Terrible Mother

Road Trip, Part II

[This is the end of the first chapter, the rest of the "teaser". Originally, I was going to post the whole thing, but it was pointed out to me by many friends that this will making publishing problematic. So, if you want to read more you gotta wait for the book! You can read the first part of this chapter here.]

One of the biggest problems I had committed was not considering the relationship between the number of things I purchased and the space inside my car. This meant that Day 1, the day we were to leave, started late because I had to pack, and repack, the car. The back of my-just- purchased-two-weeks-earlier Volvo station wagon was packed full with cooking supplies and backpacks and a cooler and food. I had to squish our extra shoes between the back windows and the cook stove, and I had double bagged the stove fuel and managed to squeeze it in near the cutlery. That left a small space—about two feet by three feet—for me to look see out the back window. The roof cargo box held our tent, sleeping bags, pillows, and air mattress. I had barely been able to shut it, and it took more than two hours to pack everything because it all had to be fitted together, like the pieces of a complicated Lego set.

By the time we got on the road, it was nearly 11:00 am, and we had to make it to Hat Rock State Park, Oregon by nightfall, some 300 miles away. I had planned for us to leave much earlier, say 8:00 or, at the latest, 9:00. In that scenario, we would have stopped for lunch at a rest stop along the way, maybe near Multnomah Falls. I’d make sandwiches out of the cooler, and we’d eat in a park.

Instead, we got lunch from a Taco Bell drive-thru in Brooks, just off I-5. Only part of the reason was our tardiness. The other was that I realized I couldn’t get to the cooler without unearthing half of the stuff we’d brought along, and this meant that lunch would turn into an hour stop as I would have to unpack, and then re-pack, the car. Driving along I-5 I tried to think of a way to re-engineer the packing so that I could easily get to the cooler.

And then I wondered why the hell I had to “engineer” packing the car in the first place. This does not bode well, I thought.

But we managed to still stop for a bit at Multnomah Falls and walk around. The kids posed for photos in front of the cascading water, and we walked around the gift shop. We’d been there before, but it felt good, sticking to the plan even in some small way.

We pulled into the Hat Rock Campgrounds just before nightfall. The campground was the kind of place we would find throughout the trip: a park-like setting with numerous gravel driveways, filled with RVs of various sizes and escalating luxury. And in one corner, would be a small area devoted to tenters, like us. At Hat Rock Campgrounds, there were 72 RV spaces. And 4 tent spaces. We had one of the latter, campsite #3.

The kids ran to the campsite first, excited about sleeping outside. I followed them in the car. I drove down a gravel drive behind Chloe, the slowest runner of the family, who was yelling at the other two to wait. I could hear the excitement in her voice, the way it lifted in happiness.

And then I saw our camp site. It was surrounded by trees, which was what I always envisioned when I thought of camping. However, they weren’t pine, or even something that looked remotely wild. Instead, they were the kind of tall, shrub-like trees people in suburbs use to line their fences. Each site was defined by these shrubs, like miniature suburban plots of land. In one corner was a water spigot, a fire pit and a wooden picnic table. I looked at the other sites. They were identical. I glanced across the street and saw the restrooms, the showers, and the coin-operated laundry. At that moment, the light in the Pepsi vending machine outside the laundry room ticked on.

I felt a little crestfallen. On one hand, the idea of having to rough it at a real campground—one with wild animals and latrine-style bathrooms—didn’t appeal to me in any immediate sense. I didn’t like the idea of having to wash my hair in the camping sink, for example. On the other hand, what was the use of buying and bringing all of that “roughing it” gear if we were going to be spending our nights at places that advertised pools and complete RV hook ups? And how hard could it be, really? No one will respect me if we keep staying at places like this, I thought. There’s nothing really hard about it.

But then we had to set up the tent. We had done it once before, in our front yard. That time, it took a few tries to get it right, but I hadn’t put on the rain fly, or actually gone inside the tent.

