This is something about us that's lingered for a while. There's something about road trips that have touched us in an almost spiritual way. With a note of irony, this set in due to the last one we went on, and we haven't had a chance to do any since.
2017 was the year we left the states. We'd been yet-undiagnosed for our bipolar and PTSD, and minus medication every emotion we felt was as big as the world. We'd internalized so much fear that all we could think to do is run, and this is where it lead.
Importing a vehicle is sketch. We're still not sure if we understood the paperwork to this day, but by all we got from it the US government was going to take ownership of our car if we didn't make it to the border in time.
We were in Maryland, the middle of the east coast. We had to make it to Vancouver, which is of course considerably west and also a good deal north of there.
Dear friends of ours had made a move from Pittsburgh to Seattle about a week prior to when we were going. They offered their route, and we took it. Five days start to finish, just as they'd done. Five days to get across the country, or we lose our car.
Of course, they did it by trading off drivers. We were alone.
We hid ourselves in a hoodie and sweatpants, paranoid-fearful that someone was going to hold our identity against us. We lived on meal bars and bottled water and energy drinks, piled in bulk packages on the passenger seat. When we had to piss, we did it off the side of the road. We only got gas as we absolutely had to. Travel was as early as we could manage each day, given we were chaining 12-13 hour stretches of road and wanted to give ourselves enough time to sleep.
We had friends queued up in a discord server, the idea that they could be along on the journey, check in and cheer us on and keep us focused. But, of course, the connection kept keeling over, and eventually we agreed there wasn't much of a point.
A day or two after that is where it sets in.
What started as fear started to fade as we realized how alone we were. Not a bad kind of alone, just... empty interstates in the small hours. Barely any souls, any place we passed by between the hotels.
This comes to a head one night, somewhere in the midwest. It's 2 am, and the road climbs into the mountains. The night is dark. We've never seen a darker night. It's a total VOID anywhere outside our headlights, and the road keeps climbing. It gets noticeably colder.
The road starts to dip and rise, small hills of asphalt. One moment the high beams show nothing but the world, and the next they point to the sky, tunneling into the infinite black. A rhythm, endless, stretching on and on.
I don't think there was - or will be - a moment in our life that will ever be that utterly alone again. Lost in the black, not another soul in sight on the roads. Dip, rise. Dip, rise.
Maybe it was dissociation or fear or exhaustion. Maybe it was just the time of night. But then, absolutely as we've ever felt it, we were alone and somewhere other than real.
Something in that stretch of night lingered with us. It's still there. And gods, do we still hunger for it.
And that's where the feeling lies.
As long as we have been making roads, paths, trails, we have been mythologizing them, and with good reason. Anyone who has driven the vastness of North America for any considerable amount of time alone has a story like yours, and I'll tell you mine:
The I-90 as it passes through my home state of new york is a deceptively treacherous road. It is mostly flat and unassuming from above, winding up from pennsylvania, then firing straight across to boston after leaving buffalo. East of syracuse, the mohawk river sees fit now and again to overflow its banks and flood the highway, like when in 2011 it rendered 100 miles of the highway completely impassable.
A more perennial threat, however, is seasonal, and gives the 90 its true notoriety. For most of the state it is under threat from those two eldritch monstrosities, the deep murky Lake Ontario, and its shallower, wider cousin, Lake Erie. From weedsport to Jamestown the thruway and its travellers are at the mercy of what is called the Snowbelt, where the warmer water of the lakes and the cool canadian winds create an unholy alchemy known as Lake Effect Snow. High winds and deep snow mean that the 90 shutting down from storms is a once-a-year-at-the-least affair. The westernmost part of the state, from buffalo down southwest to the pennsylvania border, takes most of the brunt of this.
I can pin when it happened to me somewhat narrowly. I hadn't dropped out of college in buffalo yet. My younger sister had started college in fredonia. My dad hadn't lost his license yet, so I wasn't driving his old car full time. My sister and I had quietly pooled our money with our mom and bought a shitty old ford taurus for ourselves. The heat in the car still worked. My ex didn't have her car yet. This narrows it to be in the winter of 2012-13.
SUNY Fredonia was only 60 miles or so from UB, so my sister and I shared the car. It worked easily. We texted each other when we needed the car, and either we'd drive and pick up each other and swing back to drop each other off, or we'd catch the greyhound down or up to the other. The bus was alright. I lost my first DS on that bus. One of the originals the size of a brick. Still sad about that.
