dreampepper

I took a near continent-spanning road-trip last year, that stretched from Vancouver, Canada, down to Seattle, then to Nevada and back for Burning Man, then from Seattle to Tacoma, then Portland, and from there to Boise, Jackpot Nevada, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Salt Lake City, Moab, Denver, Boulder, Lincoln, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Madison, Chicago, and Detroit before crossing back into Canada at Sarnia and finally arriving home in Toronto. 

I was gone from June until November, mostly living in a Honda Element bought specifically, (at least partially), for the trip. I slept in the back on a foam mattress piled with blankets and pillows, the Burning Man festival camping gear underneath, random couches, and the occasional bed. 

There is often a demand made of women to feel unsafe when alone or travelling, but there were no concerns, aside from Covid, which occupied my mind every time I looked at all the Americans pretending it was over or had to brush my teeth in a rest stop bathroom, and the encroaching weakness of my body, which writes its own biography of failure every day, with little to no input from myself.   

It's the kind of trip that people write novels about, the Great Americana of it all, the timbre of each state, rolling hillsides or sharp mountain peaks, how the beauty of farmland is striking to the city eye. A certain type of literary realism seems to spring forth from these experiences, but I didn't feel it that way. It wasn't remarkable, somehow, driving that long distance alone.

I took mental notes, though, occasionally, of things I thought it might be nice to share. Odd signs, (the Michigan Left, the No Name Rest Area), songs that meshed well with the dark, the unexpected number of foxes dead along the highways of Nebraska, what it was like to drive in a complete white-out blizzard between Madison and Chicago, the moving lace of the snow as it built in ripples and waves, the shocking pungency of the rich red of Moab, cracking from beneath the grotesquery of the repellent, ugly landscape between Salt Lake and Moab. 

Other snapshots I didn't take: Clusters of Instagram-poisoned families taking near-identical toddler birthday photos at the Salt Flats, all with the same metallic number-shaped balloons. Well-polished groups tumbling out of #vanlife RVs, all blonde, the children snapping into poses, practiced and true. The sharp bird of prey that woke me from my sleep at a Colorado rest stop, peering down at me curiously through the sunroof of my vehicle as I blearily greeted the day. A four story ruin with trees sprouting from the collapsed top floors, part of Detroit's crumbling architecture across from a post office with more security gates and bars than a high profile bank that couldn't sell me stamps because the delivery truck hadn't come, three weeks running. In one direction, yoga studios, boutiques. The other, abandoned for decades, an area without power, street lights blank, yet still, perhaps, with a handful of tenacious human inhabitants. 

Colorado was gorgeous, if oddly car-dependent. Idaho was flat, both geographically and culturally. Des Moines might have had a spark, but I was only there for an hour or two, lonely in a sculpture garden that felt like an obvious tax write-off, the art all the same large-scale work that splays itself across corporate courtyards in a dozen cities. The tall creepy spider legs almost comforting in their homogeneity. The polka-dot pumpkin the same as every other, cloned across social media in thousands of mirror room selfies, reflections of reflections of reflections.  
 

There's more, of course. The little dinosaur statues that were a mascot at some gas stations, how stepping into Target can be disorienting, because it feels like stepping into any other Target, visiting live buffalo in Nebraska, sitting silently in wild grassland. The loveliness of waking up in a rest stop, surrounded by bird song, looking out over a river - how unexpected, too, the gift that is the endless parade of rest-stop visiting dogs. I hadn't considered that aspect of travel, that every rest stop is now also a potential petting station. There was even a local cat at one outside the twin cities, sitting by the side of the parking lot. I threw it a snack, uncertain if it was feral, but it was gone by the time I had changed out of my pyjamas.