There's this massive, wrinkled, psychedelic map of the United States in my dining room. It's nothing fancy, just one of those flimsy educational posters we picked up at the store for a few bucks.
You can tell it's received a lot of love, despite the short time it's been up. There are folds and creases that crisscross the Rocky Mountains and run hodgepodge from Chicago to Alabama. Marks created by excited little hands and big hands making plans and dreaming up adventures.
The audacity of its colour scheme and its elephantine size drive me crazy sometimes – it takes up half the wall - especially on days when I descend into a Martha Stewart redecorating frenzy. Then the darn thing just seems like an eyesore, and I'm tempted to rip it down and replace it with something more professional looking. But I don't.
So it gets more and more of a lived-in, loved-up look. And the little red check marks my daughter has pasted on various cities across it have, over time, been proudly replaced by neon-yellow happy-face ones - a reminder of the places we've been, and those still on our bucket list.
Near the very top of that list was this one very important item, which I was able to tick off, nearly one whole year ago.
After what seemed like a lifetime of waiting, I'd arrived at the eventuality I always dreamed of: standing on the soil that my literary heroes could very well have once stood upon. Gazing at those same copper skies. I was in America.
Forgive me if I sound a little starstruck. Throughout junior college and university, I inhaled a steady stream of literary magic by American writers. Guys like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac took up residence in my brain in a way that has made them impossible to evict.
Kerouac, in particular (and who was actually Canadian-American), seduced me with his wild, furious, melancholic insanity. Suddenly, I was close enough to touch that genius spark, breathe in its source and feel it infuse into my skin.
My first instinct was to grab Mr HWNN, jump into a car and speed off down a highway, Metallica blasting on the speakers, on the road trip to end all road trips. Unfortunately for our children, their father and I suffer from an incurable condition called romanticised-nomaditis. Our restlessness isn't so much an itch to travel as it is a genetic imperative.
Highway to hell. Ok, maybe not. It's the road to Death Valley, which is sorta close, metaphorically speaking.When I was younger, I thought nothing of working several holiday jobs at a go just to scrape together money for an intercontinental flight. The fact that Mr HWNN – who was then boyfriend HWNN – was often overseas for work provided more than enough incentive for me to drop everything and catch a plane to anywhere in a heartbeat.
My lack of funds at the time often made for interesting sleeping arrangements, like crashing on the dorm floors of university mates, or bunking with a friend of a friend in an apartment so tiny, you practically had to sleep in the toilet.
But I was young and insane, and these road trips were simply heaven. I took them for nothing more than the sheer amount of life experience I gained from just going.
When our first child came into the picture, Mr HWNN and I emphatically declared that she would simply have to fit into our lives, not the other way around. That self-delusion worked, for a while. We carted our infant (read: hapless) child on endless road trips up and down the eastern coast of Australia. And baby HWNN learned to nap in car seats, strollers or strapped to my front in a sling.
Then six years later, we suddenly found ourselves in Arizona, with not just one but two children in tow – both of whom were now very vocal and very much the antithesis of what good travellers should be.
Crossing the desert to get anywhere really didn't help. Once the novelty of watching dirt go by their window wore off and boredom set in, one of them would inevitably start whining, then get phenomenally carsick, while the other would wail for hours in protest of her car seat, making a sound I can only compare to, say, a dying hyena.
We had several moments like these in the beginning, before we got smart and discovered magical spells involving “motion-sickness medication”and “portable DVD players”.
Prior to our enlightenment, I would try to entertain our young whinging overlords with a song or three. Usually something ridiculous, like Phantom of the Opera. Yes, I give you permission to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It was late. I was tired.
There was nothing on the radio.
After one of these particularly hairy escapades, I wondered aloud if we should give up on road trips forever and fly everywhere instead. Or even just be content to holiday at home until the kids were older. A little part of me secretly wondered if I actually would prefer that. Was I finally bone-weary of travel?
Thankfully, Mr HWNN has enough gung-ho for the both of us, and insisted we continue to choose the more trying, difficult route. And so our kids have braved those trips with us – whether two hours, or five, or 12, or even two weeks. Because there really isn't anything like it, seeing a country from the ground. Sure, aerial vantage points provide some stiff competition in looks department, but up there you kinda miss the point of it all:
You miss the dirt, the detail, the steady transformation of terrain, the tactile sensation of the land undulating beneath you as the car hugs the road. And you miss the humanity, oh, the humanity...
A bowling alley wedding (top) and an endearing family moment, seen during a pit stop in Santa Cruz, California.Driving in New South Wales, Australia, it used to fascinate me how the view outside my car window could go from acrid desert to lush English meadow to concrete jungle and back again to barren wasteland in the span of a mere two hours.
I find myself noticing the same metamorphosis here. Nothing is ever truly static. Not when you see it up close. A tree is never just a tree. It's a tree juxtaposed against nothingness, or cradled in a cauldron of nature.
Rocks and boulders are no more large mounds of sand than the ocean is just a big cup of water; they present a universal history that is so ancient and profound, yet still changing, constantly in motion, in friction, all about us.
Even the most ordinary of man-made things, a little burger joint or forgotten hamlet in the middle of nowhere, hide untold stories, if you bother to stop and take a close look.
As the sign up top suggests, they take their produce seriously in somewheresville California. Below, Native American stalls on the way to Page, Arizona, lie silent in the dusty afternoon heat.>I wonder if the same thing could be said about my existence? What would Kerouac have written about such a life, with its seemingly clockwork minutiae of childcare and chores? Would he have seen something more under the surface? Something that was constantly evolving? Constantly shifting, resisting, growing, playing against the forces acted upon it? I'd like to think he would.
Because I never want to stand still.
Copyright notice: All images in this story are strictly the copyright of the author, and may not be copied or used without prior permission.
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