I opened the cargo box, pulled the tent out, and set it on the picnic table. The tent came with a giant bag, and one of the selling points was that the tent and all of its paraphernalia, actually fit. I set everything out, carefully accounting for the tent stakes, the tent, the rain fly. I called the kids over, and said, “We’re going to set the tent up over there, in that clear area.”

“Why?” Ivan said.

“Because it’s flatter there,” I said.

“But what if we put it by the camp fire? Then we’d be warm.”

Chloe rolled her eyes. She was 11 with a sharp mind and, increasingly, a sharp tongue. “Because the tent will catch on fire. Duh.”

“But it would be cozy to be close to the fire,” said Ivan.

“Guys…” I said.

“Maybe we can find out the maximum temperature the tent can take and then measure the right amount of feet, and then we can move the tent just right,” Ivan said. Ivan was autistic, and mildly so. He was much worse as a toddler, didn’t talk until he was 4, didn’t point, and banged his head against every hard object in the house. But now he seemed more like an Asperger’s kid, or like an alien sent to earth with the sole mission of trying to blend in with humans to study them. In Ivan’s mind, the ideal solution to where to place the tent was really about calculating potential temperatures. Which Chloe found insane. And, at least this time, so did I.

“We’re putting the tent on the flatter surface, away from the fire pit,” I said.

Giselle, the youngest, nodded. She was a gregarious kid, and used to her two older siblings’ arguments. She was also a terrific opportunist, and, if the argument continued, would have chosen the side that was best for her.

We commenced setting up the tent. I laid it out carefully, and gave each kid a pole. North Face tents have poles that are made of aluminum, and that are attached by internal ropes. This means that they are easy to put together—you grab one set, and fit each segment into the next. The kids did theirs, and I did mine, and then we carefully threaded the poles through the sleeves.

The first time we tried to get the tent up, it was that we put the wrong poles into the wrong sleeves, which made the tent look like something from a Dr. Seuss book. The second time, one of the pole segments came undone and an entire side collapsed. The third was probably just our frustration manifested in a collapsing tent.

The entire time, the guy next to us, in site #2, watched us with a smirk on his face. I tried to ignore him, which would have been easier had we been able to set up the tent on the first four tries.

The fifth attempt did it. There was a trick to it, of course. We had to each have one side of a pole and then walk together, simultaneously, and then put the poles into the tent’s grommets. It never again took us this many tries to set up the tent, but it also never became exactly easy.

By now, night had fallen, and I still had to cook dinner. It was late, 9:00 already, and the kids were hungry. They wandered the campground while I started the stove, and pulled out the cooler. I dug the ground beef out of the ice, and then found the Garden Burgers for Chloe, the vegetarian. The box was soggy, and I had to throw it away. I made hamburgers, laid a bag of chips on the table, and rinsed strawberries in the spigot. I got the camp stove lit easily, but the pan took a long time to heat up, even with the flame turned high and licking the sides of the pan.

As I set the table, someone said, “Hey, you guys camping here for a few days?” I turned. It was our camp neighbor, the guy with the smirk. He was standing in a space between two shrub trees.

“No,” I said. “Just tonight.”

“That’s a lot of work for one night’s camping,” he said. It was, I realized. In the dark, I couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t sound like he was smirking. I walked over to the shrubs. “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t really think about that first.”

“You guys headed off a long ways?” he asked.

“Yeah. We’re driving around the country.”

“How far you goin’?”

“East Coast,” I said. “And then down to Florida. And then across the South, through Texas, and then up through California and back home.”

He whistled low. “How long are you planning on taking?”

“Seven weeks.” Seven weeks seemed, at this moment, a very long time.

“How many days you’ve been on the road?”

I didn’t want to answer because I knew I seemed like a rookie, all five attempts at getting the tent up, and the long time it took to get dinner ready. “Today’s the first night,” I said.

“Tent will get easier,” he said. “I’d worry if this was your third or fourth night, but the first few times, it’s always hard.”

“Really?” I said. I felt relief run through my body, a tingling sensation through my hands and feet. 

