in a towel to be hugged by their family.

I thought about coming up clean out of the water and out of the “soul-cleansing blood of the lamb,” not just once but over and over. The best message of the week was on Friday morning. Ben Scripture talked about trading in excuses for simple confession. We confess and Christ is eager to intercede. We are always needing fresh washing, new garments, but they always come free. They come free and they come strong. I must let my Father cleanse me of frustrations and weights which are not mine to carry. They are His, as I am.

We left camp on Saturday morning. Sunday morning we passed the fields of smooth, white windmills in northern Iowa. I remembered why even when we were younger, my cousins and I always got so quiet at this stretch of highway. They are unimaginably big and rather beautiful, but they are also frightening to me. They call up a small, stubborn Don Quixote out of my chest, ready to fight a hundred other battles which have not, in reality, been given to me.

So I came back to Missouri in peace, handing my grandpa his cane at rest stops along the way, and stopping at a Russell Stover outlet for my grandma. Back to the only place I am comfortable hanging all my laundry out to dry, even my most inexcusable underwear. The pool filter needs to be run. This is the job my Father has given to me, so I will come up clean, tend to those bug bites, and have a chat with my sister. There’s more road before us.