no doubt you too have experienced time
It’s March 29th, 2021, and my feet are propped on the dashboard as I watch rural Louisiana float by. It’s greener than we expected, my roommate and I agree, having grown accustomed to the bleached out grass and spindly trees lining the southeastern highways we’ve been going up and down for the past six months. It’s the perfect driving conditions, we agree, having weathered a small but aggressive bout of rain, and settling into a full day of slightly overcast, pleasantly grey skies, with lush grass, sprawling agricultural swamps, thickets of trees, and endless flatness lining our road. There’s something disquieting about the landscape, we agree - half-abandoned, eerie, anticipatory. New Orleans leads to Baton Rouge leads to Shreveport leads to Longview leads to Dallas leads to Fort Worth, with cities and towns and census designated areas scattered throughout. I stumble over Opelousas, Natchitoches, Atchafalaya; I look up Erwinville, Livonia, Valverda, the Louisiana university system as we pass through, reading Wikipedia articles out loud to my patient roommate.
Nothing I read answers the questions I’m trying to get at: who lives here? Who owns the agricultural machinery businesses we pass, who attends the wide, brick high schools periodically scattered alongside the highway? Directional signs point out towns with 2,421 residents, 3,024, 1,530. “I know someone who went to the university there,” my roommate says, passing a sign pointing to a small city in the middle of nowhere, her Alabama roots affording her more connections to the swamplands we drive through, foreign to me, feeling northern for the first time in my life. “My aunt lived there for a while,” as we cruise through Baton Rouge, a blip of a city in the midst of quiet. “Why?” I ask, and she shrugs - we chew silently on the question as we approach Texas.
“What if we fall madly in love with Texas?”
“I don’t really see that happening.”
The same conversation comes up on nearly a weekly basis for the last seven months, but we haven’t grown weary of it yet. Starting in September 2020, we’ve spent a month at a time in different cities scattered across the southern United States, repeatedly loading and unloading a set of belongings from the trunk of our Subaru Forester, in and out of Airbnbs in the mountains of NC, Savannah, Wilmington, Charleston, Chattanooga, New Orleans, and Santa Fe. We’ve perfected the spiel: “Oh, we’re usually based in DC,” “we’re a bit nomadic right now,” “we ended up leaseless early pandemic and decided to take advantage of that while we could.” We nod and smile as people suggest cities to us: Miami, Austin, Mobile, Charlotte, Bentonville, Seattle. “We’re trying to make the best of it,” we say on dates, to our hosts, to our friends across the country.
We dole out the ironed-out version of our story - no one wants to hear about my early pandemic job panic and flight back to my childhood home, the relationship I shredded to pieces in the process, my deeply misguided attempt to move back to DC for a few lonely and confusing months last summer, or my roommate’s extended, year long exhausting prelude to a breakup that resulted in her sister and me scrubbing down her kitchen and packing her life belongings in a car that they drove back south to her childhood bedroom for a hot, dark summer. It’s much better to fast forward to September, where I book a house in the mountains of North Carolina, and we load up her car to drive the ninety minutes down the road to our temporary home. We sat by the fire, and we watched the mountains, and we sipped wine, and we decided we had made the best decision of our lives.
It’s been seven months, six different destinations, and we have settled into what we affectionately refer to as our weird little life. We have a system - some people envision our lifestyle as a minimalist, van tour of the USA, but we cram a vast array of bags and boxes into the body of our small SUV. The night before a move, we pack our clothes, listening to our respective podcasts in our respective rooms. The morning of, we wake up and load up the rest of our belongings into their designated homes; tennis rackets, my yoga block, and hangers go in the Leisure Bag (a dilapidated reusable grocery store bag), our ever expanding collection of books go in the Book Bag (a strained Strand Bookstore tote), my roommate’s collection of spices and kitchen necessities go in the Cooking Box (a surprisingly resilient cardboard receptacle). The dense suitcases full of winter, spring, and summer clothes go in first, and we tuck our array of bags, boxes, baskets, yoga mats, and backpacks around them. Once our Hollywood light make-up mirror is wrapped in a blanket, and the rattling lid of the Dutch Oven is muffled by my roommate’s apron, we depart.
“Do you ever think about how we’ll probably never be in this exact spot ever again?”
I pause and consider it. “No. But now I’m going to start thinking that.”
My roommate drives, and I chatter at her for miles. I theoretically give her directions, but my inability to differentiate left from right probably slows down our journey more than if she just guessed the turns at random. We drive through flat expanses punctuated by small towns and spaghetti junctions of big cities, cruising by towering apartment buildings in Atlanta and freshly built condos in Chattanooga and faded nautical-themed restaurants in Myrtle Beach. Vibrant neighborhoods in Wilmington full of colorful old houses have Biden signs stabbed into every front yard, and we twist and turn through rural roads in Tennessee with dingy Confederate flags fluttering outside of squat houses whose front yards are overrun with dilapidated cars and rusted machinery.
We ask over and over: who are these people? What brought them here? What do they do every day? How long have they been here? I look at Zillow listings, browse the local subreddit, we discuss the jobs of people we see on dating apps. I imagine having some form of X-Ray vision - as if I could point at a house and understand who lived there and what their path was that brought them in this moment to this place. Who are you? I think to myself, and how do I learn anything about you?
We have stupidly obvious epiphanies at every turn. We learn that there are people who live lives fundamentally different than our own. We learn that our world is so small and insular, it’s laughable. We learn that we aren’t even considering a fraction of the scope of what our lives could look like one day. We learn how to fill our days, we learn how to change a tire, we learn how to make babka, we learn how to play tennis, we learn how to build a fire.