He nodded.  “You’ll get used to it pretty quick. Me, I’ve been here for a month already.”

“A month?” This seemed odd, that someone would camp for a month at a place like this.

“I’m working over in Hermiston, down the road about ten, twelve miles. Construction. But the hotels are too expensive, and this is cheaper. Makes it worth it to take the job.”

“How long is the job?” I asked.

“’Nother month or so.”

I could not decide how to feel about this, or what to say. He seemed happy with the arrangement, the camping. He had a big truck, and a nice tent and it made sense, camping for a few months instead of staying in a hotel. Still, I imagined it was not easy.

“Hey, good luck on your trip,” he said.

I thanked him, and wished him good night. After dinner, the kids and I climbed into the tent, Ivan curling next to me on the air mattress and we talked, all excitement and tired happiness.

Chloe asked, “Does Idaho look like Oregon?”

“A little,” I said. I had been there before, but none of the kids had. “The western side has kind of dense forests and it’s really pretty. We’re going to drive over a lake on our way.” We were driving through eastern Washington, then through Idaho, and to Montana on Day 2.

“What are we going to do in Montana?” Ivan asked.

“See Keetje,” I said. “And hang out for a few days.” Keetje was my closest friend, a poet I had gone to graduate school with. She lived in a cute bungalow in Missoula. The kids drifted off, and I was close to, listening to the sounds of the other campers around us, when I heard the construction guy next to us talking in a low voice. “Yeah, it was a hard day,” he was saying, and I could tell he was talking into a phone. “But it was good. How about you?” Then a long pause, and I imagined him, sitting at his picnic table, listening in the night for a voice beamed across the Pacific Northwest, down through some tower, and into his phone. “I miss you,” he said, quietly. Then, “I love you, too.” I felt a pang of loneliness, quick and brutal, because I knew there was no one I could call who would tell me he missed me or that he loved me, no boyfriend or lover somewhere, wishing I was back home in bed next to him. No real reason to be home.

*tm

Road Trip, Part I

[In the next few months, I will be posting sections of my road trip memoir, which is in progress, on this blog. They will go up every Wednesday and I'll try to keep them between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Once it's all up--all 80-some odd pages--I'll keep it posted in its entirety for 2 weeks. Then it will all come back down, and you won't be able to read it again until its in print form. So, for now, enjoy).

It was somewhere between Cody and Buffalo, when I finally pulled the car over and cried.  I hadn’t cried on the trip yet, though I’d felt the urge more than once.  We were on Highway 14, two lanes that run east and west through Wyoming.  It was still early in the day, a little after lunch time, and the kids were squabbling when I pulled over.  They were tired of being crammed into the back seat of the Volvo during the day, and then crammed into the tent at night.  Chloe was yelling about Ivan crossing into her seat, and Giselle was whining about a book she couldn’t find, and all I wanted was to be home.  Home.  It wasn’t the squabbling that completely did me in.  It was the fact that we were just six days into the trip, and already everything seemed too hard, too difficult, and my mistakes obvious and famateur. 

For three years I had told everyone I knew, sometimes people I had just met, that I wanted to “someday take the kids around the US—all of it.”  When they’d raise their eyebrows and ask how long I expected the journey to take, I’d say “A month at least, maybe two.”   My plan was that we could do it on the cheap.  We would make our way across the plains, and then cut into the Great Lakes states, before dipping down into Chicago.  We’d hit Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York.  Then we’d drive south along the eastern border, until we made Florida.  Then we’d veer west again, stopping in Louisiana and Texas and Arizona and New Mexico.  We'd camp, mostly, though in the bigger cities we'd find a hotel.  We’d visit family in Southern California, then head back home to Oregon.  Along the way, I was sure we would see every major landmark and attraction, and nothing was too kitschy or minute to be included on the list.  So I planned that we’d stop at the Liberty Bell, and the World Trade Center site, as well as to see the largest ball of twine, and the giant corn maze.  I wanted the kids to eat a real Chicago hot dog, and to see the Atlantic Ocean.  We’d take photos and talk to people.