Anyways, the stretch of thruway was a blustery hell from november to april back then, and on one unfortunate night I left Fredonia headed northeast towards Buffalo. I rode this stretch of highway so often in both directions that I could (and surely more than once, did) drive it in my sleep. No inch of it was unfamiliar.
I could bore you with granular details, because this memory is sharper than anything else from that period of my life. I know it was before the Irving/Silver Creek exit, because the road dips into a valley before it crosses the Reservation after that, and I think it happened somewhere around where Sheridan is on the map, because I hadn't hit the creek bridges yet either. I was still on the higher part of the highway, where it's past the vineyards and it's a good stretch of flat where nothing happens.
It was late. After 9 or 10 pm. The snow was fast and grandular. The wind whipped it across the roads in blinding swirls. As the snow shifted like desert sand, it settled in windswept piles, making an unbroken surface between road and ditch. It was slow driving in the dark, and at some point any other cars were gone and I wasn't on earth anymore.
It was still snowing, the planet covered in ice, or at least a little stretch of it I touched. I remember feeling like my shitty little Ford Taurus and I were the only things besides snow that existed. There were not trees, no life, no terrain. I remember feeling the terrible crushing weight of something, a pressure pushing downward, looking up and seeing a terrible whirling planet, eclipsing the sky, whirling with snowstorms on its surface. It lowered closer and it
I came to awareness again suddenly at the angola rest station. It was still snowing, but not quite as hard. I still pass by it on my way back to rochester sometimes. It stands there as the gateway to the western end of western New York. The station itself is bewtween the lanes in the middle. Each side had a hallway bridge to it. I know I was parked near tiny building for the bridge entrance. 40 Minutes had passed and I was 20 miles further down the road from where I last remembered driving. I to this day have no recollection of how I got there, even if what I saw was a hallucination brought on by the stress or the storm, I could not fathom how I had gotten there in one piece and have zero memory of it. I was no stranger to the snow havi g a mirage-like effect. A decade before this event something happened to me that I know was me seeing things in the snow, which is a story for another time.
But this wasn't a hallucination. I swear on my copy of House of Leaves it was real. Other than a few recurring superstitions, i am a very secular woman by nature. I'm not one to believe in things lightly, if at all. I see no other explanation for what happened to me. Even if it was some road mirage, I can recall it with such vividness how it felt, how it felt sharp and polished like a marble slab in my brain.
For a while I shifted sideways through to another reality, completely sober, and I've never forgotten it.
Anyways, that's my moment on the road
i don’t miss living in it.
i don’t miss the heat.
i miss driving. i miss that when it felt like the world was collapsing in on me i could get in a car and in 40 minutes not even see the light pollution of tucson. i miss driving on the calm rolling waves of the southwest desert, passing those bastions of myth, the plateaus that hide a different world atop them.
i miss driving in the dark for so long that a light in the distance must be a ufo, holy shit it’s a ufo and it’s near the road oh damn annnnnnnd it’s a light at the top of a radio tower.
i miss radar love as i entered the last hour of the drive.
but to the theme of the posts above, there was a mysticism in the open desert that to this day sits with me, a calling for the feeling of true space. for an expanse that puts you into scale.
there is also the time that my brother and i made the 850mi drive from tucson to lake tahoe. we were passing phoenix, having been forced to turn of tina fey’s bossypants—because laughing was making it hard to drive—when i called my dad and gave him an update. “we’ll be there by 10,” i said confidently shaving nearly 2.5 hours off of the estimated time on google due to some bad time zone math.
when i hung up i realized my mistake, “they are laughing their asses off, there’s no way we finish this drive in 8 hours.” now, i grew up on road trips. i’ve visited most of the states west of the mississippi and 3 hour drives to apache lake on fridays after school was what we did. my brother and i switch off driving at our 4 stops for gas, and it wasn’t until we crested spooner summit that our minds woke up from the fugue state created by possibly the driest book on tape known to the universe, rainbow siz (unabridged) by tom clancy, and realized it was 9:30. we were going to be early. how? my car’s cruise control stops at 90 so in the nevada desert that’s what we had it set to. but we’d just made an 850 mile drive in 9.5 hours or an average of 90 MPH WITH GAS AND FOOD BREAKS.
anyways we have a reputation for driving faster than seeming possible which was reinforced when i made the drive carrying my cousin’s then bf (now husband) from slo to walnut creek (230mi) in 2h30m which is a more achievable speed if you ignore that traffic does not allow you to go 90 on the 101.
