Maps of the Journey So Far

The First Half, Chicago (8/22/12) to New Orleans (1/10/13)

The Second Half, a Work in Progress

Coming Full Circle

This is the end, my friends. I’m going into the woods, the land of no wi-fi and cell service only if you stand on that one hill and close your left eye.

In a month I’ll come out of the woods and make the brief journey home to DC. Once I get there I may write up some more entries for this blog. There were so many things I wanted to write about and didn’t get the chance to. We’ll see how things look on the other side.

I spent the past day in Chicago, and thought about how different that city looked after a year of seeing new things.

I spent today floating in a lake and thinking about how so many of my most pure moments of joy on this trip were in or on or around water.

It’s been an amazing ride. Thanks for sharing it with me.

Two Seattles

One of my favorite things about the way I’ve been traveling–and the reason I’ve been able to travel as long as I have–is that I’m staying with friends everywhere I go. This means that I get a really personal view of a place. I don’t have to rely on a guide book to tell me what to see–though sometimes a few Google searches have led to discovering awesome things–the people hosting me will have suggestions and ideas of ways to get to know a place. As one of the women I stayed with put it, I’m “trying on lifestyles.”

A 4th of July in Seattle

The moments that really crystallize for me that I’m traveling, that I’m not where I was a month ago, let alone where I was all the years before this one, always happen around holidays. Every regular day of the year falls into a sort of rut in our memory, and that rut hasn’t varied too drastically over the many places I’ve visited. So this is February 23rd in Austin, Texas; there’s not too much to mark it as different from February 23rd anywhere else. So this is February 24th in Austin, Texas; well, that’s Oscar Night. (Yes. Oscar Night is a holiday. In my household at least.) And that’s exactly what makes me realize I’m traveling, that awareness of the things I’m missing back home. Who knows what happened on February 23rd in DC? But I certainly know what happened on February 24th.

We all have significant dates by which we mark the passing of a year, though those dates can vary from person to person and place to place. No one in New Orleans really marked Valentine’s Day because it fell so close to Mardi Gras. Whereas in the rest of the country it’s easy for Mardi Gras to slip by unnoticed, except maybe you’ll see some King Cakes in Whole Foods’ bakery section, but Valentine’s Day is sure to be driven home by a whole host of things. Dates like these make it more obvious that you’re somewhere else because the rituals we build up around them vary from place to place. Maybe in Portland, Maine there’s a parade on Halloween, maybe in DC there’s a zombie lurch.

Repeating Stories

I skipped over Nevada on this trip, staying south of it until I reached California and then heading north, and only north, for months. Two of the books I’ve read that tell tales of journeys spent time in Nevada, though, so I’ve gotten to know it, to some degree, from a third-hand perspective.

Parade Snob

I think New Orleans has kind of ruined me for parades. Saturday was the Fremont Solstice Parade, and like a good collector of local culture, I went to see what it was all about with a friend–who has also experienced New Orleans parades, having lived there once upon a time. Both of us were perhaps a little too jaded from these experiences to really get in to the spirit of Fremont’s parade.

Contact Sober

I’ve written a lot in this blog about community, and finding commonalities with people through a shared experience, or a shared love of something. Usually I’m part of the group I’m writing about, and I’m excited to have found it in this new place. Whether it was sitting around in a backyard in Chicago with women who had shared the experience of Michfest, or finding a whole theater of people in San Francisco who loved The Last Unicorn, I’ve been giddy to find these people who understand something that I understand.

The other night I got to spend time with a community I’m definitively not part of; whose language I don’t speak, whose experiences I haven’t shared. A friend of a friend had reached her fourth year of sobriety, so my friend (the first friend in this sentence) was throwing her a party.

Nearing the End

I’m nearing the end of my journey. I’ve decided not to try and make it out of the Pacific Northwest for the next month, instead spending that time bouncing around between Seattle and Portland and Eugene. I can think of worse ways to spend my time. Then, just over a month from now, I’ll pile into a car with four other women and I’ll complete the circle of North America that I started last August, before I knew that my route would resemble a circle. (It seems appropriate that it did, especially as I started reading Blue Highways—the book after which this blog was named in part—again the other day. William Least Heat Moon traveled in a circle, and he writes this of his route: “Following a circle would give a purpose—to come round again—where taking a straight line would not.”)

It’s hard to believe I’ve been at this so long. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve been drifting forever. I’ve had a great time, and will continue to do so for the next month–with a number of posts still to write, I’m not closing down the blog just yet–but despite the fact that I specifically set out without any goals so that I couldn’t fail, I feel like some hopes that I wasn’t admitting I had haven’t come to pass.

Tuning in to the Middle of a Bottle Episode

[This post brought to you by procrastination]

If I got to be an extra on a bottle episode on the ride from Atlanta, to New Orleans, I tuned right into the middle of one on the way from Albuquerque to Phoenix. Albuquerque was a stop in the middle of the route of the bus I was riding, meaning that everyone’s dynamics–as well as their seats–had been firmly established by the time I got on. I didn’t realize this as I sat in the middle of the Greyhound Station, watching the people around me and listening to them talk to each other about things as disparate as the new pope and where to go smoke a cigarette. This was my introduction to the cast of characters I was about to become a part of: the young man sitting on a bench, wearing bright, sparkly, mauve headphones and dancing as best he could in a seated position; the tall man with a tear, and a cross, and a multitude of other things, tattooed on his face; the female half of the couple behind me who realized that her backpack, empty, was worth more than Greyhound would insure all of her luggage for.

Flash Fiction: Salty, Fishy, Metallic

They buy sushi and eat it under the squid.

They like to eat the raw fish and pretend they’re underwater. The squid above them slowly comes to life. A tentacle twitches as a piece of salmon is devoured in two bites.

The smell here, in this often over-looked food court, is a little salty, and a little fishy, and a little metallic. If they ignore the whining toddler at the table behind them it’s easy enough to imagine this is the scent of their deep sea kingdom.

Pickled ginger is sucked behind a row of blisteringly white teeth, disappearing like a worm down a gullet, and the squid clacks its beak. They laugh, wondering if anyone else can hear the wires that suspend the squid groaning.

The toddler’s stopped whining and if either of them turned to look they’d see the identical looks of petrified terror on his and his father’s face. One of them picks at the fallen grains of rice; eating them like so many eggs of an as-yet-undiscovered eel or anemone.

The air is thickening around them and by the time they go to throw away the empty container they can swim to the trash can. The last few bubbles of oxygen escape the toddler’s nose.

The cables holding the squid have rusted through and they snap. It gathers them up in its tentacles. The suckers tickle a little.

Seattle’s Streets

Seattle’s streets know where they want you to go. At least they do in Madrona, the neighborhood I was exploring yesterday. I set off without any carefully drawn maps or written instructions because I only had the loosest of goals and they seemed easily accomplished. Go east to Madrona Park, go north to the Japanese Garden, see some things along the way, maybe walk along 34th Ave for awhile as that’s where Google Maps told me coffee was.

The streets had something else in mind though. They let me get to Madrona Park eventually, but only if I went their way, only if I saw what they wanted me to see first. I had to be tenacious about heading in my intended direction, but flexible in how I pursued it. There’s no way I could’ve made it to Madrona Park only on Union Street, as I’d first imagined. I had to curve around and double back. The streets don’t offer up a straight shot. You have to work to uncover their secrets.