The Final Push

I am sitting here in Ballard in our rental that my aunt very graciously covered for us during our stay and listening to the owner Jill, my aunt’s friend, and some of her girlfriends play guitar outside. They are sitting on the patio between Jill’s house and the small rental they built in their backyard. They’re playing easy going country/bluegrass riffs. It lends a nice bohemian air to the otherwise suburban surroundings and adds another touch of authenticity to our deepening sense of this eclectic neighborhood.

We are poised on a verge. On one hand we are so close to the end of all this, to the end of constant movement and logistics and poor sleep, to the end of close quarters and irritability with each other, to the end of the road – which, oddly enough, is very close to the beginning. On the other hand we couldn’t be farther away. We are in America’s Upper Left, the corner pocket, tucked as far away from anything else in the country as possible. We have three days of driving ahead of us just to get back to the camper. From there, we have to drive clear across three states and a portion of two more.

So we sit here on the precipice and try to pretend like it isn’t that big a deal. We can still enjoy a few more weeks, right? We can still have fun camping and traveling and sight seeing and learning and exploring, right? We can still attain an air of carefree wonder and ease, right?

Sort of.

Withholding the logistics of working our way across half the country in our RV, there is the substantial challenge of settling ourselves down once we get there. We have to tackle these issues now and it takes away from being in the moment, which is what this adventure was all about from the beginning.

We are exhausted. We all know what it truly means to be at the end of your rope.

It is incredible what we have seen and done. Our conversations with friends and family take on a comic spin when we suddenly start bouncing around all our various experiences and the person on the brunt end watches us like they are watching a ping pong match. One thing leads to another.

‘Remember that time we stayed in the ghost town in New Mexico!?’ one of us will blurt out.

‘Oh yeah, and the guy with the gun! How many rattlesnakes did he say he killed a year?’

‘Remember that rattlesnake we saw hanging dead in the tree on the side of the trail in Georgia?’

A line like that will come straight out of the middle of a relatively benign discussion about the continental divide or the various cacti we’ve seen. Our fellow conversationalist will look longingly for some context.

Someone will ask about our favorite place and we’ll all look at each other and smile. This question always elicits a different reaction than people think. We’ve seen so much that sometimes we forget it all. Then we’ll remember something and all answer at once.

‘The Redwoods…’

‘The Everglades…’

‘Indiana Dunes…

‘Nantucket…

‘Joshua Tree…’

We have all been reminded by each other about a place or experience that we haven’t thought about since.

‘Remember the guy on the tour boat who was famous on German TV. Carl, I think his name was?’

‘Oh yeah, that guy. Boy did he know his birds!’

‘Or that time we missed our train back to Jersey City at night and had…

‘…to wait in the dark at the station and that…

‘…sketchy guy with the dark hoody was walking back and forth!’

‘You can’t ever forget that sunset at Glendo, though!’

‘Oh, Glendo had the best sunsets!’

Usually it’s me who says, ‘Remember that storm in…’

May 14th will be our 330th day on the road. Some days I feel as if that time just went like sand through our fingers. Other times I am incredulous with what we were able to do with those 330 days. Sometimes I am amazed at what we can do with ONE day! Time is such a fleeting and difficult thing to pin down. Its relentless and doggedly consistent pace is sometimes at odds with the whimsy of perception. They say if you go fast enough you can slow down time. Travel at the speed of light and relativity says you will age slower than your earth-bound mates. I like to think the opposite, that as we slow ourselves down we get more out of each moment.

Wendy once spent hours watching ants at a campsite in Arizona. For anyone who knows Wendy this is an almost impossible thing to believe. Much easier to imagine me doing something like that. She followed the antics (haha) of a single worker ant struggling to bring a large chunk of bread (in relation to itself) to the nest. She watched it and commented on its seemingly random movements and improbable progress. She would leave it and come back to find it. It didn’t seem to follow any specific path. Sure enough, that ant managed to bring that chunk of bread into the nest and it disappeared (backwards) down into the sandy surface. She took a video of the moment to celebrate its success. 

It says a lot about her, and a lot about this trip, that she was able to attain a state of mind that allowed her to appreciate something that most would never have time for. That most would scoff at. You did what?!

As we approach our new life beyond this trip we will probably become those people again. So we take great solace in the fact that, at least for a moment, we have been able to stop time.