Road Trip: Invitation to Step Away

1 · Last Days in the Driveway 

You’d be surprised how loud a town can get once you decide to leave it. Lawn-mower engines nagging through Saturday mornings, delivery trucks hissing compressed air at intersections, your own phone coughing up one more “urgent” e-mail—all of it conspires to make staying put sound reasonable. But the very noise that pleads I stay is the noise that finally sends me packing.

So I stood in the driveway, mid-April sun not yet mean, sleeves pushed to the elbow, two knuckles raw where the socket slipped, and listened to the neighborhood’s hum as if it were background music I’d soon forget. Josie, my forty-two-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon, lay half-gutted before me: air filter out, fan belt off, oil dripping on to what used to be the shipping container of a refrigerator, now flattened and protecting the garage floor.  

The engine smelled of hot metal and ancient promises. Most Vanagon owners name their rigs for luck, but Josie earned hers the hard way—that first breakdown in Wyoming where we slept in separate tow yards while a thunderstorm rattled chain link like jail doors. She forgave me, eventually. I forgave her, mostly. We’ve been married to the road ever since.

Preparing her for a tour through small-town America felt less like maintenance and more like pregame pep talk. I crawled under, twisting the torque wrench until the motor mounts squeaked the language of steel fatigue. She groaned, I groaned back. That’s how we say I love you.

2 · Lists You Can’t Order from Amazon

While the oil drained, I opened the notebook I keep in my back pocket and added yet another line to the packing index:

• line 42: unsaid apologies for leaving too long (won’t fit in luggage—file under emotional baggage)
  
  

It joined other absurdities:

• spare fan belt
  
  
• duct tape (good for hoses, emotions, seat seams)
  
  
• envelopes—12, each holding $1,000 for whoever needs it more than I do
  
  
• Brenda’s patience (non-returnable, handle with gratitude, “just be home by Christmas.”)
  
  

Tools and talismans, faith and flange sealant, all thrown in together like gumbo.

Travel, at least the way I prefer it, demands two kinds of preparation: mechanical and interior. You can buy gasket kits; you can’t buy readiness to be lonely. You can torque lug nuts; you can’t torque courage (at least not sober). For the past month I toggled between the two shops—garage out front for wrenches, mind upstairs for inventory of what I still feared.

The fears line up neatly if you let them:

• Will story subjects slam doors when I knock?
  
  
• Will the air-cooled engine melt on a Utah grade?
  
  
• Will the bank statement laugh when I drain savings into the tank?
  
  
• Will the silence inside Josie’s cockpit swell toward deafening when my mind starts to catalog people I’ve lost?
  
  

I wrote each fear in ink, closed the notebook, and kept turning bolts. You don’t exorcise doubts; you torque them to spec and hope the threads hold.

3 · The Map that Won’t Obey

For navigation I carry a laminated Rand McNally Road Atlas, Sharpie stars marking every town someone once said, Oh you’ve gotta stop there. Digital maps whisper efficiency; paper maps seduce with suggestion. They show roads that no algorithm will choose because they take you five miles off the shortest line just to wind past an abandoned two-room schoolhouse or a field where buffalo might still remember when they ruled the earth like titans.

Weeks before departure, I spread the atlas across the kitchen table and traced a blue highlighter over highways I’d never driven. Route 60 across the Shawnee; Route 36 skimming the belly of Ohio; U.S. 83 straight up the Great Plains like a plumb line to the horizon. Then I closed the book. None of that is binding. Plans are what the road laughs at while it hands you detours gift-wrapped in orange construction barrels.

Brenda stood by the coffee pot watching my cartography. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

“Anywhere the line wiggles more than it should,” I said.

Brenda half-jokingly asks me to stay. I promise I’ll call every night. You must always promise. Promises are the tether between go and come home.

4 · The Garage as Temple

The day before launch I performed a ritual older than motor travel: the final once-over. Oil at the line? Check. Valves? Self-adjusting. Spark plugs gapped like soldiers at inspection. I caressed each hose clamp, muttered psalms of prevention. Pilgrimages do not wait for perfection. They start when the heart says go, even if the body of the vehicle isn’t entirely on board.