And then, I told people, I’d write this amazing book about the experience.  When I described the trip, and the book, the word I used most was “amazing.”  “It would be an amazing adventure!” I’d say.  And “The book will be an amazing story!”  I didn’t say things like “It will be amazingly hard,” or “It’s amazing that I think I can easily do this with three kids on my own,” though both of those would have been more truthful, and more accurate, uses of the word “amazing.”  But now, less than a week in, I could feel the pressure of all of those expectations, and the pressures of traveling and the kids, weighing down on me. 

I had always considered money to be the first, and biggest, obstacle because it was always an obstacle in my life.  I was a single mother of three kids, Chloe, 11, Ivan who was 9, and Giselle, 7.  Their dad paid his child support on time, but it was meager, and I worked as an adjunct writing instructor at a local university.  I wrote freelance stuff on the side.  Life was always paycheck to paycheck, and I was forever cobbling together ways to make life better for the kids—scholarships for swim team and chess club and soccer.  For my whole life, money had always seemed the biggest barrier to an easier, better life, and so the trip had remained a thing I could not afford, a possibility I only considered with the daydream of “I get a good job,” or “I win the lottery,” or “I sell a book.”

Then, in the spring of 2009, my mother offered to lend me $7,000 for the trip, “an investment in your writing career,” she called it.  She also gave me $5,000 to buy a new(er) car, since my 1991 Subaru wagon with 220,000 miles was never going to last on such a trip.  I pooled my resources—a tax return, some writing money—and started planning.  I poured over my US atlas.  I penciled lines along highways and scenic routes I wanted to drive, circled places I wanted to go.  I typed, and revised, a 7-week itinerary.  And then I started buying things. 

I bought a North Face 3-season tent (even though we’d be traveling in exactly one season), sleeping bags, and an air mattress. I bought battery-powered fans, and mosquito candles and lightweight cutlery.  I bought water sandals and hiking shoes for each of us.  I bought a portable camping sink.  I bought a tarp and flashlights and a lantern and a cook stove.  I bought marshmallow skewers.  I even bought books on how to camp and camping cookbooks and traveling activity kits for the kids. 

It wasn’t as though I had thought I could buy my way into a successful and easy trip.  Instead, it was as though each item became suddenly important the moment I saw it.  Of course, I would think upon laying eyes on the camping sink, of course we need this.  I had never camped longer than a handful of days at a time before.  I had never even cooked on a camp stove.  I’d never set up a tent by myself, either.  I didn’t want to discover, in Ottumwa, Iowa, that what we really needed was a sink to wash our faces.  At that time, with my fuzzy and theoretical understanding of the trip, the lack-of-sink-failure seemed like the worst that could happen. 

My mother and several friends had bigger worries about us traveling, which seemed to cover two general categories:  the Big City Thug, and the Creepy Deliverance Guy.  My mom insisted that I buy pepper spray or mace, or, if I could get my hands on one, a taser.  My friend Brad agreed, and added that an air horn would be a perfect addition.  I could use it to both scare away either Big City Thug or Creepy Deliverance Guy and signal for help.  I didn’t worry too much about getting mugged or attacked, but the more I thought about the unknown—the streets of Brooklyn, or the back roads of Georgia—the more worried I became and the more likely it seemed we’d encounter one or both versions of this potential “bad guy.”  So I bought both pepper spray and an air horn.  I stored them, unopened, under the front passenger seat of the Volvo.  Maybe I thought I’d be able to, when the carjacker held a gun to my head, ask him to wait a moment while I dug out my weapons. 

I bought all of these things in part because I thought this was the way to plan for a long trip, an immense excursion.  Hadn’t explorers always planned for multiple scenarios?  Didn’t they bring equipment like extra batteries, or weapons, or a portable sink?

But the biggest obstacle wasn’t money or a lack of equipment.  It was that I didn’t understand the very nature of a long road trip, especially one with kids.  I had planned for us to drive hundreds of miles a day, every day.  I planned for us to break and set up camp every day, too.  And cook on the cook stove.  And somehow, still see America.

