The Long Way Home

Little Joys Vol. 2: Not every journey takes you somewhere new. Some return you to yourself.

There’s a simmering excitement that belongs only to early evening departures. Somewhere between 5 and 7 PM, when the light is going golden and the day has already had its say. I back out of the driveway with a destination I’ve circled on a map, my aunt’s guest room in Camarillo, the ocean a few miles from her front door. Something in my chest releases. The audiobook is queued. The backup playlist is ready. I have nowhere to be but there, and I won’t arrive until the sun comes up.

I was 18 the first time I drove more than a thousand miles alone. Portland to Colorado. No second thoughts. No asking for permission. The following year I drove from Seattle and earned two speeding tickets on the same day—one outside of Seattle, one on the Oregon-Idaho border only a few hours later. Apparently freedom without accountability has a learning curve. It took until I was 25, and becoming a mother, to finally ease up on the lead foot. Not the 24 hours in jail for speeding. Motherhood.

Road trips as a child meant sibling squabbles and losing the vote on dinner. (Taco Bell, always. I had opinions.) I discovered driving alone meant I chose everything: the music, the food, the speed. It felt less like transportation and more like reclamation.

I’ve been to concerts alone. Movies alone. A convention in Las Vegas, alone, where I spent long information-packed days talking to strangers and retreated each night to 650 square feet in the Venetian, which felt, honestly, like a decadent dessert I got to savor in peace after all the small talk. I adore a solo hotel room.

I’ve never let the absence of a companion stop me from going somewhere I wanted to go.

It turns out, movies and concerts are experiences I want to share. Not necessarily in the moment, but after, when the reminiscing starts and the memory gets its second life.

But a road trip? A road trip I want for myself.

When I get in the car alone, I come back to myself. The world outside the windshield slows and speeds simultaneously. Scenery flying past, my mind still enough to take it all in. A stray dog at a gas station in reservation country. Boys playing soccer in an empty grocery store parking lot somewhere in the middle of nowhere. When I’m outside my routine, autopilot isn’t an option. I have to pay attention. And paying attention happens to be one of my preferred forms of joy.

One summer my son and I drove from Texas → Oklahoma → Colorado → Arizona, and into California—3,200 miles round trip—visiting family and friends, with Disneyland as his reward for being a champ about all that highway. He was 9. We were in line for Pirates of the Caribbean when another single mom struck up a conversation. She asked where we’d come from. When I told her, she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. That I’d driven all that way myself. That I wasn’t afraid of getting murdered in a gas station parking lot. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties and said her mother would never allow it.

That conversation stayed with me for years.

It never occurred to me that I couldn’t drive across the country alone. The thought of needing permission was completely absent from my lived experience. I know not everyone has this. A self that feels at home in its own company. An interior life spacious enough to remain entertained for 13 hours heading west on I-70 to I-15. That woman in line helped me see that I’d been given something. I just hadn’t known to name it.

When I tell my mom I’m leaving for California at 6 PM and plan to drive through the night, she says: “Be safe. Text when you arrive.”

That’s it. No fear transferred. No warnings disguised as love. Just—go, and let me know you got there.

I drive at night because it’s peaceful. No sun glare. No heat shimmering off the asphalt. Cruise control set because there are so few other cars, I can’t use them to pace myself. Just the road and whatever story is playing through my speakers and the occasional glow of a truck stop on the horizon.

My mom gave me the blueprint without meaning to. Trust yourself with your own life. Not as a lesson. This was the water she swam in, so it became the water I swam in too.

The joy in a road trip isn’t the miles traveled. It’s the allowing. Choosing to take up space alone. Opting, on my own, for music or silence. I get to pull off at a viewpoint nobody else agreed upon. And when I arrive tired and satisfied I’m reminded how powerful intentionality is.

I’m not trying to convince anyone that solitude is better. Some joys require a witness. Someone to turn to when the magic unfolding on stage becomes something you can’t hold by yourself. Road trips aren’t that. Not for me, anyway. Road trips are where I go to remember that I am, at my core, good company.

Turn the key. Set the cruise control. Let the starry-skied night do its work.

P.S.
Virginia Evan’s, The Correspondent, was unparalleled company for my last night drive through the Arizona desert.