1. No one else in the car knew how to drive a stick shift.
2. The only other licensed driver in the car only had a learner's permit and wove dangerously into the shoulder when confronted with oncoming traffic.
3. We stopped in Pueblo, Colorado for a few days to visit friends of my then boyfriend.
It was a great road trip. We stayed in lots of cheap hotels and ate too much convenience store junk food. In the morning, I would always wake up first and go to the gas station and get beverages and breakfast for everybody. I'd fuel up the car. We'd go. I was comfortable with that routine. Comfortable.
Before we set out, I would spend a few minutes on clean-up patrol of the car. We would rid ourselves of the previous days waste and get ready to waste the car all up again. When we finally got going, we would jam two songs: "Ray of Light" by Madonna and then "Beautiful People" by Marilyn Manson. Every morning. I don't know how those songs became the cornerstones of the trip, but I still can't hear either one without thinking about our morning routine on the road.
There are lots of stories from the road trip, but one of the biggest events wasn't a big event at all. Let me show you:
We left Colorado on the eve of an enormous thunderstorm. I was driving spooked after I narrowly missed hitting a deer that ran across the middle of the expressway just outside Denver. We proceeded to drive across Kansas. We stopped somewhere mid-state at a tiny Motel 6. It was the only motel we stopped at that required my driver's license to rent a room. I'd been using fake names across the rest of the continent after an unfortunate incident in the first motel.
The next morning when we started out I vowed that I would make it all the way to Michigan from Kansas in one marathon sprint. I was tired of hop, skip, jumping. I was tired of being on the road. And I was too tired to drive any further by the time we got halfway across the state. It was way too hot, we were surrounded by wheat fields on all sides and there was an oppressive sameness about the whole scene. It was even worse than Wyoming and Montana. So I did the only smart thing: I stopped by the side of the road and got out.
I sat on the shoulder of the road for about 20 minutes and not a single car went by. I just looked out at all that wheat. The wind that was blowing was too hot, too, and for the first time in our long journey, I thought about the weight of my decision to move to a whole new state. The road trip was the fifth time I'd ever been out of Alaska and only the second time I'd ever been out of the state "by myself".
I started to doubt myself and my decision. I started to wonder if I'd done the right thing. I kept thinking that I just couldn't drive anymore. But then the strangest thing happened: The wheat stopped being oppressive and got a little bit comforting. I was cheered up by the wheat. It was just hanging out in that field doing what wheat does. And I figured that if I moved to Michigan, I could just chill and do what people do. Whatever that is.
I hadn't gotten in over my head. I hadn't made a bad decision. I hadn't screwed up my entire life. (There were more dark periods of doubt to come, but I didn't know that yet. I was too busy getting back to good.) So I got back on the car, turned the radio back up and kept going. The last leg of the journey was over 900 miles. That was more than double what I'd done every other day since we left Canada. We made it up to Michigan early the next morning. We got into town about 6 AM. We got lost in St. Louis and hit a lot of heavy fog on the way up I-69, but we made it.
Just like the wheat knew we would.