 It’s not an accident I cried on the side of the road in Wyoming, either.  Wyoming is austerely beautiful, the kind of place where you can look out from the sanctity of your car into western wilderness the way Americans have always imagined it to be—isolated and untamed and lonesome.  We’d pass through miles and miles where the only sign of civilization was the macadam under us, and our own car, a speck amidst the looming buttes and scrub brush and rocky crags.  No people.  No houses.  Not even a telephone wire.  Once, we came into a high meadow, all tall grass bisected by highway.  Sheep were crossing the road, guided by a cowboy on horseback.  I slowed the car while we waited for the sheep to cross.  We watched in silence as the cowboy called to the sheep—“Hi!” and “Hee” and “Comon!”—and got them safely across the road.  I watched how he would take off his cowboy hat and mop the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.  I felt like a trespasser, and I felt awed and desperately sad, as though I were witnessing the last real cowboy in America.  

Hours later, when we’d come down the pass and entered the Wyoming prairie, all I could think about was my incredible hubris—my conviction in my own abilities—and that cowboy in the high meadow.  I could already see the money running through my fingers like water, and I felt like a rookie most of the time, trying to get from Point A to Point B and trying to do so with three kids.  It seemed to me that I was the worst kind of American—the ugly American with the big plans, and the big talk, and the impossible dreams—while that cowboy was the best kind—quiet and unassuming and tough in a way I wasn’t. 

So, on day six, somewhere between Cody and Buffalo, I pulled the car over by a historical marker, got out of the car, sat on the hood, and cried.  I had not understood what the real obstacles in planning and taking the trip were.  While the kids were in the car, Ivan still stubbornly trying to enact his version of Manifest Destiny over seat space, I pulled out my cell phone and called my friend Kari.  The first thing I said when she answered was, “I don’t think I can do this.”  I said this between sobs, because it was embarrassing to admit that I was already suffering when we hadn’t been on the road a week.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “It’s just everything.  I packed too much stuff and Chloe threw up and we missed part of Yellowstone, and then I planned this insane driving schedule, and already I feel like I’m running out of money, and the kids keep fighting….”  I trailed off. 

Kari said, “How did you think it would was going to be?”

“I don’t know!  I thought it would be easier!”

Kari was quiet for a moment and then she said, “Look, people who take long trips are ruined by sticking to some pre-conceived plan.  Re-schedule things.  Go easy on yourself.  You have to get used to this.” 

“But I’ve already paid for camp sites and places all over!”

“Then cancel them.  You’ll lose the money, but you’re going to make yourself insane by sticking to the schedule.  Stop forcing this trip to be what you want it to be.  Let it be what it is.”

Kari’s the friend I called when I needed sarcasm and wry commentary, or a steady voice to tell me everything would be okay, even when it was terrible.  So I took this momentary Zen-like advice seriously.  I stopped crying.  Then I called most of the campsites and hotels we’d had reservations with, and canceled them.  I got back into the car, quieted the kids, and started driving east again, thinking about the previous six days, and I what I could do now to make this trip work. 

 

It was somewhere between Cody and Buffalo, when I finally pulled the car over and cried.  I hadn’t cried on the trip yet, though I’d felt the urge more than once.  We were on Highway 14, two lanes that run east and west through Wyoming.  It was still early in the day, a little after lunch time, and the kids were squabbling when I pulled over.  They were tired of being crammed into the back seat of the Volvo during the day, and then crammed into the tent at night.  Chloe was yelling about Ivan crossing into her seat, and Giselle was whining about a book she couldn’t find, and all I wanted was to be home.  Home.  It wasn’t the squabbling that completely did me in.  It was the fact that we were just six days into the trip, and already everything seemed too hard, too difficult, and my mistakes obvious and foreshadowing. 