In the engine compartment I hung a dog-tag stamped “HOPE & GEN TOUR” because vans, like sailors, travel better wearing identity round the neck. If a mechanic finds me unconscious at a Love’s Travel Stop, at least he’ll know the mission.

Turning out the light, I said goodnight to Josie the way a father tucks blankets around a child before her first field trip: half trust, half terror, love threaded through both.

5 · Packing What Won’t Break

I packed two pairs of hiking pants, the kind you can zipper off the legs and have instant shorts, five T-shirts, five pairs of socks, a thrift-store blazer in case some small-town council wanted a fancy interview. I stuffed them all into a brand-new plastic economy storage bin from Home Depot. I packed two cameras—digital for the documentary shots and an ancient Hasselblad as an offering to the film gods—a selection of favorite pens, and a great blank notebook with linen paper, deckle-edge, the kind that makes your scribble feel like scripture.

Food? Plenty of Ramen noodles, canned beef stew and chili, peanut butter, and tuna in a pouch. Coffee grounds, a favorite mug, a one-burner butane stove for all the cooking, and a cheap aluminum set of backpacking pots and plates.

What else does a man need? He needs open eyes. He needs that child-sense of maybe. 

6 · The Mind as Hitchhiker

Even pared down to axle grease and underwear, the hardest cargo to stow is the mind itself. It flits, flaps, refuses harness. In the weeks leading to departure, I practiced sitting still in the driver’s seat while Josie slept on jacks. Ten minutes. Eyes shut. Not meditating, exactly—just acquainting nerves with stillness. A pre-ride handshake between man and machine.

Sometimes I replayed dialogue with ghosts: my father, who taught me life skills in a cantankerous, begrudging way; my son, who died by his own hand, whose laugh still echoes when I break a bolt loose; and the estranged friend who called generosity naïve. They rode shotgun for those ten minutes, argued or forgave, then evaporated. Call it mental packing. You decide which spirits to bring along.

7 · Road Etiquette for Strangers

I drafted a manifesto on hospitality and taped it to the dashboard:

1. Accept coffee when offered—no matter the brew strength.
   
   
2. Listen twice before answering once.
   
   
3. Pay for the pie if the widow insists it’s free.
   
   
4. Don’t photograph tears without permission.
   
   
5. Always replace a borrowed tool cleaner than you received it.
   
   
6. Leave handwritten thanks where your tire tracks remain.
   
   

The rules aren’t cosmic. They’re small kindnesses that grease conversation more than any credit card swipe.

8 · Saying Goodbye to the Internet

Two nights before rollout, I ran backups of backups, scheduled out-of-office replies that read like confessionals, and slid my phone into “Do Not Disturb except Brenda” mode. Connectivity is the great devourer. It eats present moments first, the future next. Out there on two-lane blacktop I need to hear wind, not notification pings.

I kept the phone. I’m not suicidal. But I exiled it to the crease of the passenger seat, where it must holler through four layers of willpower to claim my attention.

9 · First Miles—Learning to Breathe in Third Gear

Launch morning, the neighborhood hushed as though the world loaned me a quiet minute. Dew glossed the windshield like varnish. I say the same silent prayer I always say before turning the key to nudge Josie awake. I finally turn the key, and Josie rumbles to life. 

Backup camera? Ha. I craned my neck, watched Brenda in the rearview mirror; she raised a coffee mug in salute, bathrobe cinched tight against the dawn. A wink, a wave, a small ache sliding between ribs. Then the throttle opened. We crawled out of the neighborhood, wide tires kissing pavement that still remembered midsummer tar.

At the city limit sign my breath finally unclenched. Third gear humming, trees arching overhead like the nave of a roadside cathedral. Every mile past familiar grocery stores peeled away a layer of hurry I hadn’t realized was strangling me.

10 · The First Unscheduled Turn

Forty-seven miles in, the atlas pegged a thin county road curling east toward a cluster named Pine Ridge—population too small for census rounding. The pavement narrowed, inviting mischief. I flicked the blinker left though no one followed, and we dove into sycamore shade.