While dining at a mediocre outdoors brewery after our first eight hour driving day:
“Assuming we’re learning a major life lesson from every city we go to, what’s your Fort Worth life lesson?”
“What are my other life lessons?”
“The world is big, history is long, life is mysterious.”
“Don’t live somewhere where everything closes on a Sunday.”
It feels trite to characterize Texas as a different country, a different culture, a different universe. We spend approximately ten hours over two days traversing the state, driving from the edge of Louisiana to the edge of New Mexico, hugging the Oklahoma border. Somehow we don’t encounter a single cloud the entire drive through the Lone Star State. The sky is impossibly huge, reminding me of a science fiction novel from my youth where the protagonists travel to a planet with a smaller diameter than Earth, causing the horizon to feel like it was tilting down in the corners of your eye. Our bare legs start to burn as the relentless sun beats down on us - I alternate between draping my sweatshirt over my legs and sweating and exposing them to the rays and sweating. The road hugs train tracks, and it’s hard not to be hypnotized by the colorful containers, printed on the side with Chinese characters, that churn dizzyingly by. “Love a good train,” I comment compulsively as they rattle past. I watch closely for freight hoppers tucked in between the cars, but don’t catch a glimpse of anyone bold enough to endure the relentless Texas sun or the expansive mileage. Every two hours, we trade places, and trade control of the radio. Every two hours, we trade back.
Outside Dallas, we pass through the densest thicket of suburban neighborhoods I’ve ever seen. The dark, low roofs are spaced a mere three feet away from each other, and each house has an enclosed, perfectly square backyard. We, two suburban girls, who love suburbia and will ultimately live out our days in some nice planned community somewhere, gawk at the endless identical house after house after house after house, sprawling on one side of the highway as far as we can see. It’s unnatural, we mutter, it’s eerie. One house amongst the swarm is randomly burnt to the ground, a blackened shell, like a glimpse into the bone structure of the neighbors on either side. One house has a small army of tiny men belaying on it like ants. Where are the trees? I ask. I Google: Why don’t trees grow tall in North Texas?
To my unamused roommate, before her morning coffee:
“What small Texas town are you most excited to pass through today?”
“Uhm. What are the options?”
Ostensibly I could read, but instead I slide down in my seat and watch. What we passed: pumpjacks, some frozen in place like a taxidermied animal, some lowering into the ground like alien horses dunking their heads down for a drink of water. Miles of thick, green grass. Miles of cracked, tan dirt, punctured with spiky black shrubs, like the apocalyptic Lorax landscape. Riverbeds, crevices in the land filled with low, brown water, lined with dried, entangled brush and grey tree trunks with black branches splintering off, reaching unambitiously into the sky like dense arteries. The car shakes, battered by relentless wind that roars uninterrupted across the flat plains and tries to push us out of our lane lines. Miles of rows of white wind turbines, towering over us and placidly rotating their giant arms. Pastures dotted with black cows, double decker cattle trailers passing us on the highway, the periodic earthy smell of manure. A car dealership with a hundred bright blue tents, housing the shiny new cars from the baking sun. Trucks I would need a step stool to climb into, driven by men in camouflage with thick forearms. I try to capture pictures, videos of the sights, and of the trains, and of the turbines, and of the cows, but every image turns out featuring almost entirely rich, deep, distracting, impossibly blue skies.
Mountains start looming on the horizon, buttes start jutting up from the landscape, we cross over into New Mexico. The roads take us further north, and further up, and we see patches of snow on the ground on either side of the road despite the seventy degree weather. We settle into quieter music, sparser conversation. Empty land turns into jutting rocks turns into scattered ranches turns into stacked adobe houses as we wind towards our next home. Our energy levels, buoyed by gas station candy and salty snacks, crash as soon as we unload our bags into the house. We each quietly unpack, pursuing our independent nesting rituals in our new rooms in our new house.
“Carolyn, you have to come and look at the sunset.”
We stand in our front yard, looking west down our street at a sky drenched with an orange glow. The air is thin and dry, the street is quiet.
Halfway into the journey, I decide I want to start writing down some things about the places we’ve gone and the places we’re going before it turns into a hazy blur of my various desk configurations in different apartments, colorful meals and recycled bottles of wine, chilly mornings and humid evenings. I plot out an outline for each city - I look back at my pictures, I peruse the books I read that month, I try and remember various existential crises I warded off. The task feels daunting - never before have I spent such a dedicated period of time considering daily what it means to build for yourself a good life. Stripped away from my friends, my hobbies, my routines, my city, my insular, warm little bubble, I feel some days like I’m left with just my reflection in the mirror looking at me expectantly, like “Alright? Now what?” Now what? What am I going to wake up and do today? In the absence of late night work emergencies, dinners with coworkers, plays in Silver Spring, brunch near Dupont, Survivor watch nights in Alexandria, yoga on Mondays, lunches at my desk, trivia at Kingfisher, texts from my friends, messages from my group chats, in the void left behind, the onus is on me to construct for myself a good day from scratch. When the din is gone, in the vacuum remaining, there is space for me to think and breathe and maybe write some.
“All this self-reflection can’t be good for a person,” I complain to a friend over text.
Recommended content for a seventeen hour road trip across the American south:
Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland
Joan Didion’s South & West
Choire Sicha’s review of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts
The history of the Tome, New Mexico land grant legal battles
The entirety of The Killers’ Sam’s Town
coming up: month one, Fleetwood, NC