 

For three years I had told everyone I knew, sometimes people I had just met, that I wanted to “someday take the kids around the US—all of it.”  When they’d raise their eyebrows and ask how long I expected the journey to take, I’d say “A month at least, maybe two.”   My plan was that we could do it on the cheap.  We would as we made our way across the plains, then cut into the Great Lakes states, then dip down into Chicago.  We’d hit Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York.  Then we’d drive south along the eastern border, until we made Florida.  Then we’d veer west again, stopping in Louisiana and Texas and Arizona and New Mexico.  We’d visit family in Southern California, then head back home to Oregon.  Along the way, I was sure we would see every major landmark and attraction, and nothing was too kitschy or minute to be included on the list.  So I planned that we’d stop at the Liberty Bell, and the World Trade Center site, as well as to see the largest ball of twine, and the giant corn maze.  I wanted the kids to eat a real Chicago hot dog, and to see the Atlantic Ocean.  We’d take photos and talk to people.

 

And then, I told people, I’d write this amazing book about the experience.  When I described the trip, and the book, the word I used most was “amazing.”  “It would be an amazing adventure!” I’d say.  And “The book will be an amazing story!”  I didn’t say things like “It will be amazingly hard,” or “It’s amazing that I think I can easily do this with three kids on my own,” though both of those would have been more truthful, and more accurate, uses of the word “amazing.”  But now, less than a week in, I could feel the pressure of all of those expectations, and the pressures of traveling and the kids, weighing down on me. 

 

I had always considered money to be the first, and biggest, obstacle because it was always an obstacle in my life.  I was a single mother of three kids, Chloe, 11, Ivan who was 9, and Giselle, 7.  Their dad paid his child support on time, but it was meager, and I worked as an adjunct writing instructor at a local university.  I wrote freelance stuff on the side.  Life was always paycheck to paycheck, and I was forever cobbling together ways to make life better for the kids—scholarships for swim team and chess club and soccer.  For my whole life, money had always seemed the biggest barrier to an easier, better life, and so the trip had remained a thing I could not afford, a possibility I only considered with the daydream of “I get a good job,” or “I win the lottery,” or “I sell a book.”

 

Then, in the spring of 2009, my mother offered to lend me $7,000 for the trip, “an investment in your writing career,” she called it.  She also gave me $5,000 to buy a new(er) car, since my 1991 Subaru wagon with 220,000 miles was never going to last on such a trip.  I pooled my resources—a tax return, some writing money—and started planning.  I poured over my US atlas.  I penciled lines along highways and scenic routes I wanted to drive, circled places I wanted to go.  I typed, and revised, a 7-week itinerary.  And then I started buying things. 

 

I bought a North Face 3-season tent (even though we’d be traveling in exactly one season), sleeping bags, and an air mattress. I bought battery-powered fans, and mosquito candles and lightweight cutlery.  I bought water sandals and hiking shoes for each of us.  I bought a portable camping sink.  I bought a tarp and flashlights and a lantern and a cook stove.  I bought marshmallow skewers.  I even bought books on how to camp and camping cookbooks and traveling activity kits for the kids. 

 

It wasn’t as though I had thought I could buy my way into a successful and easy trip.  Instead, it was as though each item became suddenly important the moment I saw it.  Of course, I would think upon laying eyes on the camping sink, of course we need this.  I had never camped longer than a handful of days at a time before.  I had never even cooked on a camp stove.  I’d never set up a tent by myself, either.  I didn’t want to discover, in Ottumwa, Iowa, that what we really needed was a sink to wash our faces.  At that time, with my fuzzy and theoretical understanding of the trip, the lack-of-sink-failure seemed like the worst that could happen. 

 

My mother and several friends had bigger worries about us traveling, which seemed to cover two general categories:  the Big City Thug, and the Creepy Deliverance Guy.  My mom insisted that I buy pepper spray or mace, or, if I could get my hands on one, a taser.  My friend Brad agreed, and added that an air horn would be a perfect addition.  I could use it to both scare away either Big City Thug or Creepy Deliverance Guy and signal for help.  I didn’t worry too much about getting mugged or attacked, but the more I thought about the unknown—the streets of Brooklyn, or the back roads of Georgia—the more worried I became and the more likely it seemed we’d encounter one or both versions of this potential “bad guy.”  So I bought both pepper spray and an air horn.  I stored them, unopened, under the front passenger seat of the Volvo.  Maybe I thought I’d be able to, when the carjacker held a gun to my head, ask him to wait a moment while I dug out my weapons. 