Within minutes gravestones appeared—old, lichen-licked, Civil War-era names. I stopped, engine idling, because curiosity tugged the sleeve. Wandering among markers, I found a single stone with a carved lamb and the dates 1904-1910. Someone had left a spoonful of marbles beneath, bright glass winking under leaf litter. I knelt, with nothing to say, but gratitude swelled anyway. Preparation had guided me here: the slowed-down heart willing to pause, the notebook ready to capture the whisper of memory.

Back in the driver’s seat I wrote the child’s epitaph: Short song, still echoing. That line may never appear in a chapter, but leaving it behind felt like polishing a window only I could see through.

11 · Mechanical Baptisms

Preparations, even meticulous, never outrun random chance. At mile 200 Josie sputtered like she’d swallowed a wasp. I coasted onto gravel, shut her down, and held my breath. I phone a friend who rides the same vintage steed. We agree something went amiss because the engine is just too hot. Let her cool down and move on. A half hour later, I again spark her engine to life. I wipe little beads of sweat from my upper lip. I grab a pen and wrote in the margin: Fear sometimes pays dividends, even though I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, and I never would…

Breakdowns aren’t setbacks; they are introductions. When you kneel on a stranger’s driveway wrestling a stuck bolt, neighbors appear bearing lemonade and small talk. That is where stories germinate, not under pristine success but amid shared aggravation.

12 · The Art of Slowness

By afternoon the odometer clocked another 100 miles and the day bulged with detail: a cotton field opening like a prayer book, two kids selling boiled peanuts from a card table, the bright yelp of a fox trotting across fresh asphalt. Every unscheduled mile felt earned, chiseled into memory deeper than any interstate ninety-minute blur could ever match.

Steinbeck wrote that a journey is like marriage—the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I taped that quote above the rearview as training material. Slow is the only pace that lets revelation overtake you.

13 · The First Camp

Night found us on Forest Service land. I parked under loblolly pines, cracked the vent windows so cricket symphonies could drift in. Dinner was chicken-flavored ramen and washed down with river-cold water. I wrote until the page blurred, then folded into the bed, quilt pulled to chin.

Lying there, I inventoried the day’s intangible cargo:

• two marbles etched by weather
  
  
• the taste of lemonade with too much sugar
  
  
• the ghost of a gravestone lamb
  
  
• the hush that befell me when the phone stayed mute all afternoon
  
  

None of those weigh more than a feather, yet the van felt heavier—rich with gathered earth.

14 · Unwritten To-Do Lists

Before sleep I drafted a new checklist:

• Stop at more cemeteries; the dead haven’t forgotten how to speak.
  
  
• Ask every cashier where the locals eat; trust the first answer.
  
  
• Keep the map folded wrong-side out so surprise can read it first.
  
  
• Remember Brenda’s face when doubt bites—phone her before doubt chews through to the bone.
  
  

Preparation doesn’t end at departure; it evolves. Each day sculpts the next day’s readiness, like a carpenter shaving wood until the grain reveals its own desire to curve.

15 · The Point of All This Wrenching and Worry

Why chase small towns with a creaky van? Because the heartbeat of a country hides in places unpinned by GPS heat maps. Because generosity sounds louder where populations whisper. Because I need reminding that worth resides in stories traded over counters sticky with pie syrup, not in metrics tracked by investors.

Mechanical checks, packing rations, mental calisthenics—these are not chores, they are devotions. Each spin of a wrench says I intend to arrive. Each map fold says I intend to be lost enough to see. Each good-bye says home is portable; it rides behind the lungs.

Josie creaked as the night cooled. The wind sifted pine needles across the roof. My muscles ached in the fine print of joints, but the ache felt clean, like a barn swept after muck-out. Tomorrow would bring road, and road would bring whatever mischief kindness required. I drifted asleep to the idea that all preparation, at its root, is hope made tangible—threads you tie before the storm so the tent won’t blow away.

Morning always keeps its promise when you’ve done the work in darkness.