 

I bought all of these things in part because I thought this was the way to plan for a long trip, an immense excursion.  Hadn’t explorers always planned for multiple scenarios?  Didn’t they bring equipment like extra batteries, or weapons, or a portable sink?

 

But the biggest obstacle wasn’t money or a lack of equipment.  It was that I didn’t understand the very nature of a long road trip, especially one with kids.  I had planned for us to drive hundreds of miles a day, every day.  I planned for us to break and set up camp every day, too.  And cook on the cook stove.  And somehow, still see America.

 

It’s not accident I cried on the side of the road in Wyoming, either.  Wyoming is austerely beautiful, the kind of place where you can look out from the sanctity of your car into western wilderness the way Americans have always imagined it to be—isolated and untamed and lonesome.  We’d pass through miles and miles where the only sign of civilization was the macadam under us, and our own car, a speck amidst the looming buttes and scrub brush and rocky crags.  No people.  No houses.  Not even a telephone wire.  Once, we came into a high meadow, all tall grass bisected by highway.  Sheep were crossing the road, guided by a cowboy on horseback.  I slowed the car while we waited for the sheep to cross.  We watched in silence as the cowboy called to the sheep—“Hi!” and “Hee” and “Comon!”—and got them safely across the road.  I watched how he would take off his cowboy hat and mop the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.  I felt like a trespasser, and I felt awed and desperately sad, as though I were witnessing the last real cowboy in America.  

 

Hours later, when we’d come down the pass and entered the Wyoming prairie, all I could think about was my incredible hubris—my conviction in my own abilities—and that cowboy in the high meadow.  I could already see the money running through my fingers like water, and I felt like a rookie most of the time, trying to get from Point A to Point B and trying to do so with three kids.  It seemed to me that I was the worst kind of American—the ugly American with the big plans, and the big talk, and the impossible dreams—while that cowboy was the best kind—quiet and unassuming and tough in a way I wasn’t. 

 

So, on day six, somewhere between Cody and Buffalo, I pulled the car over by a historical marker, got out of the car, sat on the hood, and cried.  I had not understood what the real obstacles in planning and taking the trip were.  While the kids were in the car, Ivan still stubbornly trying to enact his version of Manifest Destiny over seat space, I pulled out my cell phone and called my friend Kari.  The first thing I said when she answered was, “I don’t think I can do this.”  I said this between sobs, because it was embarrassing to admit that I was already suffering when we hadn’t been on the road a week.

 

“What happened?”

 

“I don’t know,” I said.  “It’s just everything.  I packed too much stuff and Chloe threw up and we missed part of Yellowstone, and then I planned this insane driving schedule, and already I feel like I’m running out of money, and the kids keep fighting….”  I trailed off. 

 

Kari said, “How did you think it would was going to be?”

 

“I don’t know!  I thought it would be easier!”

Kari was quiet for a moment and then she said, “Look, people who take long trips are ruined by sticking to some pre-conceived plan.  Re-schedule things.  Go easy on yourself.  You have to get used to this.”  

 

“But I’ve already paid for camp sites and places all over!”

 

“Then cancel them.  You’ll lose the money, but you’re going to make yourself insane by sticking to the schedule.  Stop forcing this trip to be what you want it to be.  Let it be what it is.”

 

Kari’s the friend I called when I needed sarcasm and wry commentary, or a steady voice to tell me everything would be okay, even when it was terrible.  So I took this momentary Zen-like advice seriously.  I stopped crying.  Then I called most of the campsites and hotels we’d had reservations with, and canceled them.  I got back into the car, quieted the kids, and started driving east again, thinking about the previous six days, and I what I could do now to make this trip work.